and votive monuments, such as the early-eighteenth-century Plague Columns in Vienna and in Buda (now part of Budapest), or the Charles Church in Vienna, also built in gratitude for relief from the plague.‡ In the seventeenth century, Christopher Wren built not only a new Saint Paul’s Cathedral but fifty other churches in the City of London.1
Papal Rome, from its height to the end of its full splendour, contributed two further features to urban monumentality, the Cathedral of Saint Peter apart. One was the straight axial road with its long urban vista, the Via Pia, from the Quirinale to Porta Pia, constructed from 1561 to 1562, long antedating the wider Nevsky Prospekt, the Champs-Élysées and all the others.2 The second was the grandiose piazza in front of Saint Peter’s, capable of receiving in a grand manner the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims coming to Rome. It got its final shape with Bernini’s colonnades from the years around 1660, becoming arguably the most elegant monumental public space in the world.
The Rise of Territorial Capitals
Before any central urban monumentality could emerge, there had to be a capital city. The European Middle Ages started out as a massive reruralization of social and political life. The idea of a capital city passed away.3 Even the greatest of early medieval rulers, Charlemagne, did not need one, although Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) was his preferred residence in the latter part of his reign. Paris became caput regni only in the first half of the fourteenth century.4 And that was not irreversible. In the last decades of the long and powerful reign of Louis XIV, Paris became a huge suburb of Versailles. In his last twenty-two years, Louis visited Paris only four times. Until the revolution, the relationship of Paris to Versailles was never quite clear.5
London assumed permanent capital functions by the twelfth century. Before that, Winchester was the modest political capital of England, where the regalia and the royal treasure were kept and where the survey results for the Domesday Book were returned.6 However, the capital functions centred around Westminster, that is, around the royal palace and the Abbey, which was the coronation church. The City of London was still for some time rather a twin city to Westminster, some kilometres down the river to the east.
Vienna became the permanent capital of the Habsburgs in the course of the seventeenth century – Prague was the major alternative – and definitely only when the Ottomans began to be rolled back, after their failed siege of Vienna in 1683.7 Russia grew out of Muscovy, but Peter I moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg after his decisive victory in the Northern War at Poltava in 1709. After the October Revolution, Moscow became again the main capital: ‘main’ because in Tsarist Russia, the USSR and post-Communist Russia, the two cities both have both a special standing as stolitsy, capital cities (originally meaning ‘throne cities’).
Berlin had housed the main residence of the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns since the 1440s, but that meant more a feudal manor than a national centre. In the eighteenth century, when Brandenburg-Prussia was becoming a great power, Potsdam was alongside Berlin the official ‘residence city’, the one much preferred by Frederick II (the Great). To the Hohenzollerns, Potsdam was a possible capital even of the German Reich; Bismarck had to push the new German emperor into accepting Berlin.8
The Spanish royal court moved to Madrid in 1560 and the city soon became very dominated by the court and its needs, but the former kept an ambulatory life for another good half-century, with El Escorial as the grandest and most important alternative in the surrounding region. Even when a permanent royal palace was built in the 1630s, the Buen Retiro Palace, it was actually (just) outside the city. This led to the symbolic and highly ceremonial entry into Madrid of a new king or queen through one of the city gates, the Puerta de Alcalá.9
Ofen, or Buda, had gathered most of the capital functions in Hungary after the abortive revolution in 1848, at the onset of which the Hungarian Diet met in Pozsony, currently Bratislava. It became Budapest only in 1873, uniting the three cities of traditionally German Buda (Ofen), the rapidly growing economic centre Pest across the Danube and ancient and aging Obuda, a bit to the north, where the Roman Aquincum had once been. Brussels, finally, had been the site of the Dukes of Brabant and of Habsburg plenipotentiaries, but became a state capital only in 1830.
Pre-Nation Cities
It has already been hinted at that there was no straight road from the rise of capital cities to national capitals. The city was in a sense also part of the prehistory of the nation. The City Belt, from the Italian peninsula up through the Swiss Alpine passes into the Rhineland and to the North Sea, was the European pièce de résistance to the formation of territorial states.10 The cities on the southern shores of the Baltic succumbed earlier, but as long as they could, the Hanseatic cities fought the rise of sovereign territories. In the period of transition from the Middle Ages and the New Age, cities, rather than territorial states, were often the main sites of power and wealth: Florence, Venice, Genoa, Lübeck, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Antwerp and Amsterdam are, perhaps, the most famous examples.
Among European capitals today, London is unique in being both an ancient, indeed Roman, trading hub and the old medieval capital of a dynastic territorial state. No wonder that it took some time for its two parts, the City (of London) and Westminster, to coalesce.
The wealthy and powerful trading cities coming out of Europe’s Dark Ages had their own pre-national monumentality. Their grand town halls and guild halls, the most splendid of which were built by Flemish cloth-makers, their magnificent town gates and sometimes a prominent weigh-house and/or exchange represented a specific urbanity: autonomous, proud, capitalist and rich. The main buildings of the city and its commerce were generally laid out at or around the main square – typically called in Germanic Europe the ‘big market’ (grosse/grote markt), which often but not always also had the main church.
Amsterdam was special in the Calvinist austerity which wrapped its enormous wealth, but its huge mid-seventeenth-century city hall in the main square (the Dam) highlights well its pre-national monumentality. Amsterdam was then the capital of the United Provinces and of its major part, the province of Holland. The city is still officially the capital of the Netherlands, although the Hague is the site of the monarchy and the government. But it is the city hall – now formally a royal palace – that is Amsterdam’s most monumental piece of architecture.
Brussels, another part of the City Belt, still testifies eloquently to a rich pre-national urban iconography. In spite of the national trimmings after 1830, to which we shall return below, the symbolic centre of Brussels is still its grande place/grote markt, dominated by its mid-fifteenth century Gothic town hall and surrounded by various guild halls, mostly in Flemish baroque save for one in reconstructed Gothic, all with nicknames out of the city argot. The topological city centre, Place de Brouckère, is named after a mayor.
The Peace of Utrecht in 1713, ratifying the eclipse of the United Provinces by Great Britain, signalled the beginning of the end for the city republics. The French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna did the rest. The United Provinces were reconstituted as the Realm of the Netherlands under the Orange dynasty, and Venice was handed over to the Habsburgs as part of a package. Only the now rather marginal Swiss city cantons kept most of their autonomy, for another thirty-five to sixty years, and Lübeck still lingered on in a shadowy existence until the unification of Germany.
Royal Absolutism
The European power configuration preceding the national state was usually the dynastic territorial state, governed with royal absolutism. This general rule had one major exception, though, apart from the decaying city-states, which were ruled by closed commercial oligarchies. There was the ascending, post-absolutist Kingdom of Great Britain, governed in the name of the king by a land-owning aristocracy while dominating world trade and starting an Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, the major style was that of absolutism, set since the time of Louis XIV at Versailles,
