Start Over: Rebuild a City

In the Summer of 2005, a few days before I had to leave Erfurt, Germany, I stopped at a bookstore to find something to read for the trip home. I saw a book that looked interesting—titled Stadt-Bau-Geschichte by Dr. Thomas Nitz. I picked it up and put it in my rucksack to read on the long flight home. In English, the title means "City, Architecture, History". The undertitle reads "Development of a city, as seen by its architecture."

The author Thomas Nitz works for a department of the Thuringian provincial government that has responsibility for all historic properties. He published Stadt-Bau-Geschichte as his doctoral thesis, first in a grad-student type file-folder, then in book format, as German law requires. Dr. Nitz did, in my opinion, an absolutely remarkable job, showing that architectural development in a city depends on the health of the local economy. The more wealth, the classier the buildings.

The history of Efurt, in effect, begins in 1080 a.D., when a regional war reduced the city to burnt ruins. The ruling religious authority, the Archbishopric of Mainz, realized that it had to re-organize Erfurt as a more secure place to give it any chance of surviving. Erfurt had to make "citizens" of its people, permit them to make a decent living, and give them the means—i.e. money—to facilitate their transactions. Additionally, Erfurt needed to be able to defend itself from criminals, as well as from invaders in rival kingdoms.

So the Archbishop took steps that would define European culture for the next thousand years:

1.  He build a wall around Erfurt. It cost a lot of money, so he had to recoup the expenditures in the form of tax revenue. The name for a walled city is "Burg" in German, "Bourg" in French; and people who lived in them were called  "Bürger" in German, "Bourgeois" in French. The names of German cities like Hamburg and Regensburg reflect their origin as walled cities. They succeeded because they offered security and order to their citizens.
2.  The Archbishop let the citizens of Erfurt lease the land. They paid property-tax on their parcels each year, called a "Zins" in German. Payment of the Zins gave citizens "Freizinsrecht"—meaning they could do whatever they wanted with the parcel of land.
   They paid the tax at their local parish church. Church officers created files for each parcel, like any modern property-tax agency. Each file gave the name of the lessee, the amount of tax he paid, and a description of his use of the land. Those records still exist and are maintained in the city-archive of Erfurt, called in German Stadtarchiv. Scholars can view those files, which are nearly complete back to the 14th century.
3. With the wealth they created, citizens could build homes to suit their needs. At the high-end, the homes had an arched entrance for the passage of work-wagons and carriages. Behind the high-end homes lay the work-yard where workers wove baskets, processed animal hides, or made roof- tiles, doors, bricks, and windows. They also had buildings for storing their inventory. See below the two examples of high-end buildings in the Johannesstraße.
   
   
4. For expansion and renovation, Erfurters needed loans, more or less like today. Jews served as money-lenders, since the Archbishop forbade Christians from loaning money for interest. In 1998, archeologists in Erfurt discovered a jar full of coins underneath a demolished house and determined that the hoard of coins had belonged to Jewish money-lenders in the 14th century.
5. And finally, undergirding the wealth of the walled city was money itself, primarily silver and gold coinage. Throughout Europe, official mints made coins of similar size and weight, so that the citizens of different nations and kingdoms could use the coins interchangeably. That saved a lot of time and bother from having to deal with money-changers.

These factors made more people want to move to Erfurt. It eventually outgrew its original wall; so the Archbishop commissioned a second one to increase the living area. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the seven hundred years since that time. People want a safe, orderly society where they can live, work, and raise a family. Americans need to refresh their understanding of these principles once in a while, so that we can renew our nation and move forward.