CHAPTER ONE

Introduction:
Segregation, Zoning and Assimilation in
Medieval Towns
Derek Keene
Of all types of settlement, it is the town or city where one is most likely to
encounter a stranger or foreigner. Such a person will often have originated from
afar and be distinguished by language, physical appearance, dress, beliefs or
practices, characteristics covered by the slippery modern terms ethnicity or
cultural identity. The largest, wealthiest, and most powerful or attractive towns
tend to contain the greatest number, variety and proportion of strangers in their
populations. Among the global metropolises of the modern world a mark of
distinction is the number of languages in everyday use well over one hundred
in the cases of London or New York. Much the same was true of the towns and
cities of medieval Europe, though on a lesser scale and within different social and
political constraints. In western Europe notable examples of ethnic and linguistic
diversity, accompanied by a striking degree of openness towards strangers, were
Venice, Bruges and Antwerp, cases which indicate that port cities, or inland
centres likewise engaged in facilitating commercial exchange over long distances,
were especially likely to attract varied populations, if only of short-term residents.
Among the towns of central and eastern Europe covered in this volume, Prague was
such a place in the tenth century, while at a later date Dubrovnik resembled Venice
and Lviv came to be compared with that commercial metropolis on account of the
diversity of its population and the many languages spoken there (Chapters 4, 11).
The attractions of such places are clear: they offered opportunities for business in
which it seemed to be possible to make substantial proft, as well as employment in
more secure or routine occupations such as those of labourer, craftsman or notary.
Towns that were sites of rule offer similar though less varied opportunities by
providing for the needs of the elite, as well as of those attracted to the place by the
desire to seek political advantage, justice or protection. In the west, London and
Paris, and towards the east Prague, Esztergom and Buda (Chapters 6, 11, 12, 13)
occupied such positions, in addition to important roles as centres of commerce and
exchange. For Christians in western and central Europe, and for many elsewhere,
Rome was the key site of authority and devotion and attracted many different
cultural groups, some of which maintained a more or less continuous presence in
the city. Pilgrimage to Rome and other cult centres (Chapter 2), and the commerce
SEGREGATION INTEGRATION ASSIMILATION 2
which often accompanied it, was an important stimulus to the movement of people
and to the visible presence of strangers in many towns.
1
An ancestor of one of the
German commercial families in thirteenth-century London was said frst to have
come to England with his wife to visit the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury
and then to have established himself in London, where Thomas had been born
and where the couple themselves fnally managed to conceive a child.
2
In central
Europe itinerant Irish monks were a stimulus to many urban monastic foundations
(Chapter 2), while university cities such as Prague and Krakw attracted students
and scholars from far away.
As sites to which people migrated, medieval towns operated within distinctive
demographic and economic structures. On account of their sanitary conditions they
generally relied on immigration to increase or even to maintain their populations.
A well-populated countryside could support substantial towns, but at the same time
urban demand could promote rural productivity, specialization and demographic
growth. A rapidly growing town absorbed the natural increase of population in
its immediate territory and so drew in immigrants from further afeld. Famines
enlarged the population of established towns, as people from the countryside moved
in to seek the marginal opportunities and charitable assistance available there.
When food and other materials became scarce, towns used their wealth to draw in
supplies from farther afeld and in that way inficted shortages on the surrounding
territory. Demographic pressure on landed resources and falling prices of labour
could encourage migration to towns, especially when those who controlled the
land spent their rising incomes there. The relationship between medieval towns and
their hinterlands was complex, involving multiple sets of reciprocal relationships
of regional and trans-regional character. Within the immediate hinterland people
moved in and out on an almost daily basis in the course of marketing and craft
production. Immigrants fowed in over greater distances. Many did not stay long.
Others settled, but maintained regular contacts with relatives and others in the
regions from which they originated, sometimes over several generations. This was
a particular characteristic of mercantile families. Merchants from the town visited
lesser towns and markets in the hinterland and sometimes set up residence there
so as more easily to tap into local resources. Conversely, monarchs and other lords
encouraged people from abroad, particularly those with skills and capital, to settle
on their land and in their towns, especially in remote or marginal districts, so as to
increase the economic value and strategic resources of their territory. All of these
forces promoted the cultural and linguistic diversity of towns, not least in central
1
Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and
Commerce, A.D. 300900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20001), pp. 621,
67881 and passim; Margaret Harvey, The English in Rome, 13621420: portrait of an
expatriate community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
2
Joseph P. Huffman, Family, Commerce, and Religion in London and Cologne:
Anglo-German emigrants, c.1000c.1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp. 18995.
INTRODUCTION 3
and eastern Europe. Surnames derived from place-names in some contexts can
denote the extent of the economic, migratory and cultural hinterland of a town
although on their own they cannot reveal the nature of the contacts involved.
Measured in this way, the hinterland of London about 1300 extended across the
whole of England, overlapping those of major provincial towns, and included
many places overseas.
3
Likewise, those who took up the citizenship of Venice
during the fourteenth and ffteenth centuries tended to come from a distance: more
originated from Tuscany than the Veneto, with Lombardy in third place, while
with the acquisition of the terra frma, those who were citizens of the subject
towns were also admitted.
4
Here, as elsewhere in Europe, especially in Italy, it was
not uncommon for wealthy individuals to be citizens of more than one town.
Cultural exchange, cultural levelling, assimilation and integration are often
features of the urban environment.
5
Thus it is likely that London was a key force
in driving the inter-regional exchanges that promoted levelling in late medieval
English, while in a similar fashion the citys administrative and commercial
practices came to be widely adopted by other towns. This process, working
through a dense network of contacts and exchange, resembled that of market
integration, but political and institutional structures were also important. Londons
widespread infuence, for example, was facilitated by its situation within an
extensive territory over which the authority of the monarch was relatively strong.
Moreover, the king could override the interests of towns as communal bodies in
favour of minority groups, such as Jews and foreign merchants, whose services
he required. In modelling processes of linguistic change and assimilation, in ways
which are helpful for understanding urban societies more generally, historical
sociolinguists have made effective use of the sociological distinction between
groups characterized by strong or by weak ties.
6
This is particularly applicable
to towns, both to their communal governance and to societies and groups within
3
Derek Keene, Metropolitan values: migration, mobility and cultural norms, London
11001700 in Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English 13001800:
Theories, Descriptions, Conficts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.
93114, esp. Figure 6.7; Peter McClure, Patterns of migration in the late Middle Ages: the
evidence of English place-name surnames, Economic History Review, 2
nd
series 32 (1979):
pp. 16782.
4
Reinhold C. Mueller, Venetia facti privilegio: les trangers naturaliss Venise
entre XIV
e
et XVI
e
sicle in: Jacques Bottin and Donatella Calabi (eds), Les trangers dans
la Ville: minorits et espace urbain du bas Moyen ge /epoque moderen (Paris: Editions de
la Maison des sciences de lhomme, 1999), pp. 17181.
5
For topics addressed in this paragraph, see Derek Keene, Cities and cultural
exchange, in Donatella Calabi and Stephen Turk Christensen (eds), Cultural Exchange
in Early Modern Europe, volume II, Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 14001700
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 327.
6
Mark Granovetter, The strength of weak ties, American Journal of Sociology 78
(1973), pp. 136080; Mark Granovetter, The strength of weak ties revisited, Sociological
Theory, (1983), pp. 20133; Leslie Milroy, Language and Social Networks (Oxford: Basil
SEGREGATION INTEGRATION ASSIMILATION 4
them. Groups with strong internal ties, arising from strong collective interest
(sometimes in response to external threats) and highly institutionalized systems
of control, would tend to resist external infuences and maintain barriers between
groups. Those with weak ties might combine a suffcient degree of cohesion with
an openness to outsiders that would facilitate bridge-building between networks,
innovation and assimilation. In practice, the balance could be very fne and local
circumstances important for determining the outcome. In the Middle Ages it
seems that poor immigrants and those with a cultural and linguistic identity which
contrasted least with that of the host city, Flemings or Dutch in medieval and
early modern London for example, were absorbed most rapidly into the general
population, while wealthier, often mercantile, groups, whether Jewish, German,
French, Gascon or Italian, who had their own institutions and often a strong
collective interest in the right to trade, maintained a distinct identity, expressed
in language, dress and domestic customs, over the entire period of their residence
in London, sometimes over many generations. Such people could also serve as
cultural models for indigenous citizens, especially if they were not separated by
religion. Some of them clearly served as cultural brokers between minorities and
the host society. Modern studies reveal some of the complexities of assimilation,
even among poorer groups. In immigrant families frst-generation males might
conform to indigenous dress and practices, at least in public, while their wives are
more conservative and separate from the host society. The second generation may
more publicly express their ethnic identity, while at the same time unconsciously
adopting indigenous practices or even those of other immigrant groups.
7
It is only
rarely that the evidence for medieval towns enables us to capture such subtleties.
There was a widespread feeling among townspeople that they differed
fundamentally from their rural neighbours, even when they were ethnically and
linguistically similar to them and above all in their customs and laws. Those
customs refected the sanitary and social problems that arose from the density
of urban habitation and the need to develop rules and protective frameworks to
foster commerce. Particular points at issue here concerned the desire of townsmen
to preserve their interests in distributive trade against infringement by outsiders,
whether local rustics or merchants from afar. Protecting the market and the proft,
both private and public, to be derived from it, was an essential concern. Likewise,
and especially in the absence of strong external authority, towns often felt compelled
to tighten and extend their control over the territory outside, to protect trade, to
secure supplies and to establish defensible frontiers. Dante, who had clear ideas
concerning authority and governance, attributed the moral decline of Florence to
immigration from the contado the surrounding dependent territory arguing that
this would have been avoided had the boundary remained closer to the city and
Blackwell, 2
nd
edn, 1987), pp. 199204. Granovetters work is widely cited in network and
management theory.
7
See Gerd Baumann, Contesting Culture: discourses of identity in multi-ethnic
London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
INTRODUCTION 5
naming places no more than 30 km distant from the city as sources of corruption.
8

Similar ideas underlay the notion that citizenship be restricted not just to the best
or most law-worthy individuals or to the merchants of a town, but to those of
standing by virtue of property ownership, long residence and ancestry, thereby
excluding labourers, artisans, recent immigrants, and foreigners. Citizenship, or
degrees of it, was often a bone of contention. With regard to admitting foreigners
from overseas as citizens of London, for example, successive civic regimes
adopted different policies and at times the monarch favoured admitting foreigners
against the views of the citizens.
9
In many parts of Europe and Asia newcomers and strangers, whatever their
origins and status, adopted similar strategies of arrival and survival in towns and
were often treated in similar ways by state or civic authorities. For many, some
form of chain migration was doubtless the rule, involving advance knowledge of
the journey and of where to fnd lodging on arrival, very often with compatriots
or other groups likely to facilitate socialization. Long-range family and business
networks could be important here, especially for merchants, a group characterized
by strong ties. For artisans and labourers informal arrangements of this sort in
social environment predominantly characterized by weak ties were signifcant,
and economies of providing cheap lodging and other services for new arrivals
became embedded in certain parts of town. An example is the eastern suburb of
the City of London, which, like Manhattans Lower East Side, accommodated
successive waves of poor immigrants from different parts of the world over a
long period and at the same time acquired a distinctive cluster of occupations
that either provided for their needs or could easily be entered by newcomers, a
characteristic that persisted through continual changes in the population.
10
In this
case the city wall had no signifcance as a defning or excluding feature and the
pattern of settlement was determined essentially by the low value of land in this
peripheral zone.
Foreign merchants, by contrast, usually gravitated to more central high-value
sites, where their local counterparts and the principal markets were to be found.
Nevertheless, like the poorer immigrants, they too probably depended on local
networks of contacts that would facilitate their arrival and accommodation. The
8
Paradiso, cantos 1516; cf. Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), pp. 545.
9
For partial and not entirely accurate accounts, see Gwyn A. Williams, Medieval
London: from Commune to Capital (London: The Athlone Press, 1963), pp. 2534 and
Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200
1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 39.
10
James L. Bolton, The alien population of London in the ffteenth century: a
reappraisal, in James L. Bolton (ed.), The Alien Communities of London in the Fifteenth
Century: the Subsidy Rolls of 1440 & 14834 (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1998), pp. 146;
Lien Bich Luu, Immigrants and the Industries of London, 15001700 (Aldershot: Ashgate:
2005), pp. 87140.
SEGREGATION INTEGRATION ASSIMILATION 6
streets known as Wahlgasse and Wahlengasse in Cologne and Regensburg (Chapter
2), respectively, denoted clusters of foreign merchants close to the principal
markets and the river frontages of those cities, while in Cologne another street of
the same name in the sparsely settled periphery of the city suggests the presence
of a poorer group of foreigners.
11
There was a similar district on Londons river
frontage, on either side of the Walbrook, a stream whose name, frst recorded by
about 1100, probably denoted the presence of foreigners.
12
Merchants of Rouen,
had special rights there on the waterfront, perhaps by the mid eleventh century,
while in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries monarchs confrmed the merchants
of Cologne in possession of their guildhall nearby, where other Germans joined
them as neighbours, the group eventually establishing the enclosed cluster of
houses known as Londons Steelyard. In the same neighbourhood during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries foreigners, including those from southern
Europe, provided lodgings for their countrymen. In both London and Regensburg,
high-status offcials supervised the foreign traders.
13
By extending privileges to
foreigners, including exclusive rights over territory within the town, monarchs
promoted and regulated trade and served their own interests in the acquisition
of imported high-status goods and fnancial services, sometimes contrary to the
interests of local traders. In this they followed practices derived from the ancient
world, which in the Middle Ages were expressed in the privileged sites known
as fondaci, prevalent in the Mediterranean region, Constantinople and the Black
Sea. Germans extended the practice in northern regions, by founding kontoren
and acquiring comparable privileges from local rulers at Bergen, Baltic ports,
Novgorod and inland trading sites in central Europe.
14
At various times Chinese,
Japanese and other oriental rulers followed similar policies, which for them, as
11
For the location of these streets, see Deutscher Stdtatlas, Regensburg (Lieferung
I nr. 8, 1973) and Kln (Lieferung II, 1979), ed. H. Stoob. Hermann Keussen, Topographie
der Stadt Kln im Mittelalter, 2 vols plus folder of plans (Bonn: P. Hausteins Verlag, 1910),
i, pp. 589, ii, pp. 22930.
12
Eilert Ekwall, Street-Names of the City of London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954),
pp. 1934. The suggestion that the wal- element in the name Walbrook denotes foreigners
rather than Britons is my own.
13
Derek Keene, Du seuil de la Cit la formation dune conomie morale:
Ienvironnement hansatique Londres, entre XII
e
et XVII
e
sicle in: Bottin and Calabi
(eds), Les trangers, pp. 40924; for the Regensburg offcial, see J. Widemann (ed.),
Regensburger Urkundenbuch I (Munich: Knigliche Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Monumenta Boica, 53, 1910), nos. 63, 69, 81, 86.
14
Donatella Calabi and Derek Keene, Merchants lodgings and cultural exchange in
Calabi and Christensen (eds), Cities and Cultural Exchange, pp. 31548. See also: Jrgen
Bracker (ed.), Die Hanse: Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos. Eine Austellung des Museums
fr Hamburgische Geschichte in Verbindung mit der Vereins- und Westbank, 2 vols.
(Hamburg: Museum fr Hamburgische Geschichte, 1989), with revised texts reprinted in
Jrgen Bracker, Volker Henn and Rainer Postel (eds), Die Hanse: Lebenswirklichkeit und
Mythos (Lbeck: Schmidt-Rmhild, 1998); Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger
INTRODUCTION 7
sometimes for their European counterparts, were also a means of containing the
foreigners and emphasizing their subordinate status.
15
Only a minority of foreign merchants occupied such communally owned
establishments. Across Europe Italians, the richest of mercantile groups, generally
inhabited private houses, often held on behalf of family enterprises or business
consortia. The way of life associated with these establishments was not much
different from that of the formal enclaves and involved a degree of social segregation
from the host city. Most of the merchants living there were young unmarried men,
subject to a degree of regulation by their elders which, however, failed to prevent
them forming liaisons with and fathering children on local women. Sometimes
these households were perceived as a more general threat to the women of the city,
both married and unmarried. The career cycle of many of these young merchants
involved returning after a few years to their home cities, where they made strategic
marriages and pursued politics. Some older merchants resided with their families
for much longer periods away from home, serving as intermediaries with the local
authorities and providing continuity in business. Such groups developed forms of
adjudication independent of the local courts, as at the Steelyard in London and in
the Italian consular houses that became part of the landscape of Bruges. Despite
not having consuls of their own, the London Italians (ruled by consuls in Bruges),
nevertheless made their mark on Londons cultural landscape. The early name for
Lombard Street evolved so that it came to refect the clustering of Italian houses
there. Their practice of socialization in the street and in suburban gardens became
a feature of the neighbourhood, where they assembled and worshipped at a local
friary (as they did in Bruges), chapel and parish church. Several of their religious
cults and practices of socialization, as well as tastes in literature, philosophy and
dress became established among Londoners. Despite their more enduring presence,
the Germans, who followed similar practices, were less obviously infuential. This
perhaps refected their linguistic and other similarities to the English, as well as
their lack of resources by comparison with the Italians.
Across Europe as a whole foreign groups in towns followed similar strategies,
living in close proximity, imposing their identity on public spaces such as streets
or squares, assembling and worshipping in churches which they adopted as their
own, forming fraternities and craft guilds for mutual protection and support
and sometimes developing formal judicial and regulatory institutions. This was
especially the case with merchants and scholars, but much less so with craftsmen
and labourers. Non-Christian and to a lesser extent non-Catholic groups were often
treated differently, despite their wealth. This is most apparent in the case of Jews,
whose special status was often emphasized by their direct subjection to regal or
quasi-regal authority rather than to that of the community of townsmen. Occasions
in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle
Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
15
Derek Keene, Cities and Empires, Journal of Urban History 32.1 (2005): pp.
821.
SEGREGATION INTEGRATION ASSIMILATION 8
when Jews were admitted to local guilds of merchants were rare, if not unique.
16

Yet in many respects Jews resembled other ethnic or mercantile minorities, at least
until the establishment of ghettoes in the sixteenth century.
17
They lived together
in certain districts close to their places of worship and other facilities, sometimes
distinguished by place-names such as Jewry or vicus Judeorum, but not to
the exclusion of Christian residents, despite periodic attempts by the church to
segregate the two. Often these neighbourhoods were close to the principal areas of
commerce, as in London, Winchester, Paris, Rouen or Cologne, or to a royal castle
that could offer protection from popular suspicion or attack (cf. Chapter 12). The
presence of Jews could also be a source of wealth and prestige for a town. In 1084
the bishop of Speyer, desiring to add to the honour of his villa of Speyer and to
make it an urbs, gathered Jews there and settled them outside the area inhabited
by the other citizens. He gave them economic privileges and jurisdiction over their
own affairs, while to protect them from the common herd he surrounded them with
a wall.
18
This did not preserve them from attack at the time of the First Crusade
and they quickly moved the focus of their community to within the defended
area of the city, close to the centre of trade, where despite continuing persecution
they remained until the ffteenth century. In establishing the ghetto, the Venetians
devised an institution that appears to have been welcomed by Jews, enabling them
to pursue their way of life in a protected environment. Some decades later Venice
displayed a similar attitude towards the resident Turks, whom they had good reason
to treat well, recognizing that their fondaco should meet the Turks high standards
of cleanliness and protect them from the moral risks of the everyday Venetian
environment.
19
In their colonies, however, the Venetians adopted contrary policies.
Thus in Crete, following their acquisition of the island in 1204, they reordered
the spaces of the principal towns, imposing characteristically Venetian and Latin-
Christian monuments on the centres and marginalizing Orthodox Christians and
their churches to the peripheries.
20
Similarly, following the Norman conquest of
16
Michael Adler, Benedict the Gildsman of Winchester, The Jewish Historical
Society of England: Miscellanies 4 (1941): pp. 18.
17
Donatella Calabi, La cit des juifs en Italie entre XVe et XVIe sicle in Bottin and
Calabi (eds), Les trangers, pp. 2540.
18
Alfred Hildgard, Urkunden zur Geschichte der Stadt Speyer (Strassburg: Karl J.
Trbner, 1885), no. 11.
19
Donatella Calabi, Dorothea Nolde and Roni Weinstein, The city of Jews in
Europe: conservation and transmission of Jewish culture in Calabi and Christensen (eds),
Cities and Cultural Exchange, pp. 87113; Calabi and Derek Keene, Merchants lodgings
and cultural exchange.
20
Maria Georgopoulou, Venices Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
INTRODUCTION 9
Sicily, the centres of the major towns were Christianized, while Muslims and their
mosques became characteristic of the suburbs.
21
Across Europe and the Mediterranean region as a whole political, religious and
ethnic distinctions, in association with economic and demographic factors such as
land values, commercial opportunities and the structure of labour and commodity
markets, had a major infuence on patterns of segregation and assimilation in
towns, in which it is possible to identify features common to the whole area. In
central and eastern Europe, however, the historical characteristics of the region
accounted for some distinctive features. Among those characteristics, were the
relative sparsity of population and the limited degree of commercialization and
monetization. One expression of this was the relative absence of the offces of
Italian fnanciers, active in north western Europe since the twelfth century (cf.
Chapter2), from the eastern parts of Germany and further east (other than in Prague
under the Luxemburg dynasty), even after the large-scale exploitation of precious
metals there during the fourteenth and ffteenth centuries. That exploitation,
however, did tie the region more closely to commercialized territories lying to the
south and west and stimulated urban growth, not least to meet the needs of newly
wealthy rulers. Moreover, even if Italians were reluctant to set up banking houses
in Central and Eastern Europe, as individuals or as representatives of enterprises
based in Italy they offered administrative, fnancial, military and artistic skills,
notably in Hungary (Chapters 5, 12, 13) and Krakw.
22
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the eastern areas also attracted settlers and
craftsmen from more densely populated areas of Europe. They included Romance
speakers (Gallici, Latini, Italici) apparently from Lombardy, Lorraine and Flanders,
who were welcomed by local rulers and contributed to urban growth, often as
elements that played an important role in the formation of a town from its very
beginning. The Latini probably included Italian merchants, at least in Regensburg,
which in the twelfth century was an important centre for trade via Venice. From
the later twelfth century onwards Germans and Saxons succeeded the Romance
speakers as settlers, certainly in eastern areas, and they became increasingly
prominent after the Mongol invasions (Chapters 2, 5, 6, 7). The intermixture of
incoming and indigenous populations in towns was complex and varied locally,
but was marked by a greater degree of internal difference than was generally
the case in western Europe, and by a stronger contrast on ethnic lines between
commercial town centres, which tended to be dominated by Germans, and the
21
Ronald J. C. Broadhurst (transl.), The Travels of Ibn Jubayr (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1952), pp. 34050.
22
Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), pp. 2525, 26773, 282, 342, 394; see also Derek Keene, England
and Poland: medieval metropolises compared, in Richard Unger and Jakub Basista (eds),
Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), pp. 14763. See also David Gaimster, German Stoneware
12001900: Archaeology and Cultural History (London: British Museum Press, 1997).
SEGREGATION INTEGRATION ASSIMILATION 10
indigenous Slavic or Hungarian populations of the suburbs and countryside. Such
arrangements bear comparison with those of English towns in Ireland or parts
of Wales, regions that were likewise peripheral in relation to the main European
centres of commerce and power. While the names of streets and districts indicate
neighbourhoods associated with ethnic groups (Chapters 3, 4, 5), they do not
necessarily indicate segregation, for personal names, linguistic borrowing and
the need to be familiar with several languages for the purposes of administration,
commerce and preaching indicate signifcant degrees of convergence between
populations and cultures, if not assimilation (Chapters 3, 7, 13). Material culture
refected these developments. Thus in the Russian district of Tartu German
artefacts superseded those of Russian type, although the latter continued in use
for some everyday purposes (Chapter 3). The general acceptance of Hanseatic-
style artefacts by the Slavic populations of the southern Baltic area is striking,
but even more so is the resistance to them in Novgorod, where their use appears
to have been confned to the Peterhof, the German trading enclave established in
the twelfth century, a frm statement of Russian identity and control in this seat of
Russian princely authority.
23
Lying between developing consumer markets in western Europe and networks
of exchange in the Levant and the Black Sea which handled products from Africa,
India and Asia, central and eastern Europe was traversed by land and river trading
routes which connected the two zones, via intermediate centres such as Lviv
(probably preceded by Halych), Krakw,
24
Prague, Regensburg, Nuremberg,
Mainz and Cologne. In the earlier medieval period Jewish and Muslim merchants
and contacts with Kiev were important in this trade, a pattern altered by the Mongol
invasions. Subsequently, Jews continued to play a signifcant role, now also
being welcomed after their expulsion from western Europe; they were joined by
Armenians, who though established in Plovdiv by the twelfth century later spread
more widely (Chapters 4, 5, 7, 9, 11). German groups in eastern Europe became
active participants in this trans-European trade, while at the same maintaining
their distinctive identity and close contacts with the core German areas to the west
and north (Chapters 6, 7). In 1224, for example, the Cologne pfennig was used as
a monetary standard in Transylvania, while later Nuremberg merchants and capital
23
David Gaimster, The Baltic ceramic market 12001600: measuring Hanseatic
cultural transfer and resistance, in Herman Roodenburg (ed.), Cultural Exchange in
Early Modern Europe, volume IV, Forging European Identities, 14001700 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3058.
24
Paul W. Knoll. The urban development of medieval Poland, with particular
reference to Krakw in Baria Kreki (ed.), Urban Society of Eastern Europe in Premodern
Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 63136; Francis W. Carter.
Trade and Urban Development in Poland: an Economic Geography of Cracow, from its
Origins to 1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
INTRODUCTION 11
and the route down the Vistula to the Baltic became ever more signifcant.
25
The
importance of this oriental trade for the self-identity of the Germans is apparent
from the numbers of Anatolian carpets preserved not only in major centres such as
Braov but also in the churches of many lesser fortifed towns in Transylvania.
26
Most of the towns discussed in this volume had mixed populations arising
from migration and trade. The presence of ethnic groups was often expressed
in the names of streets, indicating the formation of networks of mutual support,
although as elsewhere in Europe this tendency to cluster seems rarely to have lead
to the exclusive occupation of neighbourhoods or quarters by single groups and
often may have been determined as much by economic as ethnic interests. Patterns
of intermixture varied greatly from town to town, even within a single region, and
also changed over time. Nevertheless, north of Bulgaria and away from the Adriatic
there was a tendency for the German mercantile infuence to increase, so that towns
acquired a predominantly German character, by contrast with the overwhelmingly
Slavic or Hungarian populations of the countryside or the suburbs. Nevertheless,
the latter groups were also to be found in the centre of towns, in some regions along
with Romanians and Cumans, while German settlers were by no means confned to
the towns. Ethnic differences were sometimes associated with occupational ones
and the names of guilds names often included an ethnic element, which in Buda
could refer to the majority of their members, as with the German butchers, or to
the distinctive character of the production process, as with the Hungarian tailors or
the German tanners. In southern Hungary Romanians and Cumans, still far from
sedentary in the thirteenth century, subsequently remained excluded from urban
privileges and were often associated with the rearing of livestock. Inevitably,
such towns were characterized by the use of several languages and probably by
the widespread employment of mixed language for commercial purposes. Elites
sometimes crossed linguistic divides, using languages other than their own for
administration or preaching (Chapters 27, 13).
Religion often accounted for the greatest degree of segregation. Most clearly
outside the Christian community were the Jews. Protected and encouraged by
25
Mria Pakucs-Willcocks, Sibiu-Hermannstadt: Oriental trade in sixteenth-century
Transylvania (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Bhlau, 2007), passim; for the pfennig standard
at Sibiu, see Franz Zimmermann and Carl Werner (eds), Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte
der Deutschen in Siebenbrgen, 3 vols (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007; reprint of
Hermannstadt edition of 18921902), I, no. 43; for the infuence of the Cologne pfennig,
see Spufford, Money, p. 192, and for Nuremberg, Carter, Trade and Urban Development
and Peter Spufford, Power and Proft: the Merchant in Medieval Europe (London: Thames
& Hudson, 2002), pp. 39095.
26
The surviving examples are usually dated to the seventeenth century, but this type
of carpet was widespread in Europe by 1500 and produced over a long period: Gordon
Campbell (ed.), The Grove Encyclopaedia of Decorative Arts, 2 vols (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), i, pp. 18990; cf. Pakucs-Willcocks, Sibiu-Hermannstadt, pp.
967, 10515.
SEGREGATION INTEGRATION ASSIMILATION 12
kings, they were often independent of the urban jurisdiction and excluded from
participation in retail trade, as at Lviv, while the district in which they settled
was often close to the seat of royal authority, as at frst in Buda (Chapters 4, 12).
Armenians, though Christian, occupied a similar position to Jews: they had their
own places of worship, a distinctive language and were regarded as heretics.
In Ohrid and elsewhere in Bulgaria the Armenians were spatially segregated
and attempts were made to convert and assimilate them (Chapter 9). In Lviv
Armenians encountered considerable hostility from the urban elite which limited
their rights to trade, but their customs, freedom to worship and autonomy were
guaranteed by the crown. The Lviv authorities likewise attempted to marginalize
the Orthodox, indigenous Ruthenians (Chapter 4). The short-lived Tocco regime
in Epirus followed a colonizing policy which resembled that of the Venetians
in Crete, drawing legitimacy from a Byzantine title, but shifting the capital and
maintaining a distance from its Orthodox subjects by following the court customs
and religion of Naples (Chapter 10).
In much of Central Europe ideas of citizenship derived from those extended to
foreign guests (hospites), immigrants or merchants from western and southern
Europe. The rights granted to the Latins of Szkesfehrvr in the early thirteenth
century became a model for Hungarian royal charters to other towns, and the term
guest, which could also denote internal migrants, was extended to cover others
who shared the same privileges, although eventually the term citizen (civis) came
to be preferred to that of guest (hospes). The increasing presence of Germans and
their engagement in commerce made the customs of German towns increasingly
infuential in the regulations of urban affairs (Chapter 5). Nevertheless, German
town law could co-exist with other laws. At Lviv, for example, four ethnic groups
were allowed to use their own laws, but the Magdeburg law granted to the citizens
(largely Germans and Poles) had a superior status (Chapter 4). At Krakw for more
than half a century after the general adoption of German customs, non-Germans
were excluded from citizenship. During the fourteenth century in Krakw itself
the population was mixed, including Jews and Hungarians as well as Germans,
while in the adjoining, and in effect suburban, towns of Kazimierz and Kleparz
only Poles dwelled. Krakws trade guilds came increasingly to admit Poles and
in the ffteenth century many of the towns Jews moved to Kazimierz.
27
Similar
patterns prevailed in some Hungarian towns, but overall the degree to which town
governments admitted all comers or attempted to keep non-Germans out varied
widely and seems not strictly to have correlated either with the prevalence of
Germans among the population of the region or with the isolation of a German
town within a non-German territory, while in some towns, including Buda and
Zagreb, principles of parity came to be followed in the make up of town councils
(Chapters 2, 46, 13).
27
Carter, Trade and Urban Development; Philippe Dollinger, La Hanse (XIIeXVIIe
sicles) (Paris: Aubier, 1964), p. 158.
INTRODUCTION 13
The case of Dubrovnik (Chapter 8) illustrates the complex issues that had
a bearing on citizenship in a commercial city isolated within an ethnically and
culturally different hinterland with which it had close trading relations. In this
and other respects it resembled Venice, despite the enmity between the two cities.
Dubrovnik provides a good example of the degrees of liberty, citizenship or
protection which might be enjoyed by the residents of a town, a feature common
throughout Europe but especially notable in central and eastern areas marked
by the intermixture of ethnically distinct populations. It also exemplifed the
common characteristic of a progressive closure, or at least of defnition, in access
to citizenship and offce holding.
28
As a commercial city its inhabitants used
several languages, and it welcomed and protected foreigners who quickly adapted
to its way of life. At the same time it erected barriers against outsiders from the
hinterland, as Slavs, as members of the Orthodox Church or as heretics, yet it
did not cease to trade with them. Even more acutely than in Venice, political and
strategic interests nevertheless dictated that the Turks, who came to control the
surrounding territory, be treated as special guests.
These essays deal with a number of themes concerning social and political
inclusion and exclusion that were common to towns throughout medieval
Europe. The themes themselves refect the contrasts, and at the same time the
interdependence, between urban and rural ways of life; the signifcance for status
and privilege of engagement in different types of commercial activity, from local
and retail to long-distance and wholesale; the role of religion, and to a lesser extent
of language, as cultural and political markers; and the relationship between towns
and states or other forms of territorial rule. Everywhere, there was considerable
local variation in how these general principles worked out in practice. By addressing
the subject in regions where patterns of settlement, commerce, and engagement
with peoples outside Europe were over a long period often in sharp contrast to
those of western regions, and thereby prompting comparison and contrast, these
essays contribute to a wider understanding of the ever-continuing phenomenon of
the reception of strangers in towns.
28
For a discussion of these issues in England, set within a wider feld of reference,
see Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 11926, 1717.