Carl Stephenson and the Second Urbanization of Europe
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 10 August 2024 is the 138th anniversary of the birth of Carl Stephenson (10 August 1886–03 October 1954), who was born at Fayette, Iowa, on this date in 1886 (or 1888 — at least one source gives the year of his birth as 1888 rather than 1886).
Most of my library comes from used book stores, which I’ve been visiting all my life. One of my used book store finds many years ago was Carl Stephenson’s Medieval Feudalism. I didn’t know that this was a classic of the genre when I bought it, and I didn’t know anything about Stephenson. After I read the book I didn’t follow up on it, although even at that time my younger self appreciated the clarity and concision of Stephenson’s exposition of feudalism.
This book is foundational in the sense of taking a foundational concept, feudalism, and subjecting that concept to inquiry and analysis. It is often the case that the foundational concepts we employ are poorly understood, and, as a result, their use can be vague, which leads to further confusion. A short, concise book on a foundational concept can go a long way toward clarification, and Stephenson’s Medieval Feudalism provided some of this clarification, illuminating medieval civilization entire in doing so. Stephenson himself indirectly disavowed larger ambitions in his Preface:
“My purpose has not been to give a comprehensive description of Europe in the feudal age, or even of feudal society. I have taken for granted that the reader will be familiar with the main political events of the Middle Ages: the barbarian invasions, the formation of the Carolingian Empire, the establishment of the later monarchies, the crusades, and the like. I have omitted all but cursory mention of the manorial system and the revival of commerce, admirable sketches of which have already been published. I have, in other words, restricted the discussion to the few institutions that may be said to have constituted feudalism proper or to have been peculiarly associated with it.”
Nevertheless, it is a demonstration of the power of general concepts, especially those that are foundational within a given scholarly milieu, that their clarification can inform a discipline. Foundational clarification clarifies everything that rests on that foundation.
Many years after reading this book, not long ago in fact, I received by interlibrary loan a copy of Methods in Social Science: A Case Book, edited by Stuart A. Rice, published in 1931. I had ordered this volume for the paper by Henri Pirenne that it includes, “What are historians trying to do?” which was included in an excerpted and abridged form in Hans Meyerhoff’s anthology, Philosophy of History in Our Time, which I mentioned several times recently in my episode on Karl Popper in relation to historicism. It turned out that another paper in the volume I received by ILL, “The Work of Henri Pirenne and Georg von Below with Respect to the Origin of the Medieval Town” by Stephenson, gave me a lot to think about. At first the name of the author didn’t ring a bell with me, but I eventually made the connection with the author of Medieval Feudalism.
Stephenson notes at the beginning of his paper that, “A hundred years ago historians still glibly asserted the persistence of Roman municipal institutions.” Despite the many footnotes to the paper, most of which were references are to German papers, with a smattering of French and English works, this claim is not footnoted, and it’s presented as though it were common knowledge at the time. Perhaps it was. I wonder who the historians were in the early nineteenth century who regarded the persistence of Roman municipal institutions as common knowledge. I haven’t been able to find the sources of this view, which Stephenson said was commonplace a century before his time. The continuity of Roman institutions through late antiquity and into the early medieval period continues even today to be a bone of contention.
But that isn’t what interested me about that paper. Stephenson compares the views of five historians and their theories of the origins of medieval cities, and then he gives a list of properties (p. 369) which could be said to be the differentia between villages and cities. These properties include: 1) having a market, 2) being walled, 3) constituting a jurisdictional unit, and 4) enjoying special dispensation with regard to fiscal, military, and other political responsibilities. After naming these four differentia, Stephenson adds, “All four of these characteristics were matters of public law, for they came by virtue of state endowment.” We can count this as a fifth differentia, and I’ll come back to this.
After outlining the state of the debate over medieval cities in the late nineteenth century, Stephenson introduces Pirenne and his ideas, which focus on the city as a locus of trade and the emergence of a distinct mercantile class involved in trade. These two characteristics — trade and a trading class, which I guess could be thought of as one or as two characteristics — can be added to the list given in the previous paragraph, so now we have six or seven characteristics as the differentia of village from city. Having a market might be considered to be the same as being a center of commerce, and there is some discussion of this in the paper. Even in the early Middle Ages there were small markets, but these markets were insufficiently large to support and sustain a distinct mercantile class, so one might consider the emergence of such a class as more distinctive that the existence of trade per se.
In Stephenson and the scholars he cites, the emergence of cities in medieval Europe is treated as something new in history. Stephen writes in terms of, “the beginnings of urban life in Europe” (p. 371), while Pirenne, in his famous work Medieval Cities, wrote, “The birth of cities marked the beginning of a new era in the internal history of Western Europe” (p. 153; this is the first sentence of the final chapter). Of course we know that cities are certainly not new to history, and Stephenson said it was formerly a commonplace that Roman municipal institutions survived from classical antiquity. Cities were not new to history, and not new to Europe, but they were new to the civilization of medieval Europe that was then in the process of development. Europe had, essentially, lost its Roman cities. Some cities were simply abandoned, while other cities had ceased to function as cities, though they remained as settlements, often much reduced in size. When the civilization of medieval Europe began to re-establish commerce, cities began to appear, some of them at the sites of former ancient cities, and some of them founded de novo.
Western civilization passed through a distinctive, and perhaps unique, stage of development in the early Middle Ages. We formerly called this the Dark Ages, except that historians don’t use this term anymore. During the early Middle Ages, cities that had been depopulated in the late Roman period declined further into mere ruins with an adjacent village. Rome itself declined from a peak of around a million to a few thousand residents — some put the number at 50,000, some put the number at less than 30,000. But it’s obvious that a once built-up area had largely returned to agricultural use, as statues like the Laocoön group were dug up in gardens and vineyards that had been planted long after the structures of the built environment had been forgotten. Statues that were once placed in some wealthy Roman citizen’s garden were literally plowed up centuries later.
During the Dark Ages, which is a term I continue to use, though it is now largely rejected by historians, there were fortresses, administrative centers, churches, and monasteries, but few if any proper cities. Many of these had adjacent villages, but according to Pirenne and Stephenson and most other scholars, a castle plus a village does not a city make. The royal court was essentially nomadic, moving from one castle to another, or from one military campaign to another, without settling down in one place for a period of time sufficient to attract the kind of population that would turn some center into a city.
Above all, there were manorial estates, ruled by a feudal lord who had sworn his loyalty to the crown, but who, for all practical purposes, was the unquestioned ruler within his domain. It’s interesting that Stephenson had so little to say about manorial estates, as I would maintain that this was the fundamental unit of civilization in the early Middle Ages, along with monasteries, and this is what made early medieval civilization so distinctive, so different from other civilizations and so different from its classical ancestor: instead of civilization being based on a network of cities, it was based on a loose network of manorial estates. This manorial structure is a distinct kind of civilization that constitutes a distinct period within the larger history of Western civilization.
By invoking Western Civilization I am implicitly relying on a more abstract conception of civilization, that is to say, civilization at a higher “level” of the concept of civilization, than the level of abstraction involved in the concept of medieval European civilization, or indeed of a manorially-based civilization of the early Middle Ages. In a less abstract conception of civilization, the civilization of classical antiquity came to an end, and the civilization of medieval Europe began to form, the latter following the former, influenced by it, but at the same time distinct from it.
When we posit a construction like “Western Civilization” we are talking about a different kind of civilization than the kind of civilization that classical antiquity constituted on its own, apart from what came before and what followed it. The implied continuities that make Western Civilization into one great entity comprising ancient, medieval, and modern civilizations around the Mediterranean, Europe, and eventually the New World, are not continuities of administration, of political regimes or institutions, not even, according to Pirenne and Stephenson, continuities of cities (and the institutions based in cities). We could call it the continuity of a Great Tradition, to use the terminology of Robert Redfield, but even here the Great tradition has changed over historical time. In particular, the three great divisions of Western civilization — ancient, medieval, and modern — each had a distinct Great Tradition, though there was also descent with modification of this tradition, handed down in a altered form over thousands of years.
One of the fundamental changes over the history of Western civilization was the role that cities played as the centers of the Great Tradition of civilization. This is one reason I found myself so intrigued by Stephenson’s list of four or five characteristics that distinguish a village from a city. This problem of medieval history reflects a later discussion of the origins of pristine cities at the very origins of civilization. The standard by which we naturally measure theories of urbanization is V. Gordon Childe’s 1950 paper “The Urban Revolution” published in Town Planning Review — V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” The Town Planning Review, Vol. 21, №1 (Apr., 1950), pp. 3–17. Childe’s paper dates from a couple of decades after the debates discussed by Stephenson.
Childe, too, wanted to distinguish a village from a city, but he wanted to distinguish a Neolithic village from a Neolithic city, while Stephenson wanted to distinguish a medieval village, which may well have be co-located with a now-defunct ancient city, from a medieval city. Childe had also produced a list of characteristics that he said were diagnostic of an urban revolution in the ancient world. His list consisted of ten items, including: 1) the extent and density of settlements, 2) division of labor, i.e., craft specialization, 3) surplus value transferred to social elites (which might also be called “capital accumulation”), 4) monumental architecture, 5) social stratification, 6) writing, 7) science, 8) art, 9) trade, and 10) prioritizing residence over kinship. Of these ten items on Childe’s list, the only one shared by Stephenson’s list is trade.
Childe’s list of ten characteristics of a city has been enormously influential, and continues to be influential today. Moreover, it has expanded beyond diagnostic criteria for an urban revolution to commonly being used by archaeologists as diagnostic for civilization. What this means is that later scholars are continuously revising the list of characteristics, and while there’s no settled consensus, at least there’s a common conceptual framework within which shared problems can be discussed.
But Childe was a prehistorian and an archaeologist. His interest was in the foundation of pristine cities, i.e., cities that appeared where no city had previously existed, and this makes Childe’s conceptual framework for ancient urbanization distinct from Stephenson’s conceptual framework for medieval urbanization. In a sense, Childe’s list of urban characteristics has functioned as a framework for the discussion of the emergence of civilization much as the Drake equation has functioned as a framework for the discussion of ETI and its ability to communicate with us or to us. If we could quantify Childe’s ten criteria for the urban revolution, we could formulate the Childe Equation, analogous to the Drake Equation, and we could use the Childe Equation to retrodict the presence of a civilization in the past.
Stephenson and Pirenne were engaged in a similar project, although under distinct historical conditions. The first four characteristics or criteria introduced by Stephenson were, as he said, matters of public law that came by virtue of state endowment. That cities could arise in this environment immediately distinguishes medieval cities from the emergence of ancient cities. The ancient cities that arose in the earliest history of civilization, and indeed which cities constituted the earliest history of civilization, could not have arisen by virtue of state endowment, because there was no state as of yet. But while the medieval state was weak and often ineffectual, because many of the fictions of Roman law and classical antiquity were maintained well into the Middle Ages, this fiction could always be drawn upon to impart a legal basis for a city.
Despite the pervasive idea diffusion from that earlier civilization, medieval civilization often could not, in many cases, make use of Roman ideas in any practical way, because the political, social, and economic environment had changed so radically. Thus ideas, too, became symbols, one could even say, mere symbols. Roman symbols, retained or revived without the institutions they symbolized, were invoked for reasons of prestige, and not for reasons of efficacy of governance. The grandeur that was Rome was always a convenient symbol for imperialism, but no less importance was the great antiquity of the tradition. For medieval man, and for almost all pre-modern peoples, to be ancient is to be closer to the truth, because the truth is to the found in the origins of things, and the origins of things lie in the distant past. If, through the use of Roman symbols, you can demonstrate that your regime is connected to the earliest known period of history, and preferably that your power dates to the very foundation of the world, then your legitimacy has been established over and above any later regimes.
In this context, new developments would always be rationalized in terms of earlier states-of-affairs, and new developments were always occurring, in medieval civilization no less than in ancient or modern civilization. One of these developments was the reappearance of cities in medieval Europe, and of the commerce that sustained them, after centuries of absence. The period of medieval urbanization that began in the tenth century, which Pirenne and others called the revival of the towns, could be called the second urbanization of Europe.
The first urbanization of Europe was the Roman urbanization. Prior to the Roman urbanization of Europe there were agricultural settlements, but not significant cities. With the collapse of Roman institutions, most Roman cities failed, and those that survived lost population, institutions, and complexity. Pirenne describes it like this:
“…the period which opened with the Carolingian era knew cities neither in the social sense, nor in the economic sense, nor in the legal sense of that word. The towns and the burgs were merely fortified places and headquarters of administration. Their inhabitants enjoyed neither special laws nor institutions of their own, and their manner of living did not distinguish them in any way from the rest of society.”
After hundreds of years of cities and commerce playing a marginal role in Western history, cities began to revive and new cities were founded. It is this medieval urbanization of Europe starting in the tenth century that I suggested we could call the second urbanization of Europe. I’ve taken this term — second urbanization — from the history of the Indian subcontinent, where there was a major civilization, the Indus Valley civilization, in early prehistory, that was subsequently lost to all memory. After the Indus Valley civilization had been forgotten, India eventually gave rise to another civilization, which we could call Vedic civilization, and the network of cities of his later civilization is called the second urbanization.
Are there parallels between the second urbanization of India and the second urbanization of Europe? Of course there are analogies and failures of analogies. What I what to focus on here is the structural similarity in the histories, the parallelism of urban development, where some analogies between Europe and India hold, and some fail. We can formulate second urbanization as a general concept by de-coupling it from the specific circumstances of ancient India and medieval Europe. In this way we could apply this concept of second urbanization to Mesoamerica, which had been repeatedly urbanized by the civilizations of Mesoamerica, the most intensely urban of which was the Mayan, which had almost entirely collapsed by the time the Spanish arrived in the New World. The Spanish urbanization is the second urbanization of Mesoamerica.
There are two implicit conditions of the concept of second urbanization, 1) that the urbanization is not a pristine urbanism, but that 2) the previous urbanization has completely lapsed and that much of the social complexity was lost in the earlier de-urbanization. What about 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and so on iterations of urbanization? What do we call the nth iteration of urbanism? To arrive at an even more generic concept, we can further generalize this concept away from the second urbanizations of India and Europe and Mesoamerica and apply this concept to any circumstance where an earlier and perhaps pristine urbanization has failed, and a later urbanization has succeeded it. This we could call iterated urbanization.
This is an instructive moment for concept formation in history. Concepts introduced as apparently parochial descriptors can be re-purposed in a more theoretical history. That is to say, concepts can develop from an idiographic concept toward a nomothetic concept. This is one of the mechanisms by which we can lift history out of its idiographic ghetto and raise it to be something closer to a theoretical history. If we can do this with foundational concepts, like feudalism, then all the better. When the foundational concepts of history are theoretical concepts, then we have the beginnings of a conceptual framework in place, which can be supplemented by observational concepts, and now historical thought is closer to the practice of the theoretical sciences.
