The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (2015) - Plot & Excerpts
With marauding knights and brigands roaming the countryside, the first priority lay in erecting a defensive perimeter. An eighth-century description of Verona, in Italy, tells of a city “protected by thick walls and surrounded by forty-eight gleaming towers.” In the years before the introduction of cannons, strong city defenses could resist even the fiercest invaders. Thus began a new golden age for independent European city-states. Merchants and artisans in places like northern Italy financed their own defensive armed forces.3 In a world where imperial boundaries were vague and often meaningless, cities constituted the one reliably defined space.4 Safe behind their walls, urban merchants and artisans enjoyed an independence unimaginable in the cities of the East. There was no emperor, caliph, or sultan to restrain the private property rights or the guild privileges of the commercial classes.5 In the West, the autonomous city and nascent capitalism grew together.
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