The Gothic Experim ent
work at Batalha by the French architect Diogo Boytac,
the pr incipal monum ents are the church of Jesus at
Setubal ; the Jeronymite monastery founded by Manuel
at t he site ofVasco da Gama 's landing on his
return to Portugal; the church and cloister of Sta Cruz
at Coimbra, both by Boytac; the chapter-house and nave
ofthe Templar monastery at Tomar, by Diogo de Arruda;
the Tower of BeU:m, built opposite the monastery; and
the sacristy door atAicobac;:a, framed by tree trunks with
roots, knots and leaf)' branches forming an ogee arch.
The Manueline style with its columns like twisted ropes,
its cusping like the fringed leaves of banana trees, its
ubiq uitous succulence and opulence, finds its most
bizarre expression in the window of Diogo de Arruda 's
undercroft of 1510- 14 below the choir of the Cristo
Monastery at Tomar. T he frame of this rectangulllr
window, conceived as a monument to Vasco da Gama, is
overlaid with a seething growth of marine vegetation
incorporating tree roots, ropes, cork floats, chains, shells
and astrolabes. The upper window is circular, with a
deep surround carved with fo rms r esembling a
whirlwind or billowing sails restrained by r opes. It is set
in a building ri ses like a ship dredged up from the
ocean, its buttresses encrusted w ith coral growth,
barnacles and petrified seaweed.
Town planning
Th e ri se of civi c ide ntity
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Roman cities in
Europe shrank in size, to become small settleme nts
following the rise of the German kingdoms in the fifth
century. The t ypical rectangular street network of the
Romans was grad ually abandoned , especially north of
the Alps, the towns often becoming dominated by
monasteries as centres of culture. However, at the end of
the Dark Ages, the twelfth century saw the revival of the
kind of urbanism that had been neglected since the end
of Roman civilization.
As a result, the ambition of medieval cities
throughout Eur ope was to become self-governing,
leading to the widespread creation of city councils. The
town s in northern Italy that were the seats of bishops
led the way, from the eleventh century, .in the transition
from feudal to popular government. The growing power
of th e commune was increasingly expressed in the
erection of tO'<'"TI halls, guild halls, storehouses, market
buildings and shops, which represented a challenge to
the long-established authority of bishops, religious
order s and lay lords.
The development of trad e was a vital tool in t he
growth of this secular indep endence. Towns we re
positioned along trade routes through the Low
Countries in the north, through the Rhineland and down
the Rhone to cities in northern Italy such as Pisa, Genoa
and Venice. Even in Rome, despite the power of the
papacy, premises for a senate were established in a
remodelled Roman building on the historic Capitoline
hill in the mid twelfth century. In Tuscany, well known
far its free cities and republican communities, a
programm e of urban impro,·emen t was begun in
Florence in 1284 which led to th e linking of the
cathedral and Baptistery to the grain market and Town
Hall by a new street.
In nor the rn France and Flande rs, as at Antwerp ,
Arras, Brussels and Bruges, the open space for the
marke t wou ld be sur rounded by a town hall, guild
premises and houses for the wealthier citizens. An
internati onal port and the centre o f the cloth trade,
Bruges is one of the best preserved medieval cities . Its
surviving buildi ngs, dating mainly from the thirteenth
to the fifteenth centuries, follow an irregular town p lan
featuring houses of brick and timber.
It is impossible to exaggerate how greatly the life and
the form of medie\'al towns were dominated by the
church . Holidays were based on religious festivals which
grew into fairs, while all aspects of communal activity
such as the guilds and archery companies had a religious
content. We should therefore not suppose that there was
always a separation between bishops and the secular
ar m. For example, Ulm is a powerful example of the
connection between politics and church building. The
207
 gigantic new cathedral was seen from the moment of its
foun dation in 1377 as the creation of the city council ,
paid for by the citizens, and sening as a symbol of their
independence. In the thirteenth century Siena had
initiated a parallel political course in which power was
transferred fro m aristocratic families to leading
mer chant famHies.

BuildinB rea ulati ons

The g rowth of these beautiful towns was not left to
chance. In Florence, th ere were laws to cont rol
maximum height, while in Siena the inhabitants devised
297 View ofBruges, Belgium an extraordinarily comprehensi,·e building code to help
unite the three geographically separated communities
that made up the city. The city council m et annually to
issue regulations which governed the erection of public
buildings, churches, houses, streets and fountains. As a
result, it is known today as one of the most enthral ling
m edieval towns of Europe.
Parallel regulations grew up in other cities , though
generally concerned with civic am eni ties rathe r than
with what we would now understand by town planning.
Thus, by 1300 in large cities such as London and Paris
householders were obliged to clean their pavements,
while the removal of waste was subj ect to contTo l. In
London there were fire and drainage regulations, and in
major Italian and Spanish towns control was exercised
over the width of streets and the projection of roofs. It
has been calculated that in Venice there were eventually
as many as 35 categories of control, rooted in concepts
of public order and morality, whi ch affected many
aspects o f life from minor details of dress, through
feasting and the design of gondolas, to decoration of
palaces.

The respon se to R oma n mo nu ments and to

landscape
Despite these constant attempts at regulation, p lanning
was rarely coherent. Moreover, m edi eval towns often
derive much of their individuality and charm from their
298 Cloth Hall, Bruges relation to the natural landscape setting. At Laon , the

208

299 Segovia, Spain
cathedral and upper t own are on a plateau, 650 feet
(c.200m ) high. The r ocky defensible promontor y at
Segovia is similarly dominated not by a castle but by a
gigantic cathedral. The Old Town of Edinburgh runs up
its precipitous rock , whe reas the strung-out town of
Rothenburg-an-der-Tauber follows the line of a long hill.
The irregular setting of Siena on its Y-shaped ridge led
to its development in a unique way which culminated in
its celebrated fan-shaped Campo, on the site of the
Roman forum.
This recalls principle that a determining factor
was freque ntly the survival of Rom an planning or
monuments. At Ver ona, where the Roman amphitheatre
is still the largest building in the city, many of the
300 Aerial view oNerona
The Gothic Experiment
medieval buildings follow the Roman grid plan, the main
market-place, the Piazza delle Erbe, occupyi ng the site
of the Forum. At Lucca the existence of the amphitheatre
is eloquently preserved in the oval form of the Piazza
dell' Antifeatro. At Aries, in southern France, a Greek
settlement refounded as a military city by Julius Caesar
in 46BC, the Roman amphitheatre was fortified in the
ninth century and subsequently adapted as r esidential
accommodation with two parish churches.
Ne w tow n s
We should note that there wer e basically two typ es of
medieval town. The majority, those we might describe
as ' histori c' , had grown over a long period in a largely
haphazard way. Those we have seen so far belong to this
categor y. However, there were, by contrast, a
considerable number of planned towns on new sites such
as Salisbury or Lubeck, sometimes known as ' planted'
towns, or as 'bastides' in France. These were laid out on
a grid, unrelated to the site, with rectilinear plots
foll owing predetermined units of measure ment. This
system went back to Hippodamus of Miletus, the Greek
architect and town planner.
At Lubeck, founded in 1158, much survives from
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, mainly brick -
built. Salisbury, Wiltshire, was moved down by the
Bishop of Sarum in c. 1218 from the nearby inconvenient
hill known as O ld Sarum. On its new flat site, it became
a famous under the patronage of its bishop as the most
successful of the new towns of medieval England.
Principally a textile town, increasing the bishop's
reYenue, its wide streets formed an irregular grid round
the great market-place. However, in common with many
planned towns, Salisbury eventually expanded from its
original core.
In 1246, StLouis, King of France, founded Aigues-
Mortes, on the mouth of the Rhone in Southern France,
to ser ve as a secure base from which to launch Crusades
and as a commercial centre for the promotion of trade
between Levant and northern France. A walled city on
a relentless grid plan, it is one of the largest su rviving
209
Th e Goth ic Experiment

medieval fortified towns. In 1296--7, Edward I, King of

England, Duke of Aquitaine and nephew of StLouis of
France, established a colloquium to discuss how to plan
and administer towns. Though numerous planned towns
already existed in England, he had doubtless been
influenced by seeing Aigues- Mortes from which he set
out on the Crusades in 1270. As a result of summoning
w hat must have bee n one of the first town -planning
confer ences, he order ed 24 new towns in 1296 in
Gascony, England and Wales. These fortified towns such
as Beaum aris and Caernarvon, often port towns on
coasts, we re as muc h for military as for commercial
purposes. With their grid plans, centring on a market,
they were intended for merchants, free burgesses who
were no longer subject to feudal dues. 30 I A1gues-Mortes (founded 1246)
Many of the purpose-built bastides, which could not
survive without outside subventions, ne,·er de,·eloped.
Within their fortified walls, the great ' historic' cities of
medieval Europe expanded in a tightly packed way, with were often the dominant elements. Without the benefit
narrow winding streets, little wider than lanes . In of any overall systematic planning, many major medieval
Britain , the castle was o ften the most imp ortant cities had acquired by the end of the twelfth century the
elem ent, as at Linco.ln or London, while in Italian and basic formation that was to sur vh·e unt il at least the
Fren ch cities the bishop's palace and adjacent cathedral, Industrial Revolution.

210