Forestiere, foreign or stranger, forain or étranger: the words designate someone who is not from “here”. By studying the figure of the foreigner from the year 1000 to 1500, Miri Rubin analyzes the regimes of hospitality and exclusion and, beyond that, the very definition of what a city is.
Since the pioneering works of Oscar Handlin and Gérard Noiriel, the question of the reception of immigrants in the West has been explored by historians, while remaining less studied for the periods preceding the XIXe century. Medievalist, historian of communities of religion, identity and gender, Miri Rubin takes up this challenge and informs us about the founding link between the administration of inclusion and exclusion of the foreigner, and modern politics as it was invented at the end of the Middle Ages.
Inspired by current events, particularly the influx of Syrian refugees into Europe since 2015, this book – an extension of a series of lectures given by Miri Rubin in 2017 – presents itself as a concise and rich essay. Cities of Strangers intersects the framework of medieval cities and the figure of the foreigner, from the year 1000 to 1500, and outlines a reflection on the way of receiving the other in the Christian West, according to a comparative logic bringing together a great diversity of situations. The author does not claim to be exhaustive, but opens up to a little-explored field of research. Synthetic, the subject also knows how to avoid overly superficial parallels with the contemporary period.
Designate the other
This project is complicated by the scarcity of precise social data and written sources directly relating to migrations in the Middle Ages, which are therefore difficult to quantify. The urban setting, however, allows us to approach the phenomenon through its implications for city life. Cities of Strangers is no more a history of medieval towns than a history of migrations, but it does shed light on both aspects.
In a proto-state West, which does not think of political space as a coherent territory delimited by a fixed border, the notion of foreigner finds as its first limit the absence of the proper identity of each city or political entity. However, words exist which designate someone who, coming from elsewhere, penetrates the social body without merging with it. This is the forensicus Or forensis in Latin, the merchant who goes from one city to another according to the fairs, and whose root is found in English foreignItalian forester or French fairground. The word foreigner, or stranger in English, also designates someone who comes from elsewhere (extraneous). Likewise, birth outside the city or kingdom, evoked by the word alienigenusis found in English alien.
The external origin, whatever it may be, therefore tends to unify different realities into a category. These newcomers may be rich or poor, come from a neighboring city or a distant land, be Christian or not. Their aspirations also vary. The foreigner may want to settle permanently or only stay temporarily: merchants, pilgrims, students, mercenaries, etc.
An approach to medieval urbanity
The figures evoked are as diverse as the reactions they give rise to. Migrations allow a renewed approach to medieval urbanity, through the encounter of a planned, measured, divided space, governed differently according to places and times, with movement, flow, more or less controlled and controllable. Thus practices are developed and renewed that could be designated as the regimes of urban hospitality towards foreigners.
The city, a place of administration and government, is organized spatially and socially between communities of belonging: families, trades or parishes. Added to this structure is a real Latin, religious, and academic “urban culture” that is reinforced and spread from city to city, as are moral, governmental, and commercial values and citizenship practices. The community of belonging and decision-making that the term civitas transcends local particularities in many ways.
Flows are inseparable from this framework, the medieval city being above all a hub of necessary and profitable exchanges that must be supported, stimulated, but also supervised, even limited. Trading and port cities govern the status of merchants and sailors during their stay, as shown by the collection of roles of Oléron or the statutes of Mantua (p. 32). These exchanges are material, but also religious, intellectual, political. The circulation of clerics, diplomats, and people of knowledge is permanent. Cities within the city, universities benefit from legal privileges and are in turn structured in nationsaccording to more or less strict identities.
Trade is therefore the vocation of cities. It maintains their diversity in terms of populations. Through flows, movements and conquests, local populations end up, in some cases, constituting only one group among others, in a framework with multiple cultures, languages and religions. In Avignon, the population thus increased in a few years from 5,000 to 60,000 inhabitants, when the papal court settled there in 1309 (p. 30). Cities incorporated into vast political or commercial empires are in a comparable situation: dependencies of Venice, cities of the Hanseatic League (p. 30-31).
The conditions of inclusion
The question of the status of newcomers leads us to understand, in legal sources in particular, how we receive and integrate foreigners, particularly in periods of growth.
Even a short stay by the merchant involves the management of relationships and transactions, the supervision of the residence and various guarantees, privileges or restrictions (access to local products, to pastures). Longer stays, however, give rise to a more extensive documentary production, including lists of newcomers (as in León around 1165, p. 37) which allow their weight to be estimated locally at between 20 and 30% of the inhabitants.
Then, the cities strive to define the conditions for acquiring citizenship according to each situation (economic activity, marriage, inheritance). Everywhere, it is a question for the newcomer to prove his value, his desire to contribute to the common good. Access to citizenship is a privilege celebrated by entry ceremonies (in Toulouse or in Agen, p. 38-39). The determination of a status of the foreigner and the conditions of his inclusion (regular residence, means of subsistence, reputation, absence of ties of loyalty with another prince) result in better defining what makes the citizen.
Desirable and undesirable foreigners
It is as if to verify the Schmittian dialectic of friend and enemy that Miri Rubin invites us, through the processes of inclusion and exclusion of the newcomer. In addition to limited access to citizenship, additional inclusion criteria close access to municipal offices or certain professions. Specific communities are thus targeted: Slavs in Lüneburg, Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula (pp. 48-49).
It is all a question of context and perception of what the foreigner brings (or does not bring). He can be eminently desirable and the attitude of the rulers towards the newcomers encourages their installation, when they are perceived as a source of prosperity. Legal, medical, financial expertise is sought and makes the fortune of groups that structure themselves into continental networks. In matters of finance and administration, the competence of Tuscans, Aretinos, Lombards or Jews is sought. Being a foreigner can be a quality in itself, calling into question the doctrines on the naturalness of rulers. This is the case in Italy, where the use of a foreign podestà (in Spoleto, Siena, Pistoia) is a guarantee of quality and impartiality between factions.
When perspectives change and a feeling of precariousness spreads, particularly among the elites, encouragement turns into rejection, inclusion into exclusion. Citizenship policies adapt according to the balance of interests between social groups. The trend is above all towards a tightening of the phenomena of integration and access to citizenship at the end of the Middle Ages, when famines and plagues multiply. Once again, these mechanisms observed in the West cover different realities and, sometimes, the balance of interests acts in the other direction: to repopulate a decimated city, the installation can be locally supported, as in Auxonne or Rivarolo (p. 48).
To XIVe And XVe centuries, however, the concern to distinguish communities and to question arrangements that had become customary was asserted. Once desired, integrated, now as familiar as the Flemish in London, the Astesans in Paris or the Armenians in Lvov, those who were identified as foreigners were the first to find themselves in a position of undesirables. Cities and kingdoms decided to expel entire communities and to close their doors to newcomers. The most constant example of these “familiar foreigners” remains the figure of the Jew, to whom Miri Rubin devotes an entire chapter (pp. 50-70).
Jews and Women: Figures of Foreigners
Accused of spreading the plague, targeted by debates and rumors emphasizing the danger of cultural and moral difference, Jews are judged all the more dangerous because they do not recognize themselves. As much as the presence of a foreign element in the body politic, it is the lack of distinction that is worrying. It is therefore a question of making Jews visible (and, locally, other communities: Muslims around the Mediterranean, Slavs in the German principalities), etc.
Strategies were thus developed to avoid expulsion and its harmful economic consequences. The obligatory wearing of the rouelle, a round piece of yellow cloth, spread across the continent from the XIIIe century and up to the Renaissance, with some notable examples such as Siena (pp. 64-66). The ghetto model was born later in Venice, in 1516. Thus, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance resulted in the triumph of an urban model based on exclusion, “purified” of intruders. A Christian, symmetrical, even dehumanized city, on the model of the ideal cities painted at the end of the Quattrocento (p. 69-70).
Finally, Miri Rubin devotes a large space to women as foreign figures (pp. 71 to 90). At the heart of the urban economy through their domestic tasks, through their role in commerce and crafts, women are nevertheless excluded from citizen participation, vulnerable regardless of their social status, victims of specific forms of rejection and marginalization, and ultimately foreign to their own city. Debatable no doubt, this choice allows us to demonstrate that the relationships of inclusion and exclusion do not only concern the figure of the “migrant” and that this rather constitutes an access point to a broader problem, to the very definition of what a city is, as a social and political community.
Circulations, exchanges, conquests lead to XIe At XVe century the development of regimes of inclusion and exclusion. They accompany the emergence of questions of identity, particularly in the context of the crisis of the autumn of the Middle Ages. The debates then become more radical, as with the treatment of poverty, on the discrimination between those from “here” and “elsewhere”. Such questions agitate the University of Salamanca: should we help destitute refugees? Who should we help first, between the familiar beggar and the needy foreigner?
From these speeches and the legislations they inspire (as in 1531 in the Netherlands), it emerges that the treatment of the foreigner, expansive or restrictive, is always constitutive of the consensual definition of politics and the common good; that is to say, who participates in it and who is excluded.