Free A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester Page A

of them about the size of Reno, Nevada; Eugene, Oregon; or Beaumont,
Texas. Even among the celebrated
Reichsstädte
of the empire, only Cologne housed over 40,000 people. Other cities were about the same: Pisa had 40,000 citizens; Montpellier,
the largest municipality in southern France, 40,000; Florence 70,000; Barcelona 50,000; Valencia 30,000; Augsburg 20,000;
Nuremberg 15,000; Antwerp and Brussels 20,000. London was by far England’s largest town, with 50,000 Londoners; only 10,000
Englishmen lived in Bristol, the second-largest.
    Twentieth-century urban areas are approached by superhighways, with skylines looming in the background. Municipalities were
far humbler then. Emerging from the forest and following a dirt path, a stranger would confront the grim walls and turrets
of a town’s defenses. Visible beyond them would be the gabled roofs of the well-to-do, the huge square tower of the donjon,
the spires of parish churches, and, dwarfing them all, the soaring mass of the local cathedral.
    If the bishop’s seat was the spiritual heart of the community, the donjon, overshadowing the public square, was its secular
nucleus. On its roofs, twenty-four hours a day, stood watchmen, ready to strike the alarm bells at the first sign of attack
or fire. Below them lay the council chamber, where elders gathered to confer and vote; beneath that, the city archives; and,
in the cellar, the dungeon and the living quarters of the hangman, who was kept far busier than any executioner today. Sixteenth-century
men did not believe that criminal characters could be reformed or corrected, and so there were no reformatories or correctional
institutions. Indeed, prisons as we know them did not exist. Maiming and the lash were common punishments; for convicted felons
the rope was commoner still.
    The donjon was the last line of defense, but it was the wall, the first line of defense, which determined the propinquity
inside it. The smaller its circumference, the safer (and cheaper) the wall was. Therefore the land within was invaluable,
and not an inch of it could be wasted. The twisting streets were as narrow as the breadth of a man’s shoulders, and pedestrians
bore bruises from collisions with one another. There was no paving; shops opened directly on the streets, which were filthy;
excrement, urine, and offal were simply flung out windows.
    And it was easy to get lost. Sunlight rarely reached ground level, because the second story of each building always jutted
out over the first, the third over the second, and the fourth and fifth stories over those lower. At the top, at a height
approaching that of the great wall, burghers could actually shake hands with neighbors across the way. Rain rarely fell on
pedestrians, for which they were grateful, and little air or light, for which they weren’t. At night the town was scary. Watchmen
patrolled it—once clocks arrived, they would call, “One o’clock and all’s well!”—and heavy chains were stretched across
street entrances to foil the flight of thieves. Nevertheless rogues lurked in dark corners.
    One neighborhood of winding little alleys offered signs, for those who could read them, that the feudal past was receding.
Here were found the butcher’s lane, the papermaker’s street, tanners’ row, cobblers’ shops, saddlemakers, and even a small
bookshop. Their significance lay in their commerce. Europe had developed a new class: the merchants. The hubs of medieval
business had been Venice, Naples, and Milan—among only a handful of cities with over 100,000 inhabitants. Then the Medicis
of Florence had entered banking. Finally, Germany’s century-old Hanseatic League stirred itself and, overtaking the others,
for a time dominated trade.
    The Hansa, a league of some seventy medieval towns centering around Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, was originally formed in
the thirteenth century to combat piracy and overcome foreign trade restrictions. It reached its