ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have suggested that the integrity of early modern urban society was increasingly challenged by its growing ethnic, religious, cultural and social diversity. Closely associated with immigration, such potentially destabilizing factors emerged from outside the urban environment. Yet there were also other sources of conflict inherently embedded in any form of collective settlement, namely the ever increasing gap between propertied and non-propertied social classes, collisions between individual ambitions and communal interests as well as tensions between the principles of order and long-term planning and the short-term needs of masses. All these tensions usually came into play during periods of inner instability within medieval and early modern urban societies. For any city such tumults were indeed highly critical moments, but not only because of potential shifts in power relations. The sources also found it embarrassing that these social conflicts signalled a crisis of concord within urban society as for most burghers prosperity and advancement were conditioned by the preservation of inner unity. Conversely, any disharmony might have envisaged city’s fall. Not only did panegyrics stress the need for social order and concord but the vision of the well-ordered and harmonious community was also inherently present in urban historiography. Chronicles as well as essays on city constitutions mostly inclined to the description of the wishful and utopian state of affairs and idealized construction of the past should have served as an instruction for future town dwellers. As an instrument of intergenerational communication the urban historiography thus pursued a double goal – to preserve the values of the past and inculcate them in the new generation of burghers responsible for the prosperity and sustained development of the city. In order to meet this task the authors resorted to the selective choice of historical facts and interpreted them in ‘a politically correct’ way. In the case of urban tumults, examples par excellence of the breach of social and political concord, the urban chroniclers and historians basically used to follow one of two strategies. Occasionally, they simply ignored periods of inner instability or provided merely a very concise overview of the events. If they opted for a comprehensive analysis of the conflict they usually passed a negative judgment with the aim of stressing the harmfulness and potentially detrimental effect of discords within the urban community. In an emphatic way, such an anxiety was expressed by the chronicler of the stormy events in Prague in the 1520s who clamoured for ‘good love and concord’ and warned that ‘old histories and chronicles reveal what effect is
the large, mighty and opulent cities and realms fell into misery and destitution’.1 Similarly, in contemplating the causes of social unrests in Danzig, Stenzel Bornbach voiced his firm belief that disunity in its results engenders nothing but harm and destruction.2
