C Goodson / revised 12 Dec 2017 1 Caroline Goodson, ‘Urbanism as Politics in Ninth-Century Italy,’ in After Charlemagne: Ninth century Italy and its Rulers, ed. Clemens Gantner (Cambridge: in production). ‘See how well it [the city of Verona] was founded by evil men who knew not the law of our God and worshipped ancient images of wood and stone!’1 ‘Old Rome, your morals decay as do your walls … Now if the virtue of Peter and Paul do not favour you, you will long be wretched, little Rome.’2 The author of the famous Versus of Verona, composed between 795–807, remarked upon the position of the city on the river, the walls and temples of stone, its ancient bridges and roads, as well as beauty and the history of its conversion and early Christian bishops and saints. For this anonymous author, Verona’s ancient architecture was a praise-worthy asset as much as the relics of saints in its modern churches were. For the translator of the pseudo-Dionysius, working in the Carolingian court, there was an explicit correlation between the urban fabric of Rome and the moral rectitude of those living there. Only the princes of apostles, whose had died in Rome and whose bodies lay there now, could redeem the city. Verona was not unique among medieval cities in Italy to have evolved from its ancient civic form into a medieval centre, to be celebrated as having a continuous tradition from ancient civitas to medieval city.3 Nor was Rome the only early medieval city to be criticised for lax morality, exhorted to place its faith in the saints. In the tensions between ancient Roman traditions and their socio-political forms, on the one hand, and the fast-paced changing world and new power structures emerging in the ninth century, on the other, meant that urbanism and investment in cities were effective tools for Carolingian rulers of Italy and their contemporaries. 1 Versus de Verona, ed. Pighi : Ecce quam bene est fundata a malis hominibus/ qui nesciebant legem dei nostri atque uetera simulacra uenerabantur lignea lapidea!; Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 80–7. 2 John Eriugena’s translation of Ps. Dionysius the Areopagite’s letter to the apostle John: John Eriugena, Joanni theologo apostolo et evangelistae determinate in Pathmos insulam, PL 122, col. 1194: Moribus et muris Roma uetusta cadis…Jam ni te meritum Petri Paulique foueret, tempore iam longo Roma misella fores; trans. Neil, Seventh-century Popes and Martyrs: the Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius, pp. 89–90. 3 Hyde, ‘Medieval descriptions of cities’; Granier, ‘À rebours des laudes civitatum’. C Goodson / revised 12 Dec 2017 2 The legacy of Roman cities was enormous for the communities of the Italian peninsula in the eighth and ninth centuries. Roman cities were the principle places of governance, administration, much commerce, as well as the performance of civilised cultural values and status within imperial hierarchies. A dense network of cities, linked by roads and rivers, had developed during the Republic and became richer and more vibrant in the period of the principate. 4 There is no doubt that by the fifth century, the vibrancy of Italian cities had diminished and that some places that had thrived in antiquity were nearly non-existent in the early middle ages. The intensity, chronology, and regional variation of urban change in early medieval has been the subject of a significant body of literature over the past 30 years, as urban archaeology has provided surprising (if uneven) insights, and debate has sharpened our historiographical and methodological tools.5 For the most part, at present it can be agreed that in the Italian peninsula, many long-lived cities endured from antiquity into the middle ages. They were trading places, royal seats, and the targets of elite investment and residences of elites. 6 They had large stone- or brick-built public churches and halls, high-status residences and they supported artisanal production and commercial exchange. Indeed, urbanism was (for the most part) so successful in Italy that the impetus to found new cities emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries, with new walled neighbourhoods at Benevento and Rome and new foundations in the ninth century.7 North of the Alps and elsewhere in the Empire, where the urban networks of antiquity had been more dispersed and civic centres themselves had been smaller, the decline and reordering of ancient cities 4 On the cities of Roman Italy, Cracco Ruggini, ‘La città nel mondo antico: realtà e idea’; Crawford, ‘Italy and Rome from Sulla to Augustus’. 5 For general discussion see Cantino Wataghin, ‘Quadri urbani nell’ Italia settentrionale: tarda antichità e alto medioevo’; Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City; La Rocca, ‘Public Buildings’; Marazzi, ‘Cadavera urbium, nuove capitali e Roma aeterna’. For a summary of the debate (as of 1996), see Ward-Perkins, ‘Continuitists, catastrophists, and the towns of Post-Roman Northern Italy’. 6 Brogiolo and Gelichi, La città nell’alto medioevo italiano. Archeologia e storia; Augenti, Le città italiane tra la tarda antichità e l’alto Medioevo, especially La Rocca, ‘Residenze urbane ed élites urbane tra VIII e X secolo in Italia settentrionale’. 7 Marazzi, ‘Le città nuove pontificie e l’insediamento laziale nel IX secolo’; Gelichi, ‘La storia di una nuova città attraverso l’archeologia: Venezia nell’alto medioevo’; Pani Ermini, ‘Città fortificate e fortificazioni delle città italiane fra V e VI secolo’. C Goodson / revised 12 Dec 2017 3 and the civic structures of governance was significantly more comprehensive.8 In Southern Gaul, some port cities and episcopal centres, such as Marseille and Arles persevered, but north of the Loire and east of the Rhine, the few ancient urban centres became even fewer in the early middle ages. 9 Centre-places were rural in Northern Europe between c. 500 and c. 1100: trading places for the exchange of goods (sometimes even using money), royal seats and monasteries.10 Much earlier analysis of early medieval urbanism has aimed to define cities by scale or functional attributes, though these varied considerably by region and period.11 Efforts expended to determine whether a place was a city or not have tended to overshadow the analysis of what roles the characteristics of urban places might have played in life and the experience of living in those cities. Population density, demographic diversity, elite patronage, commerce, craft production and administrative capacity—all characteristics of urban centres all over the medieval world—were not simply the by-products of urban investment, they also shaped the nature of social interaction and governance in those cities. Thus modern geographers and urban historians of more modern periods have long recognised the ways in which the experience of a city, its diversity and its pressures might intensify competition among inhabitants, drive innovation and harden divides between some groups, despite the desires and advantages of heterogeneity and opportunity that the city provides.12 Following a Foucauldian understanding of power structures in urban forms, we can recognise that cities house 8 See the balanced depiction of this process in Loseby, ‘Lost cities. The end of the Civitas-system in Frankish Gaul’ where he stresses the survival of Gallic civitates as centres of territories. Compare Verhulst’s characterisation of the ‘nadir of urban life’ in Merovingian Gaul, Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-west Europe, p. 24. See also Verhaeghe, Loveluck and Story, ‘Urban developments in the age of Charlemagne’; Henning, ‘Early European towns - the development of the economy in the Frankish realm between dynamism and deceleration AD 500–1100’. 9 These broad-brush statements inevitably obscure nuances of evidence and interpretation which have emerged in recent scholarship. For overview, Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800, pp. 665–6, 71–2, 74–88; Loseby, ‘Reflections on urban space: streets through time’, pp. 665–6, 671–2, 674–88. 10 Airlie, ‘The palace complex’, pp. 257–9. 11 See discussion of the historiography in Goodson, Lester and Symes, ‘Introduction,’ pp. 5–6; the essays in Sami and Speed (eds.), Debating Urbanism within and beyond the Walls A.D. 300–700; Loseby, ‘Reflections on urban space: streets through time’. 12 On ‘time-space compression’ as an urban social characteristic, see Frisby, Simmel and since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory; Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life’. For a recent example of the gap between urban diversity and social isolation, see Butler and Robson, ‘Social capital, gentrification and neighbourhood change in London: A comparison of three South London neighbourhoods’. C Goodson / revised 12 Dec 2017 4 particular discursive strategies which make possible or impossible certain kinds of individual and collective expressions and representations.13 Investment in cities, therefore, further supports or limits certain kinds of discourse. To recognise the early medieval rulers’ efforts to create and sustain cities as a way of living is to acknowledge a kind of rulership and therefore a heuristic.14 In their provocative history of the Mediterranean in the longue durée, P. Horden and N. Purcell called for abandoning urbanism as an analytical category because no city exists wholly without a rural hinterland or wider territory.15 For entirely different reasons, in 1959, E. Dupré Theseider declared the study of the early medieval city to be ‘a hopeless undertaking,’ given the vastly different kinds of evidence which need to be considered in order to achieve a vision of the whole. 16 Both of these points are indeed true. No city existed entirely without a rural territory, but the category of ‘urban’ — as opposed to ‘rural’— mattered in the middle ages. Thus, early medieval charters of property transactions never leave doubt about whether a property was inside or outside the walls or limits of a city or town.