False Economy - Alan Beattie [25]
It is not all quite so positive. Both the good and bad sides of modernity are inescapably bound up with urbanization. Cities are tougher, faster and richer than the countryside, but also often dirtier, more violent, and more brutal. The economic powerhouse of modern Italy is neither Rome nor Venice but the northern Italian city of Milan, which became first an industrial and then a business capital. And in a painting of Milan from 1910, The City Rises, by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, the shock of becoming urban is elevated into the violent turmoil of creation itself.
The technique of the painting mirrors its theme: it is the pivot point of Boccioni's transition from the softer, pointillist landscape aesthetics of Impressionism to a harder-edged, Cubist-influenced style of dynamism and drama. In an industrial Milan of scaffolded buildings and smoking factory chimneys, manpower and horsepower—rendered literally in a chaotic swirl of straining draft horses and their struggling handlers—drag the city toward its future.
As ever, the balance of good and bad can be tilted by peoples and governments. History provides instances of cities succeeding and failing; of the urban goose being killed for its golden eggs and of it being force-fed so violently that it ceases to lay.
It was the first of these that eventually weakened Venice. Unlike Rome, Venice avoided getting itself too clogged up with a hinterland of scroungers. But it, too, succumbed to imperial avarice—in this case, coming from without rather than within. The republic declined as it was targeted by a variety of assailants, principally the Spanish and French and the Ottoman empire.
Similar fates befell the prosperous southern European cities that grew between the fall of Rome and the rise of Venice. These were trading centers that emerged under the Saracens and the Moors—Islamic Arabs from the Middle East and North Africa. In the eleventh century, the biggest city in Europe was Cordoba, in what is now southern Spain, with a population estimated by some at 450,000. The second-biggest was Palermo, in Sicily, estimated at 350,000. London at the time was a tiny 25,000 people, and Paris 20,000.
The Moors and Saracens ran open and largely peaceful trading empires. But in the first few centuries of the second millennium, the Arabs were pushed back into North Africa and the Middle East, and the powerful European monarchies that took over were interested mainly in what they could squeeze out of the cities, not how they could nurture them.
At this stage of history it was much easier to tax urban commerce, which was physically concentrated and generally ran on a cash economy, than rural trade, which was dispersed and frequently involved barter. But cities were central to economic growth, providing the trading centers that allowed specialization and development to occur. So areas that passed from nurturing to acquisitive rule tended to go backward.
The d'Hauteville brothers from the Norman kingdom, for example, invaded and established a principality in southern Italy in the eleventh century. After a decade-long batde for Sicily, they took Palermo from the Saracens in 1071. The d'Hautevilles ran what by eleventh-century standards was a tightly centralized kingdom that wrung tax revenue out of their possessions to fund further military adventure. By 1200, the population