City and Guild Chapter One: Towns & Cities

It is a warm, sunny day in one of the grandest cities of Mythic Europe. Sunlight reaches down between the close-packed buildings on either side to cast strong shadows. Victor of Mercere, who has come from the covenant of Semita Errabunda to conduct business for several of the residents, has been here several times and looks forward to making the most of his visit. He is accompanied as usual by Aeolus, his vain magical horse.

Aeolus takes care not to step in the glistening puddles, which might splash and soil his coat. He savors the rich aroma, so thick with scents that he cannot pick out those of any other horses. People are coming and going all around, most too busy to stop and admire his good looks. He presses himself against the wall of a house to allow a laden cart to pass then moves on, avoiding the steaming pat of ordure dropped by the oxen. A church bell tolls from somewhere behind him. From an alley on the right he hears a child crying and raised voices, but cannot make out any words because on his left a stall-holder calls out the virtues of his goods. He steps over a beggar who cries out for alms. A black-clad figure clutching a few scrolls pushes past. Aeolus makes way for a couple of boys driving a laden donkey, and then a woman calls out from above and the contents of a bucket hit the road just behind him.

Victor is excited by the bustle of commerce and industry all around him and the prospect of picking up the latest news from the province. He makes way for the cart and notices that it carries great wooden beams and planks, reminding him of the new guildhall that was under construction the last time he was here. He hears the bell and knows he should not delay, but spares a minute or two to admire the latest fashion in shoes and boots displayed on the stall. He drops a small coin into the hand of the beggar, avoids the donkey, and follows after the figure in black. He needs to purchase some particular pigments for Jerome the Scribe; return a book to the monastery nearest to the northern gate, where they have recently completed construction of a magnificent new chapel; and if possible track down a comb fine enough for Moratamis of House Guernicus to use in an enchantment. Then he will be free to call at the castle to swap hunting stories with his Lordship’s eldest son. However, his first quest is for a mug of ale.

Urban vs. Rural

Towns and cities are complex, diverse, and boisterous places to be, and while their individual characters are varied, they are fairly easy to define. While all villages and some towns still fit into the long-standing feudal pattern of life, most towns and all cities have laws and institutions that are distinctly different from those of rural areas. A town’s charter (see Town Charters, below) and the rights is gives, particularly with regard to trade, are what make it a town. A city is a large town that has been given the right to call itself such. The citizen of a town or city usually has the right to have his sons educated and ordained, to marry off his daughters, and to change his occupation. This freedom is greatest in the cities of Germany, Italy, and parts of Flanders. So strong is the power of some of the cities in northern Italy that they also rule the area surrounding them, mainly in order to control food supplies. In France and England the monarchy has been supporting the increasing independence of the townsmen, embracing urban leaders as allies to counter the power of the rural, land-holding lords and barons.

Distinctions between the inhabitants of urban areas are based on class, guild, and profession. Those who earn their living in service, or by trade or manual labor, are looked down upon by those involved in administrative, martial, and clerical activities. The urban free artisans and merchants form a burgess class with increasing power to control economic and political life within their own community. Change in social structures and political systems is very evident in the cities. This contrasts with the old belief still prevalent in rural areas: that one has a certain social station and way of life because that is just the way things are. Tension between town and countryside is more apparent in Spain, France, and Germany than in Italy and England.

Citizens take pride in their home town, competing with others around to be the best (except in Germany, where there is often a spirit of cooperation) by contributing to funds to pay for the erection of prestigious public buildings such as cathedrals, bridges, encircling walls, towers, and harbors; putting up large private buildings like palaces, warehouses, and guildhalls; commissioning documents to record their history and activities; and having a unique seal to authenticate these, identifying them clearly with their place of origin.

Origins

Ancient Greek civilization promoted urban life and spread the idea across the Mediterranean lands where it was adopted and expanded by the Etruscans and the Romans. The latter established towns and cities throughout their empire but these fell into decay when the empire crumbled, except in Byzantium, Arab lands (including southern and eastern Spain), and Italy. By 1220, in many parts of Mythic Europe, society is in a period of urban expansion that started 40 or 50 years ago, so many towns and cities have a lot of new buildings or show signs of overcrowding. A good number of towns, particularly in southern Europe, have grown on the foundations of Roman towns, and some retain a vestige of the Roman layout. Often they have been able to make good use of recycled building stone and the distinctive thin, red Roman bricks, and may even retain some of the ancient structures (for example, see the city of Trier described in Guardians of the Forests: The Rhine Tribunal, pages 129– 130). Mercurian magi (see Houses of Hermes: True Lineages, page 95) pay particular attention to these towns as likely places to find traces of the Cult of Mercury. Some towns have grown up at sites that are naturally well suited to trade, for example on a navigable river, a suitable place for a bridge or safe harbor, or at the junction of major roads. Others have developed at places of pilgrimage, or around a castle or a monastery. Similarly, a thriving market on a site that has been used for that purpose since the dawn of time may well have become the nucleus for a settlement.

A relatively new phenomenon is the planned new town, established by a rich member of the nobility on a site of his own choosing. Such a settlement has the encircling wall and citizens’ rights that make it a town, but usually lacks an obvious nucleus. Many are set up for commercial reasons, while others are largely agricultural and some are political. For example, new towns are established in border areas to stake a claim on territory and were used thus by the Normans when making their mark on England and Wales during the 11th and 12th centuries (63 towns were founded during the latter). If your saga follows history, the new trend gathers pace. Norman new towns proliferate in Wales and England, both Norman English and French lords initiate them in Aquitaine and Gascony to claim power and land, and many new towns are planted in Germany and Eastern Europe to introduce new agricultural methods to Slav areas and raise more taxes from them. Many fail to attract sufficient economic activity to sustain them. A nearby covenant could well have reasons to hasten the decline or support the growth of such a town.

Town Charters

A town charter distinguishes a town from a crowded collection of buildings and grants rights and privileges, or customs, to the citizens of the town, who, in return, pay taxes. It is the legal and economic foundation of the town, and is a living document, in the sense that modifications can be made — privileges and restrictions may be added or removed. Charters have been granted to towns for several centuries, but many of the great cities of Mythic Europe date from antiquity and hence predate their charter. In their case, charters often ratify rights that existed previously, and the process of negotiating the exact form of these “ancient rights” can cause considerable conflict between burgesses and their feudal lord. New charters are also sometimes imposed upon existing towns as a consequence of military conquest.

Becoming a Townsman

To become a townsman or burgess it is, at a minimum, necessary for a character to live in the town continuously for a year and a day, after which he is accorded rights and privileges under the charter. Some town charters require additional conditions for citizenship, generally with the aim of restricting citizenship to the wealthy. Some possible additional conditions for prospective citizens include: owning land, constructing a house, swearing an oath to defend the town, having a trade, or being a member of a guild. In Toledo, and some other Spanish towns, a man’s wife must live permanently in the town for him to be eligible for citizenship, which prevents itinerant merchants from claiming citizenship of several towns. Clerical inhabitants cannot usually become the citizens of towns, as they are held accountable to canon law — and their rights may be inferior to the rights of townsmen.

In addition to gaining their rights under the charter, becoming a townsman creates a sympathetic connection between the character and all others living under the same charter (including those in other towns under the same family of charters). The connection can be exploited to provide a +1 multiplier bonus to the Penetration score of a magical attack (see ArM5, page 84). If a character becomes a citizen of another town, a new sympathetic connection is formed, which ties the character to the new town, and the previous sympathetic connection is severed.

The Lord

A charter is granted by an authority figure: the lord who claims suzerainty over the land that the town occupies. Usually this is a king, a lesser noble, a bishop, or the abbot of a monastery, but there are no universal rules about who may grant a charter. The only real requirement to be a charter lord is to make a claim of ownership over the land on which the town is sited. Sometimes, such claims are contestable, and cause disputes between lords. To avoid warfare, these disputes must often be adjudicated by some “neutral” party, like the Church or a feudal overlord. Unless a town is very important, lords are usually reluctant to resort to warfare, and wary of being drawn into a broader conflict, other neighboring lords often try to help find a peaceful solution. Clearly, the burgesses of a town prefer the most generous of the competing charter lords, and sometimes, especially if the town is large, their preferences may ultimately decide a conflict between charter lords.

Noble Lords

Noble lords grant charters as a means of control, to ensure loyalty, and to gather revenue. The kings of England, for example, place a strong emphasis on the control of coastal towns and maritime ports, and have thus founded ports or granted royal charters to prosperous or strategically important coastal towns that were previously chartered by lesser lords (Liverpool, 1208; Newcastle upon Tyne, 1070; Portsmouth, 1194). Similarly, Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, and Stamford were all granted charters in the ninth and tenth centuries by Danish kings as a method of consolidating military conquest, and currently, Christian lords in Iberia are busily granting charters to towns newly wrested from the control of the Almohad Empire. French kings rely on their ability to raise armies from both rural and urban areas, so they typically grant royal charters that include compulsory militia duty.

Story Seed: Charter Documents Rego vis may be extracted from charter documents that have been signed by town representatives and the granting lord. Most town charter documents provide only one pawn of Rego vis, which is tainted by the Divine, so this is a very inefficient method of obtaining vis, but very large towns might provide more vis. This action can be seen as an unnecessary interference with the mundane — a charge that most magi are unwilling to risk for such a poor return. Significantly, however, extracting the vis destroys the sympathetic connections created by the charter, so a paranoid magus living in a town may wish to destroy the documents for this purpose. Charters are valued, so it requires considerable finesse to acquire the documents. Magi seeking them may need to substitute copies for the originals, and so on.

Lesser nobles primarily grant charters for financial gain, rather than any military strategy. Usually, they do not need to ask permission of their feudal superior to grant a charter, but there is always a risk that a particularly prosperous town will be claimed under a royal charter. In France, through a system known as paragium, small groups of nobles grant charters in partnership. In this case, an agreement made between the lords, generally predating the town charter, describes how town revenue will be split. The Gascony region of France is under-developed and is now the site of many new, growing, pareagium settlements.

Ecclesiastical Lords

Bishops reside in large cities that typically already have royal charters, but they do grant charters to small towns on their own extensive rural estates. The abbots of monastic orders similarly grant charters to towns on their rural estates, but are much less prolific granters of charters than bishops. Towns granted charters by ecclesiastical lords are normally intended to act as collection points for rural produce destined for the seat of the diocese, and so tend to remain small. An exception was Archbishop Wichmann of Magdeburg, who, following a vision of a vast area of urban development, granted charters to many towns last century in Germany and Poland. Brandenburg, Jüterbog, Leipzig, and Stendal were all granted charters by either the Archbishop or other lords he encouraged. The Archbishop used agents called locatores, who in return for special privileges found sites and settlers for his new towns. Locatores are still used by lords in Germany, and are not uncommon in other parts of Mythic Europe.

Towns with ecclesiastical charters have a Divine aura of 3 within the town-walls, which is one higher than would be normally expected (see Realms of Power: The Divine, page 10). The aura within these towns’ churches and cathedrals is, however, unaffected by the nature of its charter. Even if a town has an ecclesiastical charter, it is still unusual for ecclesiastical characters to be able to become citizens, because of the contradictions this would cause under canon law; this may mean that the majority of the town’s inhabitants are not eligible for citizenship.

Supernatural Lords

Faerie nobility also grant charters, both to faerie and to mundane towns. Sometimes towns with faerie charters are entirely located within Faerie regiones, and so are removed from the mundane feudal system, but small isolated towns under the jurisdiction of mundane nobles may find themselves offered rival charters by local faerie lords. Some faerie charters are merely imitations of mundane charters and the faerie inhabitants may not quite understand what they have been granted. Other faerie towns, however, are fully integrated with the local mundane economy, holding markets that are attended by neighboring merchants and magi, electing town officers, and trying rambunctious satyrs in the town court. Faerie lords frequently require elected town officials to undergo a test or interview in the faerie court.

Story Seed: The Faerie Charter A company of soldiers, dressed in the livery of the local mundane lord, is discovered, lost, near the covenant. The soldiers’ captain, a young knight eager to please his lord, explains that the group is searching for the town of Nottingwood. The town once paid a tax to the lord, on whose land it is built, but for the last seven years the tax has not been seen at the castle. The lord himself is curiously unwilling to do anything about this behavior, but the young captain has resolved to personally collect the tax this year. Nottingwood has, in fact, entered into a charter agreement with a local faerie king. In return for a mortal wife and a festival in his honor, held at each of the equinoxes, the king has allowed the town to elect a council of seven aldermen who run the town. Several faerie merchants, who sell faerie wine and livestock, own property in Nottingwood, and the townsfolk have built a watchtower on the outskirts of the town, which is garrisoned by a dozen faerie knights. Most of the burgesses of Nottingwood are rather pleased with this arrangement, and they interact normally with the surrounding towns — although they are reluctant to speak about their charter to outsiders. The local priest is concerned, and has sent messages to his bishop, but he has yet to receive a reply. The faerie king has cast a spell on the mundane lord of the town that has caused his lack of interest in the town, and the faerie knights in the watchtower are maintaining illusions that prevent the young captain and his soldiers from finding the town. If the magi discover the truth of the situation, the burgesses of Nottingwood — or perhaps the faerie king himself — may offer to buy their complicity.

Worship of the Divine is discouraged by faerie lords, as they find the Divine upsetting and disconcerting, and so mundane towns that adopt faerie charters have a reduced Divine aura of 1 within the townwalls, which may become swamped by a stronger Faerie aura. Churches within a faerie town may still have a strong Divine aura, preserved by a small, zealous congregation of the faithful.

Demons also occasionally tempt townsfolk into entering demonic charter agreements. Demons use charters to manipulate entire towns into pacts for mundane riches. Generally speaking, only small, isolated towns fall under demonic charters, as the presence of the Divine is too strong in large towns. Some towns have a secret demonic charter and another, parallel charter with a mundane lord.

A typical charter demon has an Infernal Might of 15 (Mentem) and can offer some, or all, of the services below to the townsfolk.

• Relief from disease: +2 Living Condition Modifier.
• Assistance for local merchants: +3 bonus to all Bargain or Profession Merchant totals.
• Performance of dangerous or difficult labor for the townsfolk: the Polish town of Beuthen has a lead mine operated by the demon Szarlen.

Minor Covenant Boon: Chartered Town The covenant is a town and has been granted a generous charter by the local lord, which frees the covenant from mundane interference and taxes, except as required by the charter. The covenfolk expect to be able to freely exercise their rights under the charter, which may occasionally interfere with the plans of the magi who are otherwise able to control the town — although daily town business is generally delegated to mundane representatives. The charter cannot compel the magi to render service to the lord, as this would contravene the precedent in the Peripheral Code that prohibits acting as a court wizard. Nonetheless, the lord may from time to time request service from the magi and hence the magi may need to defend themselves from accusations that they are in fact court wizards. This is a boon, as it frees the covenant from any feudal obligations associated with the land that the covenant is constructed on, and the magi also benefit from having urban amenities (merchants and craftsmen, for example) readily available. The main benefit to the lord is that the presence of the magi is likely to increase the prosperity of the town, perhaps encouraging the growth of other towns that he controls, and increasing the amount of taxable traffic on the roads. The lord may also imagine that the magi will help to cope with any supernatural crises that occur in the area — although they may well cause supernatural perils, too. This boon is incompatible with the Urban Hook (ArM5, page 74), and cannot be Unknown. Major Covenant Hook: Charter Lord Several towns have been granted charters by the covenant (probably via a tame-noble proxy), which attracts the attention of neighboring lords — particularly if a generous charter, or magically augmented living conditions, result in immigration to the covenant’s towns — and the magi, or their proxies, may need to deal with petitions or even revolts by their townsfolk. This activity is clearly interference in the mundane world, and the magi must continuously be cautious that they are not seen to “bring ruin on their sodales.” The covenant and its towns are likely to be under frequent investigation by the Tribunal’s Quaesitores, and neighboring covenants may also monitor the situation. This hook may only be taken by a covenant that is a large land owner, as the covenant, or its proxies, must control land on which to site the towns, and this hook cannot be Unknown.

In return for his services, the demon might appropriate the tithe normally granted to the Church, or require some form of worship. Towns with demonic charters do not necessarily have an Infernal aura, but they are used to stage other Infernal plots.

Some land-owning covenants have also granted charters to towns on their lands (see insert), but this is controversial and can be easily construed as an unnecessary interference with the mundane.

Common Privileges

From the perspective of the burgesses, a charter granted by a noble is much the same as a charter granted by an ecclesiastic; both ecclesiastical and noble charters typically include most of the privileges described below. Charters granted by supernatural lords are more varied, reflecting the nature of the charter lord. Normally, the same rights are granted to all townsfolk, although some charters distinguish between burgesses and mere inhabitants. In return for their charter, townsfolk collectively pay an annual tax to the lord. A typical tax for a town of several hundred burgesses is 40 pounds (a noble of average wealth might collect a tax from several such towns). Particularly avaricious lords may demand a greater amount of tax and supernatural lords might demand a non-monetary payment, like mortal wives or special festivals.

Town charters provide legal assurances. Typically, burgesses can only be tried by courts within the town, and have no obligation to attend external courts — especially arbitrary feudal courts. Charters also often simplify legal processes by placing restrictions upon, or abolishing, trials by ordeal or combat, and setting limits on the fines that can be imposed by courts; for example, the law of Breteuil limits judicial fines to the sum of 12 pence — which is significant but affordable by a burgess of average wealth. A stable legal framework means that merchants can conduct their business without fear of arbitrary confiscation of produce or profit.

Monopolies and exemptions from feudal tolls are also granted in charters to encourage the activities of merchants. Toll exemptions may apply throughout a lord’s territory, and the townsmen of powerful towns could have exemptions granted by many different lords, of which they can take advantage when abroad. A charter can grant merchants permission to hold a market or fair, although usually with conditions. For example, proportions of produce might be reserved for special groups (public stores, lepers, or Jews), sales of some produce might be restricted to preserve the monopolies of other nearby charter towns, prices may be set, or stall fees might be paid to the lord or town. For example, by their town’s charter, the merchants of Ipswich are granted a monopoly on the buying and selling of millstones within the local county — obviously, this effectively grants the merchants a monopoly on milling.

The Customs of Lorris Lorris, a small town in France, was first granted customary rights by King Louis VI, which were later confirmed by Louis VII in 1155. The grant of rights included: The townsmen have the status of freemen, and anyone from another settlement, including a rural serf, who remains in the town for a year and a day, also becomes a freeman. Each man in the town has the right to sell and trade produce and goods. The men of the town are exempted from service in the royal army. (This is a very rare right in France.) The men of the town are also exempted from other customs and taxes. The exception is that they must carry wine, wood, or corn for the king once a year — although by 1220 townsmen can pay a “fine” of one penny instead. Each household must pay the king an annual rent of six pence. This is a significant expense for most burgesses, but they consider the rent fair. The town is subject to royal justice. This means that the town, along with neighboring towns in the region, is administered by a bailli who is an official appointed by the king. The bailli acts as a judicial magistrate (see Crime, below), is responsible for maintaining regional militias and defenses, and collects rents and fees on the king’s behalf. Bailli have usually made a career of serving the king, and many appointees are drawn from the king’s army, especially those appointed by Phillip II Augustus, who became king in 1180, and, if your saga follows history, becomes ill and dies in 1223. As the bailli is responsible for a wide geographical region, he devolves many of his duties to lesser officials, called prevots, who are appointed either by himself, or the king. Prevots have responsibility for a smaller area — perhaps a single town and the surrounding countryside.

Another right that is very important to merchants is salvage. Typically, the local lord claims any cargo from a shipwreck, but some towns have managed to gain their merchants wide rights to salvage. The merchants of Lübeck, for example, have negotiated a right to salvage in many areas of the Baltic.

Charters also include procedures for electing or appointing town officials, such as aldermen, bailiffs, consuls, coroners, councilors, magistrates, mayors, ministerials, portmen, rectors, and reeves. Many different systems for choosing town officials are in use and which one is chosen depends upon the temperament of the lord, the relative power of the town, and the town’s history. Possible systems include election, appointment by the lord, selection by the lord from a list proposed by the town, or (rarely) inheritance. The term of office is usually a year and a day, but officials may be appointed for other periods including life. Apart from the ability to make decisions that benefit themselves, town officials are compensated for their service to the town, in the form of a wage or additional rights; for example the right to pasture their horses in a particular field. Women are usually excluded from office and the selection processes.

Finally, town charters usually regulate the buying and selling of land. This is banned outright in some charters, however, and instead a rent, called tenure, is paid to the lord. As tenure is paid in cash, rather than labor or produce, it represents a significant improvement over the serfdom of rural peasants. Most charters, however, do allow the sale of land, but place restrictions on to whom it can be sold; for example, it might only be permissible to sell land to residents, or certain groups might be prohibited from owning land. Some ecclesiastical lords have banned the sale of town land to the Order of Hermes.

Town Governance

The governance of a town is theoretically dictated by the charter, and usually town officials cooperatively make decisions for the whole town. Important or long-term decisions are made at town meetings that sometimes may be attended by ordinary citizens, even though decisions are made by the officials themselves — usually by a council of aldermen or magistrates, possibly led by a mayor. Dictatorial systems are rare, and even when a charter reserves substantial powers to the charter lord or another individual, most decision-making is actually devolved to appointed officials.

Town officials also perform daily duties like assessing taxes, setting prices, or holding criminal courts. Sometimes, officials have responsibility for particular areas — for example, portmen are appointed to assess tolls at port, coroners are primarily concerned with assessing the value of fines resultant from violent deaths (which typically accrue to the crown), bailiffs hold criminal courts, and guild-masters police the statutes of town guilds — but other officials have wide areas of concern. The exact titles and duties of town officials depends upon local language, local history and geography, and regional idiosyncrasy, which should all be considered by the troupe when choosing roles for town officials. For example, a town without a port obviously has no use for portmen, but may have an official tasked with running a mine near the town. Another town, on the route of an important pilgrimage, may have an official who works with local churches to ensure that pilgrims are fed and housed, without causing aggravation to the burgesses of the town. The Customs of Lorris (see insert), the Law of Freiburg (see insert), and some of the illustrative town profiles (see Profiles, below) include examples of how town officials are organized in particular towns.

During the 13th century, most towns are growing rapidly, and although town officials are invariably wealthy they are not drawn exclusively from established town-families: new townsmen are equally acceptable as officials. Town officials may also be members of craft or merchant guilds, and in many towns the boundary between town and guild business is very vague; indeed, town charters and guild charters are often intimately entwined. Church representatives can sometimes serve as town officials, even if they cannot be citizens, but they are unlikely to dominate decision-making, except in towns granted charters by ecclesiastical lords. In some towns, particularly in Italy, officials are politicized and form factions. This can result in rival factions, backed by wealthy families, dominating different quarters of the town, and preventing effective governance.

Town Officials As being a town official is usually a temporary office it is not really suitable as a Virtue or Flaw, and is perhaps better incorporated into a saga as part of a story. If a troupe desires, however, a Virtue modeled upon the Minor Social Status Virtue: Town Magistrate (see Crime) can be used. For a more general town official, the requirement to have a score in the Civil and Canon Law Ability and the benefit of being able to access Academic Abilities during character generation should both be dropped.

Families of Town Charters

Sometimes a town is given the same charter as an existing town, which creates families of towns with similar laws. Some daughter towns are entirely independent of their mother, while others are politically dominated by their parent. Some example families of town laws are the laws of Freiburg (see insert), Lübeck, and Cuenca.

The town of Lübeck received its charter in 1188 from Frederick Barborossa, Emperor and King of Germany, which superseded a charter previously granted by Henry the Lion. The Emperor’s comprehensive charter details the town’s constitution and administration and includes laws on inheritance, fortifications, coinage, and taxes. In 1208, Lübeck’s law was granted to Rostock, by Prince Borwin of Mecklenburg, and other Baltic towns also use Lübeck’s law. The Teutonic Knights, a landowning monastic military order, are suspicious of Lübeck’s charter and promote their own, less autonomous, charter to Baltic towns.

The law or fuero of Cuenca contains one thousand clauses and regulates inheritance, criminal law, military service, irrigation and pasture rights, the use of public baths, and Christian-Jewish relationships. It was granted to Cuenca by Alfonso VIII of Castile, in 1190, soon after he liberated the town from the Muslims. Since then several other reconquered towns in Iberia have been granted the same charter.

Caption text

The Law of Freiburg The Law of Freiburg was first granted in 1120, by Conrad Zähringen, and has been revised several times since. Freiburg is located on the edge of the Black Forest (see Guardians of the Forests, page 64) and prior to 1120 the site was uninhabited, but by gathering merchants (mostly from Cologne) and granting them land in the town the lord was able to quickly populate the town. The charter has also been granted to several other towns, including Diessenhofen (1178) and Berne (1191). The main provisions of the charter are: The original citizens were granted plots of land in the town, by the lord, and in return pay him an annual rent. Citizens may freely sell urban property, without restriction — the rent must be paid by the new owner — and the town council sells additional plots of land (from which the lord also accrues an annual rental). The lord guarantees peace and safe-conduct to all who visit the market, and ransoms back stolen market goods. The lord allows citizens free use of pastures, streams, and the forest near the town — although, in practice, the town council controls access. The citizens of the town are free from feudal customs duties and inheritance restrictions. Disputes are resolved in a town court, or the court of the merchant guild. (In the towns that have adopted the Law of Freiburg, the court of Freiburg acts as a court of appeal). The town is governed by a council of 24 coniuratores fori, elected from amongst the citizens for terms of a year and a day — usually the existing council is ratified. Most council members are merchants and descendants of the original townsmen. The lord appoints several ministerials to represent him, who generally hold office for many years. Ministerials are not members of the council, but individuals can be both councilors and ministerials. Ministerials have no power over the council, and have military responsibilities to the lord (they are his knights), but these duties are only nominal today. The council appoints, from among their number, a rector, who acts as mayor for the town, and a causidicus (sometimes the same person), who is the magistrate who runs the town court (see Crime). The town’s income is from several sources: sale of land, fees from market-stall holders, judicial fines, and the estates of citizens who die without heirs. The council administers town finances, commissions the construction of public buildings, and administers collective town property, like the nearby pastures. Individual council members take responsibility for each of these council functions.

City & Guild Communes

Communes are towns that have revolted against their lord and written their own charter; their charter has not been granted, but taken. Commune charters grant similar rights to other charters, but ultimate power resides with town officials, who retain all taxes collected by the town. Many towns in Northern Italy are communes, which have exploited conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor, local lords, and the Pope to become strong and independent, and the communes are enmeshed in a complex web of alliances and feuds. Some towns in France and Spain are also communes, but such towns are not tolerated in England.

Communes can be substantial landowners in their own right, like the city of Lucca, in northern Italy. Lucca was granted a charter by Henry IV, in 1081, which was overthrown in a commune revolt in 1115. Since then, the city has warred against and conquered the lands of 30 neighboring rural lords, capturing a number of smaller towns in the process. Today, an uneasy truce exists between Lucca and the rival commune of Pisa, 30 miles to the south.

Structure

While every urban area has its own characteristics, there are some valid generalizations, even if every urban settlement differs in at least one way from them.

Topography

Most long-established cities take the form of a very irregular set of concentric circles, each marked by whatever remains of the wall or ditch that was once the outer boundary. Somewhere near the center lie the castle, cathedral, and main market square, with major administrative buildings, such as the guildhall, close by. From here, narrow, twisting streets and alleys reach out in all directions, many lined with workshops or shops with dwelling space above. Most towns have developed by assimilating small, scattered settlements, each of which grew up around its own nucleus, and these break up the flow of winding streets — a convent or monastery, a parish church, or a subsidiary marketplace. Settlements stretch out along either side of the approach roads beyond the marked boundary to the town or city. The newer urban areas are an exception since most are built to a plan, in particular the towns newly established in eastern Germany.

In many urban settlements, the first building on the site was a defensive fortification of some sort (see Covenants, pages 11–15, for details of castle structures). The stone castle that dominates the town may still serve that role but by now it is more likely remodeled as a statement of wealth and authority. A good number of towns in the lands that formerly belonged to the Roman Empire have grown up on the foundations of a Roman settlement. Often these display two distinct nuclei, one commercial, typically focused on a monastery because that was where the town’s market started as the monks sold off the surplus from their rural estates, and the other largely administrative and ecclesiastic. A castle might stand on the foundations of a Roman temple, but it is more likely that the church avoided the pagan site, so that the cathedral stands near to but not on top of it.

Outside the walls are the cemeteries, and the hospices for lepers. These are established a good distance beyond the walls, for reasons of health, but a growing city can reach them, so it is not unusual in the most vigorous cities to find an old cemetery within the wall.

A visitor to a town or city that is unknown to him will have difficulty finding his way about, as there are no maps or signposts. The castle perched up on a hill, and the spire of a church or minaret of a mosque stand out, but to get anywhere else the visitor must ask the inhabitants or follow his ears or nose. Storyguides may make good use of how very easy it is for the visitor to become disorientated and lost in an urban area, particularly for a visitor used to life in a secluded covenant.

Defenses

Towns and cities are proud of their ditches, walls, and towers, which may be there more as a show of affluence or as a symbol of independence rather than from any military necessity, although many towns grew up adjacent to a castle and walls extend from this strong point to surround the town.

In England only about 100 towns have some sort of encircling defenses, which may be as simple as earthworks, while towns almost everywhere else — even small ones — have a wall. This might be a great stone curtain wall punctuated by towers, a wooden fence behind a ditch with stone gatehouses where the main roads cross the boundary, or a wall created by joining adjacent buildings. Where the remains of a Roman city wall are still standing, these are made use of, perhaps rebuilding on the old foundations. Many places make use of marshland, existing bodies of water, and other features of the landscape to enhance their protection. Responsibility for the walls is not infrequently a matter of dispute. While it can be an honor to control the walls, maintenance of them is an on-going expense.

Town gates are always useful as a place to make those passing in and out pay a toll, so these exist even where there is no other sign of defenses. Gates offer an almost irresistible opportunity for a display of pride and power, whether that of the local lord or of the city’s governing bodies, so they are designed to look imposing and are adorned with coats of arms, badges, and any other appropriate symbol that will impress upon the mind of the visitor the glory and authority of the town or city.

Sometimes the physical walls, towers, and ditches are inadequate protection. At such times, the relics of saints and martyrs held in the local churches may be brought out and taken around the town in solemn procession as prayers are said asking the patron to come to the aid of the town. This counts as ceremonial influence tempering the aura to Loyal, Calm, or Brave, depending on the situation faced (see Realms of Power: The Divine, pages 38–40).

Open Spaces

The distinction between urban and rural is blurred when it comes to agriculture. There are plots of land within the walls for growing crops, sometimes for fruit and vegetables only, but in some instances for grain too. If the town is surrounded by agricultural land, the townsfolk may well be expected to assist with the harvest both inside and outside the town. Cattle may be allowed to graze on land within the city boundary, for a fee if there is no common grassland, while hens are often kept in people’s back yards, sometimes with pigs.

Zoning

To a large extent, those doing the same kinds of jobs are grouped together. In cases such as butchers and tanners, this has the great advantage of keeping the mess and smell confined to one district. There is little tendency to segregate richer and poorer; since wealthy men often like to buy up several smaller plots on which to build new city-center homes, neighborhoods may be very diverse.

In a large city, foreigners, meaning anyone from another city, and aliens, meaning anyone from another country, usually live in close proximity. There is quite often an area where the Jews have their homes and their own public buildings, and streets where all the immigrants from a particular region live. This may be imposed, but also happens naturally as new arrivals turn to fellow-countrymen when seeking employment and accommodation.

Streets

Road surfaces may be just hardpacked earth, but major thoroughfares that have to carry carts are surfaced with stone, either slabs or cobbles. Repairs are generally carried out by adding new surfacing material on top of the old, so the street surface is frequently at a higher level than the entrances to the adjacent buildings. It is common to have a channel down the center of the street to collect refuse and, if the citizenry are very lucky, it also carries a stream to wash the rubbish away. Unfortunately, this does not stop fluids from running off the side of the street to the doorways. Off the main roads, one gets about by the use of alleys, staircases, and courtyards. Streets and squares are named according to the activity carried out there, the trade or nationality of the majority of inhabitants, or an important local place or personage. Individual buildings are identified by the occupation of the owner, the trade conducted there, or a memorable symbol.

Fire is the town-dweller’s great fear, so for safety there are laws requiring that fires be put out or covered over at night. Thus, it is very dark in the streets, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that anyone out of doors is up to no good. Violence is not unusual, most often in defense of property or reputation (see Crime, below).

Markets

The marketplace may be an area of open ground used for other purposes, such as grazing, on other days, or it may be an open area used only for markets and other gatherings. In central and southern Europe, trees or arcades provide welcome shade here. In older towns, where hardly any free space can be found in the town center, the sellers set up along the side of the streets, making it hard to get through that part of the town on market days. In circumstances such as these, some people make use of their own front room as a place to sell from, and become shop owners.

It is common for live animals to be sold separately from other things, and in the largest urban areas, markets are frequently further subdivided, so one finds special areas for the sale of some of the following: bread, pies; cloth, clothing; cheese, butter, milk, eggs; fish; fruit and vegetables; grain, flour; livestock; meat, including both that of domesticated animals and game; live poultry; wood, including timber, domestic utensils, baskets, spades, cartwheels; wool, hides, yarn. Other things are sold, of course, but do not have a special market place dedicated to them. See Chapter 6: Fairs and Markets for more information.

Places of Work

Rich merchants own or rent warehouses and offices within the city. Practitioners of other trades that simply require a room, for example scribes, are likely to operate from their own dwelling place or a rented room anywhere that suits them. Craftsmen requiring workshops may rent a ground floor room or, if successful enough, own workshop space around a courtyard where they also live. Occupations that inevitably produce strong smells, particularly the butchers, tanners, and dyers, are grouped together, the last pair usually being located beyond the city walls along with the fullers. Also on the fringe of the built up area are lime kilns, windmills, and water mills. Workshops for manufacture of items from pottery, glass, or metal require fires so are likely to be sited on the outskirts too. Coastal and riverside towns have an area set aside for the fabrication of rope and netting.

Most large urban communities lie beside or astride a navigable waterway, and as transport of goods by boat is vital for them, wharves and quays are essential. These are rarely of stone, so work to renew wooden waterside structures is a constant necessity. As demand for space close by for warehousing grows, the quay tends to move further out into the river, reclaiming land and narrowing the water course, each section being modified by the owner so the individual properties expand at different rates. Such areas are prone to flooding.

Locating a covenant or even just a chapter house in a town or city without drawing unwanted attention is a challenge to the knowledge and imagination of any magus. A magic aura is more likely to be found in a regio or underground, but even when taking advantage of such a site, a way of getting in and out unobtrusively is desirable. There is a lot to be said for hiding in full view. For example, if an alehouse backs onto a smithy and covenant rooms lie below both, there are plausible reasons for a lot of people coming and going and the occasional explosion or fire. Urban magi and covenfolk should avoid being drawn into local politics but often find it difficult to keep their distance from everyone who might try to exploit them or just make friends with them. See Covenants, page 27, for suggested Hooks and Boons to make up an urban covenant.

Places of Prayer

Almost every city in Christian lands has within it a cathedral and several parish churches, and also churches and chapels associated with particular religious foundations. Most towns in densely populated areas have flowed around at least two parishes, so neighborhood churches can be common even in quite minor urban settlements, many of the smaller churches being without a resident priest and just used by the local inhabitants for their private devotions. In contrast, some settlements have expanded in lightly settled areas and comprise a single, large parish. Towns are putting up new churches independently of the religious orders, with priest and people contributing to a building that is a matter of civic pride. Rich individuals like to improve their chances of avoiding Hell by making donations to the Church, but a desire for earthly status means that many want their donations to be visible. Recently, this has taken the form of asking for an altar to be set up in that person’s name, and many existing churches are being modified to accommodate them. In the same way, guilds may pay for chapels dedicated to their members. See the insert for information on what churches and cathedrals look like.

Jewish synagogues take the form of a rectangular hall-shaped building with the entrance in the west wall in whatever style is popular when and where they were put up, so externally they often superficially resemble the nearby churches. Internally, they have an open hall for the men to assemble and a gallery for the women.

In the lands held by the Moors and Arabs, places of worship are very different (see Realms of Power: The Divine, page 108). A mosque takes the form of a walled rectangular courtyard surrounded on three sides by an arcaded portico, symbolizing the shelter of palm trees, with a pillared hall on the side facing Mecca. The open area of the courtyard contains a fountain for ablutions prior to praying. The building must include a high tower, or minaret, whence the call to prayer is made, and this is traditionally sited on the side furthest from Mecca. In some mosques, the arcaded areas to the side are replaced by rooms for teaching. External walls may display patterned brickwork or brightly colored tiles and internal decoration is often very elaborate also, with stylized calligraphy and geometrical repeating patterns. The mosques of Damascus and Cordoba are particularly fine.

In lands where the influence of the Byzantine Empire is strong, evidence of this long heritage is clear. For example, Ravenna, which had strong links with the Eastern Emperor, contains several great basilicas and small baptisteries where the highly colored and detailed mosaics on the inner walls and ceilings, dating from the fifth and sixth centuries, far outshine any wall paintings in brilliance. Venice’s Basilica of Saint Mark was built in the 11th century in the Byzantine style and has glittering wall mosaics of its own. The basilica displays riches plundered from Constantinople quite recently, during the Fourth Crusade.

Beside it stands the Doge’s palace, in the style of a Byzantine fortress. Constantinople itself has the magnificent sixth century church dedicated to Santa Sophia (Holy Wisdom). Although it appears plain and massive from outside, so marvelous is its construction of vaults, domes, and windows when viewed from within, and so dazzling its mosaics and colored marble, that one can immediately see it was divinely inspired.

Building Styles The early 13th century sees a great surge of investment in building by the Church and the citizenry. In France, England, Italy, Germany, and northern Spain, large ecclesiastical buildings have been built on much the same lines for some three hundred years. While there are local variations everywhere, churches typically have a cruciform plan, a bell tower, a main entrance in the west wall, a rounded apse containing the altar at the eastern end, rounded arches, stout columns, and, where it can be afforded, colorful wall painting and much carved surface detail. The images are usually at least vaguely related to a religious theme but can be very fanciful, the most amusing occurring in monastic settings. The churches intended mainly for pilgrims, and funded by them, are usually high and wide with large windows to allow as many people as possible to fit comfortably into the nave and not feel suffocated. Relics are often kept in a crypt beneath the altar, and the altar is therefore reached by a flight of steps. An unobstructed ambulatory allows pilgrims to move around behind the altar, where other relics may be venerated. In contrast, town churches built to be shared by nuns or monks and the laity are more elongated, since the eastern end of the building is extended to accommodate all the monks and nuns in their own separate area. Recently, architects and builders in France have discovered that pointed arches allow them to create structures with higher ceilings, more delicate-looking columns, and thinner walls. Flying buttresses help support the great height. Wall space is extensively replaced by windows where delicate stone tracery infilled with painted glass creates an almost magical effect when the sun shines through. Thus, wall painting is falling out of favor, but sculpture remains a key means of teaching the faithful and is itself usually brightly painted. Buildings according to the new style have a spire more often than a tower.

The building or reconstruction of a cathedral is not infrequently hampered by demons. Their actions may encourage sloth in the workforce, mysteriously drain the coffers of the individual or group funding the current phase of construction, or physically carry off parts of the structure. Interference by fay and magical beings ranges from knocking things down and luring away artists and craftsmen to simply hiding tools.

Architects are becoming ever more daring now that they have adopted the pointed arch that guides the eye towards heaven. Not surprisingly, many observers believe that such structures can only stand with supernatural aid. Some artists and craftsmen really have grasped the principles of the new style, but some designers and builders have had supernatural help. A maga of House Jerbiton might be persuaded to apply Terram magic to help realize an artistic vision. Heavenly aid might be sent to a worthy person building to the greater glory of God. For others, it is rumored that their building only remains standing because the architect has made a pact with a demon — a soul is so valuable a prize that Hell is willing to help further the work of Heaven to win one.'

See Realms of Power: The Divine, pages 9–11, for details of how these buildings and the communities who worship in them affect local auras.

Groups of monks or nuns following the Benedictine rule prefer to live in a rural setting, but some of their foundations have been incorporated into expanding urban areas. Urban monasteries and convents have an inner courtyard and cloisters for their own sole use, and an outer courtyard where they conduct business with the outside world, in addition to having a church of their own. It is quite common for monks’ enthusiasm for interaction with the people of the town to go further than it ought. The walls around their buildings serve to mark the distinction between those who have dedicated their lives to the service of God and the rest of humanity, but these same walls are sometimes a necessary defense when friction, or even violence, breaks out with the townsfolk. Monks and nuns are usually dependent on their associated rural manors for their dayto-day food supplies, making little use of regular markets, but the more affluent are eager patrons of the larger fairs to obtain wine and other luxuries (see Chapter 6: Fairs and Markets).

Among many of the clergy, cities are seen primarily as the breeding ground for every vice. Richard of Devizes, a monk living in Winchester, England, wrote at the end of the 12th century that London was home to all sorts of disreputable people including “actors, jesters, moors, flatterers, effeminates, pederasts, singers, dancing girls, quacks, sorceresses, extortioners, magicians, beggars and buffoons.”This may say more about the writer than the city; however, it is this reputation that calls the members of the newly established mendicant orders to live amongst the citizens, using their example or their oratory to combat sin. The order of the followers of St. Francis was founded in Italy in 1209 and has not as yet spread beyond Italy and France; there, friars are to be found preaching in the market places and public squares rather than in churches. The order of friars living according to the rule of St. Dominic was founded in 1216 but is still only thinking about taking its fi ght against heresy to the urban centers as preachers. Canons, too, live and work alongside the urban populations that support them, most often doing pastoral work including care of the sick and insane, the aged, and lepers. Although the urban populace celebrates the same holy days as everyone else, their festivities are adapted to their environment so that a procession through the streets, perhaps behind a banner, a crucifi x, or a statue of a saint, is a common sight.

Regional Variations in Church Design In England, the roofs of olderstyle buildings are generally of wood rather than the stone that is used in France. Unlike the relatively compact French cathedrals, new ones being constructed in England have a very much longer nave, extended transepts, and no eastern apse. German churches are almost all in the older style, as the French influence is being resisted. They are more likely to have a rounded apse at each end, and so are accessed by a door in one of the side walls. They often boast several ornamental round towers but are much more restrained than elsewhere with regard to internal decoration. The only examples built as yet with elements of the new style take the compact French ground plan further, approaching the shape of an aisled hall. In Italy, churches are all in the older style and are usually built of brick or stone, often clad in marble if it can be afforded, and have wooden roofs. Delicate arcades in tiers often decorate the external walls. The developments in France have as yet been rejected as unsuited to the Italian climate, where the light is strong and the sun hot for much of the year with the result that thick walls and small windows are a blessing. Also, increasing window sizes reduces the area available for the painted frescoes that are so popular there as a good means of reminding churchgoers of their duties. Ecclesiastical architecture in Sicily reflects the skills of the unusually varied workforce, a mix of those trained in the techniques of the Normans, the Byzantines, and the Saracens.

Places of Learning

Because a degree of literacy is necessary for most positions in the Christian Church structure, many monasteries and cathedrals provide some basic tuition to boys, either within their own buildings or in a closely associated grammar school. Education of boys and young men is given higher priority in Jewish communities, so there is at least one place of learning for them if the city has a Jewish Quarter (see Realms of Power: The Divine, pages 131–132). In the parts of the world where Arab infl uence is strong, it is similarly important for boys to learn the holy texts, so education to that end is provided at the mosque.

Specialist schools and universities are very rare, and are little more than gatherings of clerks with an interest in scholarship who get together to debate matters of theology, law, philosophy, medicine, and the liberal arts. Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Modena, Montpellier, Regio, Vicenza, Cambridge, Palencia, Arezzo, Salerno, and Salamanca boast such a thing. If your saga follows real history, others are founded in Padua (1222), Toulouse (1229), Siena (1240), and Valladolid (1250). Each is of great interest to magi and it is probable that if there is not yet a covenant of some sort in each of these cities, there will be before too long. It may be that members of the Order are involved in establishing one or more, particularly magi of House Jerbiton who may wish to join the academic circles. On the other hand, such places of learning are very likely to compete with the Order for non-Hermetic books and could be seen as a threat to be monitored closely.

Other Public Buildings

The buildings that a city erects for the administration of government, law, and trade refl ect the power and affl uence of the town as a whole and of those among the wealthy burgesses who like to spend money for the public good, whether out of charity or the desire to show off. Thus, in some parts of northern France, northern Italy, Flanders, Germany, Poland, and Hungary, the major commercial centers boast public buildings grander than their cathedrals. Guildhalls typically resemble the home of a wealthy man, having a main hall, kitchen, and ancillary rooms including storage areas, and, in rare instances, also a chapel and stable. In some of the richest cities where wealth derives from trade in fabrics, a cloth hall for the exchange of fabrics has been built; construction of a particularly grand one in the new style was started in Ypres last year.

In Arab countries, or those heavily under their infl uence, including Iberia, the public baths are important. While the architecture and decoration there are Arab, the components of the bathing suite are modeled on the Roman system. In the lands where the Eastern Empire maintained Roman traditions, bathhouses are also common. They are also commonly found close to the synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of a city. There is often a hospital for that community there also. For Christians, hospitals and hospices are run by religious orders, and usually occupy a building adjacent to the home of the people who serve in them, outside the original town boundary. The early years of the previous century saw many hospitals founded, and, although originally built on the edge of the town, in many cases the built-up area has swept around them.

Accommodation for visitors is rare unless the town is a center of pilgrimage, in which case the Church generally provides very basic sleeping facilities. If a fair is in progress, anyone who can make space will rent it out to visitors (see Chapter 6: Fairs and Markets), and at other times some will be persuaded by payment to give a visitor somewhere to sleep. The very rich living in the countryside maintain a town house to use when they or their servants have to stay, for example to collect rents. Others make use of their contacts to obtain shelter. A large city probably has a rudimentary inn where food and a sleeping space in the shared common room can be bought.

Housing

All but the wealthier citizens rent their homes from those who are rich enough to own property, whether the local lord or a monastery, a merchant, or simply a neighboring successful burgess. The poorer citizens, if single, are likely to live in a small wooden hovel at the back of a shared courtyard, or in a windowless upper story room shared by several people. A poor family may be able to afford one or two rooms for sleeping, while sharing an oven, a privy, and a source of water — typically a well or fountain — with other families. Better off families occupy more rooms. A merchant or craftsman aspires to his own house with a cook fire and storage space for himself and his family, apprentices, and servants.

Most urban houses have a very narrow frontage and extend back with one narrow room behind the other. Increased overcrowding in the most densely packed cities has produced multistory dwellings, up to as many as four or five stories high in parts of Paris, Florence, Genoa, and Siena. The ground floor room fronting the street is often used to conduct a business of some kind. This may be the owner’s own business, but it is as likely that the room is rented out to the people living above, or to someone else entirely. In parts of southern France and Italy, it is often not treated as a private space at all. Inside, most such homes are quite dark and airless so a great deal of time is spent outdoors. Children play in the street, women gather at the well to do their washing together, and adults sit outside their front doors in the evening to chat with their neighbors and passersby. Because they live so closely together, people generally know a good deal about each other’s business, which can make secrecy of any sort problematic, particularly if one wishes to avoid suspicion.

Wealthy citizens have a house similar in style to those of their rural counterparts. Typically, two, three, or four buildings are arranged around the sides of a courtyard with an arched passageway through the range that runs along the street so as to allow access to the interior. One building, the largest, is the hall and the others are rooms for storage and domestic activities. The bedrooms are on the upper floors of the smaller buildings. In some German and Italian cities the richest merchants live in tall, fortified stone town houses with storage space below and living space above. The grander city homes are often occupied infrequently, because they serve as occasional town bases for the most powerful among the nobility, rich abbots, and bishops.

The homes of the well-to-do in countries other than those around the Mediterranean are largely of the same materials as those of the poorer classes, having a timber frame with infill of wattle and daub, and roofed in thatch of straw, rushes, or reeds, or with wooden shingles. In London, for example, despite a ruling in 1186 to encourage use of materials less at risk from fire by insisting on use of masonry for walls that divide two adjoining but independent houses, and for roofs to be covered in ceramic tile or slate, only the grandest homes are of non-flammable materials. In the south, around the Mediterranean, stone is more often used for construction, either robbed from old Roman structures or freshly quarried. Urban covenants are likely to require at least some stone structures as safe places to conduct laboratory activities, but any such show of wealth attracts attention.

Homes in areas under strong Arab influence are adapted to the heat of the southern sun. The rulers in Muslim lands live in grand fortified palaces, often austere externally but highly decorated within by carved stone and brightly colored geometrically patterned tiles. Some are immense; for example, the Alcazar in Seville includes a harem large enough for 800 women in addition to the staterooms and workrooms. Covered living spaces are arranged around a series of courtyards and are designed to provide shade. Pumping systems carry water into the building to feed fountains and pools. The non-aristocratic live in narrow streets with scarcely room for two donkeys to pass, where high walls provide shadow; fabrics may be stretched across to increase the shade. The more affluent have dwellings similar to the nobility but on a smaller scale, down to a single, small courtyard opening onto the street through a narrow gate. The poorest homes are small and dark with flat roofs where the inhabitants may sleep in the cool of the night air.

Place of Safety In many towns, the only building of stone that can be made at all secure is the church. Visiting merchants who wish to keep their wealth safe, whether it be in goods or coin, often ask the priest to keep it for them so it is safeguarded both by the physical structure of the building and the sanctity of the place. Those with something valuable to protect who prefer not to discuss the matter with the clergy are likely to bury their precious items in the churchyard to take advantage of the assumption that hardly anyone would dare to steal from such a place. The ground there is often disturbed, so a new area of digging is rarely noticed.

Populace

The number of people living in a particular urban community is said to be larger the further away it is, at least as far as cities are concerned. To those living in or near them, the vast majority of cities have less than 2,000 inhabitants and only about sixty have a population of twice that or more (see Town Profiles, below). In the lands bordering the eastern side of the Adriatic, Greece, and Bulgaria, once-great cities have shrunk and urban living has declined so far that only small towns exist.

In regions where cities are growing rapidly, as many as one in four of the total population are urban, while in areas with little enthusiasm for urbanization, it is only one in ten. The opportunities available in town for a peasant, free or otherwise, to change his lot in life are widely known, if often exaggerated; whatever the stories say, no city in Mythic Europe has yet been found that has streets literally paved with gold. The city spoken of may lie far to the east, although there are those who claim to know that it is in Arcadia. Laborers, paupers, and vagrants of all types are drawn to urban life by the prospect of money. A significant percentage of the inhabitants of towns were born elsewhere and came to the town in their youth. Most adapt quickly to the crowded conditions and adopt the customs and culture of the community. Citizenship is granted to newcomers according to rules that vary from town to town (see Town Charters, Becoming a Townsman, above).

Towns and cities that count knights and other nobles amongst their citizens are rare in Savoy, Sicily, Castile, Leon, Portugal, the Low Countries, and northern France, although in the last two there are knights who live in cities but are outside the city’s jurisdiction. In contrast, many German towns have citizens who are knights. Some kings and princes go so far as to forbid knights from becoming citizens since it suits them to maintain the distinction, but it is becoming harder to enforce this, especially in the Kingdom of Italy. Where a town is weak or a local ruler particularly strong, citizens may make efforts to exclude the nobility from taking up residence in an urban area or place restrictions on them, for example forbidding intermarriage between the nobility and citizens. Patrician dynasties, based on success in business that has allowed a lowly family to greatly increase its social standing, are growing stronger in Flanders, northern France, parts of Germany bordering the Rhine and, most of all, in Italy.

A great many of the people living in a city work to serve the merchants, craftsmen, and religious as servants, retailers, carriers, and clerks. A transient population of masons, glaziers, carpenters, painters, and carvers of stone and wood moves in when there is a major building project in progress and may stay for several years, and 1220 is a time when many cathedrals are being built or rebuilt. Such skilled workers move around, following the work, and are very likely to move on before the construction is complete if there is a hiatus in the funding.

In a few urban areas a group of supernatural beings may live in a regio quite apart from the mundane activities. Others choose to involve themselves with certain aspects of urban life. A brownie or similar household faerie may help a craftsman in his work, perhaps doing the finest, most detailed work. Another may help with sales by making sure goods are moved to where they can be seen or reached easily. Every city is likely to be home to a few animals naturally at home in urban areas but having supernatural characteristics. One such may be a fay cat that really can be simultaneously stealing food in the kitchen, tripping someone up on the steps, and watching every passerby while appearing to be fast asleep in the sun. There are also the magical dogs who epitomize loyalty, and so involve themselves in the affairs of their owner, working to protect them, or seeking out a lost child and guiding it home.

Family Life

Although urban families tend to be smaller than rural ones, children frequently remain living with their parents for longer. In many parts of Europe, urban men marry rather late and often marry women considerably younger than themselves, so widows are quite common. Poorer families lack the funds to marry off their daughters so this, along with the pro longed bachelorhood, plus the large number of priests and the religious, means that a relatively high proportion of the urban population consists of unmarried adults. One effect of this is to increase the opportunities for temptation into sins of the flesh; another is to strain sympathy between young and old.

Diet

Diet in towns is similar to that in the country. However, the fact that all towns must import a substantial amount of their food means that there are some differences.

Grain and Bread

Grains (wheat, barley, oats, rye) are the most common foodstuff in the towns of Mythic Europe, and are imported from either the local countryside or from other towns. Of these, wheat is the most popular because it can be easily stored, and many towns have public granaries. Some Italian towns use their granaries to distribute wheat as a charitable dole, reminiscent of the practices in classical Rome. Town officials (backed by public funds) often guarantee high prices to merchants for grain, to ensure that the town is preferentially supplied in times of famine or shortage. These guarantees have also allowed many merchants to make their fortune shipping grain.

Town mills refine grains to make flour from which bread is baked. As few households own an oven, due to the expense of installation and fuel, it is common to prepare dough at home to bake in the local baker’s oven. White bread, made from highly refined wheat, is a high status food. The majority of townsmen, however, eat brown breads that contain other, less refined, grains. Poorer town dwellers, who cannot afford bread, eat porridges or gruels.

Occupations Agriculture Craft Service Trade Small Town 50% 50% — — Medium Tow 10% 50% 30% 10% Large Town 10% 30% 30% 30%

Drink

Grains are also brewed to make ale, but this can only be kept for a few days. Wine, made from grapes, can, on the other hand, be stored for at least several years and is thus exported from France, Italy, and Spain. Ale or wine is drunk daily in the home, but taverns are rare and it is a sign of status to be able to afford, both in time and cost, to drink a lot of alcohol. Urban water sources are often polluted by town industries and so are not drunk, if they can avoid it, by town dwellers.

Meat, Vegetables, & Fish

Town butcheries slaughter cattle, pigs, and sheep for local meat consumption. Cattle are imported from the countryside, although a few are kept in town for dairy produce or are used as beasts of burden in poor towns. Pigs, sheep, and fowls are often farmed within the town walls. Wild animals (deer, boar, hare, and wild birds) are also eaten in small towns, but large towns are too populous for hunting to supply significant quantities of food. The wealthy, in displays of conspicuous consumption, flavor their meat with expensive spices including pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, cubeb (similar to pepper but with a strong lemon aroma), and galingale (similar to ginger). These are all imported from the orient, via Constantinople, and Venetian merchants control the spice trade within Mythic Europe.

Vegetables are cheap and eaten by the poor, who cannot afford meat, but are rarely eaten by the wealthy. In contrast, fresh fruit is valued as a seasonal luxury and grown in urban orchards.

Fish are an important component of the urban diet because, as fish are spontaneously created, they bypass religious restrictions on the consumption of the products of coition. Some fish are kept in urban ponds, or caught in local rivers, but the most common fish eaten in Northern Europe is deep sea herring. Many coastal towns have developed significant fishing industries to catch and process (salt, dry, and smoke) herring for export.

Famine

Towns are insulated from the effects of famine because food can be imported from regions that are not suffering from famine via a port, and town granaries smooth out minor fluctuations in food supply. In addition, the high prices that goods fetch in town mean that what little food is available in the surrounding countryside is sent to the town market, rather than being used to feed starving rural peasants. This partly explains why town officials act to inflate the prices of staple goods, like grain, within the town. Short of armed rebellion, there is little that rural peasants can do about this state of affairs and, of course, the owners of farmland (who often live in the town anyway) ensure that they themselves are well fed. A famine that lasts for years, or is spread over a wide geographical area, will eventually affect town inhabit ants and the poor will be disproportionately affected, perhaps suffering deprivation (see Diseases). Wealthy burgesses solve the problems of longterm famine by emigration.

Disease

The human body is composed of four humors. Each humor is a reflection of an element, a season, and a set of conditions: blood, corresponding to air and spring, is hot and wet; yellow bile, fire and summer, is hot and dry; black bile, earth and autumn, is cold and dry; and phlegm, corresponding to water and winter, is cold and wet. Excess of a humor causes an imbalance in the body, which is disease, and treatment is often based on the application of a counter-balancing humor; for example, an excess of black bile (cold and dry) can be treated by the application of hot and wet conditions that favor blood. Diagnosing and prescribing the correct treatment for a disease is represented by the Medicine Ability (ArM5, pages 66, 179, 180). In addition magi can diagnose and treat many diseases using suitable Intellego and Creo Corpus spells (ArM5, page 130).

Story Seed On feast days, wealthy burgesses in the town host a sumptuous banquet at which the poor of the town are served for free. However, for the last year the burgesses have been unable to host a feast, not because they cannot afford it, but because some supernatural power has been sabotaging the feast preparation — roasting meat burns to a cinder, stored grain is found to have rotted, and wine turns to vinegar. Somehow, the townsfolk decide that this is the fault of the magi living in a covenant near the town. Unless the magi can quickly discover the saboteur of the feast, they have to contend with a riot, which may result in the deaths of many townsmen, causing both alarm in neighboring regions and consequences for the magi at Tribunal. The saboteur could be a faerie, a demon, or perhaps the agents of a rival covenant attempting to provoke an incident for political gain at Tribunal.

Diseases are prevalent in towns because they contain sources of humoral imbalance, especially bad air from smoke and odors from dyes, animal dung, sewage, tanneries, and butcheries. A town’s location may also favor a particular humor; for example, the inhabitants of a cold and wet coastal town will suffer from an excess of phlegm. Precisely how often a character must be tested for exposure to sources of humoral imbalance is at the discretion of the storyguide. As a rough guide, a character who is newly arrived in town may need to be tested once or twice during his fi rst season of residence. Long-term town residents mostly contract diseases as a consequence of Aging — an illness result, indicated by the Crisis Roll (ArM5, page 170), may be represented by a disease chosen from those below, at the storyguide’s discretion. Note that some diseases have consequences even if the character survives the crisis. Long-term town-residents may also contract diseases if their local environment changes (a new butchery opens in the neighborhood, for example) and some diseases (childbed fever or leprosy, for example) can be triggered by the activities of the character.

Leprosy

And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. — Leviticus 13:45

Leprosy is a divine mark of damnation manifesting as an excess of black bile, and causing skin damage, clawing of hands and feet, blindness, loss of sensation and paralysis in the limbs, and sometimes madness. In total, two to three million people in Mythic Europe are infected. Poor moral standards, especially immoral sexual practices, contribute to the onset of leprosy, and individuals conceived during menstruation are particularly vulnerable. Due to its Divine origins, leprosy cannot be cured except by Divine intervention, although Hermetic magic may alleviate or disguise some symptoms.

Leprosy is greatly feared and most communities follow a decree issued by Pope Alexander III in 1179 and expel their lepers. A leper’s expulsion may include a ritual burial of his possessions, after which the community considers the leper to be dead. Throughout Mythic Europe, the Church maintains special colonies, or leprosariums, for the convalescence of exiled lepers; there are over 2,000 such leprosariums in France alone. In some regions, including Scotland, leprosy is so feared that lepers are hanged or burned at the stake.

Town charters frequently contain rules for dealing with lepers, which may include special begging rights or restrictions for lepers. For example, in 1204 King John decreed that a proportion of all flour sold at market in England must be set aside for lepers; others expect lepers to announce their presence by wearing elaborate costumes consisting of long robes, gloves, footwear, and horns, or by ringing bells.

Lepers gain the Major General Flaw Leprosy. This Flaw may also be taken during character generation. The disease caused by the spell Curse of the Leprous Flesh (ArM5, page 133) is not true leprosy, but has similar effects.

Anachronism and Disease In Mythic Europe disease is caused, as stated, by humoral imbalance. Sometimes this is prompted by living conditions, and the humors are often aggravated by demons and occasionally by other supernatural agents. In particular, troupes should note that diseases are not caused by viruses, or bacteria, nor are they usually contagious, nor can they be spread by vectors such as vermin.

The Ague

The ague is caused by bad air, and outbreaks cluster around urban sources of bad air (especially sewage and tanneries). Its main symptoms are a regular cycle of chills and fever. The length of each cycle indicates the type of humoral imbalance: a continual fever indicates phlegm, a quotidian fever occurs daily and indicates blood, a tertian fever occurs every third day (inclusive) and indicates black bile, and a quartan fever occurs on every fourth day and indicates yellow bile.

If a Stamina roll against an Ease Factor of 3, 6, or 9 (depending upon the strength of the bad air source) is failed, the character contracts the ague, which inflicts a wound. Continual fever is the worst and always inflicts a Heavy Wound, while the other fevers only inflict Medium or Light Wounds. A related disease, the fen ague, is endemic in marshland.

St. Anthony’s Fire

St. Anthony’s fire is an excess of blood caused by a minor disease demon in the victim’s intestines. Symptoms include a red rash, intestinal pain, visions, muscular spasms, contortions, and a burning sensation in the extremities. Eventually the limbs begin to rot and the victim dies.

If a Stamina roll against an Ease Factor of 9 is failed, then the demon has found his way into a character’s intestines. These attacks are magical and can be resisted with Magic Resistance. Once resident in the intestines, the demon causes a wound to the character each season: a Light Wound in the first season, escalating to a Fatal Wound in the fifth.

The demon has a Might of 10 (Corpus) and can be exorcised using a ritual known to the Order of the Hospitalers of St. Anthony, which was established in 1095 and named after a fourth century Egyptian hermit. The order has many houses in continental Europe and an important chapter house on Threadneedle Street, London.

Tarantism

Tarantism is an excess of yellow bile, caused by the bite of a faerie tarantula. The disease triggers an irresistible urge to dance — to the point of exhaustion — along with thirst, unusual sexual urges, and pain around the bite mark. Tarantism is at its worst during summer, although it may take years to manifest, and the disease predominately afflicts young women.

A character bitten by a faerie tarantula is afflicted with tarantism unless a Stamina roll is made against an Ease Factor of 9. Once per season a Stamina Roll against an Ease Factor of 3 (or 6 in summer) must be made for each afflicted character. If this is failed she may do nothing for the entire season except dance every day until exhausted.

Living Condition Modifier A Living Condition modifier is applied to the Aging Roll (ArM5, page 170). Additional modifiers are given below: Leper –2 Live in a leper colony* –1 Work in a bad air trade –1 Work in a mine –1 * Cumulative with “Leper.” For example, a character who lives in a town (–2, ArM5, page 170), is a leper (–2), and works in a tannery (bad air trade, –1) has a total Living Condition modifier of –5. Major General Flaw: Leprosy A leper has a permanent –2 modifier to her Living Condition (with an additional –1 if she lives in a leper colony), and whenever she undergoes an Aging Crisis (ArM5, page 170) the leper sustains a Heavy Wound in addition to any other result. Lepers cannot gain a positive reputation due to a pungent rotting smell that they emanate.

Tarantism is not fatal, but the character requires care during her bouts of frenzied dancing; at a minimum she must be fed by others. Hearing a particular tune, the tarentella, cures the listener, and often an epidemic of tarantism is followed by the arrival in town of faerie minstrels who offer to cure the disease — for a price.

Childbed Fever

The act of giving birth causes swings in a woman’s balance of humors, which make her vulnerable to the childbed fever demon. This demon attempts to enter the woman’s body as the baby leaves, where it causes chills, fever, abdominal pain, nausea, and in terminal cases a rotting of the reproductive organs that can spread to the rest of the body.

When a character gives birth a Stamina roll against an Ease Factor of 6 is made. If the roll is failed the demon, which has a Might of 10 (Corpus), causes a Heavy Wound. If there were birthing complications (prolonged labor, placenta retention, conception during menstruation, or a still-birth, for example) an Incapacitating Wound is caused, instead. This is a magical attack and can be resisted with Magic Resistance.

The Bloody Flux

The bloody flux is an excess of phlegm caused by living in cold, wet conditions. It is common in towns and among campaigning armies; symptoms include diarrhea, chills, cramps, a running nose, and bloody stools.

If a Stamina roll against an Ease Factor of 3, 6, or 9 (depending upon the extent of the excess phlegm) is failed, then the character contracts the bloody flux and suffers either a Medium, Heavy, or Incapacitating Wound, again depending upon the extent of the excess phlegm.

Worms

Worms are agglomerated excesses of the blood humor. In a healthy person worms quickly disperse, but in an unhealthy person they build up and overwhelm the body. Children and infants are very susceptible to worms, as their bodily humors are intermixed with milk.

A character with an excess of blood contracts worms if a Stamina roll against an Ease Factor of 6 is failed. This causes no immediate health effects, but a further Stamina roll must be made every season for the character, also against an Ease Factor of 6. Failing the seasonal roll inflicts a Medium Wound.

Abscesses

Abscesses are caused by the absence of humors and are a common affliction during famine. Deprivation causes wounds (see ArM5, page 180) that manifest as pustules or abscesses on the body. Black pustules indicate a lack of yellow bile, and develop from Incapacitating Deprivation Wounds. Yellow pustules indicate a lack of black bile and result from Heavy Deprivation Wounds. Grey pustules indicate a lack of blood and result from Medium Deprivation Wounds. Light Deprivation Wounds cause red pustules, and indicate a lack of phlegm.

Crime

Unlike the country, where populations are small and everybody knows their neighbor, towns are relatively anonymous and a character may attempt to literally get away with murder. In fact, murder is not the most serious crime in Mythic Europe — thievery is. This is because murder can be a “crime of passion” — and therefore primarily the fault of drink, demons, or another momentary madness — while thievery, burglary, and robbery are all only ever premeditated acts and hence worse sins.

Crimes are committed by ordinary people, and there are no guilds of thieves or other such criminal institutions, although gangs of criminals, particularly highwaymen, may act together. There are no formal police forces either, but large towns have city-watches who patrol the city, especially at night, largely to enforce curfew by escorting obstreperous drunkards home. The city-watch also interrupt and attempt to apprehend any criminals that they observe; but, unlike a police force, the city-watch has no formal investigative function and does not generally attempt to solve crimes that have already happened, unless perhaps they were committed against the city-watch itself. The city-watch only interrupts crimes that are in progress.

Black Death Black Death, or the plague, does not exist in Mythic Europe. If your saga follows history, then Black Death arises in 1347 in Constantinople. It is a demon that appears as the shrouded reaper, although it is invisible to the mundane senses. Black Death is summoned by an Infernal ritual, and members of the Hermetic Order might contribute to or avert earlier attempts by infernalists to summon Black Death.

Judicial Procedure

One function of the town charter is to list the town’s criminal statutes and prescribe judicial procedure (see Town Charters, above). Typically, townsfolk are tried in a town court that is presided over by a magistrate, whose precise title varies by region. An average town has up to half a dozen magistrates, who frequently have other responsibilities like assessing taxes. In a small town court buildings may double as the town hall.

The first step in a trial is an accusation, made by the plaintiff against the defendant, who either admits or denies the crime. The plaintiff need not be the victim; in a murder case the plaintiff will typically be a kinsman. If the defendant is not present in court, officials are sent to find and notify him of the case, and a trial date is set. A defendant who repeatedly fails to appear will be judged guilty in his absence. It is perfectly acceptable to accuse a non-human of a crime; for example, a farmer might accuse a neighbor’s stock of grazing in his field, or a nymph might be accused of seducing travelers that pass by her stream.

At the time of accusation, the court has to decide whether it has jurisdiction or not. Town courts do not hold jurisdiction over a man who disciplines his wife or children, nor do they hold jurisdiction over Church officials, who are tried by their own ecclesiastical courts under canon law. Commercial law and heresy are also judged under canon law, by the Church (see ArM5, page 205). The court can also dismiss a case it deems frivolous. Otherwise, the town court claims jurisdiction over the town’s inhabitants. Additionally, there is a regional hierarchy of towns; thus, if a case involves men from several towns it is heard in the court of the most important town in the region. This only applies in relatively homogenous regions, like much of England and France. In Northern Italy, for example, a large town never cedes judicial authority to its rivals and such inter-town antagonism may lead a criminal to seek sanctuary in a rival town. Very small towns may also defer to the court of a larger neighbor. In the absence of any other agreement, town courts also claim jurisdiction over supernatural beings, but a magistrate who doubts his ability to enforce a decision may decline to hear a case involving the supernatural.

Minor Social Status Virtue: Town Magistrate The character has a position of judicial responsibility in the town, with a small staff of minor officials (up to five individuals). The character must be a citizen, have a score of at least 3 in the Civil and Canon Law (or Common Law) Ability, and is paid a wage or gains special privileges in return for his services. Being a magistrate occupies the character for two seasons each year, but he is free for the remaining two seasons. Academic Abilities may be bought for the character, during character generation. Court Decisions A court session can make for an interesting story, but if the troupe wants to quickly decide a case, make a Communication + Civil and Canon Law roll against an Ease Factor of 6, on behalf of the defendant or his proxy. If the roll is successful, the defendant is found innocent. In England, the Common Law Ability is used instead. As this is a social interaction, penalties for The Gift and other Virtues and Flaws apply. The Ease Factor is modified by the following: Defendant actually is innocent: –3 Defendant has a negative reputation in the court: +3 The majority of credible witnesses declare the defendant is guilty: +3 Civil Law, unlike Canon Law, can accept arguments that are based on logic, and so the Artes Liberales (logic) Ability can be used to influence whether a particular witnesses declarations are considered credible, or not, by the court. Islamic Law The teachings of Islam explicitly address criminal and legal matters, and thus Islamic law, or al-shari‘a, is well defined, although there are certainly different schools of law. Troupes wishing to resolve cases using Islamic law are referred to The Divine, page 105.

Once the court decides that there is a case to answer, guilt or innocence is decided, often very quickly, on the basis of witness statements, sometimes known as oaths. The strength of each oath depends upon the perceived character of the oath maker, and whichever side assembles the best selection of supporting oaths prevails. Evidence may also be produced, especially seized property that was allegedly stolen, but there are no formal procedures to gather evidence and many courts meet their costs by selling confiscated, stolen property. Forensic science does not exist and evidence gathered through magical means is normally treated very suspiciously. In some towns, particularly in Italy, the magistrate, or a panel of magistrates, decides guilt, while in other towns, especially in northern Mythic Europe, a jury of townsmen decides. A majority decision has traditionally been sufficient for panels or juries, but recently some town charters dictate that a unanimous decision is required.

Sentencing

If a defendant is found guilty, the court passes sentence. Sometimes, the town charter dictates the sentence, but often magistrates have some discretion. A magistrate might consider mitigating circumstances like provocation or alcohol, particularly when deciding whether a death is a premeditated murder or a “crime of passion.”

Thievery, robbery, house-breaking, arson, premeditated murder, and treason to the town or lord are all punishable by death. The normal method of execution is hanging, but sometimes the guilty are beheaded, drowned, or burned at the stake. Executions are performed publicly, and the criminal may need to be imprisoned until the next market day.

Murder, accidental death, rape, assault, petty thievery, and failure to observe charter obligations (normally curfew, militia service, and paying taxes) are punished by fines, which may be as high as 50–60 pounds — which will take an average burgess a lifetime to pay — or as low as a few pence. A proportion of fines are normally paid to the victim, or their relatives, and the remainder is retained by the town, or maybe by a feudal lord. If a fine is not paid, the criminal is declared an outlaw (ArM5, page 57) whom anyone may freely kill, in return for a reward. Sometimes a mutilation — loss of an eye, ear, or hand (ArM5, page 56) or branding (ArM5, page 52) — is inflicted instead of, or in addition, to a fine. For violent offences the mutilation may be picked to match the crime.

Sometime minor crimes (prostitution, begging, and petty thievery) may instead be punished by public shaming and ridicule, such as by placing the victim in stocks or tying them to a pole (pillory) for a period of time, in a public place.

Prison

Court buildings may include small prisons with cells for a few inmates. Prisoners are either awaiting trial or execution (as incarceration is not used for punishment), and are fed, but may be required to purchase their meals. Normally, visitors are not allowed, aside from Church and court officials, although some jailers are amenable to bribes. Towns without prisons may hold prisoners in stocks for short periods.

Approvers Approvers are criminals who confess to a hanging crime, but reduce their sentence to exile by accusing their accomplices. This system is open to abuse and is an aberration of English common law not found elsewhere in Mythic Europe. Trial by Ordeal A defendant who insists his innocence, even when the court finds him guilty, can choose to undergo a trial by ordeal. These are administered by the Church, as it is through Divine intervention that the innocence of the defendant is proved. Trials by ordeal are archaic and severely limited or banned by many town charters. See Realms of Power: The Divine, page 78, for more details on trials by ordeal. Ordeal of Combat: Fought between the plaintiff and the accused; the victor is judged righteous. Ordeal of Cold Water: The accused is thrown into a river; if innocent he sinks instead of floating. Ordeal of Hot Water: The accused pulls a stone from a kettle of boiling water; if innocent the ordeal wounds heal after three days. Ordeal of Iron: The accused carries a red hot iron a distance of nine feet; if innocent the ordeal wounds heal after three days.

Prisons can also house political prisoners, such as wealthy prisoners of war held for ransom, but these are usually the prisoners of nobles and are as likely to be incarcerated in a castle tower or the camp of a campaigning army.

Shows of Feeling

With such a concentration of people, conditions can be ripe for mass hysteria. While the authorities are keen for the populace to rise up en masse in defense of the city, the mob can react with violence against those same authorities or a scapegoat. Riots in the streets are usually directed against anyone who stands out as being different, so anyone with The Gift is potentially at risk. In periods of economic hardship, citizens often band together to vent their feelings on a particular individual or group. Magi or other inhabitants of a covenant themselves, or traders and craftsmen made noticeably better-off by their known association with strange people, even if nothing is known about the covenant, are likely targets for this unrest. Violent discontent can turn against the town’s patron saints if they appear to be neglecting their duty to mediate between the citizens and their Creator, or failing their protectorate in some other way. In this case, the peoples’ action typically takes the form of humiliating the relics of the saint, for example placing the reliquary containing them on the fl oor of the church on a bed of thorns until the problem is resolved (see Realms of Power: The Divine, page 87). If conditions are right, a charismatic preacher can easily rouse the townsfolk to extravagant displays of piety and extreme penitential practices, for example group public fl agellation. Celebrations too can become heightened in the crowded streets of a city, generating a carnival atmosphere, which, perhaps with help from minor demons, may sweep people along from fun and into sin.

Town Profiles

The largest towns in Mythic Europe, with populations over 50,000, are Constantinople, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Paris, and Venice. Slightly smaller towns, with populations in excess of 20,000, include Barcelona, Bologna, Brugge, Cologne, Cordoba, Ghent, London, Siena, and Palermo. Several dozen towns, most in Italy, have populations around 10,000 (including Naples and Rome), and a number of towns have populations of a few thousand, but the vast majority of towns have only a few hundred inhabitants. If your saga follows history, then throughout the 13th century, urban populations grow very rapidly, largely due to immigration from the countryside, and by 1300 many large towns are three to four times their current size.

Following are some brief notes on some towns of various sizes and levels of importance that the magi might visit. The information about the smaller towns (Ipswich, Kolding, and Anizy-le-Château) can be easily transferred to small towns in other regions, by troupes that are not bothered by historical inaccuracy, as can some of the story seeds for the larger towns.

Florence

Florence (Florentia) was founded by Julius Caesar in 59 BC at the confl uence of two streams, the Arno and the Mugone. It was briefl y a center for the Cult of Isis, until conversion to Christianity in the third century at which time two churches, San Lorenzo and Santa Felicita, were built. There are now 48 churches within Florence, but much of the old Roman city still stands, including baths, pavements, and a sewage system.

Today, Florence has a well-developed cloth industry and a banking industry that, if your saga follows history, will dominate Mythic Europe within the next 50 years. The Florentine sky is pierced by 90 towers, each the preserve of a noble family. Alliances of these families, tower societies, control portions of the city, and since 1216 the city has been split by a feud between two factions: the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Imitating the tower societies, the city merchants formed, in 1182, their own societies, the Arte dei Mercanti, which have spread to many other cities. The final piece on the crowded chessboard of Florentine politics is the commune, whose officials are elected for two month terms and have governed Florence since 1138, except for a brief period from 1185, when Frederick Barbarossa conquered Northern Italy and imposed a marquis. The paralysis of internal political squabbling has caused the city to institute the office of Podesta; this is an outsider arbiter invited by the city to lead it in times of external military threat.

Story Seed: Florence In Piazza San Firenze, part of the old Roman settlement, is a magical regio within which stands the Roman Temple of Isis. The Temple appears abandoned, but it is in good repair and a covenant could be sited within it. The High Priestess and her immediate followers may still occupy hidden, higher levels of the regio and relics of both the Cult of Isis and the Cult of Mercury can be found in the Temple. The relics of the Roman cults could be a rich source of Hermetic innovation, but a covenant sited in Florence would run the risk of becoming embroiled in the feuds that dominate the city.

Constantinople

The Greek city of Byzantium was founded in 658 BC by the sailor Byzas, at a site suggested by the Oracle at Delphi. The gateway between Europe and the Orient, it is a vibrant trading city, and has a market for religious relics. In 73 Byzantium became part of the Roman province of Bithynia-Pontus and, following a revolt in 196, the city was recaptured by the Roman Emperor Septimus Severus, who constructed the Hippodrome arena, baths, and palaces in the city. The Emperor Constantine renamed the city Constantinople in 324, declared it the new Roman capital, and built within it many churches and monuments. The Roman Empire collapsed in the west, but with its new capital remained strong in the east, until 1204 when the knights of the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople. They crowned Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders, the first emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, but Baldwin did not reign for long and in 1205, while in battle against King Ivan of Bulgaria, he mysteriously disappeared. He is believed to be dead, but there are rumors of sightings in Flanders. The current Latin Emperor is Robert of Courtney.

Constantinople is partitioned into eight sections, each independently governed under the control of different Crusader groups. Venetian merchants occupy the three most favorable sections and the Venetian clergy, who deposed their orthodox Byzantium brethren, also dominate the many churches. Constantinople has declined since the arrival of the crusaders, as trading profits now flow to Venice.

London

London, the largest city in Britain, is a center of commerce located in the south of England. London was completely destroyed in 61 by the Romans, following Queen Boudica’s rebellion, but they rebuilt the city in 100, and it grew to have a population of 30,000 on the eve of Rome’s retreat from Britain. Following the departure of the Romans, London’s population slumped. It was sacked, again, by Vikings in 851, then resettled by King Alfred in 883, and has since regrown.

London is very crowded, plagued by rats, and fire regularly destroys portions of the city. The polluted river Thames, straddled by London Bridge, runs through the city and is a potent source of disease. The bridge is made of stone and was completed in 1209. The largest landowner in London is the Church, but the authority of the highest public office, the Lord Mayor, stems from a royal charter. The mayor heads a council of aldermen, and the first mayor, Henry fitz Ailwyn, served for 23 years from 1193. He oversaw the formulation of the city’s first modern charter in 1204. In 1215 King John granted an updated charter, and the current Lord Mayor, Serlo Le Mercer, took office in 1218.

Brugge

In 862, the first Count of Flanders, Baldwin I, was exiled for kidnapping and marrying Judith, daughter of the French king, Charles the Bold. When he arrived at the site of Brugge he fought a ferocious bear that attacked from the forest. Baldwin was victorious, but the bear, magically transformed, joined Baldwin’s retinue, and became the first citizen of Brugge.

Story Seed: Constantinople The covenant is approached by an agent of the Byzantine Emperor, Theodore Lascaris, who lives in exile in Nicea. The agent explains that in antiquity the goddess Hecate saved Byzantine from siege by Phillip of Macedon, and he offers a rich reward to the magi if they will help contact the goddess to expel the city’s Latin usurpers. Hecate is a powerful faerie who lives in a regio coincident with Constantinople, which can only be entered by a character following a ritual path illuminated by a crescent moon. The precise method to enter Hecate’s regio has been lost, however, and the magi need to find an archaic account of the ritual. If they do manage to contact Hecate, the magi must convince her to assist the exiled emperor, and she was sorely offended by the city’s conversion to Christianity under the Romans. Story Seed: London In the grounds of the Tower of London is the Royal Menagerie, which houses exotic animals, including lions, ostriches, and zebras, that have been gifted to the King of England by his peers. A faerie queen, calling herself Titania, has recently gifted the King of England a hippogriff, but it has fallen ill, leading agents of the king to seek out the magi for assistance. The magi can establish that the hippogriff has been poisoned by the strong Divine aura emanating from the many churches of London, and that it will die within a few seasons. The king’s court does not wish to insult the faerie queen by killing her gift, but the court also feels that returning the hippogriff or moving it to a country estate will equally insult the queen. Quite apart from these considerations, the magi may wonder why the faerie queen is exchanging gifts with the King of England, and what she received in return. Story Seed: Brugge Brugge was once little more than a castle that collected tolls from merchants crossing the Reie river, but its fortunes changed in 1134 when a storm altered the coastline and carved a deep channel, the Zwin, that brought the town to within a mile of the sea. A sea dragon created the storm, in a secret agreement with Countess Jeanne’s great-grandfather, Derrick of Alsace. Two sailors, thought to have recently drowned, have arrived in town, claiming to be the dragon’s emissaries. They threaten to render the Zwin impassable if accumulated tolls owed to the dragon are not paid.

The current lord of the town is the Countess Jeanne of Flanders, who is without an heir. She is married to Fernando, Prince of Portugal, and lives in the nearby town of Lille.

Today, Brugge is a major power in the wool, weaving, and cloth industries. A council of elected officials governs the city, collects taxes, and supervises public works including the canals that link the city to the sea. Foreign merchants are permitted to own property and a number of foreign enclaves have begun to grow outside the walls of the town proper. Craftsmen are not allowed to own property and have fewer rights than merchants.

Acre

Acre is the major port in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the center of Christian activity in Outremer, or the Holy Lands. It is a very dangerous place, which was captured from the Muslims in 1104, recaptured by Saladin in 1187, and recovered again in 1191 during the Third Crusade. Acre was the staging site for a recent Crusade that captured the Egyptian city of Damietta in 1219 — although, historically, these Crusaders were routed in 1221 — and Acre and the various fortresses in the surrounding countryside are constantly at risk from attack by Muslim forces. If your saga follows history, the city is again recaptured by Muslim forces in 1291. The inner town of Acre is protected by a wall and castle, and another wall and a moat surround the outer town.

Acre’s harbor is surrounded by enclaves of Pisan, Genoese, Venetian, and Marseilles merchants. Each enclave has its own charter, churches, fortifications, markets, and system of taxation. Acre’s urban landscape is further complicated by the presence of the military orders, the Hospitaller Knights of St. John, the Teutonic Knights, and the Knights Templar, each of which control their own sections of the city. Finally, as Jerusalem has not been re-conquered, Acre is the nominal capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and a further section of the city is under the control of the king. St. Francis of Assisi visited Acre during his time with the Crusaders, but he departs for Venice in July 1220, to resolve a crisis in the Franciscan Order, and never returns to the Holy Land.

Ipswich

Ipswich has a population of around 300 burgesses, and is the chief town in the county of Suffolk. Originally an Anglo-Saxon settlement, it was granted a charter in 1200 by King John, of England, giving the townsfolk a court, exemption from tolls throughout England, a merchant guild with a monopoly on milling in the area, and the right to elect two bailiffs and four coroners to administer the town. In return, the town pays the crown a yearly fee of 40 pounds.

Story Seed: Ipswitch Reports have reached the bailiffs of Ipswich that the nearby covenant mills its own grain with a magical millstone. Concerned that the town’s monopoly on milling is in danger the bailiffs send a delegation to the covenant to investigate. The bailiffs intend to destroy, or perhaps capture, the magical millstone. Clearly, the magi can easily prevent this happening if they wish, either by killing the bailiffs, or by using Imaginem or Mentem magic. However, if the magi’s impedance of the elected bailiffs is discovered it may ultimately draw down the wrath of the King of England, in whose name the bailiffs operate. Story Seed: Acre An Hermetic covenant sited near Acre may be mistaken for an outpost of a military order, particularly if it has an obviously armed turb, and therefore it is likely to be attacked — probably by Muslim forces, but possibly by a military order seeking to gain an edge over their rival orders. If Hermetic magi are known to be in or near Acre, they are likely to be approached by one or more Crusader factions that either seek magical assistance for their military strategies or seek help to recover relics captured by Muslims.

Ipswich has a large grain market on Cornhill Street, which also sells local meat, timber, fish, wool, bread, and dairy products. Market day is Tuesday and traders pay an annual fee of three pence. At the quay, foreign imports can be purchased, including iron from Spain and Normandy. The bailiff’s tollhouse, St. Mary’s Church, St. Mildred’s Church, and the mills of the merchant guild are the most important buildings in town. The county jail has just been constructed in Ipswich.

Kolding

Kolding is a small trading town built at the head of Kolding Fjørd, on the border between the Kingdom of Denmark and Duchy of Schleswig. Currently, the King of Denmark (Valdemar II) is relatively secure, as both Schleswig and the neighboring Duchy of Holstein are under his control, but this situation may not last long (see Guardians of the Forests, page 68). If your saga follows history, in 1230 the King of Denmark grants a full charter to Kolding, in order to guarantee the burgesses’ loyalty against Schleswig, and in 1268 a royal castle, the Koldinghus, is built in the town, to defend Denmark from the southern dukes.

In 1220, Kolding has 200 inhabitants whose prosperity relies on both a fishing industry, based in the Fjørd, and a weekly market for farm produce. The town also controls the sole crossing over the river Kolding, which must be used by road traffic between Denmark and Schleswig — this is the road route taken by merchants from Germany, further to the south. A royal customs house collects taxes from cattle merchants using the Sønderbro bridge, but, as the town’s current charter is only rudimentary, most taxes are sent directly to the king.

Anizy-le-Château

Anizy-le-Château is a town with a population of 300 that dominates a constellation of fourteen smaller towns in Laonnoise (southwest of Laon in France). In the past, the towns were harshly taxed by their lord, the Bishop of Laon, so in 1174 the townsfolk petitioned King Louis VII for a charter — which he granted. This outraged the bishop, Roger of Rozoy, who marched on the town, and in 1177 his knights, in a battle near the town mill, slaughtered both the town militia and their allies from the neighboring towns of Laon and Soissons. The king seized the bishop’s worldly goods in retaliation, but was forced to back down and revoke the town’s charter in 1179 because the Bishop’s cousin, the count of Hainault, was an important ally of England with whom the king was unwilling to risk conflict.

In 1185, the new French king Philip Augustus summoned Bishop Roger and representatives of the townsfolk. He imposed a compromise charter that fixed rent and appointed a court of 12 echevins to try disputes between the bishop and town, but tensions still remain.

Ilium

This port town, on the Aegean coast south of Constantinople, has magnificent walls built by Poseidon within which lives a population of 1,000. The town is located in a faerie regio that can only be entered by ships guided by faerie pilots, and Ilium was recently granted a charter by its faerie lord, the elderly Priam, who claims descent from Zeus. Ilium’s charter grants the townsfolk a market, an assembly that judges criminal cases, and the right to sell property in the town to anyone who can prove Olympian descent. Ilium is famed for its mid-summer horse fair, which is attended by faerie merchants from throughout Arcadia, and a few privileged mortal merchants. Ilium’s merchants regularly travel to the markets of Constantinople.

Hermetic scholars are divided as to whether this actually is the Trojan town besieged by the ancient Greeks, or merely a faerie imitation. The town’s nobility periodically prepares the town for siege by a hostile army, which they expect to arrive on the winter solstice, but puzzlingly the invasion army never appears.

Story Seed: Kolding The townsfolk have just begun to plan the construction of a stone church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas, which will replace a small wooden church. It will take about 30 years to complete the church, partly because of the interference of a local faerie winter king who fears the encroaching Dominion aura. Eventually, the townsfolk approach the covenant for assistance in dealing with the faerie nuisance. Saint Nicholas is venerated, in northwestern Mythic Europe, for miraculously resuscitating three children who had been murdered by an innkeeper who pickled them in brine. Story Seed: Ainzyle-Château Despite the compromise charter, the bishop of Laon still places an impossible tax burden on the town, and the townsfolk are planning for mass emigration to the town of Soissons. The bishop’s agents have discovered this and approach the covenant, which also lies within the bishop’s diocese, for assistance in suppressing the brewing revolt in the town. If the magi assist the bishop they open themselves up to accusations of unnecessary interference in the affairs of the mundane; but, conversely, if they don’t assist the bishop’s agents the bishop may attempt to expel the covenant from his lands. Story Seed: Ilium A female member of the covenant is approached by a merchant while at market. The merchant claims to be from the town of Ilium, and he tells her of a beauty contest held by lord Priam’s son Paris during Ilium’s mid-summer fair. Convinced that the woman’s beauty will win the contest, the merchant offers to take her to Ilium in return for a share of the prize.

Further Information

Guardians of the Forests provides some information about towns located in the Rhine Tribunal, and the supplements for the other tribunals provide relevant information about the towns within them. Troupes that wish to set an historically accurate saga in a large city may like to visit their local library for further information about the city, as there is insuffi cient room in this text to provide all details of interest.

Attribution

Attribution Based on the material for Ars Magica, ©1993-2024, licensed by Trident, Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games®, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license 4.0 ("CC-BY-SA 4.0"). Ars Magica Open License Logo ©2024 Trident, Inc. The Ars Magica Open License Logo, Ars Magica, and Mythic Europe are trademarks of Trident, Inc., and are used with permission. Order of Hermes, Tremere, Doissetep, and Grimgroth are trademarks of Paradox Interactive AB and are used with permission.