La ville médiévale en débat simultaneously aims to enhance the value of urban history within medieval studies in Portugal, and to introduce to an international audience the contribution of Portugal in the European medieval urban history through the use of French and, to a lesser extent, English languages. For this purpose, the volume collects the contributions of European scholars of urban history, gathered during a conference held in Lisbon in 2011, as well as the results of new studies about urban history in Portugal. Together, the texts of the international and of the Portuguese section converge around four topics: historiography, archives of medieval cities, urban territory and economical networks of cities and ports.
Boone depicts the ideological premises of urban historiography from the Middle Ages until today: the discourse about the city is pitched between pessimistic visions of an uncontrolled growing city and the idealized vision of the city as the place of modernity and democracy. Boone proposes to step back from the ideology and to study the medieval city as a place of social experimentation between individual and collectivity. Andrade answers Boone with a picture of the state of Portuguese historiography about medieval cities, explaining its relative thinness as a result of a traditional association made between urban history and poorly regarded local history. Andrade calls for more Portuguese studies of a larger range of towns from the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, a region in which Islamic and Christian models of towns cohabited. Unfortunately, no paper fully develops this transcultural aspect.
Hemptinne offers a general overview of the research fields in medieval urban history according to the different types of sources and pleads for a comparative history of the active role of archives in the politics of medieval cities: the destruction or modification of documents was often a political act. A similar approach is adopted by Roldão for the archives of Evora. However, the insightful analysis of some documents – for example a 1415 archive inventory of disappeared sources – only describes the sources themselves, rather than the events which they describe.
Other contributions deal with urban territory. Bolumburu exploits early modern views and maps for the reconstruction of the topography of medieval Spanish towns. In an effective criticism of this type of document, she notes that the early town views were often stereotyped, while the maps of the eighteenth century were very precise. However, her argument that urban topography did not change from the late Middle Ages to 1950 seems problematic, like her reduction of urban space to its topographical dimension. Alvoro de Campos analyses the urban landscape in a more socio-economic perspective in her study of the property of the church Santa Justa in Coimbra, which proves that such research is possible for Portuguese towns.
The final section of the book discusses the economic dimension of medieval towns and ports. Bochaca describes the commercial structures of the Aquitanian estuary ports; Portuguese urban history could indeed have a role to play in a European comparison of such ports. However, the book concentrates on the networks of ports. While Blockmans delivers a classical picture of the ports network in medieval Europe, Miranda presents the network of medieval Portuguese towns. He refutes the idea of a Portugal without cities: most Portuguese cities were of European average size, and Lisbon was comparable with Bruges or Barcelona. Nevertheless, the only towns of international importance were Porto and Lisbon. Silveira further details the structures of the Portuguese ports network, and emphasizes the role of salt taxation as a tool of commercial politics – following Menjot who presents the urban tax system and public debt as a complex element in international political strategy. In general, Silveira points out the role of the Portuguese crown as protagonist by constructing and structuring the ports network across the land. Monnet's paper also shows that the German leagues of autonomous towns did not habitually act against the emperor and territorial lords, but rather in a balance of power with the other territorial actors within the political system of the German empire, justifying their comparability with urban history in medieval Portugal, which lacked autonomous cities.
The book reminds us that Portuguese cities should be more often considered within a comparative urban history of the Middle Ages on a European scale, but also that the historiography of Portuguese cities has yet to deliver its full potential.
