Introduction

Then there is the dimension of space: it is no coincidence that Italy looms larger in this section than in previous ones, for the political power of Italian cities, and their creation of new power-structures within urban space and also covering the surrounding countryside, are among the most striking developments of the period from the twelfth century onwards. The wealth of these cities gave them enormous political power internationally as well: the crusading activities of the twelfth century and later are unthinkable without Italian involvement. Nor could the Hundred Years War have been undertaken without the financial support of Italian bankers for both sides. Italian cities were not the only ones to emerge onto the political stage in the later medieval centuries: though the Italians remained dominant in the eastern Mediterranean, the cities of the Netherlands and northern Germany created their own spheres of commercial and political power in northern Europe, based, like that of their Italian counterparts, on de facto autonomous control over urban space. Cities played new roles within kingdoms too, and some, such as London and Paris, became capitals, fixed centres of government. Two new kingdoms, Portugal and Sicily, were twelfth-century creations. They could afford to be smaller than the huge amalgamated realms of the earlier Middle Ages, in part because commercial resources enabled sufficient wealth to be amassed to sustain a separate state on a smaller territorial base. Wars fought in distant theatres, and long-distance commerce, evoke the international dimension of medieval politics. In the earlier Middle Ages, exchanges of envoys had been offshoots of inter-dynastic links: later, diplomacy became a structured set of inter-state relations. But were medieval European

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state-structures unique to western Europe? Many explanations can be invoked to explain why it was western Europeans alone who came to dominate the globe, economically, then politically, in the early modern period, but a shift of focus to the ‘medieval’ African and Islamic state centred on Timbuktu allows a more critical perspective on Europe itself, and suggests that global dominance was not a foregone conclusion.