10.

1177/0096144205279197
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2005
Keene / CITIES AND EMPIRES
ARTICLE

CITIES AND EMPIRES

DEREK KEENE
University of London

This article reflects on the ways in which cities—from the ancient world to the present and in four conti-
nents—have expressed and transmitted imperial ideas. Different types of empires are considered: territorial,
commercial, nomadic, dispositional, and reactive. The cities themselves might be central sites of rule, often
incorporating symbols of power imported from earlier empires; outposts of commerce or rule; military en-
campments; or some mixture of these. Strategies of imperial rule and the forms of the cities themselves are
often shaped by the traditions of the ruling group or by reference to the political and cosmological systems of
other empires deemed worthy of emulation. At the same time, the city forms and governmental structures of
lands taken into an empire often are absorbed and used by the empire itself, sometimes even after the empire
has been dissolved.

Keywords: cities; empires; history; architecture; ideology

EMPIRES

These reflections are intended to tease out some strands in the theme of
“imperial cities” as a basis for further discussion and exploration. An obvious
starting point is the idea of empire itself and the forms that empires can take.
This is no straightforward matter. Even in Europe, where the ideologies and
vocabularies of empire are widely understood and for the most part lead back
to Rome, empire is often to be found in the eye of the beholder or in the rhetoric
1
of its protagonists rather than in objective criteria. Comparison with other lin-
guistic and cultural zones can be even more problematic. Nevertheless, both in
empires with Roman ancestry and in others throughout the world, the city
plays a central role as the site of power and legitimacy and as the transmitter of
imperial ideas. One useful definition of an empire characterizes it as a political
system encompassing wide and relatively highly centralized territories, in
which the center, embodied both in the person of the emperor and in political
institutions, constitutes an autonomous entity. Moreover, empires commonly
embrace some idea, commonly religious in character, with claims to universal-
ity. Many ancient and some modern empires, constructed by extending control
over continuous territories and often lacking a strong sense of competition
with other empires of a similar kind, seem to fit this pattern. Some European
empires of recent centuries, however, have been characterized as taking the
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DOI: 10.1177/0096144205279197
© 2005 Sage Publications
8
 Keene / CITIES AND EMPIRES 9

form of extended, intertwined networks arising from competition among

2
nation-states to control resources far outside the continent. Yet such empires,
commonly commercial in origin, can develop strong territorial interests and
the strategies necessary to buttress them, whereas in recent times some territo-
rial empires have embarked on establishing networks of extraimperial depend-
encies. Strategies of reinforcement include the appropriation of symbols from
former empires or stepping into the political and bureaucratic shoes of existing
ones. The internal dynamics of imperial expansion are complex and variable.
They can be dispositional, involving deliberate extension from a core author-
ity, or reactive, for example when driven by the need to settle disorder (or per-
ceived disorder) on the imperial periphery. In either case, expansion can arise
from conflict at the core, as separate groups competitively seek to enlarge their
resources by external appropriation or to carry others with them by engage-
ment in a common imperial venture. Strict notions of imperial sovereignty and
boundaries need play no more than a partial role in the formation of empires.
Effective control over subordinate states has been a key characteristic of many
empires, whereas in looser systems acknowledgment by those states of the
imperial ideology may be all that is required.3 The British Empire was held
together by an exceptionally wide range of legal relationships between the
central authority and its component parts. Indeed, for much of its history it
lacked an emperor, and when it acquired one (partly to resolve difficulties at
home), strictly imperial authority applied to only one of the dependent
territories.

CITIES

Cities contribute to empires in many ways. Even the empires of the medi-
eval Sudan, whose purpose was to protect and profit from the transfer of com-
modities (gold and slaves) from southerly territories outside their formal rule
to distant consumers in Mediterranean regions, incorporated cities that served
as sites of rule and trade and drew both on indigenous traditions and on those of
4
Islamic civilization to the north. Metropolitan seats of imperial authority have
many features in common: a palace; offices for bureaucrats; temples of the
imperial cult or its equivalent; imperial burial grounds that, although often not
within the metropolis, are usually closely associated with it; and collections of
regalia and other symbols of authority. Subordinate cities in an imperial hierar-
chy replicate or allude to these characteristics. Often, it is the conquest or con-
trol of a city rather than its territory that confers or enhances imperial status.
Indeed, in the period before that commonly associated with nation-states,
major European cities embodied several notions of empire that made effective
contributions to order across large parts of the continent. At the same time,
between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, several Italian cities evolved
models of commercial colonization that were subsequently used by European
10 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2005

5
states in imperial projects across the Atlantic and in the Far East. Furthermore,
as we come to better appreciate the composite nature of many states and the
continuing vitality of their component parts, it is more difficult to draw a con-
sistent distinction between empire and nation-state.
Empires need not be physically extensive: the idea and the structure of rule
are the essentials. Bede characterized the overlordship that around 600 a king
of Kent had exercised over the rulers of other provinces of the English as an
empire (imperium), within which the royal city of Canterbury was the metro-
6
polis. Here, Roman ideas of government informed Bede’s perception of what
in fact was no more than a loose hegemony over a small territory, and it seems
that in Bede’s eyes the “imperial” and metropolitan quality of that hegemony
was reinforced by the king’s settlement of Roman Christian missionaries in his
city. In the late thirteenth century, King Edward I deployed imperial symbols
in support of his assertion of English rule over other kingdoms and principali-
ties in the British Isles. Edward’s capital city of London had a key role in this
program, both as the destination to which the Welsh and Scottish regalia were
transferred and as a city where it was necessary to demonstrate the annihilation
of Welsh claims for it as the head of a former British, rather than English,
7
dominion. London’s role as an imperial city, by virtue of being the capital of a
monarch whose dominion could bear some comparison with that of ancient
emperors, acquired more explicit force with the Reformation when a direct
line of authority to Rome was abolished, although during the preceding cen-
tury or so, both English and French monarchs had made claims to imperial sta-
tus. Ideas of an empire with London at its head were further strengthened by
extensions of English authority in Ireland and by the succession of a Scottish
king to the English throne. Thus, the idea of an “empire of Great Britain” was
8
born.
Empires are not always readily visible or comprehended. Some European
observers of early Tokugawa Japan, for example, failed to perceive the
emperor in Kyoto as the focal point of the country’s culture and identity. For
these outsiders, the “emperor” was the shogun at Edo, who by force of the
material power that he exercised over the provincial aristocracy held together
9
what was in many respects a federal state. The form of these two imperial cit-
ies reflected their contrasting functions. Edo was dominated by the shogun’s
castle and the subordinate compounds of the aristocracy, whereas Kyoto, with
its orthogonal plan and centrally situated imperial palace, expressed ideas,
introduced from China, concerning the function of the emperor and his city at
the interface between celestial and terrestrial systems of order. The immediate
model for this was the T’ang imperial capital of Chang’an, the plan of which,
with inevitable distortions on the ground, derived from theories formulated a
10
millennium earlier. For much of its history, Japan, despite its self-contained
nature and strong regional characteristics, could be characterized as an empire
within an empire that borrowed many of its basic principles from China. These
included literacy, administrative practice, the notion of a state religion that
 Keene / CITIES AND EMPIRES 11

overrode local differences and cults, and court ceremonial and luxury goods—
all deployed within a framework of imperial cities. At the first high point of
this reception, during the seventh and eighth centuries, regular tribute-bearing
missions were sent to China and brought back in return high-status gifts that
symbolized Japan’s dependency and became the nucleus of the imperial col-
11
lection, still kept on its original site in the then–imperial capital of Nara.
Much later, when the Ming dynasty attempted to restore a Chinese world order
based on exchange, the Japanese authorities again acknowledged their
12
subjection and renewed the tribute missions.
Imperial cities do not need a settled and durable material form: their essence
lies in an ordered system of human relations. A European visitor to the court of
the Mongol horde on the Volga in the mid-thirteenth century described a vast
and confusing array of tents extending over several miles. The tents were, nev-
ertheless, pitched carefully in relation to the khan’s pallisaded enclosure at the
13
center. The siting of the khan’s tent itself, with an open prospect to the south
and unhindered rear to the north, reflected established practice among the
14
Mongols and Uighurs, but seems also to have been influenced by the Chinese
form of imperial city, in which the central avenue leading south from the pal-
ace was commonly reserved for the emperor. By this date, the great khan had
established a settled capital at Qaraqorum in the Mongolian heartland. This
contained a bureaucracy, mercantile and craft quarters, temples, mosques, and
a church, and was surrounded by a wall. There was also a palace enclosure
with a hall, storage buildings, and, sited symmetrically to the east and west of
the hall, mounds that may have been for pitching tents, an arrangement that
possibly represents a halfway stage between nomadic encampment and Chi-
nese imperial palace. Qaraqorum, however, lacked magnificence and was not
really a court city, for important ceremonial events continued to be staged at
15
temporary encampments in the surrounding country. Nevertheless, the Chi-
nese city model—not to mention the empire itself—became increasingly
attractive, and later in the thirteenth century the Mongols, working with a Chi-
nese advisor, laid out the palace city of Shangdu (Kaiping Fu), which was
intended as a capital, and then established the longer-term imperial seat of
Dadu (now Beijing), an imperial metropolis that overlapped the sites of two
capitals of non-Chinese dynasties and of earlier cities. 16
In other contexts, too, the encampment has served to express imperial
authority. At Nimrud, the decorative scheme of the throne room of
Assurnasirpal II (ninth century B.C.E.) displayed the divine associations of the
monarch and a record of his conquests, among which was a prominent repre-
sentation of a military camp. With the quadrant layout that in many early city
plans has a cosmological purpose, this camp was evidently an important impe-
17
rial attribute. Fustat, the garrison city that became the seat of government of
Egypt under Umayyad rule and then under the Fatimids was chosen as the site
for a city “that would rule the world” (Cairo), owed its distinctive layout, at
least according to later tradition, to its origin as a tent city where the narrow
12 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2005

streets followed the divisions between the tribal groupings of the army of the
18
faithful.
Likewise, the location of imperial capitals has reflected fundamental charac-
teristics of empires as systems of rule. In China, they tended to be at the center,
where the great mass of rural population dwelled, and also toward the north,
where the greatest external threat lay. They also were situated on major rivers
or canals to ensure a steady flow of supplies for their enormous numbers of
19
inhabitants. Often, for strategic reasons, there were two capitals. The Roman
Empire was at first ruled from the single city of origin, but the tetrarchy intro-
duced by Diocletian (284-305) was a necessary attempt to hold it together by
distributing the system of rule among four imperial capitals (Trier, Milan,
Thessaloniki, and Nicomedia) with hierarchies of cities beneath them. Among
other requirements, this structure reflected the need for capitals with ready
access to threatened frontiers.20 Emperors can create cities at will, as an expres-
sion of personal or dynastic identity and sometimes with the aim of minimiz-
ing any political challenge that might claim legitimacy by controlling a former
imperial city. Thus, in establishing his imperial authority, Akbar abandoned
Delhi, which had served as a capital for more 200 years of Turkish rule, and set
up a network of palace-fortresses before developing an imperial court city at
Sikri, not far from the fortress of Agra, in honor of the Sufi saint who had lived
there and had predicted the birth of Akbar’s first son in 1570. In significant
ways, Fatehpur Sikri resembled the movable camp that was a feature of
Mughal rule. After fifteen years, it was abandoned, and the empire came to be
ruled through a series of magnificently adorned primate cities, including
Lahore, Delhi, Agra, and Burhanpur. When the ruler was residing at one of
these capitals, vast numbers of people, including merchants, were present, but
when he was elsewhere the city seemed empty. Under Akbar, however, it
seems that the true imperial capital was his camp and that in this way he identi-
fied his rule with Central Asian nomadic traditions familiar to the warrior aris-
21
tocrats who were among his key supporters. Those traditions were echoed
even under British rule, one of the distinctive features of which was the mili-
22
tary cantonment, a distinctive and camplike form of imperial city.
These striking accommodations between nomadic principles and the idea
of the imperial city stand in sharp contrast to those capitals in less peripatetic
imperial systems, such as those of Rome, China, or Britain, where the emperor
or imperial institutions were more continuously present at a single site. Other
imperial structures could distribute imperial functions among cities in a vari-
ety of ways. No empire had so many “capital cities” of this sort than the Holy
Roman, or German, one. Aachen, Speyer, Goslar, Frankfurt, Nürnberg, Prague,
and Vienna all contributed imperial functions. Moreover, under Charles V, the
new palace at Granada was an important imperial statement of Christian pur-
pose at a central point of an empire that had just extended its reach into the New
World, whereas in 1197 and 1250 emperors had been buried in Palermo as
kings of Sicily, the jewel of their territories. During the eighteenth century,
 Keene / CITIES AND EMPIRES 13

Vienna, for dynastic and strategic reasons, was the capital of a great power,
Austria, but the empire itself had a stronger formal presence in other cities:
Regensburg, the seat of the Reichstag; Frankfurt, the old coronation city;
Mainz, the seat of the chancery; and Wetzlar, the seat of the imperial court of
justice. When, in 1782, the Russian ambassador asked the emperor Joseph II
where he held the imperial capital to be, the response was that the true capital
23
and middle point of the empire was self-evidently Rome. In reality, the
ancient imperial capital was beyond the emperor’s control.
Although all imperial capitals command resources to an exceptional
degree, the predominance of the capital over other cities in terms of size or
wealth varies according to the structure of the political system. The imperial
camp on the banks of the Potomac is no rival to New York as a world metro-
polis. When the center was unchallenged or served as the primary motor of
empire, as in the cases of Rome, London, and Constantinople, the preemi-
nence of a single city was marked. Under more distributed or peripatetic sys-
tems of rule, as in Japan or Mughal India, formal capitals did not overshadow
other cities to the same degree, although they certainly stood out for their
refinement as cultural centers.
Imperial structures likewise influence the function, status, and image of
imperial cities below the rank of capital. In the empires generated by European
nation-states, there was a broad distinction between the cities of the home
country and those of the colonies or dependencies. The former were often
associated with and supported the imperial capital, whereas the latter had a
more subservient role as instruments of rule or trade. In the Chinese, Roman,
and Ottoman Empires, by contrast, that distinction was lacking, and all cities,
along with their provinces or prefectures, were part of a single hierarchical
system under the capitals. In both types of imperial systems, however, the cit-
ies, and especially the capitals and port cities, have been notable for attracting
ethnically diverse populations of distant origin.
British cities in recent centuries have displayed a particularly dense nexus
of “home imperial” ideologies, reflecting the long-established integration of
its urban system. London was the unchallenged seat of imperial rule and the
principal site of imperial trade and finance, but other cities—including Bir-
mingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester—also had claims to
imperial standing by virtue of their participation in the imperial network
through commerce and manufactures. In France and Spain, by contrast, the
capitals, although undoubtedly seats of imperial authority and rule, were rela-
tively remote from provincial cities such as Bordeaux, Marseille, Seville, and
Cadiz, which had a more direct engagement with empire through trade and
24
even, in Spain, had a role in imperial administration.
Within diverse types of empire, institutions and building expressed ideas
of unity and common cultural aspiration. These overlaid indigenous features
but did not usually extinguish them. Roman cities, for example, contained a
remarkably standardized repertoire of forums, basilicas, theatres, temples,
14 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2005

amphitheatres, racetracks, and bathhouses, paid for both out of public funds
and by private benefactors, but coming increasingly to be seen as a source of
25
civic and imperial identity to be supported out of taxation. Their equivalents
in other empires come readily to mind and can include private institutions such
as banks and nonconformist chapels as well as official ones like custom
houses, law courts, governors’residences, and cathedrals. In cities just beyond
imperial frontiers, other rulers might express their aspirations, as well as their
informal client status, by introducing institutions and buildings modeled on
imperial forms. During the eleventh century, for example, Kiev drew on Con-
stantinople in this way,26 and, as we have seen, the Chinese example exercised
an especially powerful force in the Far East. The cities pertaining to an empire,
therefore, are to be found not only within its formal boundaries.
Colonization is often accompanied by the imposition of urban forms that
express imperial rule. When Santa Fe was established as the capital of the
kingdom of New Mexico about 1610, in one of the most isolated spots of the
Spanish Hapsburg Empire, it was to be laid out in six districts with a square
block for government buildings. The latter quickly became known as the gov-
27
ernor’s “palace” and although built in mud brick was impressive for its scale.
The plan, ordered around a central square, conformed to the principles pro-
claimed in Phillip II’s ordinances for city planning in the Indies issued in July
1573. This was a significant moment, for only two years earlier Philip had
moved into the Escorial, his palace, monastery, and effective capital, to which
in June 1573 the imperial bodies of his parents had been translated. The
Escorial became a model for royal building, and its severely quadrangular plan
is reflected in that ordained for colonial settlements. Moreover, both the
Escorial and the ordinances conveyed powerful messages concerning Chris-
28
tian cosmology and cultural imperialism. In a different vein, early British
colonial port towns self-consciously emulated the commercial metropolis of
their empire. Thus, at the peak of its late seventeenth-century prosperity, Port
Royal in Jamaica had a Thames Street, a Lime Street, a Queen Street, a Broad
Street, a Honey Lane, and an impressive St. Paul’s church—all City of London
29
names familiar to the merchants who traded there. The imposition and adop-
tion of new place-names are widespread imperial phenomena. Thus, in the
tenth century, when Kaifeng was adopted as the northern Sung capital, its prin-
cipal topographical features, which until then had been identified by descrip-
30
tive names, were renamed to reflect the state cult. Equally widespread in
recent empires has been the practice of imitating in the colonies the iconic
buildings and landscapes of the imperial metropolis. Thus, the design of the
celebrated London church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which was readily
available in print, was imitated in Madras, Calcutta, and throughout the British
Empire, whereas the style and spacious setting of European houses in Calcutta
reminded observers of Hyde Park and Regent’s Park in London. British India
illustrates the way in which empires, perhaps those of nomadic or commercial
origin, can make their most grandiloquent urban statements in dependent
 Keene / CITIES AND EMPIRES 15

territories rather than at home. India came to be the dominant element in Brit-
ish imperial identity and could offer for its expression political structures,
material resources, and traditions of magnificence that were not available in
Britain.
One type of imperial city, commonly at the frontier, mediates exchange
between the empire and the outside world, and might be characterized as a
gateway city or a port of trade according to circumstances. Trading cities on
imperial margins can both provide a neutral site for exchange and serve to con-
tain external powers whose representatives were thereby given subordinate
status within the imperial system. One of the most successful instances of such
control was in Tokugawa, Japan, where a controlled enclave at the port of
Nagasaki was set up for those few groups of external traders permitted access
31
to the country. Ning-po and other tribute ports served a similar role in Ming
32
China, as did Canton, Shanghai, and Hong Kong at later dates. In other parts
of Asia, there was a long tradition of allowing foreign merchants to operate
freely and with a degree of self-governance within such ports, and so when
European traders established factories at Surat and similar coastal settlements
33
in Mughal, India, they fitted into an existing pattern. In Europe, some of the
extensive commercial settlements on the northern fringes of the Carolingian
34
empire probably operated in a similar way. These marginal cities also
become portals through which one empire can penetrate, and even absorb,
another. External powers have extended their influence by acquiring substan-
tial enclaves in such places along with extensive rights in their hinterlands, as
35
in China after the Treaty of Nanking (1842). British rule in India was
extended, almost ineluctably, in a similar way, and the rise of the coastal
metropolises that played such a large part in shaping that empire can be attrib-
36
uted to the activities of the European trading companies. There are many ear-
lier cases of such imperial interpenetrations, ranging from the privileges that
37
imperial German merchants had gained in London by about the year 1000 to
the enclaves within Constantinople and other east Mediterranean cities that
38
groups of Italians established from the same time onward.
The cultural and ideological interplay that takes place within imperial cities
often reflects the way in which empires take over or adjust to established struc-
tures. In Gaul and Britain, for example, the Romans fitted their pattern of gov-
ernment and town foundation to existing groupings of people and their places
of assembly, and Roman control of territory involved relations with client
39
kingdoms as well as direct rule. Successive British empires followed similar
strategies. Cities, or their sites, are thus important for the transition from one
empire, or set of ideas about empire, to the next. Imperial succession some-
times requires the razing of the old capital, as when the Spaniards destroyed
Tenochtitlán after they captured it in 1521. Yet such was the power of that city
as the center of Aztec rule that the necessity of placing the metropolis of New
Spain on its site immediately became apparent. The cathedral of the new city
of Mexico was constructed on the ruins of the great temple of Tenochtitlán,
16 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2005

and elements in the grid plan of the new capital reflected the orthogonal layout
of its predecessor. Although the two grid plans expressed very different ideas
concerning the ordering of cities, it seems that their features in common served
to link cultures and worldviews that subsequently became intertwined to a
remarkable degree. Moreover, the encounter with Tenochtitlán had such a
powerful impact on the Spanish imagination that its grid plan perhaps rein-
40
forced ideas of the suitability of the form for colonial towns in general. One
ideological justification of the invasion invoked the precedent of the Roman
Empire. Thus, in 1539, the citizens of Mexico marked the visit to France of
their emperor, Charles V, by staging festivities on the lines of the ancient Roman
triumphs. Old identities were not submerged, however, and in 1680, when the
citizens of Mexico welcomed their new viceroy, they did so with a huge trium-
phal arch. This arch was not decorated with images alluding to the Roman
Empire, however, but with paintings of the Aztec tribal god and the eleven
41
Aztec emperors, who had thus become part of the city’s classical inheritance.
Cities newly incorporated into empires have been reshaped in many differ-
ent ways. When Venice gained control of Crete in the early thirteenth century,
it adopted the administrative framework of Byzantine rule but, for an initial
period at least, concentrated on the cities, leaving the Greek aristocracy to its
country estates. The heart of the capital, Candia, was remodeled on Venetian
lines, with a suite of churches expressing the most up-to-date forms of Latin
Christianity and a group of distinctively Venetian secular structures. Candia
remained an important center for Greek culture, but the monuments of Ortho-
42
dox Christianity were now to be found in suburbs rather than at the center.
Segregation between the institutions of colonial rulers and those assigned to
the indigenous population is common to imperial cities.
The experience of empire can influence practice and reshape identities at
home. The large and well-ordered city of Tenochtilán was a shock to the invad-
ers and their rulers. Within three years of its destruction, its plan was published
in Europe, where it became so well known that a group of Venetian humanists
43
considered using it as the model for a program of public works in their city.
Venice itself came to draw on Crete in reinforcing and projecting its own iden-
tity as the heart of an empire that transmitted eastern practices to the West. That
process reached a peak immediately after its loss of the island in 1669, when
the cult of St. Titus and the icon of the Virgin associated with it were formally
translated to Venice, where they came to occupy a central place in public cere-
monies. Moreover, if recent suggestions on Venetian policies concerning the
Jews are correct, it seems that the city both learned from existing practices in
its Cretan cities and used them as a laboratory for experiments in government
44
and social organization that were subsequently applied in the metropolis.
Sometimes, the aftermath and memory of empire can promote more clearly
articulated expressions of imperial ideas than were possible in the period of
empire itself. Thus, in the architecture of London, one of the least program-
matic of imperial capitals, there was no stronger expression of imperial ideals
 Keene / CITIES AND EMPIRES 17

than in the period when the peak had passed, a lagged response that is to some
degree explained by the state’s habitual reluctance to indulge in magnificence.
Yet in London, as much as in Venice, key elements in the cultural identity of
the place have come to be defined by the people drawn to it by its role as an
imperial capital.
Imperial cities often buttress their standing by importing symbols of power
from elsewhere. Rome shipped in obelisks from Egypt. These portable monu-
ments had a complex history. One was re-erected to mark the twelfth-century
revival of the republic of Rome, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the re-erection of others made similar contributions to papal programs for
reordering the city as the metropolis of the Counter-Reformation. Through
tourism and the circulation of prints, this newly ordered Rome became widely
known and was one of the most influential models for ideas used in the plan-
ning of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial cities, including the use of
45
obelisks and columns. The foundation of Constantinople likewise inaugu-
rated a long history of translation.46 Constantine’s own program, aiming to pro-
claim imperial authority and to establish Christianity as a universal system that
would embrace the existing framework of state religion, involved symbolic
statements of special complexity. At the focal point of his new city, in the cen-
ter of his forum, he set up a porphyry column, beneath which was buried the
supposed Palladium, originally the symbolic protection of Troy and more
recently housed in Rome. Constantine’s immense statue on top of the column
had originated as one of the Sun God, whose attributes were retained in the
head of the emperor now added to it. The orb in his hand was surmounted by a
representation of the female deity who traditionally stood for the fortune of a
city. This column subsequently attracted both pagan and Christian devotions.
Moreover, in this and other forms of self-representation, Constantine appears
47
to suggest his epiphany as both Sun God and Christ.
In due course, Constantinople itself became a source for imperial spoils.
After the capture of the city in 1204, the Venetians carried home a great collec-
tion of relics and monumental fragments. At first, they simply warehoused this
loot, perhaps because of a plan to transfer the central institutions of their state
to Constantinople itself, thereby asserting the legitimacy of the Venetians’
claim to be heirs to the imperial ideal.48 The transfer plan (if it had existed) was
dropped, and the Byzantine recapture of Constantinople in 1261 seems to have
strengthened a recently formulated intention to express the imperial character
of Venice itself in a scenographic allusion to Constantine’s capital involving
the display of the most monumental of the looted pieces. The bronze horses,
for example, which had originated on an arch in Rome, were transferred to
Constantine’s new Hippodrome and ended up over the new loggia of St.
Mark’s, itself a form of triumphal arch, whereas the winged lion in the
Piazzetta had enjoyed an even longer and more complex imperial career.
Constantine himself appears originally to have commissioned the statues of
the tetrarchs, which expressed the severity of imperial rule and were later set
18 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2005

49
up at the corner of St. Mark’s. In later centuries, Venice continued to celebrate
its wealth and status by appropriating images, relics, and decorative forms
both from ancient imperial cities and from contemporary commercial cities
50
within the empires of the Islamic world. This tradition of booty, collecting,
and triumphal display continued to characterize imperial capitals into the
twentieth century but rarely rivaled the Venetian program in depth and
subtlety.

CONCLUSION

Cities and empires represent different, but often complementary, forms of

human order, which interact in complex ways. At one level, imperial cities can
readily be classified within hierarchies—metropolis, provincial capital, port
of trade, and so on—even when a single city performs more than one of those
functions. In practice, matters are not so simple. Variations arise from the
political structures of empires themselves and the ways in which they were
formed. There will be differences in the role and perception of its cities
between an empire founded on commerce and one based on territorial control,
or between one united by the idea of citizenship and one that exercises hege-
mony over a heterogeneous collection of polities. A single empire may well
include parts governed by different constitutional principles, especially as it
evolves throughout time. Moreover, the characteristics of an empire may be
expressed in cities outside it, either in client states or in those that seek to
enhance their status or to resolve internal problems by borrowing from an
imperial model nearby. Almost all imperial cities have in common certain cat-
egories of institution and monument. Likewise, they express some universaliz-
ing principle, but in a wide variety of forms. These features are as apparent in
nomadic empires and transient encampments as in cities of durable construc-
tion, and in the empires being formed today as in those of past centuries. More-
over, although the idea of the city seems essential to that of empire, the
concentration of central imperial functions in a single city is not. Many
empires have had more than one capital or have distributed functions among
cities. Imperial cities contain exceptionally large and diverse numbers of
strangers, attracted by prospects of advancement near the center of power and/
or drafted in by conquest or other means. Visitors to the imperial encampment
of the Mongols were struck by the large numbers of foreigners from the
farthest limits of Europe and Asia, including enslaved captives, princely hos-
tages, diplomats, merchants, and craftsmen. Very often, in more recent
empires, such displaced persons find the metropolitan environment to be one
where they can most effectively rehearse their ethnic or political identities,
sometimes against the oppressive system symbolized by the city itself.
Cities are perhaps most important for empires as symbolic capital and as
sites where the material and ideological expressions of that capital can be
 Keene / CITIES AND EMPIRES 19

accumulated, displayed, or obtained. They both preserve imperial identity and

serve as a means by which the authority or insignia of one empire is transmit-
ted to successors. Certain cities—Chang’an, Troy, Rome, and Nara—endure
through millennia as stimuli to imperial imaginations or as museum-like col-
lections that offer the preservation of imperial legitimacy long after their
administrative or political role in empire has faded away. The transmission of
imperial attributes through cities is not necessarily a straightforward matter of
conquest, for the encounter by the citizens of one empire with the cities of
another has commonly caused them to rethink their own identities and pur-
poses. This interchange of symbol and practice among empires, a process con-
tinuing now much as it has done for more than 3,000 years, is one of the core
strands for exploration in the theme of empires and cities.

1. For example, Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and
France, c.1500 - c.1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), esp. 11-62; David Armitage, ed.,
Theories of Empire, 1400-1800 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998); and Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan
Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1964). Unless otherwise stated, all dates in this article are Common Era.
2. Thomas A. Brady, “The Rise of Merchant Empires, 1400-1700: A Merchant Counterpoint,” in The
Political Economy of Merchant Empires, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 117-60, esp. 120-21.
3. M. W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 19-47, is a valuable discussion
of many of these points.
4. Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (New York: Africana, 1980), 116, 154-55, 174-75.
5. Charles Verlinden, “The Transfer of Colonial Techniques from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic,” in
Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an Introduction, trans.
Yvonne Freccero (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), 3-32.
6. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 1992), 74-75, 78-79, 142-43, 148-49; and cf. James Campbell, Essays in
Anglo-Saxon History (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), 103, 108.
7. R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identity in the British Isles, 1093-1343 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 27, 32-33, 35, 40, 45.
8. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), esp. 24-60.
9. Mark Ravina, “State-Building and Political Economy in Early Modern Japan,” Journal of Asian Stud-
ies 54 (1995): 997-1022.
10. Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1990), 108-18; and William H. Coaldrake, Architecture and Authority in Japan (London: Routledge, 1996),
60-70.
11. For the formative period, see Conrad Totman, A History of Japan (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000),
60-86; Delmer M. Brown, ed., Ancient Japan, vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993), 455-56; and Donald H. Shiveley and William H. McCullough, eds., Heian
Japan, vol. 2 of The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 344.
12. Kozo Yamamura, ed., Medieval Japan, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999), 423-26, 439.
13. Peter Jackson and David Morgan, eds. and trans., The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey
to the Court of the Great Khan Mögke, 1253-1255, 2nd ser., no. 173 (London: Hakluuyt Society, 1990), 131.
14. Jackson and Morgan, Mission, 74 n. 1.
20 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2005

15. Jackson and Morgan, Mission, 20-21, 125, 209, 221-22; Christopher Dawson, ed., The Mongol Mis-
sion: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 61, 64-65; and Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City,
148-50.
16. Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City, 20-21, 151-56; and Caroline Blunden and Mark Elvin, Cultural
Atlas of China (Oxford: Phaidon, 1983), 98, 104-5, 136.
17. Joan Oates and David Oates, Nimrud: An Assyrian City Revealed (London: British School of Archae-
ology in Iraq, 2001), 48-52, 235-36.
18. André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000),
17-39.
19. Blunden and Elvin, Cultural Atlas, 19, 23, 104-5.
20. Richard Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983), 42, 45.
21. K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of
Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 358-61, 364; John F. Richards, The Mughal
Empire, vol. 1, pt. 5 of The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 19, 24, 27-31, 49, 52; John F. Richards, “The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and
Jahangir,” in The Mughal State, 1526-1750, ed. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1978; reprint,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 126-67.
22. Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India, 1660-1947 (London: Murray,
1985), 77-78.
23. Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, “Das Reich ohne Hauptstadt? Die Multizentralität der
Hauptstadtfunktionen im Reich bis 1806,” in Haupstädte in europäische Nationalstaaten, ed. Theodore
Schieder and Gerhard Brunn (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1983), 5-13.
24. Cf. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of
Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 11-19, 73-74.
25. Bryan Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Urban Public Building in North-
ern and Central Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. 3-48.
26. Henrik Birkman, “Kiev, Novgorod and Moscow: Three Varieties of Urban Society in East Slavic Ter-
ritory,” in Urban Society of Eastern Europe in Premodern Times, ed. Bariša Krekic! (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987), 1-62, esp. 9-14.
27. Charles Wilson Hackett, ed., Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya and
Approaches Thereto, to 1773, Collected by Adolph F.A. Bandelier and Fanny R. Bandelier, 3 vols. (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1923-1937), 3:108, 3:148; and George P. Hammond and
Agapito Rey, Don Juan de Oñate, Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595-1628, 2 vols. (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1953), 2:1087-88.
28. George Kubler, Building the Escorial (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 75-76,
131-34; Dora P. Crouch, Daniel J. Garr, and Axel I. Mundigo, Spanish City Planning in America (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 2, 6-19, 39-40, 69-115; and Richard Kagan, “A World without Walls: City
and Town in Colonial Spanish America,” in City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective, ed.
James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117-52, esp. 139-48.
29. Michael Pawson and David Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 81-97,
176-77; Donny L. Hamilton, “The Port Royal Project,” Nautical Archaeology Program, Texas A&M Uni-
versity (2000), http://nautarch.tamu.edu/portroyal/; and Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols (Lon-
don: T. Lowndes, 1754), 2:139.
30. E. Krake, “Sung K’ai-feng: Pragmatic Metropolis and Formalistic Capital,” in Crisis and Prosperity
in Sung China, ed. John Winthrop Haeger (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), 49-77, esp. 71.
31. Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 114-16.
32. Jerome Ch’en, China and the West: Society and Culture, 1815-1937 (London: Hutchinson, 1979),
26-28; and Yamamura, Medieval Japan, 424.
33. Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India, vol. 2, pt. 6 of The New Cam-
bridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 123-35.
34. A. Verhulst, The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 91-92,
108-11.
35. Ch’en, China and the West, 317-18, 333-35.
36. Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, 146.
 Keene / CITIES AND EMPIRES 21

37. Derek Keene,“New Discoveries at the Hanseatic Steelyard in London,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter
107 (1989): 15-25; and D. M. Palliser, ed., 600-1540, vol. 1 of The Cambridge Urban History of Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2000), 196-98.
38. Verlinden, “Transfer of Colonial Techniques”; and Donald M. Nicoll, Byzantium and Venice: A Study
in Diplomatic Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 59-62, 94-96.
39. For example, Peter Salway, Roman Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 90-98, 186-88.
40. George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1948), 69-80, 100-2; Crouch, Garr, and Mundingo, Spanish City Planning, 58-59; Johanna Broda,
Davíd Carrasco, and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of Tenochtitlan: Center and Periphery
in the Aztec World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. 124-62.
41. David A. Lupher, Romans in the New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Amer-
ica (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2003), ch. 2, 319, 325.
42. Maria Georgopoulou, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43-103.
43. Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press,
1989), 152-54; and Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 29 (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana,
1983), 142-46, s.v. “Alvise Corner.”
44. Georgopoulou, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies, 116-18, 243-52.
45. Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1980), 198-99; and Richard Krautheimer; The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655-1667 (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1985), 63-73, 88-89, 120-23, 143-44.
46. Gilbert Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire: études sur le recueil des Patria (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1984), 128-31.
47. Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals, 55-56, 61, 63-64; Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire, 90,
129, 131; and Cyril Mango, Le Développement urbain de Constantinople: IVe- VIIe siècles (Paris: De
Boccard, 1990), 25.
48. S. Marin, “The Venetian Community—between Civitas and Imperium: A Project of the Capital’s
Transfer from Venice to Constantinople, According to the Chronicle of Daniele Barbaro,” European Review
of History 10 (2003): 81-102.
49. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1996); Georgopoulou, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies, 231-33; Krautheimer,
Three Christian Capitals, 55; and Nicoll, Byzantium and Venice, 182-87.
50. Élizabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Venise entre Jérusalem, Rome et Byzance: stratégies d’appropriation
d’images,” in Mégalopoles méditerranéennes: Géographie urbaine retrospective, ed. Robert Ilbert and
Jean-Charles Depaule (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, Collection de l’École française de Rome 261, 2000),
546-64; and Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic world on Venetian Architec-
ture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).

Derek Keene is Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Metropolitan History at the In-

stitute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He
was the founding director of the Centre for Metropolitan History at the Institute of His-
torical Research. His books and other publications include the following: as general
editor, St. Paul’s: the Cathedral Church of London, 604-2000 (2004); contributions to
The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 1, and to The New Cambridge Medieval
History, vol. 4, pt. 1 (2004); and many studies of economic, social, cultural, and mate-
rial aspects of English towns, principally in the period 600-1700.
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