Peter Arnade: “The City in a World of Cities: Antwerp and the Civitates Orbis Terrarum”

 

The early modern period affected a spatial revolution as the world was probed, explored, gridded and mapped with technological breakthroughs in cartography and chorography, among other innovations. In the print world of cityscapes, no work was more popular and commercially successful than the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, a six-volume atlas of world cities produced over four decades (1572-1617) in Antwerp and Cologne. The brainchild of Frans Hogenberg and Georg Braun, the Civitates’ intellectual design was hatched in Antwerp among a tight circle of humanists associated with Abraham Ortelius during the early years of the Dutch Revolt. With its 362 color plates of cityscapes that range from Mexico City to Quiloa in east Africa, its praise of urban life as the salve of humankind, and its elegantly executed cartouches and local inhabitants in regional attire, the Civitates is an iconographical exultation of cities and their spaces. My talk will focus on the local dimension behind the atlas’ global pretensions, especially the place of Antwerp as incubator of this urban chorography and its more muted role as both muse and foil to it. More generally, I will probe how the context of religious conflict and urban violence in the cities of the north, and Antwerp above all, may have inspired the Civitates’ presentation of ideal and idealized cities.

 

Claire Billen: “The construction of centrality: Brussels in the duchy of Brabant during the late Middle Ages”

 

From the end of the thirteenth century, the mercantile and entrepreneurial elites of Brussels were engaged in a tense struggle with the city of Louvain (Leuven) to make their own city the principal residence of the duke and the main power center of the principality of Brabant. Beginning in the middle of the fourteenth century, the city deployed cultural and religious tools as well as financial. They tried to present the city as the guardian of, and the place for celebration of, the territorial integrity of the duchy and the legitimacy of its princely dynasty. To this end, they fabricated a cult featuring processional and civic celebrations of the virgin, which was materialized in a statue thought able to perform miracles and stolen from the city of Antwerp (the third city of medieval Brabant); the cult and its rituals helped preserve the close alliance between the city and its dukes into the seventeenth century.

 

Based on new research and a new interpretative frame, but also building on the work of predecessors, my paper will explore the socio-spatial aspects of this political project, attempting to provide a coherent account of what until now have been partial and scattered studies.

 

Claire Billen : « La construction d’une centralité : Bruxelles dans le duché de Brabant au bas moyen âge »

 

Depuis la fin du 13^e siècle, les élites marchandes et entrepreneuriales bruxelloisent ont enclenché une concurrence acharnée avec Louvain pour faire de leur ville la résidence principale du duc et le centre de pouvoir majeur de la principauté brabançonne. Parallèlement aux stratégies financières, une offensive culturelle et religieuse se déploie dès le milieu du 14e siècle. Elle vise à présenter la ville comme la gardienne et le lieu de célébration de l’intégrité territoriale du duché et de la légitimité dynastique de ses princes. L’invention sophistiquée d’un culte processionnaire et civique à la Vierge, matérialisée par une statue miraculeuse, ravie à la ville d’Anvers (troisième ville du Brabant au moyen âge), prolonge , jusqu’au 17^e siècle, l’alliance privilégiée de la ville et des ducs.

 

Sur la base de nouvelles recherches et de nouvelles interprétations, l’exposé développera les aspects sociaux et spatiaux d’une entreprise politique à laquelle de nombreux auteurs se sont déjà intéressés. Il tentera d’effectuer une mise en cohérence de l’ensemble de travaux importants mais dispersés et parcellaires.

 

Marc Boone: “From Cuckoo’s Egg to sedes tyranni: the princely citadels in the cities of the Low Countries, or the city’s spatial integrity hijacked (15^th-early 16^th centuries)”

 

During the open warfare against some of the major cities in their northern territories and following creeping insubordination of urban powers who had supposedly been subdued, the princes of the Burgundian and Habsburg dynasties time and again materially marked their victories in urban space. Some constructed a military citadel right in the heart of the city, thus establishing a physical threat as well as a symbol of the prince’s power and of the city’s subjection. As recent studies have shown, this was often part of deliberate and politically inspired destructions and modifications of the urban landscape. What needs to be clarified however is the impact of these interventions on the existing spatial organisation of the city, and the way these interventions changed the city’s political structure. What parts of urban space were concerned and targeted, at what particular groups within the city’s commercial and corporative elites may these operations have been directed, and with what effects? These actions were in many cases similar to, and perhaps inspired by, similar operations in the Italian cities of the period, but scholars have not taken up this issue in a systematic way. The paper will discuss these issues, beginning with the reign of Charles the Bold (dealing with the examples of Liège and Ghent) and ending with the reigns of emperor Charles V and King Philip II of Spain – when other cities such as Utrecht, Antwerp etc. were concerned. It will also, as a kind of epilogue, consider the way these actions were reflected, directly or indirectly, in ideology. After all, did not Machiavelli himself advise any prince that the ‘best fortress that exists is to avoid being hated by the people’ (The Prince, chapter XX).

 

Diane Chamboduc: “The Economic Trades through the Lucchese Judicial and Fiscal Sources: a cartography of the economic life of the city in the late XIVth century”

 

When the city of Lucca recovered its Libertas in 1369, the political as well as the economic and cultural life of the commune was entirely reorganized. This reorganization was completed in the economic field thanks to a new production code (the so-called Corte de Mercanti Statute of 1376), and the combined effort of the elites among the silk merchants and the communal authorities, who often belonged to the same social circles. In this process, new series of archives were created or renewed that give a remarkable insight into the economic trades of the city and can help us create a dynamic cartography of the economic use of space both inside the city’s territory (the city itself and its contado) and outside of it, the international trade being taken into consideration. First, the judicial records of the Merchants Court give a very complex view of the city’s productive sectors and allow us a view of areas where production was highly specialized, for example among women spinsters in the countryside. Second, the fiscal records of the town, known as the Gabella Maggiore, register all the products entering or leaving the city when they are taxed, and usually include their origin and their destination. For the 30 last years of the XIVth century, such records exist both for the whole city and for each of its gates, which allow us to guess the main routes of local, regional and even international trade. Thus, the confrontation of these two very rich archival collections should allow us to map the economic life of this city in the late XIVth century from the point of view both of production and distribution. The aim of this study is also to vary the scale of analysis in order to reveal the everyday life of the various social agents of Lucca as well as the city’s place in the larger economic order of the day.

 

Denis Crouzet: “The Space of the Here and Now and the Space of the Afterlife: Catholic violence in search of the city of God (France 1560-1598)”

 

In the middle of the wars of Religion, at the center of exclusivist Catholics’ awareness of space, there was doubtlessly as much anxiety about salvation as there was presumed hopefulness. From the 1550s, even before the beginning of the civil war, the city of the here and now was represented as a city not only as besieged by heresy but also eaten away from inside by forces working, secretly or openly, to sabotage it, to transform it into a new Nineveh. In Paris, just as in Toulouse, the imaginary is dominated by the painful image of an offended God who could no longer recognize his own because they allowed his glory and honor to be violated by his enemies. Because the false prophets announced in the Apocalypse have arrived, because ever more people listen to their seductive speech, because the iconoclastic profanations have been at work, the city is no longer in contention to be the city of God, to be the city of the hereafter that will emerge when the last days are near; his realm is polluted and befouled and papist preachers announce and proclaim; before the broadsword of God’s anger falls on the city, it is necessary that the sword and the fire of men strike all who worship a god who is nothing but a replica of Baal or of Moloch of the Old Testament. The calls for a purifying violence insist, by their accumulating evocations of paradigmatic biblical events, that the cities of the French realm should conform to the model of Jerusalem in the time of the Alliance, a time located in their space, even in the places where they punish or have punished, that the heretics must be killed in order that God is avenged. And this rhetoric of violence demands that the rites of re-sacralization be respected, which will restore a time when God was present to his people, when he spoke even by means of marvels. Whence the massacres or the murders which had an almost liturgical purpose, because they mark a space of blood, the same blood as that which ran during the time of the wavering of the chosen people, and that should be understood less as offerings addressed to God, as much proceedings, made on behalf of the body of the faithful, to name sins as to invoke divine pardon. Space is animated in public places, on the bridges, at crossroads, in front of the sanctuaries or before the holy images, at the moment of these murders and massacres of heretics, in a huge cry directed to the ear of God, by means of staging that is intended to illuminate the space of these abominations, even to the point of mimicking both the processional penance and the realization of the prophetic justice of God. In this figuration of a Mystery, the space of the here and now and the space of the hereafter tend, in the immediacy of the violence, to be fused, as if in the end the blood of God’s adversary was the necessary link between the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalem, the link between human error and divine desire, between crime and mercy. In the period of the League, in a Paris haunted by the double image of a Jerusalem at risk of divine retribution and of a Jerusalem that is becoming the space of Christ’s millenarian rule, the tension intensifies by constituting a sacred time that witnesses the space of the capital of the realm laced with processions of penitents, making each Parisian a solder of Christ who is preparing his city for the eschatological reign of the Cross.

 

Denis Crouzet: « Espaces d’ici-bas et espace de l’au-delà : la violence catholique à la recherche de la cité de Dieu (France, 1560-1598) »

 

Au cœur des guerres de Religion, au cœur de la conscience de l’espace des catholiques exclusivistes, il y eut sans doute autant une angoisse du salut qu’une espérance assumée. Dès le tournant des années 1550, avant même l’entrée en guerre civile, la représentation de la cité d’ici-bas est celle d’une cité non seulement assiégée par l’hérésie, mais travaillée de l’intérieur par des forces agissant occultement ou ouvertement pour la subvertir, la transformer une nouvelle Ninive. L’imaginaire, à Paris comme à Toulouse, est dominé par l’image douloureuse d’un Dieu offensé qui ne reconnaît plus les Siens parce que ceux-ci laissent sa gloire et son honneur être offensés par ses ennemis. Parce que les faux prophètes annoncés dans l’Apocalypse sont là, parce que toujours plus nombreux sont ceux qui prêtent l’oreille à leur parole de séduction, parce que des profanations iconoclastes sont agies, la cité n’est plus en tension d’être la cité de Dieu, d’être en tension d’être la cité de l’Au-delà qui surgira lors de derniers temps qui sont imminents ; son territoire est pollué et souillé et les prédicateurs papistes le clament et le proclament : avant que le glaive de feu de la colère de Dieu ne s’abatte sur la cité, il faut que le glaive et le feu des hommes frappe tous ceux qui adorent un Dieu qui n’est qu’une réplique du Baal ou du Moloch de l’Ancien Testament. Les appels à la violence purificatrice soulignent, par accumulation d’évocations de situations paradigmatiques bibliques, que les cités du royaume de France doivent se conformer au modèle de la Jérusalem du temps de l’Alliance, que c’est dans leur espace, dans les lieux mêmes où ils sévissent ou ont sévi, que les hérétiques doivent être mis à mort pour que satisfaction soit donnée à Dieu. Et cette rhétorique de la violence exige l’adhésion à des rites de resacralisation restaurant un temps au cours duquel Dieu est présent au côté de son peuple, lui parle dans son espace même par des signes merveilleux. D’où des massacres ou des meurtres qui ont une vocation presque liturgique, puisqu’ils marquent l’espace du sang, le même sang que celui a coulé dans le temps des vicissitudes du peuple élu, et qui sont donc à comprendre moins comme des offrandes que comme des prières adressées à Dieu, autant des procédures, de la part du corps des fidèles, de désignation du péché que d’invocation au pardon divin. L’espace s’anime sur les places publiques, les ponts, aux carrefours, devant les sanctuaires ou les images saintes, lors de ces meurtres ou massacres d’hérétiques, en un grand parler dirigé vers l’écoute de Dieu, par le truchement de mise en scènes destinées comme à lustrer l’espace de ses abominations, et ceci jusqu’à mimer aussi bien la pénitence processionnelle que l’accomplissement de la justice prophétique de Dieu. Dans cette optique de figuration d’un Mystère, espace d’ici-bas et espace de l’Au-delà tendent, dans la temporalité propre des violences, à fusionner, comme si finalement le sang de l’adversaire de Dieu était le nécessaire liant entre Jérusalem terrestre et Jérusalem céleste, le liant entre la faute humaine et le désir divin, entre crime et miséricorde. Avec le temps de la Ligue, dans une ville de Paris hantée par la double image d’une Jérusalem risquant le châtiment divin de la destruction et d’une Jérusalem devenant l’espace du règne millénariste du Christ, la tension s’amplifie en la constitution d’un temps sacré voyant l’espace de la capitale du royaume être sillonné de processions pénitentes, faisant de chaque parisien un miles Christi préparant dans sa ville le règne eschatologique de la Croix.

 

Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan: “La proximité en négatif: the rites of stigmatization and the spaces of ordinary life in Renaissance Italy”

 

At a time when, in one study after another, historians of Italian cities continually focus attention on the diversity in the way conflicts were resolved in these communities, at a time when it is no longer enough to consider the complex plurality of judicial jurisdictions and the diverse social customs that such an institutional richness allows, at a time when attention is ever more concentrated on the culture of the vendetta, it would seem strange, and historiographically old-fashioned, to turn one’s gaze toward the administration of corporal punishment. In effect, an entire historiographic season has been reserved for the study of criminal justice and the problem of public order in urbanized Italy. Many studies in Florence and Venice have been devoted, in the past few years, to analysis of the repressive legal systems in the 12^th and 13^th century, and to their evolution for the benefit of an ever more authoritarian power regime. Thus we have a history recounting the penalization of comportment and the strengthening of the public judicial system. It is thus not surprising that the “spectacle” of public justice has been equally scrutinized. As the diffusion of the inquisitorial procedure, the tightening of social control, and the progress, if not that of the state at least that of a more coercive political power, was tracked, it logically followed that one would have become interested in the scenography of the punitive ceremonies.

 

Thus, we have so many descriptions of tortured bodies, dismembered and displayed on the gates of the city. In addition, as a result of this quest to reconstruct the scene of torture and the nature of the punishments, there are so many references to the guillotines, to the stocks and gallows in the city. Above all, we have so many more pieces of information about the public ceremonies and the messages disseminated for the benefit of the powers who were forming a new ideology of justice, one was based on pacifying the social whole. So many works have yielded these insights and thus we have passed beyond our first, freely teleological readings, which regarded the torment inflicted on bodies and the sophistication of the executions as steps in the process of state building, towards more nuanced interpretations.

 

Why, as part of a more general reflection on the power of space, should we return to a dossier such as this preamble that, in spite of its rapidity and schematic quality, would present the historiography as closed? First, we will observe that very often [in existing studies] the places themselves where the punishments took places are given only brief, if not repetitive and conventional, mention. It is thus necessary in the first place to enrich such an analysis, showing the complexity and the mobility of the spatial scenarios used, with one purpose: not to treat city space as a blank field, as though it were a passive and malleable ground on which public authority was imprinted. The example of Venice will permit, in the second part of my paper, to show how punishment could be administered in the spaces of daily activity, right beside life and crime. There will be time, for concluding, to comment on the range of uses to which space was put in order to discover and isolate the diverse territorialities that could exist in an Italian city during the last centuries of the Middle Ages.

 

Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan: « La proximité en négatif: rites de stigmatisation et espaces du quotidien dans l’Italie de la Renaissance »

 

A l’heure où, une étude après l’autre, les historiens des villes d’Italie, n’en finissent pas de mettre au jour la diversité, dans ces communautés, des modes de résolution des conflits, à l’heure où il ne suffit plus de considérer la complexe pluralité des instances judiciaires et les usages sociaux différenciés qu’une telle richesse institutionnelle autorisait, à l’heure où l’attention toujours plus se concentre sur la culture de la vendetta, il pourra sembler singulier, et historiographiquement vieilli, de faire porter le regard sur la justice afflictive. A l’étude de la justice criminelle et des problèmes d’ordre public dans l’Italie urbaine, toute une saison historiographique fut en effet un temps réservée. A l’analyse du système répressif et judiciaire aux XIIe-XIIIe siècles, puis de ses évolutions successives au service d’une organisation plus autoritaire du pouvoir, des travaux nombreux, à Florence, à Venise, furent, il y a quelques années, consacrés. Ainsi fut mise en place l’histoire d’une pénalisation des comportements et d’un renforcement de l’appareil judiciaire public. Rien d’étonnant donc à ce que le spectacle de la justice publique ait été en parallèle scruté. Quand on suivait partout la diffusion de la procédure inquisitoire, le resserrement du contrôle social, les progrès, si ce n’est de l’Etat, au moins d’un pouvoir politique plus coercitif, il était logique de se passionner pour la scénographie des cérémonies punitives.

 

Autant alors de descriptions des corps suppliciés, démembrés, exposés aux portes de la ville. Autant aussi, dans cette quête pour restituer l’éclat des supplices et les caractères de l’exécution des peines, de références à ces échafauds, à ces piloris, à ces gibets dressés dans la ville. Autant surtout d’éléments d’information sur ces cérémonies publiques et leurs messages diffusés au bénéfice de pouvoirs qui conceptualisaient une nouvelle idéologie de la justice, fondée sur la pacification sociale. Tant de travaux ont porté leurs fruits et ainsi est-on passé de premières lectures volontiers téléologiques, qui voyaient s’accomplir dans le tourment des corps et le raffinement des exécutions les seuls progrès de l’Etat, à des interprétations plus nuancées.

 

Pourquoi reprendre, au bénéfice d’une réflexion sur le pouvoir de l’espace, un tel dossier que ce préambule historiographie et problématique tendrait, malgré sa rapidité et son schématisme, à présenter comme clos ? On observera d’abord que bien souvent aux lieux des châtiments sont réservées des remarques rapides quand elles ne sont pas répétitives et convenues. Il s’agira donc d’abord d’enrichir une telle analyse, en montrant la complexité et la mobilité des scénarios spatiaux utilisés, avec une ambition: ne pas traiter l’espace urbain comme un plancher, comme un support docile et malléable sur lequel l’autorité publique imprimerait ses marques. L’exemple vénitien permettra, et ce sera une deuxième série de remarques, de montrer comment le châtiment pouvait aussi être administré dans les espaces du quotidien, au plus près de la vie et du crime. Il sera temps, pour finir, de commenter l’ensemble de ces usages de l’espace pour y découvrir et isoler les diverses territorialités qui pouvaient coexister dans une ville italienne des derniers siècles du Moyen Âge.

 

Chloé Deligne: “Powers of Space, Spaces of Power: the constitution of the grand-place in the cities of the Low Countries, 12^th-14^th centuries”

 

The central market, often known as the « grand-place » or « grote markt », is often presented as the organizing space of the cities in the Low Countries. According to numerous tourist guides and historical works, the grand-place/grote markt of Brussels, Leuven, Antwerp, Mechelen, Mons, Tournai, Lille, Bruges, etc. were the central points around which the cities took form.

 

As opposed to these simplistic views, archaeological fieldwork and recent historical studies have shown that these open spaces were sometimes established on sites that had long been occupied and built up (Ypres, Mechelen, Ghent, ’s Hertogenbosch…) or on marginal spaces at the edge of a previous centre (Brussels, Mons, Lille…). When brought together and lined up on the borders of these grand places, the town hall, the belfry, important covered markets, etc. materialized the progressive strengthening of civic powers and their strong links to the commercial activities. The chronology of the grand-place’s constitution throughout the principalities of the Low Countries begins in the course of the 12th century in Flanders and stretches out until the fourteenth centuries in the neighbouring principalities. As such they can be considered as a « regional phenomenon » as well as a political, cultural and urban one. In the same way, the construction of the buildings gathered on their sides was a long-lasting process and subject to frequent rearrangements throughout the centuries.

 

On basis of a wide range of case studies this study will try to show how the successive transformations of these ‘sensitive spots’ express not only the efforts to redefine the urban model and adjust spatial arrangements to those models but also to expose how the changes reflect the internal socio-political dynamics of each city.

 

Jean-Baptiste Delzant: “Instaurator et fundator: the erection of the urban seigneurie and construction of the city (central Italy, end of the Middle Ages)”

 

The difficulties the papacy faced in the three first decades of the 15^th century following the Schism and its consequences allowed a number of the important Italian families to give free rein to their ambitions. In the regions at the center of the peninsula, especially the Marches and Umbria, dynasties that had dominated the activities of the communal institutions for decades took the occasion which Fortune offered and tried to reinforce their hold on the city, increasing the personalization of power and the construction of territorial enclaves governed by a small family group.

 

Numerous reforms of communal statutes followed that showed the tensions within the governing groups, the efforts of a family to take hold of the apparatus of government, and the resilience of the old institutions.* The three cities which are the focus of this study, which were united by commercial, diplomatic and marital bonds among their elites, firmly belong in this company: Fabriano changed its statues in 1415, Cameriono in 1424, Foligno in 1426. Each time, the changes revealed the increasing pressure of those who had been able to install themselves at the top of the city’s hierarchy: the Chiaveli, the da Varano and the Trinci. One arena, however, where the commune was able to preserve its rights in the name of the common good was governance of public space. The principal places of the city, the place of the commune or that of the cathedral, the great arterial roadways, the tiny streets or the gates of the city were the object of jealous attention on the part of the assembles of citizens who were otherwise progressively excluded from participation in governance of military or diplomatic affairs. At the same time, the men who had monopolized power and used the old institutions to their advantage increased their hold on the property inside the city and appropriated the symbolic spaces of power – signs, coats of arms, statutes and palaces.

 

Space itself thus functioned as the playing field of power and the strategies, often futile, which were deployed for control of space reveal the oppositions and the collaboration, within a complex political and social game, between the old communal institutions and the domain of lordship that was being constructed, between elites eager to preserve their influence and the family groups who were, provisionally, the victors. However, space, whether looked at laterally or from above, cannot be reduced to a simple instrument in the contests between the important actors in civic life. Built, occupied, traversed and lived, space is used in many different ways by a diverse population made up of different groups who have different interests and objectives that are sometimes entirely unlike those of the people who govern them. The inertia of built spaces, the stolid resistance of set patterns of social life and commerce, and the weight of civic memory combine into a political culture that makes “space” a complex notion. My study attempts to expose the depth of this notion and to reveal how space wielded its power as efforts were made to establish lordships in Fabriano, Cameriono and Foligno.

 

Jean-Baptiste Delzant : « Instaurator et fundator : édification de la seigneurie urbaine et construction de la ville (Italie centrale, fin du Moyen Âge)  »

 

Les difficultés que connaît la papauté dans les trois premières décennies du xv^e siècle, à la suite du Grand Schisme et de ses conséquences, permettent à de nombreuses grandes familles italiennes de donner libre cours à leurs ambitions. Dans les régions du centre de la péninsule, les Marches et l’Ombrie notamment, les dynasties qui dominent le jeu des institutions communales depuis des décennies saisissent l’occasion que leur offre la Fortune et tentent de renforcer leur emprise sur la cité, accélérant la personnalisation du pouvoir et la construction d’entités territoriales gouvernés par un groupe familial restreint.

 

De nombreuses réformes des statuts communaux ont alors lieu, qui traduisent les tensions à l’intérieur des groupes dirigeants, les tentatives de main mise d’une famille sur l’appareil de gouvernement et la résilience des institutions anciennes[1]. Les trois villes qui constituent le cœur de cette étude, unies par des relations commerciales, diplomatiques et matrimoniales entre les élites, s’insèrent pleinement dans ce cadre général : Fabriano amende ses statuts en 1415, Camerino en 1424, Foligno en 1426. A chaque fois, les modifications manifestent une présence plus appuyée de ceux qui sont su s’installer à la tête de leur cité : les Chiavelli, les da Varano et les Trinci. Un des domaines dans lesquels la commune parvient cependant à maintenir ses prérogatives, au nom du bien commun, est la gestion de l’espace public. Les principaux lieux de la cité, la place de la commune ou celle de la cathédrale, les grandes artères, les ruelles ou les portes de la ville sont l’objet d’une attention jalouse de la part d’assemblées de citoyens par ailleurs progressivement écartées de la gestion des affaires militaires ou diplomatiques. Au même moment, les hommes qui ont accaparé le pouvoir et détourné les institutions anciennes à leur profit accroissent leur emprise foncière à l’intérieur même de la cité et marquent l’espace des signes, armoiries, statues ou palais, de leur puissance.

 

L’espace apparaît alors comme un véritable enjeu de pouvoir et les stratégies, souvent inabouties ou infructueuses, qui sont déployées pour son contrôle traduisent les oppositions et la collaboration, au sein d’un jeu politique et social complexe, entre les institutions communales anciennes et la seigneurie en construction, entre des élites soucieuses de préserver leur influence et le groupe familial provisoirement vainqueur. Cependant, l’espace, déployé à l’horizontale comme à la verticale, ne se réduit pas à un simple instrument dans les luttes opposant les grands acteurs de la vie civique. Bâti, habité, parcouru et vécu, il est l’objet de nombreux usages de la part d’une population diversifiée, dont les différents groupes ont des intérêts et des objectifs différant parfois singulièrement de ceux de leurs gouvernants. L’inertie des constructions, la résistance des pratiques sociales et marchandes et le poids de la mémoire civique se conjuguent aux aspects politiques pour faire de l’espace une notion complexe. L’étude proposée à l’occasion de la conférence de l’Italian Academy de l’université de Columbia, en mars 2010, tentera de rendre compte de l’épaisseur de la notion et de montrer le poids déterminant joué par l’espace dans les tentatives de construction des seigneuries de Fabriano, de Camerino et de Foligno.

 

Pierre-Henri Guittonneau: “Small Cities and the Riparian Environment: social practices and conflicts about usage in the Parisian region during the XVth century”

 

The Seine, like many other rivers during the Middle Ages, linked localities extending more than 700 kilometers along its banks. At the middle of its bed, more or less at the Parisian basin, one or another played an uncontested role in the progressive domination of Paris over the rest of the French realm. In the shadow of the capital, from the areas around Montereau-fault-Yonne up to those around Mantes-la-Jolie, in this basin where the principal tributaries of the Seine converged – Yonne, Marne and Oise – lay a long chain of settlements made up of small cities, towns, and villages. Often the seat of old royal or seigneurial institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical, or economic centers of varying importance, these places gave life, in varying ways, to the regions they dominated.

 

Famous for the relative paucity of their archives, due to local pecularities or to issues of conservation, these places nevertheless have a collection of sources, which are more or less substantial from case to case. Whether collected in registers or surviving as independent documents, they consist of deliberations, accounts, judgments, leases, and other “actes de la pratique” issued by diverse institutions, secular as well as ecclesiastic, placed in cities or appointed as representatives authorities in charge of civil disputes. In addition, there are royal institutions – Parlement, the Chambre des Comptes, the Chatelet de Paris, royal chancelleries among others. Taken together, these archives bear witness to social practices that developed in spaces dominated by the institutions that produced the source. Furthermore, each series of documents reveals the sinews of the spaciality that contained the actors in the source, described the activity, the places themselves, the distance between these places and the location of the authority in whose name or before whom the document was drawn up. By following the routes mapped by these dry sources, we can sketch the spaces, or the sum of the spaces whose common point is the small city – or even town – that played a role in the their production, by means of the biases of their institutions and their men. Rather than seeing them as unconnected spaces, it is necessary to recognize that they are overlapping spatial patterns which together describe the reality of medieval urbanism, something very much unlike the unit imagined in historiography.

 

Among the elements that, in the sources, unify all others, each entity in these string of settlements, the relationships with Paris, understood as big city and royal capital, takes pride of place as much for issues of provisioning or the real estate market as for the institutions that are located there. Paris imposes itself on the entirety of its surroundings. Another point in common (among these settlements), the Seine and more precisely its quality as a river, occupies a preponderant place which explains both the placement of these localities and the continual attraction that the river exercises on the groups and the individuals that populate these sites. An object of nature whose physical qualities impose themselves on the urban landscape, the river also offers multiple possibilities for appropriation and alteration: the Seine is, just as other rivers, a powerful creator of social practice both at the local and regional level.

 

To privilege a river valley, to define it in the broad sense --as the riverbed and its banks – dominated by the flow of the river itself, is necessarily to take account of space itself and all that the word invokes. It refers, if we understand the extensive research by humanists and social sciences, to two meanings: the part or entirety of the earthly surface and a “territory,” that is the space appropriated by a society. When used to think about the relations between small cities and the river valley, this proposition invites us to consider the place where the river meets the land, on the riverbank, or the nearby areas where each of the localities under consideration are placed and to direct our attention to the social space produced and continued by the activities of the groups and the individuals who live, work, and travel near this place. It also invites us to vary the levels from which we regard these activities so that we don’t remain stuck in the river next to each locality. To the extent that the physical space of the river theoretically opens to each locality and to group a panoply of social activities that contribute to the enlargement of their immediate horizon, there are two complementary further steps we could take. The first would be to compare the localities, the second to study the effects of neighbors’ actions – whether simply in terms of coexistence, mutual aid and rivalry.

 

In order to try to understand “the power of space” on the society and the urban institutions that bordered the Seine, my study focuses on the practices, above all the economic practices, which the river makes possible and which fuel the creation of social spaces, as lived and as represented, and especially the spaces common to the small cities. In particular I focus on those sources whose actors and authors enjoy certain powers over space which must be understood both as recognized powers over a given space and as possibilities to benefit from all or a part of a given space. More precisely still, my analysis focuses on the types of relations in and among cities which powers over river space and the use of the river can create. From judicial sources, administrative sources and accounts we can, in the first place, understand how the river space was shared on a daily basis. They allow us, in effect, to understand both the claims of the institutions such as the Provost of the Merchants of Paris or the Abbey of St. Denis to a portion of the Seine, the requests of the fishermen of Corbeil and Melun or even snatches of the voices of witnesses who, via their own activities and experience, can be considered able to give reliable testimony about the river space. All this leads us to think that one of the principal powers of “space” is to produce sources that translate daily use of space, economic and social, political and judicial, individual and collective, of communities that are fully or partly urban and who are less isolated, one from another, than it may appear.

 

Pierre-Henri Guittonneau : « Petites villes et espace fluvial : pratiques sociales et conflits d’usage autour de Paris au XVe siècle »

 

La Seine, à l’instar de nombreux autres fleuves au Moyen Age, constitue un véritable trait d’union pour les localités qui en sont riveraines, tout au long d’un cours qui s’étend sur plus de sept cent kilomètres. Elle l’est en tout cas dans la partie médiane de son bassin qui correspond peu ou prou au cœur du Bassin parisien, l’un et l’autre ayant joué un rôle qui n’est plus à démontrer dans la progressive domination de Paris sur l’ensemble du royaume de France. Dans l’ombre de la capitale, depuis les environs de Montereau-fault-Yonne jusqu’à ceux de Mantes-la-Jolie, dans cette cuvette géologique où convergent les principaux affluents du fleuve — Yonne, Marne et Oise —, s’égrène une longue suite d’agglomérations faite de petites villes, de bourgs et de villages. Sièges souvent anciens d’institutions royales et seigneuriales — tant laïques qu’ecclésiastiques —, ainsi que centres économiques modestes ou plus importants, ces localités animent diversement l’espace qu’elles dominent.

 

Réputées pour la relative pauvreté de leurs archives, qui tient tant aux spécificités locales qu’à des questions de conservation, ces agglomérations disposent, malgré tout, d’un corpus de sources, certes plus ou moins consistant selon les cas. Sous forme de registres ou de pièces indépendantes, les documents rassemblent délibérations, comptes, arrêts, baux et autres actes de la pratique qui émanent d’une diversité d’institutions, laïques et ecclésiastiques, implantées en ville ou qui témoignent de l’exercice par celles-ci d’une juridiction gracieuse. En sus, les sources des institutions royales — Parlement, Chambre des Comptes, Châtelet de Paris, chancellerie royale entre autres — complètent ce premier pan du corpus. L’ensemble de ces archives témoignent de pratiques sociales qui se développent dans le cadre d’espaces dont la localité ou l’institution productrice de la source qui y siège est le centre de gravité. Par ailleurs, chaque série de documents révèle en filigrane une spatialité d’où émergent les acteurs de la source, l’action décrite, les lieux considérés, la distance entre ceux-ci et le siège de l’instance, et l’instance au nom de laquelle ou devant laquelle le document est rédigé. Suivant cette présentation succincte et forcément réductrice, on aboutit, du point de vue spatial, à une somme d’espaces sociaux dont le point commun est la petite ville — voire le bourg — qui joue un rôle dans leur production, par le biais de ses institutions et de ses hommes. Plutôt que d’y voir des espaces éclatés, il faudrait reconnaître une imbrication d’espaces caractéristique d’une réalité urbaine médiévale bien éloignée de ce que l’historiographie urbaine appelle une « monade ».

 

Parmi les éléments qui, dans les sources, rapprochent des autres chaque entité de cette suite d’agglomérations, les relations avec Paris, entendue comme grande ville et comme capitale royale, figurent en première place tant pour les questions d’approvisionnement ou de marché immobilier que pour le jeu des institutions qui y siègent. Paris s’impose à l’ensemble de ses alentours. Autre point commun majeur, la Seine, et plus précisément son espace fluvial, occupe une place prépondérante qu’expliquent à la fois le site des localités et l’attraction continue que le fleuve exerce sur les groupes et les individus qui les peuplent. Cadre naturel dont la matérialité physique s’impose dans le paysage urbain, elle offre en outre de multiples possibilités d’appropriations et d’aménagements par les hommes : la Seine est, à l’instar d’autres fleuves, un puissant agent de pratiques sociales à la fois sur le plan local et le plan régional.

 

Privilégier un espace fluvial, à définir comme l’étendue — lit et rives — dominée par le cours d’eau considéré, c’est tenir compte obligatoirement de ce que signifie la notion d’ « espace ». Cette dernière renvoie, selon ce que nous apprennent de nombreuses recherches en sciences humaines, à deux sens principaux : partie ou totalité de la surface terrestre et, comme un équivalent de« territoire », espace approprié par une société. Dans le cadre d’une réflexion sur les rapports entre les petites villes et l’espace fluvial, ce postulat de départ invite à considérer le lieu de rencontre du fleuve et de la terre sur les rives, ou à proximité, là où se dresse chacune des localités examinées, ainsi qu’à prêter attention à l’espace social produit en continu par les pratiques des groupes et des individus qui vivent, travaillent, circulent près de ce lieu. C’est aussi une invitation à varier les échelles pour ne pas en rester à l’espace du fleuve propre à chaque localité. Dans la mesure où l’espace physique du fleuve ouvre en théorie à chaque localité et à chaque groupe une panoplie de pratiques sociales contribuant à élargir leur horizon immédiat, deux démarches complémentaires sont à poursuivre également. La première consiste à établir des comparaisons entre localités, la seconde à prendre acte des conséquences que le voisinage, conditionné par l’espace physique, occasionne en termes de coexistence, d’entraide et de rivalité.

 

Pour tenter de saisir le pouvoir qu’exerce l’espace sur les sociétés et les institutions urbaines riveraines de la Seine, l’accent sera mis sur des pratiques, avant tout économiques, que la présence du fleuve engendre et qui participent à la fabrication continue d’espaces sociaux vécus et représentés et plus largement d’un espace social commun aux petites villes. L’attention sera portée sur des sources dont les auteurs et les acteurs jouissent de certains pouvoirs sur l’espace qu’il faudrait entendre à la fois comme puissances reconnues sur un espace donné et comme possibilités de jouir de tout ou partie d’un espace donné. Plus précisément, l’analyse portera sur les types de relations dans et entre les villes que les pouvoirs sur l’espace fluvial et l’utilisation variée de ce dernier sont susceptibles de créer. Des sources judiciaires, administratives et comptables viendront en premier lieu éclairer ces questions du partage quotidien de l’espace fluvial. Elles laissent en effet entendre à la fois les revendications d’institutions telles que la Prévôté des marchands de Paris ou l’abbaye de Saint-Denis sur une portion de la Seine, les supplications des pêcheurs de Corbeil et de Melun ou encore quelques bribes de voix de témoins qui, par leur pratique et leur expérience, passent pour de bons connaisseurs de l’espace fluvial. Tout cela amène à penser que l’un des principaux pouvoirs de l’« espace » est de produire des sources qui en traduisent l’appropriation quotidienne, économique et sociale, politique et juridique, individuelle et collective, par des communautés urbaines ou presque urbaines qui sont moins isolées les unes par rapport aux autres qu’il n’y paraît.

 

Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin: “The Space of Torture: reflection on the expression and the perception of pain and punishment in cities of the Low Countries at the end of the Middle Ages”

 

My paper treats the theme of the ritualisation of violence in urban spaces in order to comprehend the role of space in distinguishing ordinary daily violence from exceptional violence: it is, in effect, a roundabout way of treating the power space has to identify/constitute the community and its authorities (the places within the city chosen for carrying out punishments, the places chosen for undergoing the punishment, the conquest of places of torture in order to express one group’s domination over another, impact [of these punishments] on the collective urban memory and the political identity of the city, the actual practice of violence and its theatricality).

 

Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin : « L’espace des supplices : réflexion sur l’expression et la perception de la peine et du châtiment dans les villes des Pays-Bas à la fin du moyen âge »

 

Ma contribution travaille sur le thème de la ritualisation de la violence en milieu urbain afin d’évaluer le rôle de l’espace dans la distinction violence quotidienne/violence exceptionnelle : c’est une façon circulaire de traiter le pouvoir de l’espace dans l’identification des communautés et des autorités (lieux de la ville choisis pour pratiquer le châtiment, lieux de la ville choisis pour subir le châtiment, conquête d’un même lieu de supplice pour exprimer la domination d’un groupe sur un autre, impacts sur la mémoire urbaine et l’identité politique d’une ville, pratique de la violence et théâtralisation de la violence).

 

James M. Murray: “Ubi Borsa, Ibi Pecunia? space and money in medieval Bruges”

 

Market places are the defining structures of medieval towns as both Henri Pirenne and Max Weber pointed out long ago. In the Flemish city of Bruges, three market squares connected by roads and watercourses developed by 1400, forming the articulated skeleton of its central urban space. The “Great” Market, the Burg, and the Bourse, squares were anchored by important civic institutions and their buildings – the Halletoren (belltower and sales halls) the “Waterhalle” (or new cloth hall, the most significant purely commercial building in northern Europe), the church of St. Donatian and the City Hall (Stadhuis) and the collection of inns around and near the “place de la Bourse,” which subsequently gave its name to organized merchant exchanges in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London, Bruges’s successors as financial centers.

 

There was, however, a fourth market, which unlike the other three, had both a physical and virtual existence. This was the Bruges money market, which strictly speaking corresponded to the money changers’ stalls, which migrated from the Halletoren to the arcade of the Waterhalle by 1300. This was very much in keeping with the close financial relations between cloth sales and money changing, a pattern continued unchanged from the Champagne fairs of the 12th and 13th century. Yet in finance (that virtual realm) a system of highly developed book transfer techniques, especially between moneychangers and hostellers, which in turn allowed a common nexus for the credit/payment practices of the extremely numerous and diverse foreign merchant colonies, considerably extended money’s “space” making Bruges the most important banking city of northern Europe.

 

This paper will argue that during the fifteenth century, perhaps by c. 1450, a second displacement of the money market occurred, centered in the Bourse square and thus physically removed from the traditional location of the “Wechsel.” As in the earlier case, the change in the physical location of the money market was rooted in macroeconomic change: Bruges had become an international market in commodities and currencies, whose prices were commonly set in meetings held in the “Bruges Bourse”. And where this new trade in money flourished, the money changers and their financial brethren came as well.

 

Henk Van Nierop: “The Struggle for Sacred Space: Amsterdam in the age of the Reformation”

 

Amsterdam's peculiar urban space -- two parishes, the Old Side and the New Side, symmetrically poised on either side of the river Amstel and built around the town's core and political center at Dam Square -- played a role in how the inhabitants experienced and constructed the idea of urban unity and how they coped with increasing religious and political differences. Catholics believed in the healing ritual of the Corpus Christi procession in unifying the town (both spatially and confessionally), while Sacramentarians sought to (symbolically) disrupt the processions. The Anabaptists projected their eschatological expectations on the urban space, identifying the Old Side with sin and the world and the New Side with the imminent coming of Christ. And the Calvinists, even if they did not believe in the sacredness of any space at all, could not avoid playing out their symbolical appropriation of Amsterdam's ritual space in the form of iconoclasm and the desacralization of sacred objects.

 

Marco Vencato: “Space Politics and Images of Power: the urban renewal of Naples during the Renaissance”

 

In the context of the baronial conspiracies against the Crown of Aragon, King Ferrante (1458-1494) of Naples made an attempt to expand his sphere of influence to the inner-city by implementing a new politics of space. His plans of a Renovatio Urbis were realized only in part, but would become the paradigma of the urban renewal accomplished decades later by the viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo (1532-1554), the most important Renovator Urbis of early modern Naples.  

 

In the iconographic sources of this period these programs of urbanization give expression to a specific visuality of space. I will argue that the concept of combining political interventions in the urban texture with the need of self-representation («images of power») goes back to pope Nicholas V and his considerations on the imperative of architectural visibility for the continuance of the Ecclesia Romana. In the testamentary discourse reported by his famous biographer Giannozzo Manetti the moribund pope brings forward both a justification for his expensive building activities as well as a protomachiavellian vade-mecum explaining why the Roman Catholic Church should invest in bricks and blocks. In the prospect of this theory on architectural mediality the papal constructions become the expression of Auctoritas Ecclesiae, gaining thus a primarily didactic function. It will be shown that these strategies of self-representation outlined in the middle of the 15th century apply to Naples’ later refurbishment under King Ferrante and Pedro de Toledo.

 

Ellen Wurtzel: “Embattled City Walls: a debate over use, jurisdiction and power in Lille, 1400-1526”

 

City walls, symbol of corporate spirit and proud independence, defined medieval cities as spaces of power. They were also areas where contests over that power were often shaped and tested. This paper explores the relationship between control of walls, moats and gates and the competition among those groups who claimed to have jurisdiction over them. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the urban corporation of Lille and the influential collegiate church of Saint Pierre fought over possession and use of the city walls. Because of their original donation and subsequent history, the canons of St. Pierre claimed to be able to do what they liked with the section of walls behind their houses. The city magistrates, or échevins, argued that their defense of the city required permanent and constant control of the space of the fortifications. Both sides claimed to have jurisdiction over the walls, and fought their battles with a variety of arguments and within various legal traditions. Although there was little resolution for these debates at the time, I argue that they reveal a heightened interest in control of fortifications and the new-found importance of the enclosure of the city as a space crucial to the exercise and conception of urban authority.