ABSTRACT
Medieval and early modern urban society was a hierarchized but strongly collectivist, socially relatively cohesive and highly organized community. Innumerable texts portrayed city life exactly in this way. Writing about the urban environment authors mostly utilized the topos of harmony, unity and tradition. A late 17th century panegyric upon Pilsen renders a standardized description of such a well-ordered city:
Voicing exactly the same idea, the Hungarian humanist Martin Rakovský (1535?– 1579) resorted, in his poem Descriptio urbis Lunae Boiemicae, to an allegorical picture of the urban community as the human body. While different limbs form a perfectly working body controlled by the will, all urban dwellers are parts of the well-ordered and harmonious community managed by the city council. Evidently enchanted by this rather traditional notion, Rakovský glamorized the collectivist spirit of urban life by disregarding an individual who, in his own words, alone was worth nothing. Prosperity and strength may only arise from unity while quarrelling and discord would unavoidably lead to downfall and, eventually, to destruction.2 Another humanist, Georgius Sibutus, wrote in the late 1520s about Olomouc councillors and town dwellers who ‘in full concord enjoy peace and quiet’ while two decades later Šimon Ennius Klatovský stated that ‘in this city the happy harmony blossoms’.3 Viewed as pillars of the urban culture, urban mentality and republican urban policy these values were considered absolutely crucial in any city or town irrespective of its size and juridical status. Thus the concord among town dwellers was also praised by Michael Fusselius in his panegyric upon the parochial Moravian town of Litovel,
which had no more than a few hundred inhabitants.4 An emphasis upon harmony, concord and order formed, in Weberian terminology, the constitutive sign of an occidental urban community and were seen as the sine qua non for the prosperity and the very existence of a city, irrespective of its size and geographical location.
