long term effects problems feudalism chart

#Long term effects problems feudalism chart series#

These two contrasting perspectives leave us with an empirical question: Were medieval European cities fundamentally different from industrial and modern cities? Or were they part of a general continuum of urban form and function?įar from just a particularistic issue, answers to such questions are important for constructing a general, historically-informed theory of urbanization. Cast in this light, medieval cities appear structured, corporate societies where social groupings limited social and economic opportunities for individuals and households to a much greater extent than today. Church, crown, and guilds had a far greater influence on the regulation of social and economic life than in both more recent and contemporary urban systems. Situated within agrarian societies, productivity was lower, technology simpler, and the market economy much less developed.

To be sure, medieval cities were much smaller.

#Long term effects problems feudalism chart series#

At the same time, others have argued a qualitative watershed separates medieval from industrial cities, and for a series of crucial changes during the Early Modern period and Industrial Revolution. Indeed, many scholars have maintained that the organizational, social, political, and economic innovations that would usher in “modernity,” “capitalism,” and the Industrial Revolution originated in medieval European settlements. They were also centers of commerce, manufacture, and innovation, possessed long-range trade networks, and had recognizable divisions of labor. As concentrations of population in space, medieval urban areas are recognizable as “cities”, in a modern sense. Scholars have long debated the role of the medieval city in the long-term economic development of Europe. This research builds off of work undertaken via Luis Bettencourt's John Templeton Foundation Grant (grant #15705 and therefore assisted in making this research a reality.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. McDonnell Foundation Grant (grant #220020438 assisted in this ongoing research program and paid for publication fees. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: The (joint) Arizona State University Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems funded Rudolf Cesaretti's data collection and analysis, and preparation of the manuscript, through a Research Assistantship. Received: OctoAccepted: AugPublished: October 5, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Cesaretti et al. PLoS ONE 11(10):Įditor: Celine Rozenblat, University of Lausanne, SWITZERLAND The similarities between the empirical patterns of settlement relating area to population observed here support the hypothesis that cities throughout history share common principles of organization that self-consistently relate their socioeconomic networks to structured urban spaces.Ĭitation: Cesaretti R, Lobo J, Bettencourt LMA, Ortman SG, Smith ME (2016) Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities.

Although social life in medieval Europe was orchestrated by hierarchical institutions (e.g., guilds, church, municipal organizations), our results show no statistically significant influence of these institutions on agglomeration effects.

Our empirical estimates of model parameters show a strong densification of cities with city population size, consistent with patterns in contemporary cities. To interpret this data, we develop two related models that lead to differing predictions regarding the quantitative form of the population-area relationship, depending on the level of social mixing present in these cities. To address these questions, we analyze a new dataset for the settled area and population of 173 European cities from the early fourteenth century to determine the relationship between population and settled area. This raises a series of interesting questions, as both modern and ancient cities have been observed to obey area-population relationships predicted by settlement scaling theory. However, the next step-to systematically relate the population size of these cities to their spatial and socioeconomic characteristics-has seldom been taken. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population sizes of medieval European cities, and comparative analyses of these data have shed much light on the long-term evolution of urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems.