ABSTRACT
For the common people of Europe, the rise of the towns is the most important phenomenon of the feudal age. It was a political, economic and social revolution of the first magnitude. No historical continuity can be shown between the city of antiquity and the medieval town. It is true that records of tumult and revolt in such places as Milan, Cambrai, Cologne, Laon; but the rise of the towns was usually slow. Thus the medieval town, though democratic when compared to the feudal privileged classes, was aristocratic and oligarchic in its government. In Florence we find seven great gilds: notaries, cloth importers and dyers, bankers, drapers the woolen gild was the richest in the city-doctors and pharmacists, silk merchants and furriers. Yet one medieval traveler reported that merchants 'sometimes became voluntary galley slaves in order that they might ply their trade in harbors'.
