Gone Medieval - Urban Life in Medieval Cities

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Between 1000 and 1500, European towns and cities started to take shape, impacting the lives of millions of people as different cultural, social and religious groups began to interact. But who was allowed to settle in a city and how was it decided who belonged?In this edition of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Professor Miri Rubin, author of Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe, about migration into urban communities, how newcomers were treated and what happened when strangers became neighbours.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie.The Producer was Rob Weinberg.It was edited and mixed by Seyi Adaobi.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.Join the History Hit Book Club in time for the June and July read of Charles Spencer's The White Ship. Become part of a community of readers who are passionate about history and its thrilling lessons. Members read a new book every two months, and get a £5 Amazon voucher towards the cost of the book, as well as exclusive access to an online Q&A between History Hit presenters and the author in the second month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Around 80,000, urbanity starts to really take a hold in Europe. Towns and cities had really developed in the early medieval period, but it's over this next 500-year period or so that these began to really take shape. And this new urbanity had been. a huge impact on millions of people's lives and importantly on the interaction between different cultural, social and religious groups. But who was allowed to settle in a city and how was it

decided who belonged and who didn't? This is precisely the topic of the book, Cities of Strangers Making Lives in Medieval Europe. The book is written by medieval and early modern historian Professor Miri Rubin at Queen Mary University of London, who's also the precedent of the Jewish Historical Society of England. In her book, Miri explores the migration that took place throughout Europe into urban communities and especially how certain groups of newcomers were treated and what happened when these strangers became neighbours. So Miri, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I'm really delighted to have you here. Good to be here. So I was really intrigued when I saw the title of your book, Cities of Strangers, and especially that concept of strangers.

And I want to ask you about those particular groups that you talk about later on in this conversation. But I just very sort of quickly before we start, this idea of that particular word, strangers. Do people in the medieval period talk about strangers? Or is it a modern concept that you've just applied? No, they totally do. Confusingly, they have lots and lots. of different words that they use for it. They have obviously the Latin words, which is extra nails, which gives a stranger, but words it'll be more familiar with all the F-O-R words like

foreigner, for a forestier, even if one doesn't know the languages, one hears it, because the F-O-R of outside, from the Latin outside. And then we get various Germanic words. So, I mean, there are so many different words. And what's really difficult for the historian to get her head around is that sometimes it can mean just like literally somebody who does not live within the walls of the city or a few miles from it in its suburbs. Somebody from a village, maybe five miles away, can be considered legally as a foreigner, not of the citizenry. But of course, there can be much more exotic people who come and have different looks and different accents and so on. So one has to listen to their voices and how they use. And how they use.

use the words, and whether they use the words with connotations that are negative or positive or just totally neutral, the definition of a person. And what was really intriguing as I went along was to find that in some medieval cities for particular jobs, they actually preferred people from elsewhere, maybe from centers of expertise, like doctors, you know, you wanted to have an Italian doctor or a Jewish financier. So I know that some of it sounds like a cliche, but there also were regional specializations. So, you know, if you're a king in 12th century, Paris, the king of France, and you want to invigorate trade and you want to bring credit givers to your city, you say, oh, Italy, yes, Lombardy, I need some Lombards, and literally reach agreements with people from

particular regions. So it is true that these can coalesce into Stereo. but they often also convey just the vast diversity that was Europe in, say, I don't know, around 1,100 or 1,200. So people come to cities and they can settle there and they can even remain strangers in all those different appellations for a really long time and out of choice to not go native, to live safely, fairly safely and comfortably in a place while retaining really important links elsewhere. So all of that is captured under this term that I have chosen in the English to be strangers. That's absolutely fantastic. I love that. So hopefully we'll get a little bit more detail into some of those things later on. But what you deal with, really, so you deal with

the period 80,000 to 1500 roughly, and really about urbanity and the cities and how these concepts and how these things happen in cities, because of course this is when we get so many people living together in an unprecedented scale, really. And I wondered if you could just start to give us a little bit of an introduction of that, that development of cities, if we go back to the beginning, you know, around about 1,000 AD, what does Europe look like? And, you know, how does that vanity really form at that point in time? Sure, and it's particularly a challenge to do so and to convey it in a sensible way

when most people think of the Middle Ages, obviously, of estates, manners, of like 90% of the population, living a rural life and even elite people having their domains and their homes and their most sort of cherished residences in the countryside and yet being involved in politics that are sometimes in urban centres or indeed even in commerce and in exchange. So there was always urban life in Europe. It was particularly intense and particularly well provided for in those areas that had a heritage from the Roman period. I mean, it's just the infrastructure. And of course, remembering the Roman Empire, it reached pretty much north. I mean, you know, like Cologne or Mainz in Germany, you know, that much north, let alone, of course, Colchester, London, York. So it can reach quite afar. But in the period of the transformation of the Roman Empire into those sort of kingdoms of the early medieval centuries, there is definitely a decline in the ability to maintain those sort of services. So the intensity, of urban life, the amount of exchange, the amount of coin changing hands, the degrees of safety

were definitely lower than they were in the heyday of the Roman period. Nonetheless, there is infrastructure, there is continuity of urban life, definitely in Italy, in southern France, in parts of Iberia of today. But there are also areas that are far less urbanized in that sense, which would be Scandinavia, the Baltic, which then become, of course, parts of Europe. Ireland, Wales. So there is this area that has, and that is the area that continued sort of energizing exchange, financial services, its merchants went far afield east and west and north, and provided luxuries that even in the early Middle Ages were very much required, of course, by elites and by ecclesiastical elites. So then it was never a time when there was not urban life,

when there was not ability to move around. But after about the year 1000, we do see a tremendous enhancement of that, and it's to do with generally a rise in a demographic rise in Europe, more people, extension of settlement, new land being brought under plow, greater productivity of the land, and thus more demand.

So when you have enough food to go around and more, some people do not have to be on the land to produce their, food. It's as simple as that. And they can experiment with other types of lifestyles, including the urban one. So there are always nuclei of the urban think of cathedrals and cities, thinks of residences, of monarchs and of aristocrats, but it all gets intensified once artisans regularly move in, once there's a lot of food to be exchanged and worked on in cities. And that is when you get this sort of phenomenon after the year 1000, and that is not a that there was no urban life before, but definitely it grows, it intensifies. And that is when

all these regulations and cities have to come into place. What is a city? What is their status? What do they need to thrive? What is their relationship to the rulers that were, well, the people in charge in every particular city, it can be a bishop, it can be a king, it can be a count, it can be so many different types of authorities. All that then gets sorted out. It's terrificly interesting. So yeah, you just said now that there are these different people who can be in control and be in charge, but are there some general trends across Europe that you see that that is sort of a consistent in terms of who is in charge, who makes these legislations in the cities? Yeah, this is super interesting. I mean, there are trends, but there are various trends. So, for example,

in north and central Italy, Lombardy, Tuscany, this sort of area, they are nominally under the rule of the Holy Roman Emperor, but they're sort of quite far away, and they receive sort of privileges also that allow them basically to develop their own life. In southern France, there is the Count of Provence, there are the rulers of Toulouse. So you're dealing with, not with monarchs, but you're dealing with important regional rulers. In England and in Poland and in Hungary And in France, you're dealing already with quite evolved, sort of attempting to centralize sort of monarchies, with a sense of themselves, with the sense also that all privileges comes from them. And those areas are where we find monarchs regulating the life of towns,

and therefore also very often the life of foreigners within towns. But again, kings and their officials can't run the city. So they too give charters to city, give freedoms to cities that allow them then to become, say, in England, it would be a borough, to become a borough, to have certain freedoms and so on, while always acknowledging the ultimate authority of the king. So whatever the ultimate authority, be it an emperor far away, be it a monarch closer by, or be it a count, very close by, say, in Champagne, they are all giving privileges for cities because they tax the cities, which is great for royal law. income because there are all sorts of indirect benefits through the growth of wealth and the circulation and trade, which means that it's a question of prestige as well. If you look at the development of capital cities, these are something capital cities, only kings have them. So kings invest a lot of effort in thinking about them, be it Prague or be it Paris or be it

in England, ultimately, it will become London itself. And you touched on this a little bit already, this idea of people coming into the cities of artisans of other people and obviously living into this idea of strangers and foreigners and so on. So I just wanted to talk now about that migration, about this sort of inviting people in. Because, of course, that is a big part, isn't it? This migration, is that something that's consistent across Europe? People are migrating towards these cities and these places. Absolutely, yes.

But there are also other types of migration that are not associated directly with urban life and its attractions. So, for example, in the area of what is northern Germany in the Baltic of today, there was a vast movement of population that was a rural population that settles in the lands now conquered and Christianized and brought into the bosom of the Holy Roman Empire, as it were. Think of areas in the 13th century parts of Wales, particularly North Wales, which get sort of dominated and then settlers come from England to settle their. to rural lands, some of them to cities as well. So there are various types of movement associated, of course, with conquest and colonization, we might say. And there's a very interesting book by Robert Bartlett about all of that from the 1990s, the making of Europe as making through the process of the movement of people. But there is also something more routine, more local, which is the response of people to the opportunities of local and regional economies to better themselves,

to better themselves. So when you have population growth, think of it. You've got a family sitting on a customary tenure. There are serfs, but they have the expectations of retaining this land. The population grows. There's more demand on this land. So, you know, one son may go off to a venture that's being organized, perhaps by a lord, to bring some land underplow and to create a new village. Another son, who maybe has skills in smithing, in carpentry, or is willing just to offer labor, might go into the town. Now, what's been discovered recently is that unlike the more dramatic, perhaps, movements over long distance of more modern migration, a lot of the migration in the Middle Ages is sort of people from the role to the urban, but the urban is already familiar to them.

That is to say, people go to market. people come to sell things. People have tasks for their lords that they have to do, you know, carting of material to market, of goods to market. And so there is a sort of familiarity that then can say, okay, maybe I take the full step and I actually move into the town. Because you always wonder, all these towns, their regulations always require. But if you want to join the town, even as a resident,

let alone the long process of the pathway to citizenship, You have to have someone to guarantee. So we'll need to put down some money and say, look, if this person breaks rules or overstays, they're welcome, I'm going to pay up. How do you start? How do you have that first person to move out for you? And historians, economic historians have shown that there can be relationships

that are before the relationship, let alone, if, say, you're running a workshop, a textile workshop, which needs a lot of working hands. You may also buy your wool from the countryside. You may also then have the contacts that allow you to suggest or to, hire people to come and work in your workshop, even unskilled people. So in both ways, it's not this sort of dramatic sort of like out of nowhere. There are networks that connect very intimately towns and country. And along those networks, a lot of the quiet migration to towns occurs. And I say it's quiet because it often doesn't even get mentioned in our sources really, because these aren't people who

even become very significant citizens. These are people who come and they work and they find. And they find their way into the town. And some of them and some of their sons and daughters may well do better. So that's such a good point, isn't it? It's just those invisible parts that really drive a lot of cities and all these sort of things that happen in the cities. And I was going to ask you about that, actually, about the sources that you look at for this. What exactly are there and what do we have to tell us about these legislations, you know, what happened to people who didn't follow the rules, who tried to come in, you know, how much do we really know? So when I started working on this project, the easiest thing to access were the statutes and the regulations that cities made for themselves,

those cities that had a sort of use statuendi, the right to make statutes for themselves. And these are those sort of particularly in Italy, northern and central Italy, where, of course, the Holy Roman Emperor is in charge, but basically for local purposes. Now, these are also communities, because of that continuity with the Roman tradition, have a very evolved legal culture, education, their school that continued undisturbed over all the centuries. So they have really the sort of intellectual resources, the personnel resources to put together packages of legislation once they're able to rest their freedoms or their freedom to make statutes, not only from the emperor far away, but also for more local rulers like local bishops and local noble families.

So once there is a sphere of freedom, you've got to do something about it and you're exactly to answer the questions that you just mentioned. That is the questions who's in, who's out, what is the process, what happens to them if they don't, how do they get fined? What happens if a foreign man, a man from outside marries a local woman, what happens to her property? Everything is figured out. And these are quite big tones. So I confess that most of the initial work for this project was really from these, let's call them, normative, regulating documents, plentiful. There are tens and tens and tens of sets of them, many of them edited, some of them still in manuscript form. And there is an objection that can be made. Look, people don't live according

to the law. They make do and they find ways around the law and this sort of thing, which is absolutely right. And for that reason, court records would usually come a good century later, are really useful because you see what comes up there. What is the town, accusing people of and then punishing them or finding them or whatever. But there's more to be said, nonetheless, about these normative sources. That is to say, if you read them very closely, what you see is exactly what's on people's minds. That is to say, the people who legislate are council members or officials and so on, advised by Roman law experts, but you see exactly what they're worried about.

And that in itself is really important information. Moreover, they regularly updated them, added to them, commented on them in the margins and whatnot. So these are not totally fossilized documents, although of course they have to be read. If they have to have a really full picture, they have to be read against where possible documents of practice, what we might call documents of application, which can be petitions to the city or can be indeed court records, or all sorts of documentation arising from. But those because they are documents of practice, they're more ephemeral, they don't survive in the same sort of way

so easily as the sort of robust books of laws that gets copied and preserved in a particular way. So that's part of the sources. But of course, there's also the material aspect of the city and archaeological aspect of the city that shows you where neighborhoods were that shows you also the city as it grows, it creates walls and then another set of walls, these rings around cities because of population growth.

So that also has to be really read in the context of sort of spatial organisation. Throughout June on not just the Tudors, we're honouring Queen Elizabeth I second's platinum Jubilee by focusing on queenship in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and all this month with my guests, I'll be exploring the coronations of Tudor queens, queens in Shakespeare, Queen's Regnant and Queen's Consort, who wielded power in ways we haven't thought about. Then there's the queen who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands and the female Swedish king.

You heard that right. So for a month of all things, magisterial and monarchical, look no further than not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to some of these stranger groups then that you talk about in your book. And the first one you talked about is the Jewish communities

and how they function and interact within cities over time. And could you start with sort of explaining a little bit? little bit about when we start to see this sort of migration and movement on quite a large scale of Jews into cities in Europe. So Jews were in cities because there's a sort of Jewish diaspora throughout the Roman Empire. There is obviously movement across the Mediterranean in the 7th century with the coming of Islam and the conquest of North Africa. These things get reconfigured. But basically there are old communities in southern Europe. And they are regulated, you know, slowly, slowly a sort of modus of event developed in the first millennium around Jews.

Jews that you're not meant to kill them, you're not meant to destroy them. But they're not first-class citizens. There are things that they do, but they do quite a lot of professions. And in the Mediterranean, you know, they have vineyards. They do have cultural work. We have evidence from southern France, from Liberia, and so on. And also, they sit in cities because these are safe places. These are places with enterprise and so on. But it's well into the 11th and 12th centuries when Jews become identified par excellence with financial services and commerce, particularly with financial services. And as in the 11th and 12th century, these sort of more centralizing kingdoms develop and so on,

there is a much more coercive legislation about the Jews as the Jews are understood as a sort of resource for these ambitious crowns and their taxation desires. This is really evident that the Jews came to England with a Norman conqueror with William to sort out an empire, really, that he was developing with different coins and different denominations from all the different parts that he ruled. and they needed somebody in charge of that project. Those were his Jews in France. Similarly, populations and cities protected, but also pressed. But it is true. There's also movement northwards, exactly like to Paris, but also in the Holy Roman Empire,

already in the 10th century, where there is this beginning of the stirring of the economy and financial services become more important. So, for example, bishops were great sort of patrons of Jewish settlement, super, super interesting. They protected them, but they also obviously benefited from their presence there. So they often were in charge of mints. But in the area of the Rhineland, for example, they took up viticulture, making wine. So the movement of the Jews sort of reflected maybe in a more enhanced manner, but nonetheless what was becoming is these sort of stirrings of possibilities to which both lords and those on the ground were beginning to respond. Now, it's a In the book, I tried to emphasize that the Jews were part of town life. They may have a history of coming in the 10th century to a city like Mainz, but they're there. Everybody knows a lot about them.

People go into business with them. No, they don't celebrate Easter with them. It is true. Nor do the Jews celebrate Passover with them. There is a clear demarcation. But what is really striking is in the mall, we know so much about it now, how utterly embedded really Jews were so that sometimes you can't give them citizenship because Jews were, could not take the oaths required. And there is a sort of some distaste about Jews being,

as it were, holding authority as it were, and exercising political power. But they are sometimes called co-citizens, conchievous. There are documents from German cities where there was trying to look for a word for them. They belong. They're part of the community. They're familiar, they fulfill functions, they pay their taxes, they have a voice, they go to court, they don't only go to Jewish court, they also go to urban court, but they aren't quite citizens. And that's where there is really a parallel also, which I developed in another chapter in the book, which is with women. Women cannot, for the same sort of ideological reasons, cannot perhaps be so readily a citizen or an official, but they're essential to the economy. They have,

of authority, a widow will run a workshop that her husband ran before her. She will train apprentices and so on. But there is this sort of coisiness about recognising it. Nonetheless, some cities did give widowed women a title that is like a citizenship title and they paid for it some of the low countries. So there is a sort of similarity there, not quite full citizenship, but utter embeddedness. Yeah. And I like those little quote I got from the of the summaries of your book, which says it's useful to recognize that strangerhood can be experienced even within the town of one's own birth, the place called home, which I thought, I think you're used referring to women, but also I'm also thinking second generation, you know, these people who

are born in maybe a Jewish community, second, third, fourth century. They have sort of half strangers, half not, aren't they? Absolutely. But I would say that they're more not than strangers, really, because there's a very nice Jewish quote from an important 13th century Jewish sort of book about how to live the good religious life is a Jew with a lot of really great advice about just day-to-day life. And one of the things they say, look, if you're migrating and Jews often migrated to seek opportunity, but also because of expulsions or trouble or whatever, so if you migrate, it says, this guidance book, Saffer Khashidim, it's called, if you migrate, be sure to migrate to a city that has a sort of upstanding citizenry and a proper ethos, because you're going to go

native. Within a generation, your sons and daughters and grandchildren, so on, they will be just like the locals. So if it's a place with a sort of, you know, where corruption rules or whatever, you want to watch out because you're going to go native, however Jewish you are. And that's really interesting. And of course, it's true. People do go native in that way. And yet they can still retain a sort of association, an emotional tie, certain core beliefs, perhaps definitely rituals that set them. So maybe you feel more Jewish or particularly Jewish, you know, during Lent. Because you see all these people around you abstaining and they're getting ready and being more sort of involved in their religion and you're excluded from that. Of course, you don't want to be part of it.

So there is this way in which I think in general we need to understand. I'm just thinking of all the people now who are from Britain going back to Ukraine to join the fighting to defend Ukraine. I mean, what is it about? They were perfectly well settled, perfectly happy in Britain. they found themselves a place, they stayed after Brexit and all this sort of thing. But nonetheless, there are affinities that are really, really important that people can harbor even and keep and nurture. And then occasionally in a lifetime they may be tested like they were then and like they may be

now. And then people saw the true complexity and richness of their subjectivity. That's such an interesting parallel. And I think definitely thinking of modern migration and anybody who has moved to a different city or a different country, completely emphasised with that feeling, I suppose, and especially with new generations. But I did also want to ask you, and you would have talked about this sort of idea of conflict now and bringing in Ukraine, for example. Over time, you do have anti-Jewish narratives appearing in Europe.

And even here in England, you've got some very violent and horrific events that are persecuted. Particularly here in England. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's, can you explain sort of how that happens? And what is it exactly? That causes it. It's a really interesting process. And above all, it's a very historical process. That is to say, nothing is foretold. So I said particularly here in England, not to say that there weren't actually in numbers, far more horrific, killings like the ones on the continent in the accusations around the Black Death. But I say it because simply the narrative par excellence about killing a child,

the Jews desire indeed need to kill a child every year around Passover. that is a creation of 12th century Norwich of all places. And I'm not saying it couldn't have happened elsewhere, but that is where it happened. Also, you know, precocious experimentation with expulsion, first in the 70s, 1270s from Dower cities and then full expulsion are again something that came out of England. And I think it's related to the fact that England was just extremely precocious

on two levels. One level was the administrative one, thinking of ways of, you know, Edward I was maximizing tax, parliament, the different interest groups, etc. And the Jews fell foul of that. That's how I understand the expulsion, but also in a cathedral like Norwich in the 1140s. It could happen in any other cathedral, but the cathedrals of England are very lively places for hagiography, for a lot of creations of new saints, new local saints in England in the 12th century. It's a very sort of active religious milieu. And so Thomas of Monmouth, who invented the story that the Jews had killed a local boy, a boy of 12, a boy called William whose body was found.

And of course, children's bodies were found all the time, and they still are. So he had behind him already this whole sort of, let's say, religious culture. culture, education, models of hagiographical writing and of thinking about Jews that made him the one who happened to put it all together into this very nasty story

that actually whose reenactment and really lethal reenactment happened far more frequently on the continent than ever did in England although there is a very famous case in Lincoln in 1255. So these things develop through a whole lot of processes

deeply historical, that is to say, it's not something that people put together in the 10th century. It was of its moment. And actually, the ritual murder, as it came to be called, when once this story that was born in Norwich, evolved into something that's much more about the Jews need the blood of a child than they needed for Passover, which wasn't there in the original story. So the ritual murder thing, it's actually surprising how few enactments of this there are. There's lots of telling of it. There's a lot of reporting about it.

But in fact, it's really, really difficult to convince the court that this is what happened in the end, or so it happens. Whereas as a recent interesting new book by Magda Teter shows in the early modern, in parts like Poland and so on, it became much more frequently used and frequently enacted. So to go back to your question about why is this happening, I think it's part of the whole 12th and 13th century phenomenon that a very brilliant historian, R. I Moore, has probably overstated, but nonetheless stated, and called the development of a persecuting society. And what I take away from his remarkable and highly influential theory is that in this period that we're talking

about this period of growth, of consolidation of sort of European identity through a very clear statement of what Christianity is for and what it does and what the sacraments are and what good Christians do and so on, all those who fall foul become much more visible in a landscape where Christian identity becomes more clearly articulated. And that will be Jews and attention to heretics, attentions to various other groups in the population, like Moneylanders in general, even not Jewish ones, Lombards, for example, there's a whole discourse against them as well. Now, in the book, in the later periods covered by the book, I talk about a real deterioration that happens in these cities in Europe after the Black Death. And I think it's because of this sort of

modus Vivendi that developed in the 12th and 13th century. Yes, we've got our Jews. We know they're different. We occasionally insult them, but they are part of our city. They are part of the common good of the city. That is sort of lost because I think in general cities after the Black Death, and remember, it's not just the Black Death. I always remind my students, it's every decade. in the 14th and 15th centuries. It was a revisitation. These cities lived with depopulation. They lived with the erosion of their tax base. They lived with constant suspicion of infection and people become suspicious and they lose trust when they're in a period of such constant pressure, demographic, medical, economic and so on. Now, there are famous winners in this late

medieval economy, of course, in certain sectors. But on the whole, it is a very uncertain time for elites, for urban elites. You know, those urban elites were proud and secure enough to say, hey, let them come, we'll find a place for them. It's really good for our economy. That's not how they're feeling. And you really see that. And moreover, I think the loss of confidence is also portrayed in certain parts of Europe, even the middle of countries, particularly Italy, even Iberia, parts of the Holy Roman Empire, you get city sort of calling in fiery preachers, reforming preachers to sort of sort of sort things out. Are these troubles because people are sinful or because that's what preachers are telling them. They're not giving an economic and demographic analysis.

They're giving them an analysis that fits in with a religious ideology. And they call for reform. and one of the points that are made, there are lots of complaints about how people live their lives and how they wear fancy dress and how they're carnal and they're lascivious and whatnot. But one of the things is also that you allow these Jews into your cities. This is what these preachers will say, and they're usually from the Franciscan or sometimes Dominican order,

and they have a whole agenda of reform, and they set the tone in these cities. And I think a lot of the arrangements that were possible early on, I mean, there were preachers in the 13th century as well, but they did not have this center stage and this sort of influence. And that's why I think the tone in cities becomes much more exclusionary, much more suspicious, according to anything, according to gender, according to ethnic background, according to religion, according to social status and so on. So to kind of summarise it wind up a little bit. At that point, 1500 where you sort of finish this piece of research in your book,

would you say that that is the biggest change that almost these strangers have become a little bit but more strangers almost than they were at the beginning at the end? They've definitely become more strangers. There are more procedures and technologies around their containment, be it documents for travel, being permissions to settle, much more scrutiny. But I would also say that there's a deep contradiction. You know, a city like Siena kicks out its Jews in the 15th century, and within weeks, several of those Jewish families have permissions to return.

But those permissions to return are then usually less favourable. A trauma and a break has occurred. It's more scrutinised. So I think that is absolutely the case, yes. Less friendly cities. And is that a sort of enduring legacy, do you think, that goes on beyond the medieval period? Or does it get better again? Really interesting.

What is remarkable is that after the 15th century, most Jews don't live anymore in Western Europe. They just don't. Because remember, there's 1492 from Iberia. So they start, a lot of those European Jews end up in a friendly part of the Mediterranean, the eastern Mediterranean, in the Ottoman Empire, in areas that are Greece and Turkey of today, and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. Some Italian cities, not all some Italian cities welcome them in as well. And of course, central and eastern Europe.

So we return to the lands of exactly what is Poland, what was Russia, is now Ukraine, Belarus, those sort of areas. that's ultimately where a settlement will occur. And of course, there you could not get deeper embeddedness over centuries. But of course, in the 20th century, then those were the Jewish communities. And of course, the Roma communities that were destroyed, of course, in the Holocaust. I'm not saying it's at all like living in the Middle Ages. All I'm saying is in terms of the movement of population,

central and eastern central Europe become the places and the Ottoman Mediterranean become the areas where Jews moved from. these cities where they thrived for generations. Well, that's been such a nice perspective, actually, to see how that medieval period has sort of developed not only in itself, but also with the consequences afterwards. I think it's good to think in the long term sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. I think we need to. Brilliant. Mirate, thank you so much. I have so many other questions I'd love to ask you,

but we could be here for hours and hours. But thanks so much for joining us. This was all about Mary's book, Cities of Strangers, Making Lives in Medieval Europe. up. So thank you all so much for listening. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. We will be back with another episode. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Saturday. Don't forget, you can subscribe to our newsletter, Medieval Mondays. Just look at the episode notes for how to do that. And again, thank you so much to everyone for listening.