ABSTRACT
An overview of the major works on early modern urban history of Europe discloses their preoccupation with urban societies in the European West and their persistent ignorance of urban civilization in the European East. With the risk of simplification, the frontier between ‘the explored Europe’ and ‘the unknown Europe’ can be demarcated by the recently fallen iron curtain, that separated for several unhappy decades the communist bloc from the rest of the continent. This may easily be demonstrated when some modern syntheses of urban development in early modern Europe are considered. Most Anglo-American authors such as Paul M. Hohenberg, Lynn Hollen Lees, Christopher R. Friedrichs and Alexander Cowan draw largely on sources that refer to the urban experience in the area stretching from the British Isles to Germany and from the Low Countries to Southern Italy.1 Conversely, references to urban life in the Eastern Europe are either sparing or completely absent. Their failure to fully integrate the vast territories of East of Saxony and Austria into their wide-ranging surveys of early modern cities is usually acknowledged by the authors themselves. For example, in the preface to his excellent book, Christopher Friedrichs elucidates that his synthesis ‘includes all of Western and Central Europe and some of Eastern Europe’, while Hohenberg and Lees clarify that ‘in the language of urban geography our Europe remains underbounded, meaning that we fail to give the peripheries their due’.2 Similarly, the famous databases published by Paul Bairoch and Jan de Vries cover urban societies in the Eastern Europe only marginally and often their demographic estimates are not entirely correct. It is true, that German studies on early modern urban Europe pay slightly more attention to territories that
were largely German-speaking and were connected by countless economic, political and cultural ties with the Holy Roman Empire. By discussing basic parameters of urban life in Germany, Heinz Schilling briefly refers also to cities and towns in the Bohemian Lands.3 The most recent work on European early modern city by Herbert Knittler includes a number of illustrative examples from the Habsburg monarchy and Poland-Lithuania that aim to support the author’s argumentation. Yet again, Knittler’s book may offer hardly more than a highly selective and therefore simplistic view of urban life in Eastern Europe.4
