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of Urban History
Carthage or Jerusalem? Princely Violence and the Spatial Transformation of the

Medieval into the Early Modern City
Peter Arnade
Journal of Urban History 2013 39: 726 originally published online 10 January 2013
DOI: 10.1177/0096144212470099
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0099 JUHXXX10.1177/0096144212470099Journal of Urban HistoryArnade
Article
Journal of Urban History
Carthage or Jerusalem? 39(4) 726748

2013 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0096144212470099
Transformation of the Medieval juh.sagepub.com
into the Early Modern City
Peter Arnade1
Abstract
This essay explores princely violence against cities and the transformation of the late medieval
commune into the early modern city. Its consideration is European wide, with nascent Mexico
City also studied, but its frame is the Burgundian-Habsburg urban world. Urban historians have
long insisted that the transformation of the medieval commune into the Baroque city was a
pivotal event in the history of modernity, the city a privileged site of and midwife to modernity.
But the momentous change in civic life came not only because of the citys commercial wealth,
dense populations, and roaring economic might. Claims to political power, whether civic or
princely, were enacted in the early modern citys public places, with assertions of rulership
performed at city gates, upon market spaces and other public squares, and through corporative
and sacred symbols. In the early modern period, these civic spaces became marked as con-
tested grounds, especially for those cities whose political boundaries were under the strain of
dynastic rulers intent on better managing their subjects. My essay argues that princely violence
against cities in the critical centuries from the late medieval to the early modern period sought
to transform urban public space to better manage control over it.
Keywords
urban space, cities, violence, ritual
Sometime shortly after 1572, Frans Hogenberg, a leading practitioner of the Geschichtsbltter,
the news sheet, issued a single sheet illustration of the sack of his native city of Mechelen.1 His
copper-engraved print (Figure 1) records the spectacular plunder of Mechelen on October 2,
1572, by the forces of the duke of Alba, a punishment delivered after the city had sided with
William of Orange in the incipient stages of what would become the Dutch Revolt. The German
text recounts how old and young fell victim to Spanish depredations. The illustration offers a
visual freeze frame of the chaos: soldiers swarm the city, houses are looted, a fleeing citizen is
grabbed by his coattails, and two naked women and their terrified children are hectored by a
1
University of Hawaii, Ma-noa, USA
Corresponding Author:
Peter Arnade, University of Hawaii, Ma-noa, HI 96822.
Email: parnade@hawaii.edu

Arnade 727
Figure 1. Mechelen sacked by Army of Flanders, 1572. Frans Hogenberg.

Courtesy of Collectie Karel Kinds.
soldier while another male citizen scrambles to gather up his belongings. At the mercy of its
enemies, the city is the realm of disorder and violence.
In the very same year of 1572, however, Hogenberg engraved an entirely different illustration
of Mechelen (Figure 2). It appeared in the first volume of the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, an atlas
of world cities that he and the Cologne-based Georg Braun produced.2 So successful was the
atlas with its elegant cityscapes, Latin texts, and cartouches that it prompted French and German
translations, and the publication of five subsequent volumes. Like many of the atlass cityscapes,
Mechelen is rendered in profile view. Parish churches and city gates shape the urban landscape,
small groups of townspeople and laborers cluster in the foreground on the greenery surrounding
the city, and boats ply the rivers waters. The city is expertly demarcated and spatially balanced
according to the latest techniques of cartography and chorography, with Mechelen presented as
a self-contained, well-ordered civic realm.
Hogenbergs two cityscapes of Mechelen in 1572 were thus opposites: the first a depiction of
its sack, a farrago of motion and fury; the second, a tribute to its urban form, harmonious and
elegant. For the artisans, merchants, noblemen, and royalty who were their intended audience,
early modern prints served as barometers of cultural tastes and political interests. For a ruler like
Philip II of Spain, simultaneous illustrations of cities under their lordship like Mechelen destroyed
and exalted were not the contradiction its binary might seem. If Hogenbergs print of Albas sack
bespoke the power of the prince to punish errant cities, his profile view of Mechelen in his atlas
confirmed that such troublesome cities nevertheless mattered, as important to a sovereign as any
other cherished asset. Little wonder then that monarchs like Philip eagerly embraced the new

728 Journal of Urban History 39(4)
Figure 2. Mechelen, 1572. Braun and Hogenberg.

Courtesy of Collectie Karel Kinds.
cartography, commissioning its most talented practitioners to catalogue their prized urban pos-
sessions in topographically exact representations.3
Royal patronage of works like the Civitates Orbis Terrarum speaks to the political desire of
princes to know, grasp, and master their urban terrain and display this hegemony as much in repre-
sentation as in political policy. Such interest in the management and presentation of urban space
made ample political sense in the early modern world of territorial rulers and their urban subjects.
Historians have long recognized the cornerstone role of cities in the premodern state. Indeed, they
have hailed cities with almost Whiggish enthusiasm as springboards of modernizationa scholarly
inclination social theorists of cities, from Georg Simmel to the Chicago school, likewise embraced.4
To the early twentieth-century practitioners of urban theory and history like Max Weber and Henri
Pirenne, medieval cities were incubators of commerce, political liberties, and associational life.
Communal self-governance was a political accomplishment Weber touted as unique to the West,
one remarkably distinct from middle and near eastern urban traditions, where municipal power was
subordinate to state power and cities subject to topdown administration.5 If these early twentieth-
century scholars interpreted cities in a heroic vein with an occidental conceit, their arguments still
have weight in scholarship on premodern urban life, despite the overturning of much of what they
proposed. We still too often consider cities in the teleological key, and still imperfectly understand
their enmeshment within larger interests, particularly those of lords and sovereign.6 We are far bet-
ter at acknowledging the political football cities became to early modern dynastic states, whether
as sites for conquest in the Habsburg-Valois turf battles in Italy, or as targets of the centralizing
interests of the French or English crown, or as resources to be integrated more firmly within the
sprawling Habsburg composite state, from Castilian urban centers to the developing civic grid in
the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.7 Historians further recognize that cities lost many of their
hard won privileges to the interests of the state between the late middle ages and the seventeenth
century, or at least had them fiercely contested, though exceptions like Geneva, Emden, or the
Swiss League make blanket generalization unwise.8 Much of the taming of urban independence
happened piecemeal or at key momentsafter a decisive military victory or political battlewhen
an overlord could weaken urban constitutional rights or impose new military fortifications to
change the face of urban design.9 Charters might be revoked, guilds combined or abolished, finan-
cial obligations stiffened, and legal privileges contested. The citys built environment too might be
affected, whether by negotiation with urban magistrates or by topdown mandates: new walls
erected, citadels constructed, and princely or viceregal residences established, altered, or expanded.
In some instances, these two processes were interlaceddramatically so when individual cities
were singled out for punishment at the hands of sovereigns and their military deputies. In such
cases, cities were forcibly remade through a repertoire of punishment: theatrical enactments of

Arnade 729
defeat, spatial alterations of defining features like walls and gates, and political and financial
indemnities. Cities might also fall victim to a military sack, swift, violent, and all too common
in the late medieval and early modern period.10 In rarer instances, princes and their militaries
might destroy core sections or even the whole city. Whatever the terms of the penalty, princely
retributions could dramatically transform cities.
In what follows, I consider these punitive measures in the early modern Burgundian and
Habsburg world, tracing their application in the urban-laced territories of the fifteenth-century
Low Countries and tracking their political currency in sixteenth-century Habsburg territories,
including New Spain. Urban historians have long insisted that the transformation of the medieval
commune into the Baroque city was a pivotal event in the history of modernity, the city a privi-
leged site of and midwife to modernity.11 But the momentous change in civic life came not only
because of the citys commercial wealth, dense populations, and roaring economic might.12
Claims to political power, whether civic or princely, were enacted in the early modern citys
public places, with assertions of rulership performed at city gates, upon market spaces and other
public squares, and through corporative and sacred symbols. These spaces were densely layered
with political resonances, none more important than as venues for communal values that were
both essential to urban identity and to the interests of the state. In the early modern period, these
civic spaces became marked as contested grounds, especially for those cities whose political
boundaries were under the strain of dynastic rulers intent on better managing their subjects.13
Nowhere was this more true than the Burgundian Low Countries, with northern Europes great-
est concentration of cities and with a dynastic state within which the balance of power between
civic regimes and princely administrators was neither stable nor fixed. The spatial dimension of
civic and princely conflicts offers new ways to understand what was at stake in the fierce com-
petition between Burgundian dukes and their cities. For in Low Countries cities, as elsewhere,
space was more than just an inert container; rather, it was an accumulation of concrete places that
both signified and enacted communal authoritywalls, public squares, town halls, guild houses,
city gates, churches and chapels, and processional routes. To disrupt, reset, and master these
spatial zones was to destabilize, even delegitimize, how such places worked in tandem with one
another as expressions of the civic sphere.
The burden the early modern city bore as a platform for securing political legitimacy was
consequential. The city was the progenitor, as Henri Lefebvre ambitiously proposed, of modern
spatial practice, a sphere whose very concrete places and their discursive representations braided
the social relations of self, society, and production. Lefebvres The Production of Space is a
prolix, sprawling meditation on spatiality, not urban history as such, much less a chronology of
the empirical repercussions of the politics and practices of place.14 Yet it has much to say to
urban historians not only by endowing space with causative power but also by acknowledging its
historicity. In a concrete way, the consideration of the alteration, remaking, and wholesale
destruction of a city as political and military punishment underscores the power of space to tether
the communal values that were the source of so much conflict between territorial lords and cities.
To destroy and remake urban space and key urban signifiers like walls and gates was to construct
and reconstitute political authority in the public domain, encompassing the precise boundaries of
citizenship, the legal long arm of sovereign authority, and the public realms where they could be
legitimately enacted.
Antagonisms between cities and rulers are as old as urban life itself. In the near eastern or
classical world, political triumphs often came at the painful expense of subjects and their cities
spatial foundations, with claims to royal authority staked on mastery over urban terrain.15 When
the Assyrian King Sennacherib sacked Babylon in 589 bce, he proclaimed its utter destruction
with an inscription carved into the cliffs near his city of Nineveh.

I destroyed the city and its houses, from foundation to parapet, I devastated and burned them. I tore out
the bricks and earth of the inner and outer walls (of the the Arahtu canal). I dug canals through the midst
of that city, I flooded it with water. I made its very foundations disappear, and I destroyed it more
completely than a devastating flood. So that in future days the site of that city and (its) temples would
not be recognized, I totally dissolved it with water and made it like inundated land.16
To Sennacherib, victory over Babylon, the slaughter of its inhabitantsabout which he also
boastsand the seizure of its precious assets was not enough. The city had literally to be unmade,
dismantled, and erased so that the rival Nineveh assumed its luster and replaced its historical sig-
nificance. Such victories over cities, predicated on the memorialization of triumph and blood-
soaked destruction, proliferated in the ancient Near East and classical Mediterranean, the stories of
the destruction amplified by centralized states and their monarchical or imperial idioms of rule.
Although most of these ancient reprisals against cities had been forgotten by the late middle
ages, three were firmly lodged in the cultural memory and became reference points for early
modern rulers: the campaigns that resulted in the destruction of Troy, Jerusalem, and Carthage.
Of this trio of cities, Troy had the most elastic resonances, in part because its Homeric literary
glow was just as rich as its political metaphors.17 For sovereigns, Troy became a handy reference
in the political task of inventing heroic lineage. Less explicitly, it served the cause of political
triumphalism. The cases of Carthage and Jerusalem were different to the Romans and their heirs,
for their destruction carried rich political associations. Scipio Aemilianuss sack of Carthage in
146 bce in the third Punic War, and the legend that the city was sown with salt after its eradica-
tion, became a shorthand for Roman military victory. Carthages fate stood out even though
Romes political culture boasted other rituals of military triumph, the greatest being the proces-
sional entry of a victorious commander.18 But if the Roman ceremonial entry was a repeatable
vehicle for political flattery, Carthage was a singular event, a high watermark of Roman political
achievement and brutal tactics, smacking of the kind of royal fervor that convinced rulers like
Sennacherib that they were the masters of a citys very fate. For all its invocation in the medieval
world, Carthage never assumed a meaning other than that of an especially violent Roman vic-
tory. By contrast, Jerusalem and its destruction at the hands of Titus in ad 70 had a much wider
significance even though its destruction was nothing extraordinary in Roman military annals.
The importance of Jerusalems sack has everything to do with its inestimable place in early
Judaism and with later Christian readings of it. In both Jewish and Christian traditions, Tituss
victory was a defining moment, even if its spiritual meaning for the Catholic Church required
centuries to take form. In Judaism, it was a historical and theological watershed, especially with
the destruction of the second Temple and the shift toward synagogue and rabbinical authority.
For Latin Christians, Jerusalems fate helped to affirm Rome as the new center of the fledgling
church. Over time, it became interpreted as divine retribution for Jesus death, with Jerusalems
fate foretold in Luke 19:41-44, inserted in the liturgy as the text for the tenth Sunday after
Pentecost, and recalled in homilies. Commemorated as divine justice against Jewish unbelief,
Jerusalems destruction became more than just a memorable Roman triumph. Its theological
weight spawned Latin and vernacular literary recountings like the eighth-century Vindicta
Salvatoris, the twelfth-century poem La Vengeance de Nostre-Seigneur, and subsequent verse
and prose reworkings.19 The religious and literary legacy of Jerusalems destruction, protean and
constantly revised, became a rich fund of metaphor and a reference point invoked by medieval
rulers when confronting urban adversaries.
Like their near eastern and classical predecessors, medieval cities fell prey to the violence of
lords and princely enemies. Italys remarkable communal movement in the late eleventh century
had its roots in the pushing back of episcopal and princely authority to secure political, property,

Arnade 731
and trade privileges.20 There, in Lombardy and elsewhere, cities gained charters of rights by
delimiting external authorities or vacating them of real power. The communal movements vic-
tories were astonishing, but never complete. The political tremors they unleashed provoked
the best known medieval prototype of punishment against an urban adversary: the German
Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick Barbarossas triumph over Milan and its Lombard allies in
1162.21 Determined to assert imperial claims over his northern Italian territories, Barbarossa
went to war against rebellious Milan and its allies. The humiliation of Milan represented the pin-
nacle of his campaigns in northern Italy. On March 1, 1162, Barbarossa forced the citys defiant
magistrates, ringleaders of a coalition of allied cities, to submit before him in penitential garb and
with swords hung around their necks. Five days later, the Milanese surrendered their war wagon,
the carroccio, unfurling the banner of their patron Saint Ambrose, a divestment of their proud
symbol of civic might. The city was given over to Barbarossas men and Milans enemies who
had sided with them. They proceeded to thoroughly sack and destroy the city: walls were torn
down, moats filled in, and churches plundered. Having earlier vowed not to wear the imperial
crown until Milans defeat, Barbarossa celebrated its demise at Easter mass in Paviaa religious
and political rebirth predicated on the communes eradication.22 Barbarossas punishment of
Milan was a benchmark in the imperial response to communal independence, and an indication
that a medieval lord was willing to destroy a city that had dared to resist him.
Cities waged battles for hegemony among themselves, and they did so on the same terms, and
with similar resources, as did their princes. The new world of cities dotting the European land-
scape triggered fierce competition and warfare during which retaliatory gestures focused on key
urban symbols marking communal authority. Here again, the Italian cities have provided some
of the best examples. Humiliation after sieges included robbing a city of its civic banners or
statues of its cherished saints and carting them into the victors city in a minor version of a
Roman triumph. It spawned rituals like the felling of trees and the minting of new coins bearing
the attacking citys insignia upon their stubs, which on occasion were then pressed into the
enemy citys walls.23 In November 1335, after Perugia defeated Arezzo, the victors had their
communal flag hung from Arezzos cathedral, forced its bishop to celebrate a victory mass, and
minted medals celebrating the triumph in the piazza, They even forced a race of prostitutes in
front of Arezzos main gatea shaming ritual other communes also practiced in warfare.24 Such
victory rituals made up the woof and warp of retaliation among warring cities, intended to mock
a defeated city by deflating its civic pride. But these military actions rarely scaled up to the kind
of draconian punishment a great prince like Barbarossa inflicted upon a defeated city.
Barbarossas destruction of Milan was memorable not merely for the thoroughness of its vio-
lence and the sacred and imperial imagery it knitted together, but also for its utter failure to
secure his political influence in northern Italy. The German emperors Lombard enemies banded
together in a League, a battered Milan joining them, and eventually won back their independence
in 1183, effectively rebuffing Barbarossas northern Italian strategy to subdue the cities.25 The
success of the Lombard League carried a political message to future lords: cities, no matter how
truculent, were better dealt with through negotiation and strategic alliances. Barbarossas politi-
cal failure suggests why, despite the classical heritage of sieges and sacks, high-profile retalia-
tions against cities that involved their partial or whole dismantlement were not common in the
medieval world. More typically, a king or lord reigned in a citys republican inclination while
nurturing the development of civic space, civic institutions, and civic prosperity. The rulers
offered charters of liberties in political, economic, and legal matters in exchange for a depend-
able source of revenue, and supported urban fortification projects to secure commercial and
population centers from enemies. It was a civic policy that, for example, the French monarchs
successfully pursued with their bonnes villes throughout the medieval period.26 Dramatic and
exemplary destruction of cities, by contrast, typically occurred outside ones own territories, the

farther away the more violent. Such was the infamous sack of Constantinople during the Fourth
Crusade in 1204, the great Byzantine city plundered and its religious treasures looted.27 Even the
much anticipated denouement of the Spanish reconquista, the fall of Granada in 1492, occa-
sioned no vengeful looting or destruction of the city. Instead, the Spanish monarchs carefully
negotiated a surrender through a series of stipulations that guaranteed the urban public sphere
remained intact even as the emirate of Cordoba was dismantled.28
But if rare, princely retaliation against a citys built environment or civic symbols nonetheless
did occur, especially in the late medieval and early modern period when cities became victims of
new and more aggressive artillery warfare and the ambitions of Renaissance princes. In the
Burgundian Low Countries during the fifteenth century, conflict between princes and cities
spawned a repertoire of punishment and retaliation more pronounced than almost anywhere else
in Europe. The sharpness of conflict between prince and cities in the Burgundian north had
everything to do with the particular configuration of power in the territories the dukes of
Burgundy ruled as well as the formation of their composite state.29 A cadet branch of the French
monarchy, the dukes of Burgundythrough the accidents of dynastic succession and a shrewd
plan for military expansionacquired a set of territories that eventually stretched from ducal
Burgundy in northern France to Holland and Zeeland, lands laced with mid- to large-sized urban
centers of great commercial importance. Theirs was not a unified state but a series of accumu-
lated territories over which they exercised sovereignty in local titles of rule. Apart from the
senior and mid-level nobilitythe grands seigneurs and gentilhommesthe dukes greatest
political interlocutors were the urban patricians, merchants, and guild masters whose coalition
governments ran the textile-manufacturing and trade cities that populated the landscape. While
sometimes their political and economic interests might overlapthe distinction between state
and city should not be exaggerated since the court was often very present in the urban landscape
as was the city at courtthe ducal administration and the cities of the Burgundian Netherlands
were often at loggerheads. As fledgling rulers of the Low Countries, the dukes of Burgundy
desired the acquisition of new territory and the efficient consolidation of their rule. The cities,
economic centers like Valenciennes, Douai, Lille, Bruges, Antwerp, Ghent, Middelburg, Leiden,
and Amsterdam, among them, had opposite ambitions. Some big cities like Ghent sought city-
state independence, and other urban regimes, no matter what size or rank, hoped to reduce exter-
nal political control while expanding their dominion over civic political life and rural hinterlands.
In the main, these ducal-civic tensions were debated in the parliamentary-like regional estates,
where towns bulked large as a political block, and in political negotiations between town alder-
men and representatives of Burgundian leadership.30 And yet tensions were constant, sparking
upheavals against Burgundian policy and even warfare. A common feature of the Low Countries
since the twelfth century, urban revolts occurred with increasing regularity during the Burgundian
period. In the leading Flemish city of Ghent alone, there were rebellions in 1401, 1404, 1406,
1411, 1414, 1423, 1437, 1440, and 14491453, the last expanding to a full-scale war with duke
Philip the Good. Bruges, a court city and a commercial center, was engulfed in rebellion in 1411
and 14361438.31 Such turmoil reflected diverse antagonisms: internal strife pitting guildsmen
against merchant and patrician elites as well as more vertical tussles between city regimes and
Burgundian officials who were squeezing them for revenues and resources.32
In a political terrain rocked by civic instability and aggression, the Burgundian dukes resorted
to a policy of exemplary punishment of difficult urban adversaries, often targeted at urban space.
Depending on the relative value of a city and its place within the Burgundian patrimony, rituals
of punishment assumed two different modes: elaborate forms of humiliation or the partial or
whole destruction of the city itself. Philip the Goods punishment against Bruges in 14381440
and his war against Ghent in 14521453 set the model for the Burgundian use of penitential rites
and spatial alteration against rebellious cities. Both cities were key to the Burgundian patrimony:

Arnade 733
rich, big, and located in the all-important county of Flanders, the heartland of the Burgundian
state. Both civic rebellions were fueled by opposition to increased fiscal burdens put on them and
by divisions among the urban political classpatricians, master guildsmen, and merchants.33 To
both cities, Philip the Good meted out punishment that included the execution of each revolts
ringleaders and an onerous financial penalty: 200,000 golden ridders, an amount in excess of the
usual annual tax burden of each. At the same time, Philip the Goods actions against Bruges and
Ghent involved laser-sharp alterations to urban design, most notably the tearing down or sealing
off of key gates that had been staging grounds for the rebellions, and the ordering of commemo-
rative masses to give liturgical permanence to the memory of princely victory.
The centerpiece of Bruges and Ghents symbolic punishment was a ritual of collective abase-
ment, the so-called amende honorable (honorable amend), staged as a preface to the duke of
Burgundys ceremonial entry into the defeated cities. This penitential ritual was not new; it was
drawn from the churchs sacrament of penance and melded to its role in customary law in king-
doms like France as a means of the public confession of ones guilt for a misdeed.34 But the
amende honorables political application was still fairly novel, and its penitential quality
confession, penance, and forgivenessparamount.35
Both in Bruges in 1438 and Ghent in 1452, the dukes officers had threatened to raze the
rebellious cities to the ground as punishment.36 Such political swagger is hardly surprising for a
late medieval prince, especially given the seriousness of each citys upheaval. Bruges had
rebelled for a number of economic and political reasons. Foremost was Philip the Goods new
alliance with the king of France that had cut the city off from its important textile relations with
England, supplier of its wool. When Philip attempted to visit Bruges on May 22, 1437, to deal
with the boiling tensions, his ducal train of Walloon soldiers was ambushed; a high-ranking advi-
sor, Jean de Villiers, was murdered in the streets; and the duke himself barely escaped with his
life. So dramatic was this attack that it spawned numerous written accounts and even a ballad
about Villierss fate that was still sung in the sixteenth century.37 Ghent likewise had economic
and political grievances: bitter resentment of a new salt tax in 1451 served as a surrogate for
larger conflicts over the princes economic control of the hinterland and his incursions upon civic
autonomy. As in Bruges, so in Ghent: the old city regime fell to rebels, who were convinced that
its town fathers were secretly complicit with ducal policy. Full-blown war ensued. A special
regime of three captains led the Ghent campaign, rallying guildsmen to their side with the prom-
ise of a fuller advocacy of their rights and prompting constant public demonstrations on the
central marketplace where guildsmen defiantly lofted their banners. Ambassadors for the French
king intervened in 1452, and in the course of threats and negotiations, Philip menaced Ghent
with demolition in retaliation for their war against him.38
Neither city, however, was demolished. They were not because they suffered a greater dis-
grace, that of subjecting their persons and their city to a public ritual of submission that granted
the defeated no honor, only shame. Undressed, unarmed, and on their knees in penance before a
triumphant duke on the cusp of entering and taking possession of the city, Brugess and Ghents
magistrates suffered loss of control over their respective citys communal spacesprecisely why
the ritual of the amende honorable was the acme of both cities punishment. The prince offered
reconciliation but at the price of a collective penance, with the accompanying alteration of gates
and walls intended less to disrupt civic life than to insert the memory of punishment within it.
The humiliation ritual of Bruges and Ghent had two leitmotifs for the Burgundian duke: the pen-
ance ritual that endowed the ruler with a sacerdotal authority and a political one that presented
him as a triumphant, but forgiving, ruler. Enacted by guild deans and other political leaders, the
amend was a public performance, one that enriched the already keen interest of the Burgundian
state in the visual, textual, and ceremonial recording of their political might. Didactic about the
subordinate place of the urban sphere, performances and commemorations of civic submission

became as important as the physical and financial punishment of urban enemies because of the
way they reordered public space and recorded these political shifts in public. Such punishments
also resonated in the civic realm, their memory invoked to justify later protests and rebellions.
These rituals were part of a larger effort to create a master narrative of civic subordination in
prose, verse, and visual texts that the Burgundian prince, like rulers of other territories, encour-
aged. Urban punishment as a subject in artwork, for example, is taken up in two tapestry sets, no
longer extant, commissioned by Philip the Bold and John the Fearless that illustrated the victo-
ries of Roosebeke and Lige over urban rebels in 1382 and 1408. Tapestry sets were staging
props, all the more effective because they were theatrical in grandeur and easily portable and put
on display at ceremonial events and in diplomatic venues. Memorialized in tapestry, the tri-
umphs of Roosebeke and Lige could be restaged upon demand, at court events and diplomatic
meetings.39
Just as ducal tapestries were serviceable political vehicles, so too, in a less obvious way, were
Burgundian literature and theater. Tituss destruction of Jerusalem was among the histories,
Biblical stories, saints lives, and romances crowding the ducal library. The narrative of
Jerusalems siege and sack chronicled by the Jewish Roman Flavius Josephus, however, was
much changed in the late-medieval retelling, especially in Eustache Marcads play, La ven-
geance de nostre seigneur, performed regularly in northern France and the southern Low
Countries in the fifteenth century. Marcads text was a late medieval son et lumire extrava-
ganza, a play so ambitious, densely layered, and violently themed that it had a shock and awe
quality to it. The Arras manuscriptone of two that surviveruns 14,554 lines and required
three days to perform. It required a cast of more than one hundred actors, and perhaps twice as
many extras. Marcads theme is the triumph of Rome over Jerusalem in ad 70 and by analogy,
church over synagogue, and Christ over the malevolent Jews, mixing Josephuss original first-
century text with medieval legends, Biblical apocrypha, and a chanson de geste jingoism. So
configured, La vengeance de nostre seigneur is awash in Roman triumphalism, violent rumina-
tions, jeremiads warning audiences of impiety, and anti-Semitic railings, none more striking than
the plays conclusion. After Jerusalems siege and destruction, a few obstinate Jewish citizens
return to a shattered city, stubborn in their determination to rebuild the Temple. To their horror,
bloody crosses ominously appear on the Temple Mount. Suddenly, they are consumed by a
shower of flames, their shocking deaths the prelude to the plays final scene of Titus triumphal
entry into Rome. Marcads text blended imperial triumphalism and late-medieval religious sen-
sibility, including a conversion story of the emperor Vespasian after his miraculous cure from
leprosy and the violent reckoning against the Jews. No wonder the play was a popular success,
nowhere more than in northern France and the Low Countries during the fifteenth and early six-
teenth centuries against the backdrop of decades of warfare, religious turmoil, and an unsettled
political landscape. As the character of the preacher warned in one of his on-stage homilies, the
contemporary world was a time of sorrows and full of brigands, violent men reminiscent of the
impious Jews of Josephuss time:
They are exactly like the Jews. They band together against God, and men come and seize the property
of others, like the thieves, pillagers and brigands . . . and the girls are raped. They are not at all afraid
of married men either.40
As political dramaturgists who staged urban defeat through rites like the amende honorable,
the Burgundian dukes interest in Marcards text is understandable. Its recounting of Jerusalems
violent end as rightful punishment against the Jews inspired two fragments of a tapestry set about
the destruction of Jerusalem now in Tournai and in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
which scholars think Philip the Good owned.41 Given the popularity of the drama in urban theater

Arnade 735
in northern France and the southern Low Countries, it should not surprise us that Philip likewise
commissioned an illuminated manuscript of Eustache Marcads Vengeance, now housed in
Devonshire. The manuscript is described in a 1467 inventory of the dukes library, and there is
payment to the copyist and illuminator recorded in 1468 after Charles the Bold came to rule.42
The year 1467 is a particularly apt date for the Burgundian acquisition of the manuscript of
Marcads Vengeance, with its harrowing storyline of urban defeat, starvation, cannibalism, and
other forms of human misery inflicted upon Jerusalems citizens. That same year, Duke Charles
the Bold was engaged in warfare with the independent principality and bishopric of Lige. A
year earlier, he had defeated and violently sacked its ally Dinant, continuing campaigns begun
by his father Philip.43 The punishment rendered again Dinant in 1466 and against Lige, first in
1467, and more spectacularly in 1468 after yet another rebellion, took Burgundian reprisal
against troublesome cities to a new level. The violent ransacking of each city echoed the fate of
Jerusalem. Certainly, the chronicler Jacques du Clercq thought so; following four days of sys-
tematic destruction of the walls and properties of Dinant after it yielded to the forces of Charles,
he compared the violence specifically to what befell Jerusalem, while also mentioning the two
classical analogies of Troy and Carthage.44
The near total destruction of Dinant and Lige stunned contemporaries. Ballads decrying the
fate of the cities were written, chroniclers dutifully recorded the pillage as a fitting punishment
for the sins of these rebellious citizens; townspeople themselvesruling magistrates above all
recoiled in awe and fear, exchanging hasty messages describing the violence, some from regions
beyond Burgundian territory, like German magistrates from Cologne to Nuremburg.45 Even
stubborn Ghent sent a letter of congratulation to Charles the Bold on his victory over Lige.46
Significantly in 1469, just a year later, the city of Bethune paid for the public performance of a
play concerning Liges destruction, both a jab at an urban adversary and a cautionary tale to
local inhabitants that the price of rebellion was exceedingly high.47 In considering why first
Philip the Good and then Charles the Bold punished these cities so dramatically, the political
valence of these actions as a form of exemplary violence stands out. It workedso much so that
neighboring cities memorialized the victory in civic drama, just as the Burgundian dukes them-
selves commissioned the illuminated manuscript of Marcads play about Jerusalems fate. The
parallel between real-life sieges and their fictional and historical enactments surely is instructive.
Sieges were large-scale, staged events whose visual representation in prints and whose theatrical
stagingwith audiences invited to visit and watchwould become commonplace in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.48
That Dinant and Lige were singled out for an exemplary destruction had everything to do
with their political jurisdiction. While both cities were part of the Burgundian sphere of influ-
ence, and Lige a bishopric, neither was under the direct political authority of the duke. As such,
the public relations issue that confronted Philip the Good when considering how to punish Ghent
and Brugesthe implications of the choice to destroy ones own patrimony and thereby violate
the ideal of the prince as protector of the bien publicwas less pressing.49 What is more, neither
city had earlier surrendered, so war had been ongoing and their punishment was not part of a
carefully negotiated peace treaty but a sack following a siege. Standard fare in the premodern
world, sieges and sacks were often conjoined as military operations. They were not only widely
practiced, but the stuff of princely vanity, with the siege even a motif in court ritual and pag-
eantry, including as a popular metaphor deployed in tournament and carnival.50 Further, there
were the so-called rules of wars that defined the permissible boundaries of a sack, though these
were less a set of codified legal points than a loose amalgamation of treatises and legal opinions.
While we should exercise a healthy skepticism about whether laws governing late medieval
warfare were as fixed as the term implies, there was still a working consensus among political
rulers and their court chroniclers in northern Europe that sacking was fitting punishment for a

defeated city whose defiance had gone unabated.51 The customs of war might be loosely
defined, but destruction, looting, murder, and rape were standard practice, with classical models,
most prominently derived from Roman history, shaping the tradition. The very Latin term that
came to describe a city plundered, the verbal noun direptio employed by authors like Livy and
Tacitus, had rape as its semantic essence. In Roman warfare, direptio came to signify two simul-
taneous activities: plundering a city and raping its citizenry, women above all, but male youth
too.52 Possessing the city, therefore, permitted the seizure and violent destruction of the built
environment and the sexual violation of the citizenry, its dependentsyouth and womenmost
notably.
Of the two sacks by Charles the Bold, Liges was more consequential because it had long
been a hotbed of anti-Burgundian radicalism to the point that an exasperated Philip the Good had
compared its citizens to Turks in 1466. As previously noted, Lige was also a bishopric, which
raises a paradox: why would an ambitious prince like Charles the Bold so violently punish a
bishops seat, especially when he cultivated sacred and priestly metaphors of authority in his
statecraft?53 Two-thirds of Lige was razed in 1468, its churches and chapels looted; its civic
column, the Perron, confiscated; its religious objects and relics stolen. This kind of damage had
been a concern of the church throughout 1467, when the papal legate Onofrio de Santa Croce,
dispatched to Lige, had worked hurriedly to mediate a peace, impose an interdict, and protect
the legal interests of the clergy and bishop.54 True enough, the fifteenth century was the era of
the Renaissance prince, and one needs only to look to Italy to see that prelates, bishops, or even
higher church officials were by no means immune to the incessant violence. Nevertheless, a
strategic destruction of a bishops urban seat was risky as a form of exemplary violence. Charles
the Bold knew that. While churches and chapels were looted, they were also left standing; while
soldiers pilfered ecclesiastical objects, the duke intervened to seize and protect the relics of Saint
Lambert in the bishops cathedral, which he later returned. What is more, in 1471 Charles
donated to the cathedral a beautifully wrought gold votive statue executed by the Lille goldsmith
Grard Loyet that consisted of two statuettes, one of himself, another of Saint George, resting
upon a gold pedestal.55 In a city only then rebuilding, Charles consecrated himself as a hero-
savior, proving that a bishopric is fair target only if its sacral legitimacy is secured, and the
princes enhanced in the process.
The destruction of Lige and Dinant stand as high water marks in the Burgundian campaign
against cities. The cycle of urban rebellions that flared between 1477 and 1492 in southern Low
Country cities against Maximilian of Austria triggered renewed princely antagonism against cit-
ies, but not with the ferociousness Charles the Bold had unleashed against Lige and Dinant.56
Yet the sixteenth century and the Habsburg era saw not only the continuation but the intensifica-
tion of Burgundian spatial penalties against cities. Now, however, they were cast more broadly
and joined to the ambitious, pan-European campaign to gird cities with citadels and bastion-
styled fortifications, a development the architectural historian Martha Pollak has dubbed mili-
tary urbanism.57 One reason for bigger and more violent interventions against cities is that
princes were more aggressive in efforts to scale back urban autonomy. The Habsburg world also
had larger stakes, greater terrain, and imperial conceits of universal monarchy.58 Like his prede-
cessor the Burgundian duke Charles the Bold, Charles V came to power facing urban truculence,
as early at 1515 in Flanders when he attained the countship of Flanders, but tellingly in the 1520s
in Castile, when he confronted the revolt of the comuneros. This sustained, complex string of
urban protests by Castilian cities whose rallying cry was on behalf of communidad he pun-
ished lightly. Despite the widespread rebellion and armed conflict, none of the rebellious cities
was altered spatially.59 Once more fully established, however, Charles V treated urban adversar-
ies harshly, the lessons of the troubles in Flanders and Castile not forgotten.60 The exemplary
punishment of cities had considerable traction in his larger imperial project. But results were

Arnade 737
mixed, particularly in its most famous instance, the sack of Rome in 1527. On a cold and foggy
May 6 of that year, Charless mercenary forces, exhausted and poorly paid, decided to plunder
the riches of the city they had just taken. German lansquenets and Spanish and Italian infantry
poured into the city while a startled Clement VII, his curia personnel and his cardinals fled into
the safety of the Castel SantAngelo to be joined eventually by some three thousand citizens.
What transpired sent shock waves throughout Europe, and became the subject of bitter polemics
and sharp-tongued pasquinades that drew on the talents of some of Renaissance Europes great-
est literati.61 The forced imprisonment of Clement VII and the reduction of Rome to a smoldering
slaughterhouse hardly befitted an Emperor who was a sworn enemy of the Lutheran heresy and
the newer menace of iconoclasm.62 Indeed, Romes sacking was a public relations fiasco for the
emperor, interpreted as both overreaching and sacrilegious, a point Baldassare Castiglione, in his
capacity as papal nuncio, riposted in a letter to Charless secretary Alfonso de Valds, author of
a defense of Romes fate.63 Charles the Bold, after his forces had destroyed the bishopric of
Lige and robbed its ecclesiastical gems and relics, had justified this violence as protection of the
citys sacrality, sealed both by his personal vow taken in the cathedral before the fighting had
started and his preservation of the relics of Saint Lambert. Rome was an infinitely more impor-
tant and audacious prize, but Charles V had not directed, much less authorized, the full scale of
violence that had erupted against it. As a result, he could neither claim nor recuperate any sacral-
ity, his authority blemished by the violence carried out by his very forces. The sworn enemy of
iconoclasm, it seemed, had become the greatest iconoclast of them all.
The attention given to the famous campaign against Clement VII that culminated in Romes
pillage has overshadowed three other important triumphs against cities. Before Romes sack, the
taking of Prato by Charless imperial forces in 1512 had spawned outcries about civilian casual-
ties and rape of women, girls, and young boys, though it did not unleash political furor.64 In 1553,
Charles V ordered the French royal enclave and bishopric of Throuanne in Artois razed down
to its foundations, a fate that befell also the small, nearby town of Hesdin.65 While the stakes
were not particularly high, both were well-known buffers in the ValoisHabsburg borderlands.
Throuanne, like Lige, was a bishopric, one whose cathedral was destroyed, whose chapter was
distributed between Saint Omer and Boulogne, and whose seat was transferred among those two
cities and Ypres as part of the reorganization of bishoprics in the Low Countries in 1559.66
Throuanne and Hesdin were consequential less for their political reverberationsthey were too
small to provoke serious rumblingsthan for the fact that they represented a new pinnacle in
princely violence: the entire destruction of a city down to its foundations.
Charles greatest urban prize after Rome, however, was the capture of Tunis in 1536 as part
of the skirmishes between the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Barbary kingdoms, a news event
that inspired analogies to Scipio Aemilianuss sack of Carthage in 146 bce in the third Punic War
and not without reason, since Tunis was old Carthage, a point Charles V made repeatedly during
his campaign. The metaphor of Carthage became for Charles what Jerusalem had been for his
Burgundian predecessors, and the sack of Tunis, no longer a significant urban mecca, was hailed
as a watershed event, a crusaders triumph.67
The political usefulness of Tuniss sack was obvious. Tuniss classical foundations as
Carthage allowed Charles to present his campaign as a Roman triumph; its Moslem status and
the release of its Christian prisoners burnished the victory as a crusaders success. Tunis played
the role of the good victory, the rightful sack to expunge the urban violence gone awry when
Rome had been taken in the emperors name. No wonder the Tunis victory was invoked regu-
larly, most ardently in a string of Italian entry ceremonies that Charles made in 1536 on his return
to the Italian peninsula, the most famous of the many processional entries of his reign. This was
the case in Palermo, Messina, Naples, Genoa, Rome, Siena, Florence, and Lucca, where classical
apparati and pompous analogies to Scipio Africanus and Carthage were favored. In Messina,

captured Moslems even participated in the triumph, seated in a small chariot, and paraded before
the emperor as he approached the city walls in a belabored effort to revive the Roman triumph.
In Rome itself, the city displayed refurbished pride, the parade route laid out to revive the ancient
via triumphalis. Charles entry into Rome came, however, at the expense of urban properties,
including an astonishing two hundred houses and four churches torn down in preparation.68
Charles was hailed as a classical imperator to a city his forces had only recently devastated. It
was a stunning renewal after the hatred incurred from the desolation inflicted in 1527.69 It was
not, however, without hard feelings, captured best in a work of anonymous graffiti that mocked
Charless entry by portraying him riding into Rome seated on a shrimp, his famous device plus
ultra reversed as plus retro.70 That said, Charless Italian entries asserted his mastery over civic
space while proclaiming his grand victory over the infidel city of Tunis.
As Tunis fed the imperial pretence of Charles, so did a triumph where he was repeatedly
evoked but nowhere present: Hernan Cortss siege and destruction of Tenochtitlan in 1521. It
was the sixteenth centurys most stunning example of a destruction of a metropolis. It was in the
heartland of the Aztec tributary state that the Spanish set about to construct new municipalities
in a landscape strongly marked by centuries of preconquest urbanism. Founding cities was key
to Cortss own military and political strategy, starting with Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz in the
Yucatan, whose formation of a cabildo, or municipal council, with Corts as its head endowed
his enterprise with legal independence from Diego de Velzquez, the military governor of Cuba.
But he and his men also remade established urban centers, none more consequential than
Tenochtitlan, the conquerors greatest prize. So much attention has been given to the compressed,
stunning set of events that led to the citys fall on August 13, 1521, that it is easy to overlook just
how rapidly the Spanish utterly remade it into Mexico City with political and sacred spaces con-
ducive to Habsburg concerns. Already by 1559, Charles Vs death could be memorialized in a
funerary ritual that, while it could not rival the one mounted in Brussels in size or scope, never-
theless was remarkable for its ambitious staging. Its centerpiece was an imperial catafalque in the
chapel of San Jos de los Naturales inside the convent of San Francisco festooned with paintings,
one of which concerned the fall of Tenochtitlan.71
The story of how a city whose spaces were both dangerous and utterly alien to the Spanish
became a new civic platform of Habsburg authority is a narrative of violent reckonings. To say
that Tenochtitlan, the shimmering island city of some 150,000 citizens, astonished Corts and
foot soldiers like Bernal Diaz is an understatement.72 They compared it to a chivalric dream, and
once reality better set in, a metropolis on the scale of Constantinople, Venice, and Naples. Corts
and Diaz marveled over the sprawling citys urban squares, temples, marketplaces, and com-
merce, trying to square the Mexica they denounced as idolaters, sodomites, and foul practitioners
of human sacrifice with the abilities of superior urbanites. But awe soon enough morphed into
total destruction, done in the name of conquest and lord sovereign Charles V.
Two points are worth making about the stunning transformation of Tenochtitlan. First,
Cortss decision to rebuild Mexico City upon the ruins of Tenochtitlanand with its detritus as
building blockswas not necessarily a popular one, though it followed the Roman practice of
building new cities upon the site of vanquished ones. Years later in 1553, the citys viceroy could
still decry the location of nascent Mexico City as the worst that could have been selected.73
Such was not the case in Peru, where the Spanish founded the new coastal city of Lima as the
administrative seat instead of the conquered Inca capital of Cuzco.74 Cortss decision bespeaks
the power of urban spaceeven when shattered by the most intense warfare, blood, and
destructionto retain and remake political and cultural boundaries. For that reason, Cortss
imperial visions of a new capital could be spatially grafted upon indigenous Mexican ones. The
citys total destruction offered the possibility of renewal and transformation because its spaces
still carried their special valences, even absent physical infrastructure. Second, while the new city

Arnade 739
quickly rebuilt with a Spanish traza at the center, the memory of Tenochtitlans destruction per-
sisted. As Charles Vs funeral points out, both conquered and conqueror referenced Tenochtitlans
fall for decades to follow, perhaps necessarily so, since the new citys raison detre depended on
remembrances of the old citys destruction. The year 1539 is a case in point. In young Mexico
City, Charles Vs peace of Aigues-Mortes with Francis I was feted with carnival celebrationsit
was February and the Lenten season was at its closeand a mock Siege of Rhodes. Not to be
outdone, nearby Tlaxcala, whose inhabitants had famously allied themselves with Corts, months
later staged the Destruction of Jerusalem, part crusader allegory and thinly veiled reference to
Tenochtitlans fate only eighteen years earlier.75 It is telling that there is an eighteenth-century
Nahautl text of the Destruction of Jerusalem play that is directly linked to a fifteenth-century
Catalan text, Destruccio de Hierusalem, itself a cognate of Marcads late-medieval French orig-
inal that Philip the Good had commissioned as an illuminated manuscript. On both technical and
contextual grounds, Louise Burkhart argues that the Nahuatl text evolved from a lost sixteenth-
century original, perhaps one tied to the 1540 Tlaxcalan staging that the Franciscans had orga-
nized and which Torbio de Benavente Motolin recounted in his chronicle.76 Whatever its
prototype, the Nahuatl drama centers on the destruction of Jerusalem. Take, for example, the
starkness of its injunction: Let us level it. Let us destroy it. Let no stone remain in it. Jerusalem
is the city in question, but Tenochtitlans fate is implicitly evoked, just as the Tlacaltecas had
struck the analogy between the refusal of the Jews to submit to Roman authority and the refusal
of Tenochtitlan to submit to Charles V. Tlaxcala had been wiser than its urban rivals; its city and
people had flourished as a result.
In both the Mexico City and Tlaxcala productions, Charles V is entirely absent but absolutely
present, if only in name and as a stage character. The real emperor was instead, as Bernal Diaz
noted, in Flanders. What Diaz did not say was that Charles was replaying an old political script
there in his role as a Burgundian heir facing the city of Ghents defiance, this time over a tax
request to defray military expenses in the HabsburgValois wars.77 An anonymous imperial
sympathizer of the 1539 upheaval in Ghent excoriated Ghentenars for their provincial sense
even if factually truethat Charles was to them merely count of Flanders.78 Ghents rebellion
was radical and quixotic. It ended with Ghents aldermen and guildsmen performing a spectacu-
lar amende honorable before Charles, determined to showcase that his authority had broader
reach than his political title to rule in the city as its count. The ceremony was heavy on explicit
symbols reminding participants and spectators that Charles was an emperor of universal sover-
eignty, and the city not a zone independent of his reach. As punishment, the city lost it political
and guild privileges, was spatially altered with a citadel built, reprimanded for treason, and com-
pared to Carthage.79 Ghent is as eye opening as Tenochtitlan, but for entirely different reasons.
It was Charles Vs birthplace and a city of troublesome inclination. But its rebellion in 1539 drew
a reaction from Charles disproportionate to its significance, especially when compared to the
light punishment the emperor handed out to the more sustained revolt of the comuneros in 1521.
Ghents rebellion prompted Charles to come from Castile to settle it personally, though there
were other, graver issues he confronted. In two vastly different corners of the world, two entirely
different sets of subjects gave tribute to Charles V by staging ceremonies of urban defeat and
destruction, with Jerusalem and Carthage metaphors of urban chastisement. One need look no
further than Maarten van Heemskercks prints of Charles Vs victories that Hieronymus Cock
published in 1556 to grasp the point that subjected cities and citizens nurtured his imperial con-
ceits.80 The power of the sovereign was the power to control cities and amend civic space
summarily.
In book five of The Prince, Machiavelli had stern counsel for rulers in possession of newly
acquired cities that had lost their independence. He advised a sovereign to destroy conquered
cities rather than rule a disgruntled, restless population who would forever chafe at the

curtailment of civic rights. Yet few early modern princes opted for such drastic action.81 The
destruction of a city was rare, threatened against ones own subjects, and inflicted selectively on
outsiders, whether it be urban rebels in Lige, Dinant, or Tenochtitlan. But it did happen, and
those cities singled out were touted as models of exemplary punishment, proof that a prince
could remake a city by extreme violence, be it a familiar place, like Hesdin or Throuanne, or
entirely new and unsettling, as was Tenochtitlan. A princes more common remedy for urban
rebellion, as we have seen, was to impose political restrictions. These actions typically focused
less on blunting the citys economic potential than scaling back its political rights, usually by
revoking charters that granted guilds and other corporate groups a role in the election of town
magistrates. But they just as insistently involved spatial punishmentsthe closing of city gates
and walls, the removal of symbols of communal and corporate authority, and the enactment of
ceremonies of defeat like the amende honorable. Such penalties were dictated in treaties and
recounted in prose, verse, and artwork commissioned by princely victors. They demonstrate
early modern sovereigns remarkable attentiveness to urban space as a cartography of civic sym-
bols that enabled political expression and materialized it in concrete form.
In the seventeenth century, the power of the prince or king expanded with the growth of the
territorial state. In lockstep, the rituals, political penalties, and iconographical and literary com-
memorations deployed against major urban rebellions intensified. Their content remained much
the same, a telling indication that the axis of conflict between city and statethe wrestle between
urban privileges and state authoritywould not fundamentally change until the revolutions of
the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, memorable reprisals against European cities
occurred, especially the horrific sack of Magdeburg in 1631 during the Thirty Years War and the
reconquest of Messina in southern Italy in 1678.82 But for sheer triumphalism, Louis XIIIs
defeat of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle in 1628 stands out. For Europe at least, it rep-
resents the pinnacle of royal rituals of victory over civic liberties and public space, not the least
because it was a culmination of the confessional divisions that had torn France asunder for much
of the previous century. Not only were La Rochelles walls destroyed and its civic liberties con-
fiscated, the city was politically refeudalized, forfeiting its independence and suffering the sting
of becoming anothers possession.83 Louis XIIIs victory also triggered one of the largest cycles
of pamphlets, broadsheets, medals, and paintings in absolutist Europe, all outsized tributes to
monarchical authority over the urban landscape. However grand its pretension, the iconographi-
cal palette of these commemorations of La Rochelles defeat owed much to the past, especially
to Charles V and his penchant for memorializing his important sieges and sacks. Not surpris-
ingly, old metaphors about the destruction of Jerusalem even crop up. Consider Poussins paint-
ing of the destruction of Jerusalems temple (Figure 3, 1625), with its neo-classical coolness and
geometrical perfection, at first glance an artistic work entirely detached from the campaign
against La Rochelle. Cardinal Francesco Barberini commissioned it at the height of the Thirty
Years War, but he then offered it as a gift to Cardinal Richelieu, the architect of La Rochelles
submission, a few years after the citys defeat.
In the Baroque era, monarchs and princes perfected their grip over urban spacecitadels,
royal fortifications, and military parade grounds established the field for the states militarization
of civic space.84 New court capitals like Madrid were transformed, with great squares like the
Plaza Mayor remade as geometrically improved spaces better suited for monarchical ritual, the
urban redesign inspired in part by the principles laid out for the development of Spanish cities in
new world.85 Great boulevards were built, linking bastioned fortifications to civic squares, and
were then deployed as grander, more accessible zones for monarchical spectacle. Cities in the
seventeenth century, metropoles like Brussels, Rome, London, Paris, as well as growing capitals
like Lima and Mexico City, soared in population. But the politically troublesome spaces where
late medieval civic protests occurred and where princely authority was negotiatedpublic

Arnade 741
Figure 3. Nicolas Poussin: Emperor Titus destroys the temple in Jerusalem (16251626, oil on canvas).
Courtesy of Art Resource.
squares, guild houses, town halls, city gateswere spatially better supervised, and in many cases
recast, by sovereign power. These changes constitute not just an architectural narrative of new
designthe more geometrically perfect streets, bigger squares, and more fortified walls featured
in some urban histories. As we have seen, they were products of the centuries-long process of
conflict, a messy, bloody, and entangled story of negotiation, coercion, and extreme violence,
with cities attacked, besieged, and forcefully remade. The spaces of the medieval city that pro-
moted communal identity and the prerogatives of citizenship were those recast to stage better the
political obligations of subjecthood to the early modern state.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. Raised in this city among the artists, including his German father, serving the court of Margaret of
Austria, Frans Hogenberg had later moved to Antwerp when his mother remarried after his fathers
death. Once in Antwerp, Hogenberg entered the tight circle of humanists, engravers, printers, booksellers,
and natural philosophers who were part of the world of publishers, mapmakers, and artists in this

bustling city with its active book trade. In 1570, Hogenberg decamped to Cologne, an imperial free
city and bishopric safe from Spanish authority and the general political turmoil that had swept across
the Netherlands. See Karel Kinds, Kroniek van de opstand in de lage landen, 1555-1609: actuele
oorlogsverslaggeving uit de zestiende eeuw met 228 gravures van Frans Hogenberg (Rekem: ALNU,
1999), with the prints, a short introduction and bibliography; F. Hogenberg, De 80-jarige oorlog in
prenten (The Hague: Van Goor, 1977); and Christi M. Klinkert, Nassau in het nieuws: Nieuwsprenten
van Maurits van Nassaus militaire ondernemingen uit de periode 1590-1600 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers,
2005), 5763, on Hogenbergs workshop.
2. The first volume came out in 1572 in Antwerp and Cologne as Civitates Orbis Terrarum. The sub-
sequent volumes bore different titles: De praecipius totius universi urbibus liber secundus (1575);
Urbium praecipuarum totius mundi liber tertius (c. 1581); Liber quartus urbium praecipuarum mundi
(c. 1588); Urbium praecipuarum mundi theatrum quintum (c. 1598); and Theatri praecipuarum totius
mundi liber sextus (1617). The publication history is reviewed in Stephan Fssel, ed., Georg Braun
and Franz Hogenberg: Cities of the World; Complete Edition of the Colour Plates of 1572-1617
(Cologne: Taschen, 2008), 1125.
3. Phillip II, in fact, commissioned Anton van den Wyngaerde, a Flemish topographer, as pintor de
cmara in 1561 to undertake a series of sketches of Spanish cities, some of which would eventu-
ally grace the halls and rooms of El Escorial. See Richard Kagan, Cities of the Golden Age: The
Views of Anton Van Den Wyngaerde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For a general
consideration, see David Buisseret, The Mapmakers Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance
Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On cityscapes, see Wolfgang Behringer and Bernd
Roeck, Das Bild der Stadt in der Neuzeit, 1400-1800 (Munich: Beck, 1999). In 1558, Philip gave a
similar commission to Jacob van Deventer for the cities of the Low Countries, resulting in 320 town
plans, many of which would find eventual publication after Van Deventers death in the third and
fourth volumes of Braun and Hogenbergs work. On Deventer, Bert van t Hoff, Jacob Van Deventer:
Keizerlijk-koninklijk Geograaf (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1953).
4. A good introduction to classical social theory on urban life is Simon Parker, Urban Theory and the
Urban Experience: Encountering the City (London: Routledge, 2004).
5. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1925), and his The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism, The American His-
torical Review 19, no. 3 (1914); Early Democracies in the Low Countries (New York: Harper & Row,
1963; [orig., Les anciennes dmocraties des Pays-Bas, Paris: Flammarion, 1910]). Max Weber, The
City, trans. and ed. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: The Free Press, 1966; original
published posthumously and included in his Wirtschaft und Gssellschaft). On Webers problematic
distinction between Western and Eastern urban development, see Christopher R. Friedrichs, What
Made the Eurasian City Work? Urban Political Cultures in Early Modern Europe and Asia, in City
Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City, ed. Glenn Clark, Judith Owens, and Greg. T. Smith
(Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010), 2964. For an exemplary case study, see Si-Yen
Fee, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010).
6. For the Low Countries, see Marc Boone, A la recherche dune modernit civique. La socit urbaine
des anciens Pays-Bas au bas Moyen Age (Brussels: Brussels University, 2010).
7. On Spain and its early modern urban viceroyalties, see Richard Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic
World, 1493-1793 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
8. On princes and cities, and the ability of urban communities to bargain for rights, see Wim Blockmans,
Voracious States and Obstructing Cities: An Aspect of State Formation in Preindustrial Europe, in
Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800, ed. Charles Tilly and Wim P Blockmans
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 21850; and on urban subordination to the territorial state and an
appraisal of scholarship on this topic, see Christopher R. Friedrichs, Urban Transformation? Some

Arnade 743
Constants and Continuities in the Crisis-Challenged City, in New Approaches to the History of
Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Troel Dahlerup and Per Ingesman (Copenhagen: Det
Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 1999), 25372. In early modern Lille, the city gained
greater legal control over its urban space in partnership with Habsburg authorities. See Ellen B.
Wurtzel, Legal Space and Urban Identity: The Shaping of the City of Lille from 1384 to 1667
(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2008).
9. Martha Pollak, Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), for military urbanism and the militarization of urban public space.
10. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; orig, 1988), 170.
11. Tilly and Blockmans, eds., Cities and the Rise of States.
12. For surveys, see Alexander Cowen, Urban Europe, 1500-1700 (London: Arnold, 1998); Christopher R.
Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450-1750 (New York: Longman, 1995); David Nicholas, Urban
Europe, 1100-1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Leonardo Benevolo, The European City
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993); Peter Clark, ed., The Early Modern Town: A Reader (London:
Longman, 1976); on urbanization and economic and demographic considerations, see Jan de Vries,
European Urbanization, 1500-1800 (London: Methuen, 1984).
13. Two of the best studies of urban space as political space remain Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in
Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), and Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in
Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press,, 1981); on early modern urban ceremoni-
alism, cf. Robert A. Schneider, The Ceremonial City: Toulouse Observed, 1738-1780 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995/1996).
14. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge: Wiley, 1992;
orig. Paris, 1971). On Lefebvre and the premodern European city, see Peter Arnade, Martha Howell,
and Walter Simons. eds., The Productivity of Urban Space in the Late Medieval Urban North, Jour-
nal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4 (2002): 51548. For Lefebvres contemporary application
in urban theory, see Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
(London: Verso, 1989), and Setha M. Low, Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social
Construction of Public Space," American Ethnologist 23, no. 4 (1996): 86179.
15. Marc van den Mieroop, Revenge: Assyrian Style, Past and Present, no. 179 (May 2003): 323.
16. Van den Mieroop, Revenge, 34.
17. Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
18. Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); on
the sewing of salt as a legend, see R. T. Ridley, To Be Taken with a Pinch of Salt: The Destruction of
Carthage, Classical Philology 81 (1986): 14046.
19. La Venjance Nostre Seigneur: The Oldest Version of the Twelfth-century Poem, ed. Loyal A. T. Gryting
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952); Alvin E. Ford, ed., La Vengeance de Nostre-
Seigneur. The Old and Middle French Prose Versions: The Version of Japheth (Toronto: Pontifical Insti-
tute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984). On the prose and verse traditions of Jerusalems destruction, see
Stephen K. Wright, The Vengeance of Our Lord: Medieval Dramatizations of the Destruction of
Jerusalem (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1989).
20. Philip Jones, The Italian City-States: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997); E. Occhipinti, LItalia dei communi: secoli XI-XIII (Rome: Carocci, 2000); G. Galasso,
La societ urbana nellItalia communale (secoli XI-XIV) (Turin: Loescher, 1984); Daniel Waley and
Trevor Dean, The Italian City-Republics (Harlow: Longman, 2010; orig., 1969).
21. Peter Munz, Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1969), 14685. For the sources, see Franco Cardini et al., eds., Federico Barbarossa et I Lombardi:
Comuni ed imperatore nelle cronache contemporanee (Europi, Novara, 1987).

22. Munz, Frederick Barbarossa, 18284.

23. Richard C. Trexler, Correre La Terra: Collective Insults in the Late Middle Ages, Mlanges de
lEcole franaise de Rome 96, no. 2 (1984): 845902.
24. Trexler, Correre La Terra, 869, from F. Ugoloni, ed., Annali e cronache di Perugia in volgare
dal 1191 al 1336, in Annali della Facolt di Lettere e filosofia. Universit degli Studi di Perugia I
(1963-1964), 236.
25. Gianluca Raccagni, The Lombard League (1164-1225) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
26. Michael Wolfe, Walled Towns and the Shaping of France: From the Medieval to the Early Modern
Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
27. As famously recounted in Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade
and The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. Frank T. Marzials (London: Echo Library, 1908). See
also Jonathan Philips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (New York: Penguin
Books, 2004).
28. A. Katie Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
29. For an account of the Burgundian state, see Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Promised
Lands: The Low Countries under Burgundian Rule, 1369-1530, ed. Edward Peters, trans. Elizabeth
Fackelman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); D. P. Blok., W. Prevenier, and
D. J. Roorda, eds., Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 15 vols. (Haarlem: Fibula van Dishoeck,
19801982); Walter Prevenier, ed., Le prince et le peuple. Images de la socit du temps des ducs de
Bourgogne (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1998).
30. On the regional estates and the States General, see H. G. Koenigsberger, Monarchies, States Generals
and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001); and for a detailed case study for late medieval Flanders, see Wim Blockmans,
De volksvertegenwoordiging in Vlaanderen in de overgang van middeleeuwen naar nieuwe tijden
(1384-1506) (Brussels: Paleis der Academin, 1978).
31. See on the country of Flanders, Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, Patterns of Urban Rebellion in
Medieval Flanders, Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005): 36993.
32. Wim P. Blockmans, Alternatives to Monarchical Centralisation: The Great Tradition of Revolt
in Flanders and Brabant, in Republiken und Republikanismus im Europa der frhen Neuzeit, ed.
H. Koenigsberger (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), 14554, and on the internal urban divisions that
provoked rebellions, see Marc Boone and Maarten Prak, Rulers, Patricians and Burghers: The
Great and Little Traditions of Urban Revolt in the Low Countries, in A Miracle Mirrored: The
Dutch Republic in European Perspective, ed. Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995), 99134.
33. On the revolts of Bruges and Ghent, see Jan Dumolyn, De Brugse opstand van 1436-1438,
Standen en landen 101 (Kortrijk: UGA, 1997); Jelle Haemers, De Gentse opstand 1449-1453.
De strijd tussen rivaliserende netwerken om het stedelijk kapitaal, Standen en landen, 105 (Kortrijk:
Nauwelaerts, 2004).
34. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, La villes des crmonies: essai sur la communication politique dans les
anciens Pays-Bas bourguignons (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 30211; Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual:
Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1996), 11920.
35. Marc Boone, Diplomatie et violence dtat. La sentence rendue par les ambassadeurs et conseillers
du roi de France, Charles VII, concernant le conflit entre Philippe le Bon, duc de Bourgogne, et Gand
en 1452, Bulletin de la Commission royale dhistoire 156 (1990) : 154, esp. 35.
36. Marc Boone, Civitas mori potest si authoritate superioris damnetur: Politieke motieven voor het
bewust verwoesten van steden (14de-16de eeuw), in Destruction et reconstruction de villes, du
Moyen ge nos jours. Actes colloque international (Spa 1996), Crdit Communal 100 (Brussels:
Gemeentekredit van Belgi, 1999), 33968.

Arnade 745
37. Jan Dumolyn, The Terrible Wednesday of Pentecost: Confronting Urban and Princely Discourses
in the Bruges Rebellion of 1436-38, History 92, no. 305 (January 2007): 320. For the ballad
Van mijn here van Lelidam, see D. E. Van der Poel et al., eds., Het Antwerps Liedboek, 2 vols. (Tielt:
Delta/Lannoo, 2004), vol. 1: 16770; vol. 22: 15153.
38. Boone, Diplomatie et violence dtat, 35.
39. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Portable Propaganda: Tapestries as Princely Metaphors at the Court of Philip
the Good and Charles the Bold, Art Journal (Summer 1989): 12329; Laura Weigart, Chambres
dAmour : Courtly Tapestries and the Texturing of Space, Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 3 (2008):
31736.
40. Wright, Vengeance of Our Lord, 108.
41. Thomas P. Campbell, ed., Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2002), 25.
42. Edward B. Ham, The Basic Manuscript of the Marcad Vengeance, The Modern Language Review
29, no. 4 (October 1934): 40520.
43. A. Marchandisse, I. Vrancken-Pirson, and J. L. Kupper, La destruction de la ville de Lige et sa recon-
struction, in Destruction et reconstruction de villes, du Moyen ge nos jours, 6996. Compelling
accounts of the two Lige uprisings, and its destruction, are Henrici de Merica, Compendiosa Historia
de Cladibus Leodiensium, in Documents relatifs aux troubles du Pays de Lige sous les princes-
vques Louis de Bourbon et Jean de Horne, 1455-1505, ed. P. F. de Ram (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1844),
13583; and Theodoricus Pauli, Historia de Cladibus Leodiensium in ibidem, 188232, esp. 22324,
on the ransacking of religious houses and the final sack of the city. On Dinant, see Aldophe Borgnet,
Sac de Dinant par Charles-le-Tmraire, 1466, Annales de la Socit archologique de Namur 3
(1853): 192.
44. Jacques du Clercq, Mmoires, in Choix de chroniques et mmoires relatifs lhistoire de France, ed.
J. A. C. Bouchon (Paris: Desrez, 1875): 1318, esp. 300303.
45. Em. Fairon, ed., Rgestes de la cite de Lige, 4 vols. (Leige: 1939), 4: 30711.
46. The public relations fall-out to the campaigns against Lige and Dinant are considered in Boone,
Civitas mori potest si authoritate superioris damnetur.
47. A. de La Fons de Mlicocq, De lart dramatique au Moyen ge: Drames du XVIe sicle, Annales
archologiques de Didron, 8 (1848): 26974.
48. Martha Pollak, Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010).
49. As Philip the Good reputedly observed about Ghent in 1453, no good prince would fully destroy an
important part of his patrimony. See Boone, Civitas mori potest, 343.
50. R. S. Loomis, The Allegorical Siege in the Art of the Middle Ages, American Journal of Archeol-
ogy, 2nd series, 23 (1919): 25569; Simon Pepper, Siege Law, Siege Ritual, and the Symbolism
of City Wall in Renaissance Europe, in City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective, ed.
J. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 572604.
51. Maurice H. Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (orig, 1965, reprinted, Aldershot: Gregg
Rivivals, 1993).
52. Adam Ziolkowski, Urbs direpta, or How the Romans Sacked Cities, in War and Society in the
Roman World, ed. John Rich and Graham Shipley (London: Routledge, 1993), 6891, who references
especially Tacitus, Histories 3: 33, 13.
53. De Ram, Documents relatifs aux troubles du Pays de Lige, 238, as reported by the Papal Legate
Onofrio: Hic populus mihi Turcus erit.
54. M. Stanislas Bormans, ed., Mmoire du Lgat Onufrius sur les affaires de Lige (1468) (Brussels: M.
Hayez, 1885), a critical edition of De excidio civitatis Leodiensis.
55. Hugo van der Velden, The Donors Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold,
trans. Beverley Jackson (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2000), 10105.

56. One of the finest treatments of this period is Jelle Haemers, For the Common Good: State Power and
Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy (1477-1482) (Brussels: Brepols Publishers, 2009).
57. Pollak, Cities at War.
58. On Charles Vs imperial ideology, see Francis Yates, Charles Quint et lide dempire, in Ftes
et crmonies au temps de Charles Quint, ed. Jean Jacquot (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, 1969), 5997; and Peter Burke, Presenting and Re-presenting Charles V, in
Charles V and His Time, 1500-1558, ed. Hugo Soly (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1999), 393476.
59. Joseph Perez, La revolucin de las comunidades de Castilla (1520-1521) (Madrid: Siglo XXI de
Espaa, 1978; orig., 1970).
60. For Charles Vs military campaigns and their complex organization and financing, see James Tracy,
Emperor Charles V: Impresario of war (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
61. See Francesco Guicciardinis account in Il sacco di Roma del 1527: Narrazioni de contemporanei,
ed. Carlo Milanesi (Florence: Kessinger, 1867); critical edition in English: Luigi Guicciardini, The
sack of Rome, ed. James H. McGregor (New York: Italica Press, 1999). Alfonso de Valdss apology,
Dilogo entre Lactancio y un Arcediano, in Memorias para la historia, 394438, and critical Eng-
lish edition in Alfonso de Valds and the Sack of Rome. Dialogue of Lactancio and an Archdeacon,
ed. John E. Longhurst (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1952), with transcription of
Baldassare Castigliones angry rejoinder in ibid., 10117. For humanist treatises on Romes sack, see
Kenneth Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Leiden:
Brill Academic Pub, 1998).
62. The destruction of holy objects, churches, and chapels in Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 108.
63. Longhurst, ed., Alfonso de Valds and the sack of Rome, appendix 1, 103-08.
64. Cesare Guasti, Sacco di Prato e Il Ritorno De Medici in Firenze Nel MDXII (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1880).
65. P. Martens, Militaire architectuur en vestingbouw in de Nederlanden tijdens het regentschap van
Maria van Hongarije (1531-1555). De ontwikkeling van een gebastioneerde vestingbouw (unpub-
lished Ph.D. diss., Louvain University, 2009); Bernard Delmaire, Throuanne et Hesdin: deux
destructions (1553), une reconstruction, in Destruction et reconstruction de villes, 12753.
66. M. Dierickx, Lrection des nouveaux diocses aux Pays-Bas, 1559-1570 (Brussels: La Renaissance
du livre, 1967).
67. On Charless Tunis campaign, see the account, Guillaume de Montoiche, Voyage et expedition de
Charles-Quint au Pays de Tunis, de 1535, in Collections des voyages des souverains des Pays-Bas,
vol. 3, ed. L. P. Gachard and Charles Piot (Brussels: Hayez, 1881), 31788. For Charless entry into
Naples, and the citys early modern festive culture, see John Marino, Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen
Culture in Baroque Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 100103.
68. Cited in Pollak, Cities at War, 236, the numbers attributed to a report from Rabelais. On the entry, see
Maria Luisa Madonna, Lingresso di Carlo V a Roma, in La citt effimera e luniverso artificiale
del giardino: La Firenze dei Medici e lItalia del 500, ed. Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Officina, 1980),
6368.
69. On the Italian entries, see Bonner Mitchell, The Majesty of the State: Triumphal Progresses of For-
eign Sovereigns in Renaissance Italy (1494-1600), Biblioteca dell Archivum Romanicum serie I, 203
(Florence: Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki, 1986), 133178; and a contemporary account of five of these
entries by Andrea Sala, La triomphale entrata di Carlo V. Imperatore Augusto in la inclita citt di
Napoli e di Messina (1536) and Ordini, pompe, apparati et cerimonie dell solenne intrate de Carlo V.
sempre Aug. nella citta di Roma, Siena et Fiorenza (1536).
70. Guido, Rebecchini, After the Medici: The New Rome of Pope Paul III Farnese, I Tatti Studies:
Essays in the Renaissance 11 (2007): 147200.
71. Elizabeth Olton, To Shepherd the Empire: The Catafalque of Charles V in Mexico City, in Death
and Afterlife in the Early Modern Hispanic World, ed. John Beusterien and Constance Cortez, His-
panic Issues On Line 7 (Fall 2010): 1026. The account of the catafalque and the funeral procession

Arnade 747
was captured by the Spanish humanist and resident of Mexico City, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar,
Mxico en 1554 y Tmulo Imperial (Mexico City: Editorial Porra, 1963).
72. Bernal Daz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espaa, ed. Carmelo Sen de
Santa Maria (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1989), 23943; Hernn Corts, Letters from Mexico, ed. Anthony
Pagden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 10212.
73. Jacqueline Holler, Conquered Spaces, Colonial Skirmishes: Spatial Contestation in Sixteenth-
Century Mexico City, Radical History Review (Fall 2007): 10720.
74. On Lima as the viceregal capital, and on Cuzcos efforts to challenge its legal and political primacy,
see Alejandra B. Osorio, Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Perus South Sea Metropolis (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
75. Hugo Hernn Ramrez, Fiesta, espectculo y teatralidad en el Mxico de los conquistadores (Bonilla
Artigas, Mexico: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009); Patricia Don Lopes, Carnival, Triumphs and Rain
Gods in the New World: A Civic Ritual in the City of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1539, Colonial Latin
American Review 6, no. 1 (1997): 1740. The best account of the 1539 productionsapart from the
Actas del Cabildo de la Ciudad de Mxico generously cited by Hernn Ramrezis Fray Torbino
De Motolina, Historia de Los Indios de la nueva Espaa, ed. Georges Baudot (Madrid: Linkgua
Digital, 1985), 20215. The fullest consideration of the 1539 Conquista de Jerusaln is Louise M.
Burkhart, The Destruction of Jerusalem as Colonial Nahuatl Historical Drama, in The Conquest All
over Again: Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism, ed. Susan
Schroeder (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2010): 74100.
76. The translation of the Nahuatl is in Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart, Nahuatl Theater, vol. 4:
Nahua Christianity in Performance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 269. For the 1539
performance, see De Motolina, Historia de Los Indios, 20215.
77. Marc Boone, Le dict mal sest espandu comme peste fatale. Karel V en Gent, stedelijke identiteit en
staatsgeweld, Handelingen der Maatschappij voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde te Gent 54 (2000):
3161.
78. L. P. Gachard, ed., Relation des troubles de Gand sous Charles-Quint (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1846),
3637.
79. For the civic constitution imposed on the city which fundamentally reorganized its political and cor-
porate life, see Les coutumes de la ville de Gand, ed. L. de Hondt and A. du Bois, 2 vols. (Brussels: Fr.
Gobbaets, 1887), II, 14083. For the alteration of Ghents public life, Boone, Civitas mori potest,
36264. On the construction of Ghents citadel, and sixteenth-century citadels in the Netherlands in
general, see P. Lombaerde, Herrschaftsarchitektur. ber den Abbruch von Zitadellen und den Bau
neuer Palste in den Niederlanden, in Italienische Renaissancebaukunst an Schelde, Maas und Nie-
derrhein. Stadtanlagen, Zivilbauten, Wehranlagen, ed. G. Bers and C. Doose (Jlich: Fischer, Josh,
1999), 31733.
80. Bart Rosier, The Victories of Charles V: A Series of Prints by Maarten van Heemskerck, 1555-56,
Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 20, no. 1 (19901991): 2438.
81. Niccol Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. David Wootton (Cambridge: Hackett, 1995), 1718.
82. Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Thirty Years War (London: Routledge, 2006; orig., 1984), 178; Saverio
Di Bella, La rivolta di Messina (1674/78) e il mondo mediterraneo nella seconda met del Seicento
(Cozena: Pilgrim Press, 2001).
83. Kevin C. Robbins, Humiliating the Greatest Rebel Town in France via Feudalization of the Cityscape:
Spatial Politics and the Rituals of Counter-Reformation in La Rochelle: 1628-1650, paper presented
at the 2010 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. See also his City on the Ocean Sea:
La Rochelle, 1530-1650 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1977).
84. Case study include Martha Pollak, Turin in 1560-1680: Urban Design, Military Culture, and the Cre-
ation of the Absolutist Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Hilary Ballon, The
Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

85. For the development of Baroque Madrid as a ceremonial capital of the Habsburg Spain, see Jess
Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003); and Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, El nacimiento de una capital europea: Madrid entre 1561-
1606 (Madrid: Turner Libros, 1989). On urban planning in the Americas, see Zelia Nuttall, Royal
Ordinances Concerning the Laying Out of New Towns, Hispanic-American Historical Review 4
(1921): 74353 and 5 (1922): 24954; and Dora Crouch, Daniel J. Garr, and Axel I. Mundigo, Spanish
City Planning in North America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).
Author Biography
Peter Arnade is professor of history and dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of
Hawaii at Mnoa. His books include Realms of Ritual (Ithaca, 1996), Beggars, Iconoclasts and Civic
Patriots (Ithaca, 2008), and the edited Power, Gender, and Ritual in Europe and the Americas (Toronto,
2008). He is completing a book manuscript with Walter Prevenier titled Honor, Vengeance and Sexual
Scandal: Pardon Letters in the Late Medieval Burgundian Low Countries.

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Carthage or Jerusalem? Princely Violence and the Spatial Transformation of the

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Carthage or Jerusalem? 39(4) 726748

into the Early Modern City

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Figure 1. Mechelen sacked by Army of Flanders, 1572. Frans Hogenberg.

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Figure 2. Mechelen, 1572. Braun and Hogenberg.

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Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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22. Munz, Frederick Barbarossa, 18284.

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