Initially formulated by Ferdinand Tönnies in his seminal study Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) the concept of ‘community’ has wielded enormous influence upon sociological thinking. It has occupied a central place in theoretical debates on mentality and society from Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel to the Chicago School of Sociology and Anthony P. Cohen. The nature of all social relationships is, according to Tönnies, either that of community (Gemeinschaft) or society (Gesellschaft). While the former is based upon the natural will (Wesenwille), which involves an emphasis on tradition, collectivism, solidarity, order and common goals, the latter rests upon the rational will (Kürwille) and is marked by individualism, rationality and plurality of judgments. This binary opposition allowed Tönnies to formulate his explanatory model of the transformation of medieval and largely rural community into modern industrial society.

The community/society theory was later applied, though in a somewhat modified form, by other sociologists including Émile Durkheim in his renowned study The Division of Labour in Society (1893). Here Durkheim recognized two fundamental kinds of social relationships: mechanical solidarity which corresponded to the ideal type of community and organic solidarity which is typical of modern society. According to Durkheim, pre-modern Europe remained an extremely homogeneous civilization as religious, political, moral and social values and cultural practices were universally shared. When describing social relationships within a community, the German sociologist Max Weber highlighted the value attached to common values (wertrational), the importance of emotions (affectuel) and traditions (traditionell). In contrast, rational behaviour (zweckrational) based upon effectiveness and considerations of costs and benefits is, according to Weber, more characteristic of modern society.Footnote ¹ In the twentieth century it was the Chicago School of Sociology that further refined and critically reassessed the theory by stressing the ecological approach (Robert Park, Louis Wirth) and rural/urban (Robert Redfield) or sacred/secular (Howard Becker) polarities. While these classical approaches to the community treated the issue in mostly structural terms, one of the more recent contributors to the debate, Anthony P. Cohen, has defined community as a cultural field based upon sharing symbols/mental constructs. This commonality of forms, Cohen states, clearly demarcates the boundaries of a community vis-à-vis the external world.Footnote ²

This study adheres to this particular concept of community and argues that language might have served as a symbolic device through which early modern burghers became aware of their social distinctiveness. In focusing on the rhetoric of community in pre-modern (East) Central European urban historiography, the article endeavours to show that urban authors resorted to a variety of strategies with the aim of depicting the city as an idealized and highly unique social environment. A strong historiographical tradition emerged as the attribute of an urban republicanism and the political self-confidence of burghers, particularly in more densely urbanized regions where there were politically powerful cities. In the geographical context of early modern (East) Central Europe this referred, above all, to Royal Prussia and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Lusatia) where royal cities succeeded in taking an active part in the decision-making process and the burgher estate integrated itself into the political system of the Ständestaat. By contrast, royal cities in early modern Hungary and Poland failed to reach a sufficient level of autonomy which hindered the evolution of both a strong corporative identity and urban historiography.

An analysis of the entire spectrum of urban narrative sources, including official chronicles, panegyrics, private diaries and family memoirs, reveals that the collectivist topos of concord, unity, harmony, order and obedience was inherently present in both their argumentation and structure. Most early modern theoretical works highlighted the same values. The famous Germania by Jacob Wimpfeling (1450–1528), for example, observed the social organism of a pre-modern city through the prism of harmony and unity.Footnote ³ Having investigated narrative sources of an urban provenance, the German historian Hans-Christoph Rublack even speaks of the Grundwerte – the key communal values representing the pillars of a pre-modern burgher identity.Footnote ⁴ As a result, the double self-perception of a medieval and early modern city can be identified: the normative, based upon the vision of a perfect urban community, and the subversive realistic, which instead soberly depicted the city as a society in conflict.

This study, mostly based on (East) Central European archival sources, will argue that the tension between the norm and its negation was a characteristic feature of the literary genre of a pre-modern urban historiography. The norm was represented by the vision of the idealized city; however, in the early modern period this became increasingly incompatible with the reality of urban life. The most explicit texts, in this respect, were the panegyrics – a specific genre of urban historiography – celebrating cities and their burghers. In these texts, the normative dimension usually far overshadowed the realistic description, resulting in the image of a city as it should be instead of a city as it is. In his celebration of Olomouc, the capital of early modern Moravia, written in the 1520s, the German humanist Georgius Sibutus (1480–1528) praised the senate and burghers who ‘in full concord enjoy peace and quiet’ while two decades later another humanist, Šimon Ennius Klatovský (1520–61), stated that ‘in this city happy harmony blossoms’.Footnote ⁵ A standardized description of a well-ordered city was rendered in a late seventeenth-century panegyric upon Pilsen:

In celebrating one of the richest Bohemian cities, Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg), and its political system, the Jesuit Jan Kořínek (1626–80) claimed in 1675 that ‘such a well-ordered city might be compared to a royal garden in which a variety of virtues flower . . . a row of obedient burghers stand in straight array’.Footnote ⁷ According to the author, the spirit of a perfect community always rests upon the wisdom of its city councillors and the full obedience of the town dwellers.Footnote ⁸ The Silesia-born poet Salomon Frencel (1564–1605) observed the same virtues in Wrócław (Breslau in Silesia) as ‘the wise city council and the obedience of the burghers forestall rebellions and secure concord’.Footnote ⁹ In search of a poetical depiction of a city as a harmonious urban republic, many authors resorted to metaphors. Thus the Hungarian humanist Martin Rakovský (1535–79) compared the burgher communities to the human body. In his poem Descriptio urbis Lunae Boiemicae he expressed the idea that as different limbs form a body controlled by the will so the individual burghers are parts of a well-ordered community wisely managed by the city council. Evidently enchanted by this rather traditional notion, Rakovský glamorized the collectivist spirit of urban life by disregarding the individual who, in his own words, alone was worth nothing. Prosperity and strength could only arise from unity while quarrelling and discord would unavoidably lead to downfall and, eventually, to destruction.Footnote ¹⁰ Similarly, in his laudatory speech the rector of the College in Hamburg drew a metaphorical picture of the city as a clock whose parts engage together and form a perfectly set and precisely working machine.Footnote ¹¹ The image of a city as a unified social organism was reflected in legal terminology. In his major work Tractatus politico-historico juridicus de juribus et privilegiis civitatum imperialium the early modern theoretician of law, Phillipp Knipschilt (1595–1657), for instance, consistently referred to a burgher community as ‘unum corpus’.Footnote ¹²

Apart from panegyrical texts, the dream of an ideal confraternity of town dwellers can also be identified in standard narrative sources of an urban provenance, including chronicles, private burgher diaries and descriptions of urban constitutions whose authors mostly construed the past as a lesson to be learned. As an instrument of intergenerational communication, urban historiography thus pursued a double goal, to preserve the memory and values of the past and inculcate them in the new generation of burghers responsible for the future prosperity of the city. An ideological bond between the past, present and future thus formed one of the fundamental constitutive features of the genre. For this purpose, urban authors resorted to a selective choice of historical facts which were consequently interpreted in a politically correct way. In the case of urban tumults (examples par excellence of the breach of social and political concord) urban chroniclers adopted one of two main strategies. At times, they completely ignored the periods of inner instability. In other words, the subversive realistic dimension was consciously disregarded in favour of the normative one. The nature of historical evidence referring to early sixteenth-century conflicts between burghers and political elites in three Moravian royal cities – Olomouc (Olmütz), Brno (Brünn) and Jihlava (Iglau) – may have been an instrumental factor in this respect. While the Olomouc historiographers remained either silent or trivialized the problem, the narrative sources from Brno and Jihlava are highly informative regarding the course of events. The early modern chronicles by Jan Haberman and Martin Leopold von Löwenthal, as well as records by Jan Munka of Ivančice, provide rich testimony of the long-term discords in both cities.Footnote ¹³

If, however, the urban authors opted for a comprehensive analysis of the conflict, they usually passed a negative judgment with the aim of stressing the harmfulness and detrimental effects of any disharmony within urban communities. This anxiety was expressed, in an emphatic manner, by a chronicler of the stormy events in Prague in the 1520s who called for ‘good love and concord’ and warned that ‘old histories and chronicles reveal what effect is created by love and harmony as opposed to hostility and disharmony. Due to disagreements, large, mighty and opulent cities and realms fell into misery and destitution.’Footnote ¹⁴ The chronicle is generally read as a moral tale since in the last chapters the author paid a great deal of attention to the sad and woeful lot of plotters. His point was clear enough; those who break the public peace and usurp power at the expense of the burgher community will not escape just punishment carried out either by human justice or God.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, in contemplating the causes of social unrest in Gdańsk (Danzig), the city historiographer Stenzel Bornbach (1530–97) voiced his belief that disunity finally engenders nothing but harm and destruction.Footnote ¹⁶

As concord and public peace implied the superiority of collectivism over individualism, pre-modern urban societies supported interventionism, assimilation and obliteration of internal frontiers rather than cultural diversity and plurality of views and critical assessments. This is the reason why medieval and early modern cities developed an entire set of juridical, social and economic structures with strong assimilative and integrating effects. As a result, all newcomers and minorities found themselves under permanent pressure to acculturate and assimilate themselves through adopting the local rules of the game as well as the norms, values and social modes of the host society.Footnote ¹⁷ This applied, above all, to the confessional environment of the city as plurality of faith potentially destabilized unity and harmony, the foundation stones of the communal order. Given this context, the worries of an urban scrivener in the predominantly Lutheran Prussian city of Chojnice (Konitz) are more easily understood. Having recorded the name of a newly admitted Catholic burgher in the municipal register, he aired his feelings with a laconic but eloquent gloss. ‘He is the third popish burgher. God save us from all evil consequences.’Footnote ¹⁸ Pondering over their city's past certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban chroniclers even saw the Reformation as a major threat to the communal order and the fountainhead of later decadence and misery. Thus, Aloys Kaufmann (1772–1847), the burgomaster of Teschen (Silesia), bitterly bewailed the fact that Luther's teachings ‘had undermined the concord among the peaceful town dwellers of our native city’ and ignited ‘the flames of discord’.Footnote ¹⁹ In the search for a homogeneous society, many cities placed restrictions on certain denominations. Protestants were often excluded de iure from citizenship in Catholic towns and vice versa. In the early modern age, Plzeň (Pilsen) in Bohemia was arguably the most typical example of systematic support for Catholic immigration. Formally, only Catholics were eligible to apply for burgher status in Kraków (Cracow), Poznań (Posen) and Biecz.Footnote ²⁰ In contrast, the mostly Protestant milieu of Royal Prussian cities attracted an influx of non-Catholic settlers, particularly Lutherans and Calvinists.

A specific regulatory mechanism applied by many Bohemian towns was the criterion of language whereby candidates for citizenship were required to be proficient in Czech. In the atmosphere of post-Hussite Bohemia, this ‘linguistic nationalism’ was primarily directed against German-speaking migrants. In Plzeň (Pilsen), for instance, the requirement was introduced in 1500, when the city council excluded in-migrants from burgher status unless they learned Czech.Footnote ²¹ Soon afterwards, a similar norm was adopted in Litoměřice (Bohemia).Footnote ²² In other Bohemian cities, including Prague, at least a basic command of Czech was a formal requirement needed by those applying for urban citizenship.Footnote ²³

The perception of a foreigner, no matter how defined, as a potential threat to the normative image of a city came to the forefront in numerous early modern texts of urban provenance. Upset by the influx of Germans and the uncontrolled spread of the German language in Bohemia, the humanist and later Protestant exile Pavel Stránský (1583–1657) aired his wrath in a militantly nationalist tract published in 1618. Convinced that the expansion of the German tongue might have heralded the twilight of domestic culture and Bohemian statehood, he resorted to drawing a historical parallel with the sorrowful lot of the Slavic tribes that once lived along the river Elbe. Stránský's vivid description of their annihilation by the Germans was intended as a warning that a similar scenario might also come to pass in Bohemia. Pursuing a merciless assimilation policy might have been the only way of escaping such a fate.Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, the Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg) burgher Mikuláš Dačický of Heslov (1555–1626) expressly linked the declining fame and opulence of this mining city to the influx of German in-migrants.Footnote ²⁵ In 1618, the Italian minority was held responsible for the decline of Plzeň (Pilsen) in Bohemia while in 1624, the burghers of Gdańsk (Danzig) sent a grievance to King James I and VI of England and Scotland claiming that the poor Scottish immigrants violated the urban peace by begging, committing petty crimes and roaming the streets.Footnote ²⁶ The medieval constitution of this Royal Prussian city contained blatant evidence that foreigners were considered a potentially subversive force as it listed ‘nations’ to be automatically excluded from citizenship unless officially approved by the councillors and the entire community of burghers.Footnote ²⁷

The hallmarks of the idealized community (concord, order and collectivism) also found their reflection in the narrative structure of urban chronicles and panegyrics as their analysis discloses a cyclical perception of time which corresponded with the static nature of all perfectly organized and well-governed social bodies. Lacking the need for any self-improvement, the ideal urban community possessed, in a manner, the qualities of a cold society as once defined by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.Footnote ²⁸ Ideally, the life of a burgher took place within an unchangeable and therefore well-predictable system which, on a symbolic level, expressed the harmony, order and, above all, the perfection of the urban social environment. As a consequence, the periodically repeated rituals and events formed the backbone of the narrative structure of most urban chronicles. The early modern chronicle of Mladá Boleslav (Bohemia) by the humanist and burgomaster Jiří Bydžovský Kezelius (1576–1655) renders such an example of a cyclical perception of urban time. The recurrent records of the annual renovation of the city council here epitomize the unchangeable and static nature of urban life as the entire text is systematically built around this central tradition. Whenever the internal peace and order are broken due to disturbing events arising from the outside, the periodical structure of the records suddenly falls apart. The complete absence of information regarding the renovation of the urban government for the years 1608–09 (the dynastic conflict between Emperor Rudolph II and his brother Matthias) and 1618–20 (the anti-Habsburg Protestant uprising in Bohemia) evokes the chaos caused by deviation from the fixed course of urban life.Footnote ²⁹ Examples of such a narrative structure abounded in early modern urban historiography. The authors of the Budějovice chronicle (Budweis, Southern Bohemia) followed the same pattern of records. Here as well the cyclical nature of life as symbolized by the ritual of renovatio senatus was uprooted by the chaos of the anti-Habsburg uprising. The pernicious effect of the military campaign upon the image of a harmonious and well-ordered community found its expression in a laconic record from 1619 ‘this year the city council was not renewed’.Footnote ³⁰ Burgher diaries and family chronicles tend to stress crucial events in the private lives of town dwellers and the periodically repeated rituals of baptism, funerals and births. However, as the private chronicle of the Olomouc (Moravia) burgher family Hobel reveals, the mid-sixteenth-century urban tumults and disorders forced its authors to reorganize the settled composition of records and investigate at length the causes and detrimental consequences of inner instability.Footnote ³¹

One finds in early modern urban historiography, consequently, the self-perception of a city as an entirely static social organism which corresponds with the cyclical notion of time. Thus the history of a burgher community was not understood as a linear process given that a development – a term congenial to change – would result in an undesirable deviation from an ideal state which is ex definitione unalterable. The static nature, the attribute of perfection leaving no space for progress and change, was a hallmark of all pre-modern urban communities as celebrated by urban historiographers.

In medieval and early modern culture, regularity and harmony were also credited with strong aesthetic values.Footnote ³² The category of beauty as a synonym for symmetry, order and rationality appeared as early as Aristotle's Poetics, a normative text with long-term impact upon European aesthetic theories.Footnote ³³ Also the perfection of utopian urban societies as described by early modern authors, including Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Tommasso Campanella and/or Johann Valentin Andreae, accrued from their beautiful symmetry and the image of the city as a construed space. In Campanella's The City of the Sun, for instance, the utopian city state was ‘divided into seven rings or huge circles named from the seven planets, and the way from one to the other of these was via four streets and through four gates, that look toward the four points of the compass’. The centre of the city was placed by Campanella upon the very peak of the mountain with a temple ‘in the form of a circle’ that ‘stands upon thick columns, beautifully grouped’.Footnote ³⁴ Bacon characterized the New Atlantis as a ‘well-built city’ whose beauty was a materialized reflection of symmetry and order.Footnote ³⁵ Finally, Thomas More discovered on his island ‘fifty four cities . . . all large and well built; the manners, customs and laws of which are the same, and they are all contrived as near in the same manner’.Footnote ³⁶ Amaurot, the capital city, had the shape of a square.Footnote ³⁷ In Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis one even finds the lay-out of the imagined ideal city which was marked by an absolute symmetry.Footnote ³⁸

All these utopian descriptions of a city corresponded with late medieval and early modern theoretical studies on urban architecture that were mostly produced in the Italian cultural milieu. Works by Leone Battista Alberti (De re aedificatoria, 1485), Antonio Averlino (Sforzinda, 1460s) and/or Francesco di Giorgio Martini (Trattato di architettura, 1481), in particular, achieved high popularity and, being translated into several European languages, substantially contributed to the idea of the city as a well-ordered and symmetrically organized space.Footnote ³⁹

If observed from a bird's eye view, most ground plans of Central European cities generally coincided with the prescribed model of an ideal geometrical urban space. The round or elliptic lay-out surrounded by walls and bastions, four (in an ideal case) gates facing all the cardinal points, the centrally located round, square or rectangular marketplace with radially diverging streets and the town hall occupying the very centre of the city was a feature of most Central European urban settlements.

In general, medieval and early modern narrative sources substantially contributed to the image of a city as a symmetrically organized space. In contemporary texts, an urban settlement was usually characterized as ‘a well-built city’ or ‘a well-ordered city’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In order to avoid a redundant accumulation of similar examples, I will endeavour to resolve the hidden meaning of these idioms by examining the narrative strategies of three urban authors – the Hungarian humanist Martin Rakovský, the Silesian historiographer Bartholomeus Stein (1476–1522) and the Jesuit writer Jan Kořínek. In Rakovský's panegyric upon Louny (Bohemia), the glamour of the city accrues from both its location and architectural symmetry. The author eulogizes Louny's circular shape edged with fortifications which are characterized by the author as ‘beautiful’. The three main streets run into the Prague gate protected by two strong bastions. The middle street leads into the square marketplace whose sides are 70 paces long.Footnote ⁴¹ Portraying Wrócław (Breslau), the Silesian humanist Bartholomeus Stein resorted to a more detailed description. In his view, the city was surrounded with round fortifications. The countless church spires embellished Wrócław's skyline and the main square was marked by a perfect symmetry with 60 lofty palaces on all four sides. From each corner two streets diverged leading to the city gates.Footnote ⁴² While Rakovský's and Stein's panegyrics rested upon the aesthetic category of symmetry, the Jesuit Jan Kořínek celebrating Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg in Bohemia) in the second half of the seventeenth century encountered a total absence of symmetry (= beauty) as this originally mining settlement instead emerged spontaneously. The author acknowledges that Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg) could not stricto sensu be called a city as it ‘lacks the urban form as the houses do not stand in rows and streets are not straight’.Footnote ⁴³

Pre-modern cities, perfect products of human craftsmanship reflecting the order and harmony of their social organization, were the antithesis of wild and unrestrained nature. The city as a planned, artificial and organized space marked with symmetry and regular proportions thus rested upon the idea of opposition to the chaos, variability and unpredictability epitomized by nature. In this respect, the fortifications demarcating the physical boundaries of a city gained a new symbolic function. They separated the ideal and governed world of order from the imperfect and uncontrolled surroundings whose rampancy posed a threat to the perfect community of burghers.

The preceding paragraphs have revealed a certain degree of similarity between early modern utopias and narrative sources of urban historiography. Additional evidence of the overlapping of both genres can be found in the reception of utopian texts in the early modern urban environment. In 1518, the Basel city council commissioned a Latin edition of Thomas More's Utopia and six years later the Basel jurist Claudius Cantiuncula translated the second part of the text into German to be used by the councillors as a practical handbook providing useful instruction as to how to govern an actual existing urban republic.Footnote ⁴⁴ Inspired by the well-ordered urban life in Basel, another utopian text by Gaspar Stiblin, De eudaemonensium republica commentariolus, appeared in 1555, which was later used as one of the sources exploited by Johann Valentin Andreae in his Christianopolis.Footnote ⁴⁵

In a sense, the description of a city as an idealized social body referred to biblical visions of a lost paradise and a well-ordered Christian community.Footnote ⁴⁶ Having said that, early modern historiography tended to view the urban political order and harmonious social relations as the perfect outcome of a collective endeavour of assembled individuals and the pure product of human reason. Seen from this perspective, the discussion of the community of burghers owed much to the texts of classical Greek philosophy, which also served as the cornerstones for medieval and early modern political thought. By examining the early modern notions of the ideal state, one discovers their direct connection with the classical intellectual heritage represented, above all, by Plato and Aristotle.Footnote ⁴⁷ In other words, early modern urban historiography directly or unconsciously took over the classical debate on a well-ordered society that since the Middle Ages had been further enriched with the Christian tradition and (quasi)biblical prophecies.

The continuity of classical philosophical and political thought in early modern texts was conspicuously displayed by lavish citations while urban historiography referred, above all, to Plato's and Aristotle's classifications of different types of governments.Footnote ⁴⁸ Greek philosophers, lacking empirical experience of large territorial monarchies, sought an ideal government exclusively within the framework of a classical city state. Moreover, their emphasis upon the urban environment stemmed from Aristotle's statement that a perfect government is feasible provided that the population size remains modest and the state territory can be glanced over with the eye.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the reality of the early modern age, such a demand corresponded to a single political and social entity, the city.

Certain early modern urban historiographers recognized existing urban republics as the ideal to be followed by other cities. For the humanist writers Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) and (though more critical and more realistic) Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), it was Florence that epitomized a perfect and well-ordered society.Footnote ⁵⁰ Over the course of the sixteenth century, however, it was Venice rather than Florence which usurped the unofficial title of an ideal urban republic. The image of Venice as the implementation of Plato's theoretical ideas came to the forefront in the utopian work by Cardinal Gaspar Contarini (1483–1542) De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum Librie Quinque.Footnote ⁵¹ The same idealization of Venice featured in works by Francesco Patrizi (1529–97) and Guillaume Postel (1510–81).Footnote ⁵² In Campanella's work the same role was played by Rome, which in all probability served as the model for the City of the Sun.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, Andreae's Christianopolis reflected its author's admiration for the disciplinary mechanisms and rigorous social order established in Calvinist Geneva.Footnote ⁵⁴

The above-mentioned Aristotelian axiom also had a decisive impact upon the debate as to the finest organization of political life and the most suitable form of government. The urban political order and community values were thus perceived by certain early modern thinkers as an ideal model to be implemented within the context of large European territorial states. In order to achieve this goal, Jean Bodin (1530–96) focused his attention on a variety of urban constitutions in his Six livres de la République, while the English traveller Thomas Coryate openly stressed the importance of studying customs, institutions and governments of European cities as their knowledge could be used for the improvement of the political order in England.Footnote ⁵⁵

Early modern texts recommending an urban political system as an appropriate model to be adopted by territorial states abounded. Penned during the Swedish invasion of Poland in the mid-seventeenth century, the renowned treatise Reformacyja obyczajów polskich (The Reform of the Polish Political Order) by the Kraków humanist Szymon Starowolski (1585–1656) proposed the long overdue reform of the Polish government and state institutions which might serve to cure the recurrent political maladies of the noble republic. Starowolski recommended the political order of certain imperial cities and several city states as a pattern worth following, namely that of Nuremberg, Geneva, Lukka and Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The author argued that their constitutions, efficient administrations and disciplinary mechanisms restraining anarchy could be employed in Poland–Lithuania with no less success.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, by comparing monarchies and urban republics, Anaximander, one of the central figures in John Barclay's (1582–1621) political novel Argenis, comes to the conclusion that the wisdom and virtues of a number of senators in a city are superior to the quality of judgments passed by a single ruler. In addition, the threat of public shame, entirely absent in monarchies, prevents urban patricians from falling into dishonesty and corruption.Footnote ⁵⁷ Finally, in 1659, an anonymous author (probably John Streater) utilized the idealized description of the ancient constitution of Ragusa as a normative model to be executed in republican England following the death of Oliver Cromwell.Footnote ⁵⁸

The visible influence of classical political thought upon narrative sources of an urban provenance becomes apparent in the debate over key terms. Harmony, unity and concord, values glorified in early modern urban historiography, were at the same time the cornerstones of ideal society theories as introduced by Plato and, though less radically, by Aristotle. Although harmony proved to be a sine qua non for the existence of an ideal community, the ultimate goal was individual and collective happiness. As Aristotle put it, the best government is when the citizens are happy.Footnote ⁵⁹ According to Plato, even personal freedom and individual judgments had to be uncompromisingly subordinated to this uppermost objective.Footnote ⁶⁰ The terms happiness, unity and order thus served as synonyms and were used precisely in this way in early modern urban historiography. A city in which ‘concord blossomed’ was usually classified as happy. When celebrating Olomouc, the capital of Moravia, the humanist Šimon Ennius Klatovský credited the city with a loyalty and order which secured the happy life of burghers, while the Hungarian scholar Valentin Eck (1494–1556) recognized a close tie between a well-governed city and the happiness of its inhabitants.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, Jacob Wimpfeling praised the ‘felix reipublique regimen’ in the free imperial city of Strasbourg, whose government distinguished itself by its unflagging care for the public peace.Footnote ⁶²

Yet another classical idea was inherent to early modern urban historiography, namely a belief that wisdom, education and innate capacities qualified philosophers for political leadership.Footnote ⁶³ Urban writers mostly agreed that only specific competencies, including prudence, life-long experience, wealth and education, entitled individuals to govern and make political decisions. In the first half of the sixteenth century the Bohemian jurist Brikcí of Licko (1488–1543) wrote: ‘to maintain order, a nation should and must be administered by a chosen elite . . ., even pagans recognized, with common sense, the need for administrators and social distinctions and they voluntarily subjected themselves to those who appeared more sensible and gifted’. Footnote ⁶⁴ In celebrating Olomouc, the poet Stephanus Taurinus (1465–1520) claimed that the city ‘prides itself with many learned men’ and eulogized the erudition and wisdom of the urban fathers.Footnote ⁶⁵ Frequently, early modern cities presented themselves as republics of scholars. According to the Hungarian humanist Martin Rakovský, the city of Louny (Bohemia) was famed for the literacy and expertise of its inhabitants.Footnote ⁶⁶ In his well-known work on Silesia, Fridrich Lucae (1644–1708) introduced the region as a hub of science and arts, stating that a number of Silesian cities only conferred burgher status upon highly educated persons.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the case of Schweidnitz (Świdnica), this contention might have been well founded, as its city books referred to such a criterion.Footnote ⁶⁸ Additional authors hastened to buttress the myth of Silesian cities as republics of learned burghers. In his lengthy panegyric from 1679, the Silesian poet Johann Andreas Mauersberger (1649–93) presented an interesting picture of the social stratification of the Wrócław population. More than 800 verses lavishly celebrated scholars and the urban intelligentsia, arguably the most important group of inhabitants, while the other social classes (merchants, artisans) remained heavily underrepresented.Footnote ⁶⁹

Certain contemporary urban intellectuals even voiced the idea that the qualified and moderate rule of respected individuals forestalls the wantonness and tyranny of the multitude that would unavoidably emerge should the benighted and easily manipulated crowd usurp power.Footnote ⁷⁰ The anonymous author of a tract about temporal political power argued in the late sixteenth century that democracy would sooner or later degenerate into anarchy and stated that ‘after some time only a few good, learned and enlightened men would remain in municipal offices while the government would fall into obscurity and chaos’.Footnote ⁷¹ An ideal urban government basically combined models proposed earlier by Plato and Aristotle. The authors of urban constitutions mostly recognized the politeia, the mixed aristocratic–democratic government, as the most appropriate form of political system in cities.Footnote ⁷² Moreover, the thesis that a mixed government best secures the stability of power in city states was also shared by numerous other political thinkers from Cicero (The Republic) to Machiavelli (Discourses).Footnote ⁷³

By 1500, Bartholomeus Stein lamented the growing political power of Wrócław's (Breslau) citizenry (democracy) which destabilized the ideal form of mixed government by suppressing its aristocratic element.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Bohemia, the Aristotelian concept of power was employed by the lawyer Brikcí of Licko for the definition of a city in the prologue to his famous work on Bohemian municipal law.Footnote ⁷⁵ The most elaborate and sophisticated theory of the aristocratic–democratic nature of the urban political order, however, has been left to us in the historical literature form Royal Prussia. When describing the urban polity, the jurist Reinhold Curicke (1610–67) questioned the well-known argument by Jean Bodin regarding the indivisibility of power and argued the statum mixtum was the chief principle of the government in Gdańsk (Danzig).Footnote ⁷⁶ A century later, the same opinion was voiced in Gottfried Lengnich's (1689–1774) monumental work Ius publicum civitatis Gedanensis. Though aware of the subordinate status of the city vis-à-vis the Polish king, Lengnich nevertheless treated the polity of Gdańsk as entirely republican with well-balanced aristocratic and democratic components of power.Footnote ⁷⁷

Although the influence of Plato and Aristotle upon early modern theoretical works on (East) Central European cities has not been properly studied yet, the evidence available seems to suggest that after 1450 Platonic teachings found their way into works by urban intellectuals. The knowledge of Plato, however, remained rather fragmentary and superficial for a significant period of time while most chroniclers and urban historians were only indirectly familiar with his vision of an ideal society. Johannes Frauenburg, the scrivener of Görlitz (Lusatia), repeatedly quoted Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics in his Bürgermeisterspiegel as early as 1476 and Jacob Wimpfeling consistently referred to Plato in his Germania (1501).Footnote ⁷⁸ One finds explicit references, however, to Platonic/Aristotelian discussion on the ideal state in Prussian and Silesian urban historiography (Lengnich, Hartknoch, Mauersberger) above all and, occasionally, in Bohemia as well. Plato's dialogues are frequently referred to, for instance, by Martin Rakovský, the humanist poet and burgher of Louny, one of the royal cities in Bohemia.Footnote ⁷⁹

Over the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, cities in Central Europe were increasingly confronted with new phenomena (proto-modern state building, the Reformation, structural shifts in the European economy, early modern urbanization) which have been perceived by most historians as the symptoms and agents of modernization. These processes challenged the integrity of burgher communities and did much to uproot the medieval concept of the city as an autonomous political, legal and economic entity. This produced a significant side effect, namely an increasing incongruity between the traditional language of community and the harshness of reality. In reflecting the change, urban historiography adopted a dual strategy. First, most panegyrics and historical works devoted to individual cities sought and found the apex of their glory and eminence in the past. The glorious past as the normative ideal was separated from the realistic description of today.Footnote ⁸⁰ A work penned by Jan Floryán Hammerschmid, W Praze blaze kdo má peníze (Those with Money Live Well in Prague), from the early eighteenth century, celebrated Prague's harmonious, renowned and happy history that was compared with the less auspicious present. This lost paradise could only be restored through reviving the forgotten and destroyed community values of the past.Footnote ⁸¹ In his giant four-volume work on Hradec Králové (Bohemia), the Jesuit František de Paula Švenda saw the history of the city as marked by irreversible though gradual decline. The city's prosperity and glory at its historical onset, metaphorically identified with a golden age, was followed by less fortunate silver, iron and copper stages. The last earthen age epitomized the doleful and benighted state of the city and the ultimate collapse of the burgher community by 1800.Footnote ⁸² In the later period, collaterally with the genesis of modern civil society, the language of community entirely disappeared from urban historiography.