Bret Devereaux writes about the origin of cities. He critiques a fantasy fiction-oriented YouTube vlogger who isn’t a trained historian, and in his critique, he expounds on the origin of cities, as coming purely from extraction, either by temples or by kings. I do not wish to contest Bret in Ancient history, where most of the examples in his post are drawn. But once one gets to the second millennium and cities are more visible to us in economic history, this is no longer the only origin of cities. Some emerge for commercial purposes, and only become sites of royal extraction after they’ve proven their economic value.

My training, to be clear, is not in history. But my work in transportation has compelled me to understand not just transport engineering but also urbanism and urban histories, and in practice this has meant the histories of the largest cities of the developed world today, skewed toward older ones (more London and Paris, less Seoul), which have had a longer period during which their specific histories were subjects of interest.

In economic history, DeLong-Shleifer argue in their article Princes and Merchants that in the second millennium, city growth in Europe correlated with non-absolutist government. This can include a constitutional government, such as the Old Swiss Confederacy, the Dutch Republic, and Britain after the Glorious Revolution, or unconsolidated states in which the king’s authority is checked by powerful magnates, such as France before the Bourbons. They argue that medieval and postmedieval Europe had an atypically rural elite, unlike the urban elite of the Ancient Mediterranean, and thus city size could be a proxy for commerce rather than imperial power. In fact, after finding the correlation, they tried running it again with royal capitals excluded, figuring that it would exclude large cities in economically inert areas like Naples and Madrid, but actually the correlation weakened, because it also excluded London and Paris.

London and Paris: city first, capital later

Bret gives two examples of cities with good locations for trade that nonetheless didn’t amount to much until they became imperial capitals: Byzantium, and Vienna. Byzantium’s transformation into Constantinople occurred centuries before the period of interest for this post; Vienna’s history is more complex, and is better viewed as a mix of imperial extraction and commercial importance; it only became the permanent Habsburg capital in 1611, at which point it was already a significant if sub-Paris-size city.

But in London and Paris, the history is one of city first, royal capital second. The English court was itinerant, and to the extent Anglo-Saxon England had a capital, it was Winchester. London became the Norman capital after it was already the largest English city, having grown as an important site of commerce and defense due to its location at the lowest crossing of the Thames and the presence of the preexisting Roman walls (themselves established for the same reason: the Thames crossing). Subsequently it grew as a commercial center, which drove the centralization of royal institutions around Westminster instead of the itinerant court – but also see below on the Angevin Empire.

Paris, unlike London, was a royal capital early. Its location on the Seine made for convenient crossings, but Roman and post-Roman Paris was not a particularly large city, and the presence of the royal court there after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire and the transformation of its western remnant into France made it big. But at the same time, the medieval Kingdom of France was extremely loosely governed. Half the country’s territory in the 12th century was part of the Angevin Empire, which also ruled England, more out of its French holdings than out of England; the Plantagenets only became more focused on England as France started pushing them out of nominally-French lands, finding England easier to administer and tax due to its greater centralization. Until the end of the 12th century, the direct holdings of the French crown didn’t extend far beyond Ile-de-France. Paris grew rapidly as France consolidated, but it was the largest city in France beforehand.

Pure trade: the Hanseatic League

London and Paris mixed commercial and political purposes; these were always intertwined in their histories from fairly early. In contrast, the main Hanseatic cities were far more trade-reliant. These formed based on trade network, and the larger ones petitioned for and received imperial immediacy, making them functionally independent, the Holy Roman Empire’s rule being quite loose. These were true city-states, relying on imported grain from areas that they by and large did not politically control, in contrast with the Greek poleis or the Renaissance Italian polities, the latter often called city-states but ruling land empires the scale of a modern Italian region or so.

Politics-first cities

To be clear, the examples of London and Paris, or for that matter Hamburg, are not the only ones one sees in premodern Europe. There’s really a spectrum of city foundations, from the entirely commercial to the entirely political. Madrid was built at an awkward location as the Spanish court centralized, which remains awkward to this day for high-speed rail planning, as Spanish cities are broadly either Madrid or on the coast, making it hard to serve more than one provincial city on the same line. Warsaw was a preexisting urban center but only became significant after Poland made it its capital because it was in the middle between the previous Polish capital of Kraków and Lithuania, shortly after the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was formed.

Early Modern foundations

Warsaw is an example of a city that had already been founded in the Middle Ages but exploded in size after it became the Commonwealth capital. But there are also cities founded ex nihilo in the Early Modern Period, at which point we must consider not just Europe but also the Americas. And those cities, again, are sited for a mix of political and economic considerations.

On the political side, one can find Karlsruhe and Charleroi, both founded to be aristocratic capitals, Karlsruhe because Margrave Charles III William wanted to get out of disputes with the citizens of the preexisting capital, and Charleroi for defense purposes as part of the Spanish Netherlands. Karlsruhe’s history, argues Jarrett Walker, makes it a uniquely good fit for its tram-train system: its modern size is such that it is monocentric but, owing to this history, its train station isn’t quite at the center. Far larger than both of these cities is Mexico City, refounded as a Spanish city because the Aztec capital had been there.

But then in North America one finds cities founded from the start at economically favorable locations. A consistent favorable location was the Fall Line, where ocean-going ships would have to transship to smaller riverboats; as all such cities lay on one line running north-south, it became easy to link them by road, eventually forming US Highway 1. Farther north, the Fall Line is very close to or even on the coast, leading to the foundation of New Amsterdam at a favorable harbor location. Since the original YouTube discusses realism in fantasy, I must point out that the concept of the fall line is familiar to fantasy worldbuilders, to the point that the D&D 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide gives a sample town for early adventures located on the falls of the river, with a low side and a high side. Ironically, this is a bit unrealistic for period medieval European fantasy, since this didn’t exist in Europe the way it did in the United States: European city locations on major rivers don’t really follow a consistent fall line, but rather are a mix of political reasons, preexisting trade routes, and favorable crossing locations.