Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/378

 328 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE literature for the knightly and feudal class much inclina- tion to dwell upon the affairs of despised traders and work- ingmen who had struggled up from serfdom. It is only when the townsmen become well educated enough to speak for themselves or rich enough to hire writers that we get adequate records of their life. To some extent medieval towns occupied the sites of previous Roman colonies and municipia, either because the situation was so advantageous that a town was sure to be located there in any period or because a portion of the Roman town had remained inhabited through the early medieval period. But many Roman sites were now abandoned and many new urban centers grew up about castle, monastery, and other points favorable to the changing requirements of trade and industry. For example, many of the large cities of France to-day were places of importance in Roman Gaul, but not more than eighty out of five hundred French towns in all can be so identified. In medieval England towns were larger and more numerous than in Roman Britain, while beyond the Rhine and about the Baltic cities arose where once barbarians had roamed. On the other hand, some regions where cities had flourished under the Roman Empire failed to revive in the Middle Ages, especially in the Balkan peninsula, including even Greece, home of the city-state, and North Africa, which under the repeated attacks of wild tribes from the Sahara became little different from the desert. To the east and west of this ruined area the Arabs had established prosperous cities like Cairo and Bagdad in the East, and Cordova and Seville in Spain; but these were now menaced by the advance of Turks and Almohades, and the future lay with the cities of the Christian West. To-day many of these in turn, if their sites have not been actually abandoned, survive with a much diminished population and amount of business, since machinery and factories, steam and railroads, and changes in trade routes and in political boundaries and capitals have turned men and money to other centers. Considera- tions of defense seldom determine the site of a modern city ?