The historiography of medieval cities in the Low Countries has long been influenced by the legacy of Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) and his pupils. The Belgian historian and his followers used new (positivist) methods to study history, such as critical source analysis and teaching in seminars, which had a great impact on contemporary scholars in Belgium and elsewhere.Footnote ¹ Furthermore, Pirenne's selection of original research topics drastically changed the study of medieval history on the Continent. Influenced by research trends in France and Germany, Pirenne did ground-breaking new research, for instance, in the field of urban history. His publications on the origins of towns, on the ‘early democracies’ in the Low Countries, and on the socio-economic background of urban growth and decline inspired many colleagues and his students. His research on particular topics in the field of urban history has, until the present day, been a fruitful starting point for many Ph.D. students. Three of these topics constitute the subject of this review article: first, the origins of towns; secondly, the social history of urban politics and thirdly, the economy and finances of cities. This review of recent Ph.D. theses on the urban history of the Low Countries will demonstrate the importance of Pirenne's legacy, paying close attention to the valuable refinements that have been made to his findings in the last decade. Moreover, the actual research trends and the fresh perspectives of young scholars on the Low Countries’ history can be of great use for scholars of the history of cities in other regions in late medieval Europe.

Three general remarks can be made regarding new trends in the field of urban history. First, young historians increasingly take urban citizens as the starting point for their research, rather than the institutional, political or financial structures of towns. Following longer-term historiographical trends, the history of cities has become an ‘urban history from below’. An in-depth statistical analysis of urban finances, for instance, has given way to a lively investigation of the political tactics by which people tried to influence the governance of public means. The traditional history of urban institutions has, therefore, been superseded by a many-sided view on the people who governed them. The humans behind urban constitutions, and the multiple reasons why they tried to influence the social and spatial reality surrounding them, have become the subject of urban historical research.

The second general remark is a logical consequence of this ‘humanization’ of urban structures, organizations, and spatial development. Urban historians increasingly make abundant use of new methods, such as prosopography, discourse analysis and social network analysis in order to understand the reality behind the functioning of elites, craftsmen and other social layers in the town. The close study of human relations and the speech acts of ordinary citizens has provided new insights into the reasons why urban institutions were created or abandoned, or why urban revolts occurred in the first place.

Thirdly, the use of a renewed arsenal of research tools finds its origins in growing attempts to approach history from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Geographical and archaeological findings are fully used to explain the early medieval origins of towns, while the political history of urban populations can no longer be understood without taking the conclusions of anthropological and sociological research into account. In short, several new approaches and modern methods have helped refocus urban history on to writing a sophisticated history of people's behaviour, as the following overview of a dozen Ph.D. theses on the urban history of the Low Countries will show.

The origins of towns (case-study: medieval Brussels)

Henri Pirenne inspired many scholars with his work on the history of the origins of towns in the Low Countries, such as Guillaume Des Marez, Frans Blockmans and Adriaan Verhulst, who published a general overview on this topic in 1999.Footnote ² Most of these studies concluded that towns in the Low Countries were founded by merchants and local landowners on the crossroads of important trade routes, such as interregional roads (for example, Bruges–Cologne) and waterways (including Lys and Scheldt, amongst others). These historians generally tried to find a particular date on which a city was founded, except for Verhulst who pleaded for a more organic view of the early history of towns. Paul Bonenfant, for instance, tried to situate the construction of a castle by the counts of Leuven on one of the islands in the main river of Brussels (the river Zenne) as his starting point for the history of that city. Other hypotheses gave more weight to the local initiatives of merchants and local landowners, who earned money from the surplus-value that their tenures created through the economic development of the ports and trade centres in the course of the eleventh century. Blockmans, for instance, concluded from his study of the medieval origins of Ghent that the accumulation of possessions and the levy of taxes on their ‘urban’ grounds created an economic elite that would lead the cities during the following centuries. These were the ‘patricians’ as they were called by Pirenne and others.

Recent research by Paulo Charruadas, however, shows that this thesis, derived from a close study of the origins of towns such as Bruges and Ghent, does not hold for medieval Brussels.Footnote ³ Though an urban aristocracy was formed in what would one day become the administrative capital of Europe, the influence of landlords from the neighbouring countryside was more crucial in the development of Brussels than local initiatives. Rural landlords, and not merchants, seem to have migrated to the emerging port on the river Zenne for economic and lucrative reasons during the course of the eleventh century. Vassals and clients with feudal ties to these lords joined them and increasingly populated several nuclei of habitation around the river and the surrounding hills. In the end, even the counts of Leuven (who would become the dukes of Brabant at the end of the twelfth century) followed the example of the local lords, and they made the booming town their most important residence in the late Middle Ages. At a later stage, they would invest an increasing amount of money in the foundation of ecclesiastical institutions, and in the construction of walls and city markets. Due to these efforts, Brussels, and not Leuven, finally became the most important city of Brabant, and of the southern Low Countries at an even later stage.

It remains unclear which was the key motor for the development of Brussels, and the Pirenne thesis on the importance of local trade routes can be re-evaluated in this sense as well. In a way tributary to Pirenne's work (given its topic), the Ph.D. theses of Chloé Deligne and Bram Vannieuwenhuyze focused on the role of the two main axes of medieval trade in explaining the growth of Brussels, respectively water ways (the river Zenne and its many tributaries) and regional trade routes.Footnote ⁴ Deligne's study on the patterns of water mills on the Zenne in the twelfth century shows that the dukes of Brabant indeed derived considerable income from consumer taxes on these mills, fishing rights and the use of the water by groups such as the brewers. The creation of dozens of mills, the draining of several brooks and the canalization of the Zenne and its many branches, seem to have been costly investments made by powerful laymen in the countryside; ecclesiastical initiatives were, therefore, far less numerous than has often been thought. The counts of Leuven seem to have been active players in this field, too, as they would establish their residence on the ‘Coudenberg’ (where the royal palace of the kings of the Belgians still stands). According to Vannieuwenhuyze's hypothesis, this ‘Coudenberg’ is the oldest urban nucleus in Brussels. It appears that the hill was already occupied for some time before the counts settled in Brussels. The combination of archaeological, toponymic and written evidence has prompted him to conclude that the role of the trade route with Roman origins from Bruges to Cologne was not as important in the emergence of the city as has often been thought.Footnote ⁵ A new research method to re-evaluate sixteenth-century cartographic material, using GIS and other computer scientific methods, has led Vannieuwenhuyze to assert that Brussels was a regional and local trade centre in the first place, situated on a little hill dominating the surrounding countryside and the Zenne, rather than an important site on international trade routes.

In short, Charruadas, Vannieuwenhuyze and Deligne all reconsider the role of rural surroundings, specific geographical conditions and seigniorial initiatives in their explanation of the rise of cities. As Verhulst had already argued, historians should not seek out one concrete foundation on an exact date in explaining the emergence of towns, but they have to clarify a wide-ranging process of interaction between cities and their rural setting when studying the growth and decline of villages and towns. In short, the foundation of a town cannot be explained just by the crossing of a main road and a single river. The dynamic social interactions within a patchwork of occupations and the attempts of local lords to control vital sites of contact between people made villages grow into regional centres of commerce and power.

Urban conflicts and peace settlement

Henri Pirenne's historiographical influence is also perceptible in Ph.D. theses on the political history of cities in the Low Countries. His thesis on the formation of so-called ‘national states’ has left many traces in present-day writings on urban politics and collective violence in late medieval towns.Footnote ⁶ In several publications, Pirenne legitimized the existence of his native country by claiming that the late medieval conglomerate of regions, which was united by the dukes of Burgundy (such as Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, etc.), was predestined to become a unified state in Europe. According to Pirenne, regions and cities such as Ghent, Bruges and Ypres conceded their political rights of self-government in favour of the dukes of Burgundy, who increasingly concentrated coercive state power without leaving room for politically autonomous subjects. Although Pirenne largely studied (and admired) the emergence of the political autonomy of powerful cities in the Low Countries (as, for instance, in his Les anciennes démocraties),Footnote ⁷ his belief that the national state would fatally undo that autonomy created a certain contempt in his work for cities that tried to protect their privileges of self-government – a disdain that has not totally disappeared in present-day studies on political conflicts between centralizing states and powerful cities. Consequently, urban guilds, which were the motor of the struggle for the corporate rights of urban self-government in Flanders, were seen by Pirenne as a conservative force in society which fought a losing battle against political centralization. These thoughts were largely influenced by the writings of Max Weber, and elaborated on by Norbert Elias in his works on the ‘civilizing process’, and by Charles Tilly, Wim Blockmans and others in their influential publications on the formation of national states in western Europe.Footnote ⁸ Although many of these scholars also studied the political alternatives of centralized states in detail, the triumph of national states was still seen as being of key importance in the explanation of the political history of towns.

In more recent Ph.D. theses, however, cities have been emancipated, for historians now realize that internal political and social factors have to be taken into account when explaining towns’ political histories. In my Ph.D. thesis on the fifteenth-century revolts of Ghent and Bruges against the autocratic policies of the duke of Burgundy, Maximilian of Austria, craft guilds are no longer seen as conservative powers endeavouring to thwart or even reverse political evolution toward a centralized state, as Pirenne said, but corporations of craftsmen who had become self-conscious artisans with sophisticated beliefs about the principles of how cities ought to be governed.Footnote ⁹ Economic interests, political traditions and social factors determined why craftsmen forcefully defended the corporate rights and urban privileges of self-government. The reactions of the craft guilds to the attempts of the Burgundian dukes to restrict their political interference in the towns’ internal affairs are no longer considered to be a traditional reaction to restore an idealized form of the past, but a self-confident effort to defend acquired rights of political participation and representation. Craftsmen did not want to overthrow social order, as chroniclers sometimes want us to believe, for they strove for the maintenance of established institutional means of political participation, checks on the rulers’ decisions and control mechanisms on their accountability. The lord, whose authority was not questioned by the artisans, could expect defensive reactions if he wanted to restrict their political power by, for instance, abolishing the aforementioned acquired rights. In addition, such actions could stir up factional conflict in town at the moment when the court tried to empower political adversaries of the urban elite in order to enhance its own political influence in town. In their collective actions, urban craftsmen were frequently supported by powerful factions of the elite, which contested the empowerment of its political adversaries. The intensive use of social network analysis and social capital theory in the study of these coalitions and factions has shown that the rival factions of the court supporters consisted of a cohesive social body, and that they had at their disposal important economic resources. The patronage relation of the state could hardly break the economic and marriage networks of its rivals, nor could it undermine the economic position of the urban elites that opposed them. Only military power and sufficient financial resources could help the court conquer its political enemies, but the dukes of Burgundy could not undo the political autonomy of the cities as long as local alternatives to power (such as elite factions or privileged craftsmen) were present in the cities. The turbulent history of the sixteenth-century Low Countries, with the Dutch Revolt and, in the end, the creation of the Dutch Republic, proves that the victory of the central state was not as fatal, nor as decisive, as Pirenne thought. In short, my research demonstrates that urban conflicts were not old-fashioned attempts to reverse political measures taken by courts to centralize the state apparatus, which were thought to be progressive, but auto-defensive reactions of urban populations who saw the basic conditions of their urban life, namely a privileged social position, threatened.

The conclusion that the formation of national states in Europe did not automatically pacify urban society, and that the social reality behind the political power of urban populations has to be taken into account when explaining the reasons why violence took place in cities, can also be found in two other Ph.D. theses that study violent conflicts and peace settlement in the city, albeit in the private sphere. For Frederik Buylaert and Maarten Van Dyck have both argued against the assumption that the rise of the central state had a decisive role in diminishing violence in towns, as Elias and others have argued.Footnote ¹⁰ Buylaert noticed that between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, violent feuds between leading urban families by no means became rare, but they did become less violent and large-scale feuding disappeared. According to Buylaert, this remarkable phenomenon was not caused by the rise of the state and its presumed establishment of a rule of law, or a so-called ‘civilizing process’ stimulated by patterns of behaviour at court. Instead, the reshaping of conflict management among the Ghent elite was closely entwined with the transformation of the social and political structure of the urban community. In this new setting, conflicts and feuds were settled by pre-existing mechanisms of conflict resolution, which were inherent in the functioning of the extended families of the Ghent elite as managers of wealth, status and political power and all other elements that constituted the ‘family honour’. This provided the Ghent elite with remarkable social stability, which did not owe its cause to an alleged growing control of the state over urban society. In the long term, as the thesis of Maarten Van Dyck shows, similar mechanisms of self-regulation and peace settlement between citizens made urban life less violent. Van Dyck's statistical analysis of urban violence demonstrates that townsmen developed at a very early stage a ‘modern’, less violent, behaviour because of their socialization in urban society. His figures show that in the countryside, on the contrary, a more violent pattern of crime emerged during the sixteenth century. Van Dyck claims that the presence of several disciplining characteristics in the urban public spaces, which villagers lacked because they were not used to the particular social setting of the cities, were crucial in the evolution toward less violent behaviour in towns and cities. The concentration of people in the city, the presence of several tactics of conflict settlement and the presence of strangers in trade towns made the behaviour of townsmen less violent in the course of the early modern period. Together with Buylaert, Van Dyck disagrees with the assumptions that the central state had a decisive role in pacifying urban society, and both conclude that the internal history of towns and the social behaviour of townsmen offer a better explanation for the increasing success of peace settlement procedures than the history of emerging states does.

Economy and finance(r)s of the city

Henri Pirenne's studies on the economy and finances of the late medieval city and on early capitalism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries inspired two Belgian Ph.D. students who recently studied bankers and merchants in this period. In these studies, Pirenne's insights on the origins of the ‘spiritus capitalisticus’ of ‘modern’ entrepreneurship are not refuted, but further modified and refined by detailed scrutiny on the financiers of late medieval cities and their inhabitants.Footnote ¹¹ Both scholars, David Kusman and Bart Lambert, undertook a close analysis of Italian immigrant families that were successful in trade and finance businesses in the cities of Flanders and Brabant. In the past decades, once again, the activities of Italian bankers were studied within the framework of an investigation of the origins of states and the formation of the so-called fiscal state in Europe (see the studies of Richard Bonney, for example),Footnote ¹² because many famous Italian merchant companies, such as the Bardi and the Medici, invested great sums in princely wars. Spectacular cases of huge loans by Italian bankers to princes, and, consequently, of bankruptcies of courts have, however, eclipsed the fact that many Italian immigrant families in the Low Countries were also crucial in financing cities and citizens. By contrast, the Ph.D. theses of Kusman and Lambert take the financial roots of Italian bankers in the cities of the Low Countries as the starting point for their research, and connect the conclusions of the studies on state formation to their own findings on the financial history of towns.Footnote ¹³

Bart Lambert's study of the Rapondi, a family active in Bruges but originating from Lucca, demonstrates that for their company, urban finance was not a sideline of their financial activities. Like many other Italian bankers in the medieval Low Countries (such as Tommaso Portinari and Giovanni Arnolfini), Dino Rapondi (c. 1350–1416) and his relatives were mighty traders who sold cartloads of silks throughout Europe, as well as important bankers who granted gigantic loans to the French king and transferred hundreds of thousands of florins to the Avignon papacy. But, as Lambert's detailed analysis of city accounts shows, not only the dukes of Burgundy (such as Philip the Bold), but also the city of Bruges borrowed considerable sums of money from the Rapondi company to finance its activities. Moreover, Lambert shows that the key to the continuing success of the Rapondi lay within the specific context in which these bonds were pursued. The dukes of Burgundy, who wanted to extend their power in the cities of Flanders and on the battlefield against English and French troops, required enormous amounts of money. To a certain extent, this money was provided by the Rapondi, who were able to charge heavy interest on their repayments. Yet, the reinforcement of his political position enabled the prince increasingly to shift his financial burdens to the cities, who had to pay either directly for the duke's activities or indirectly for the loans which financed them. Being the main suppliers of these funds, too, Dino and his relatives were able to make handsome profits. In this way, the Rapondi were able to do a lucrative business in the short term, but, at the same time, helped to create new opportunities to do so in the long term. Their loans contributed to a further reinforcement of the position of the duke, who was thus able to continue his costly policy and demand new contributions from the city. The conclusion that the clever financial mechanisms that Rapondi had built up in Bruges and at the court, thereby providing the merchant with a continuous income of considerable size, would have led Pirenne to see in Rapondi that famous ‘spiritus’ (the ‘love of gain’) that was the motor of economic change in the late Middle Ages. For the Rapondi company, however, the tripartite relationship between the city, the duke and their banker was as much a means of risk management as were the decentralized firm structure or marine insurance for others in the hazardous period of the later fourteenth century.

Less large scale and radical, but much more widespread and intervening in the citizens’ lives, were the financial activities of the so-called ‘Lombard bankers’ in the Low Countries. These bankers and merchants, who were mainly natives of Asti in Piedmont, formed the predominant foreign merchant community in Flanders and Brabant around 1300. The scope of David Kusman's thesis was to study the more than 40 pawnshops these bankers possessed in the duchy of Brabant in the first half of the fourteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast to their well-known colleagues from Lucca and Florence, the ‘Lombard bankers’ only sporadically provided credit to princely powers. Their main targets were citizens, local textile entrepreneurs or small landlords active in the rural and urban economy. A steady increase in profits derived from agrarian occupations, which heightened the level of monetization in the small villages and towns in the duchy in the course of the thirteenth century, made these ‘public creditors’ an important financial player in the urban markets. Moreover, as intermediaries, the Piedmontese money-lenders undoubtedly played a role in the circulation of certain goods, such as tinctorial plants and spices in the whole of the duchy. Thanks to their business connections with prominent merchants and native aldermen, these Piedmontese financiers benefited from an optimal access to information on, for instance, the grain and wool trades and other economic and financial opportunities.

Consequently, the political and social position of these immigrants improved quickly, but, of course, never surpassed the social ascent of the Rapondi. Nevertheless, like Dino Rapondi, many of his Italian-speaking colleagues from Piedmont succeeded in achieving an important position in local markets and urban finances in the Low Countries, such as in Brussels and Mechelen. Kusman's Ph.D. thesis therefore provides fresh insights into the daily economic and financial activities of medieval towns and their wealthier inhabitants. It is easily comparable to the work of Henri Pirenne, who studied the economic activities of local entrepreneurs in the textile trade in late medieval Flanders. Kusman demonstrates that not only famous merchants, but also common citizens and middle-class artisans made permanent use of the ‘public credit’ of the ‘Lombard bankers’ in order to finance their daily economic (‘capitalist’) activities. His thesis shows that this kind of ‘micro-credit’ must have been of vital importance for the economic and financial investments of local entrepreneurs in particular, and, consequently, for the emergence of medieval urban economies in general. It therefore makes a significant contribution to the social and economic history of the Low Countries and provides a valuable refinement of Pirenne's and others’ findings – as can be said of all the Ph.D. theses that have been discussed in this review.