On the Relation Between the Political Factor and the Cities in the Middle Ages
On the Relation Between the Political Factor and the Cities in the Middle Ages

Summary/Abstract: In the Romanian historiographic scenery, the question of the medieval city has occupied a place whose importance is appreciated differently by specialists. Nevertheless, we can state with sufficient certainty that, at the present moment and despite certain progress that cannot be questioned, there is a rich, exigent inventory of the important questions that have not yet received a satisfying answer. However, as the theme of our debate would not justify in any way the enunciation of these issues, we shall concentrate our attention exclusively on some of them, with the specification that all of these issues deserve a special and detailed analysis; unfortunately, however, the present paper cannot exceed the dimensions of an intervention of reasonable size, with the intention of tackling only those questions that present a special interest at the moment. We find it necessary to specify from the beginning that, in the proposed formula – „The political factor in the development of cities”, the theme of the debate gives the participants the freedom – but also imposes the obligation – to state their position regarding the complex meanings that they attribute to the concept of „political factor”, an obligation that becomes all the more necessary (if not even slightly hindering) as the discussion limits the analysis of this relation, which can be detected between two fully constituted realities: a well defined political factor and, implicitly, restricted to the central political authority – the institution of the princely dignity, hence to the state, as political structure, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the agglomerations of population represented by urban centers, settlements with sufficiently well defined attributes and functions, which can be considered as fully constituted at the time of their reference to the political factor defined earlier.

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