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This article investigates cities and their political cultures in Italy and the Near East in the later Middle Ages. Cities in these two regions have traditionally been viewed in diverging ways. European cities have been understood as unitary entities which stood out on account of their urban governments and the political order of which foreshadowed the rise of modern states. The absence of comparable institutions has meant that Near Eastern cities have often been seen as very unlike their European counterparts. Focusing on the political cultures of Damascus and Bologna in the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries, this article suggests that a different understanding of cities is necessary. Partly as a result of demographic growth and the breakdown of larger political structures in earlier centuries, these cities can be understood as polycentric arenas in which public life took place around multiple units of political organisation which ranged from neighbourhoods to parties. Conflicts, including civil war and revolt, were an ordinary part of their political cultures: they were expressive of fragmentation, but equally of a shared public arena in which contending groups were stake-holders. As arenas, cities on either side of the Mediterranean world gave rise to a distinctive form of political order. They did not foreshadow forms of order associated with the modern state and, particularly in the Mediterranean regions under analysis here, often remained among its greatest obstacles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of York, England’s self-titled ‘second city’ in the late middle ages, was the site of persistent political conflict from the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The Flemish city of Bruges experienced a series of revolts in the same period. This article compares the patterns of popular politics in the two cities. Although dissimilar in governmental context, population size and commercial significance, their constitutional arrangements were much more comparable. The urban commons, organised and mobilised by the crafts, were at the centre of the major disturbances in each city. They had a distinctive reading of the urban constitution, which was nurtured in a guild environment among craftsmen and citizens. In York and Bruges, the crafts engaged in similar forms of collective action (petitioning, collective assembly and the occupation of public space), and revolt was the consequence of a pattern of corporate politics. The shared forms, goals and mentalities of popular protest in York and Bruges can provide an explanation of revolt which might apply not only to towns across late medieval Europe in which the political representation of the crafts was common but also, more generally, to those urban centres where a corporatist ethos flourished. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses the publication `Medieval Frontier Societies,' edited by Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay. Essays under the broad themes of medieval settlement, institutions and culture and religion; Castilian-Granadan frontier describing the demarcation of the Christian and Islamic spheres; Polish perceptions of themselves as finding parallel in Alfred Thomas study of Czech-German relations; As valuable contribution to the study of a range of issues.