Medieval Musings: The City State

"For I was reared

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars."

Coleridge, 'Frost at Midnight', 1797

In ye olde days, before globalisation and industrialisation mass produced human experience and made every main street look and feel the same, there were the independent city states that flowed with the flavour of individuality. These weren't the mega cities you see today of 25,000,000 plus people but rather great big country towns of 50,000 to 100,000 souls.

From the 12th century on these great cities become self-governing democratic havens, free of intrusion from nobles. Multitudes of people fed up with the restrictions of feudal existence and "to the manor born effeteness" congolmerated to escape the rule of nobles and create an ideal working and creative community in which fairness and equality were the main driving principles. It was the adventure of cooperation at its most effective. They were centers of humanity bursting with schools, hospitals, baths, workshops (in the sense of the artisan working at his chosen trade not the toxic factories or human slave lines we know today) and wonderful community inspired architecture. Guilds controlled the fairness and expression of individual trade and cathedrals rose to celebrate the glory of god and the energy and abundance of the people. Walls were their own form of self enforced limitation to growth and over urbanisation.

These free cities existed all over the known world from the coasts of the Mediterranean to the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, down the fjords of Scandinavia through Russia, Hungary, France and Spain. A mighty fraternity of spirit rose from the compost of feudalism.

I imagine a time not to far in the future where the same organic human spiritual emergence rises from the remains of capitalism and globalisation...