Migration and the European City

Social and Cultural Perspectives from Early Modernity to the Present

Christoph Cornelißen, Beat Kümin, Massimo Rospocher, Christoph Cornelissen, Beat Kümin, Massimo Rospocher

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110778731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Looking back over the centuries, migration has always formed an important part of human existence. Spatial mobility emerges as a key driver of urban evolution, characterized by situation-specific combinations of opportunities, restrictions, and fears. This collection of essays investigates interactions between European cities and migration between the early modern period and the present. Building on conceptual approaches from history, sociology, and cultural studies, twelve contributions focus on policies, representations, and the impact on local communities more generally.

Combining case-studies and theoretical reflections, the volume's contributions engage with a variety of topics and disciplinary perspectives yet also with several common themes. One revolves around problems of definition, both in terms of demarcating cities from their surroundings and of distinguishing migration in a narrower sense from other forms of short- and long-distance mobility. Further shared concerns include the integration of multiple analytical scales, contextual factors, and diachronic variables (such as urbanization, industrialization, and the digital revolution).

II. Communities

Migration, Identity, Urban Society

The German Community in Trento (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)

Serena Luzzi

Translation: Filippo Valente

1 Introduction

In 1949, with a few dark strokes jotted down in a well-known work devoted to the Mediterranean, the French historian Fernand Braudel called attention to the role of immigrants in the urban spaces of the early modern era. At the time, the question of population mobility certainly was not top of mind for historians, not even among those who worked on social history. But thanks to Braudel’s pen, mobility in modern Europe gained visibility: the figure of the migrant moved into the foreground, and did so from a social as well as an economic point of view¹. What is more, the migrant was now being recognized as “indispensable” to urban societies if these were to thrive.

“These indispensable immigrants were not always unskilled laborers or men of little aptitude”², Braudel underscored, undertaking to correct a misconception about mobility as a phenomenon bound up with marginalization, poverty, and deviance. Migrants “often brought with them new techniques” – they brought know-how, in other words, and were capable of innovating within the economic and productive systems in which they were working, making these systems more effective. Not least, they helped to maintain a relative demographic stability, constantly under threat from the outbreak of endemic diseases.

The research now available to us tends to highlight how mobility is a constitutive element of European society in the early modern age, essentially bearing out the considerations Braudel was making seventy years ago: immigrants are everywhere in significant numbers, and part and parcel of the urban landscape³. Here “everyone is in some sense a foreigner”⁴. Immigrants fill spaces, both material and symbolic; they visibly impart form and continuity to communities; they enliven all manner of interactions; they forge plural identities.

2 An alpine capital and its indispensable migrants

A marriage contract drawn up in January 1428 gives us a window onto the ceremony that joined two people in matrimony, held at an inn called “Alla Corona”, one of the oldest in the city of Trento. This city was the capital of the episcopal principality of Trento, set snugly in the Alps; it was a stopover along the Brenner Pass, linking the transalpine cities to Venice⁵.

All the people who had come together in that inn “Alla Corona” in 1428 came from German-speaking areas: all were immigrants. The bridegroom, Rigus, was an immigrant innkeeper from Frankfurt; the bride, Klara Lauer, hailed from Tramin, a German-speaking enclave under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Trento. Of the two notaries in attendance to record the conveyance of the dowry to the husband, one had accompanied Klara and her father on their trip from Tramin to Trento, while Rigus had engaged the services of a Tyrolean notary, Johannes Stanfer, who by that time had been residing in Trento for several years and had been granted citizenship status. The inn itself is described as having family quarters and suggests the presence of a growing community. It had been active at least since 1363, and for over two centuries was run by German-speaking immigrants.

The contract drawn up in 1428, the oldest among those between soon-to-be German spouses, raises more than one question: How many German immigrants were there at that time? Where were they from? Who were they? What could the city of Trento have to offer them? What could the immigrants themselves offer? How did the immigrants interact with the local community?

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Trento was a town of scarcely 4,000 souls – small by comparison with Lombard or Venetian cities, but not when compared with other towns in the Alpine region, with a low population density and little urbanization⁶. What is more, Trento would experience a demographic surge that over a 150-year span would make it one of the most populated cities in the subalpine belt; its population in the mid-sixteenth century is estimated to have reached 8,000, maybe 10,000 inhabitants. Contributing to the upwards trend was the great Church Council of Trent (1545 – 1563), even if the plague of 1575 put a dampener on that growth, as did a series of food shortages that toward the end of the century would become increasingly severe⁷.

In sustaining a rising demographic trend, immigration played a key role. There are at least three factors that can explain Trento’s ability to attract people: its location midway along the Brenner Pass route, its politico-institutional function as the region’s capital, and its tax policies. In this latter regard it is worth noting that, even into the eighteenth century, the city continued to offer some quite generous tax breaks and incentives, in such a way as to attract skilled and even semi-skilled labor and an entrepreneurial class willing to invest in an economic system still in the making. Immigrants with a proven background in a trade or profession could count on a tax-exempt status for at least three years if they settled down with their families⁸, and in some cases the exemption would even be extended to seven years-policies clearly testifying to an economic and demographic situation continuously hanging in the balance. Contingency dictated the way that exemptions were set from one cycle to the next; this was a “rubber-band policy”, as it has been described⁹, conditioned by the ebb and flow of economic and demographic upturns and downturns.

Once in the city, a foreigner had eight days to report to the local authorities, who would assess his quality – what skills and know-how was he bringing? – and his intentions – was he going to bring his wife and children along? Would he be willing to relocate and for how long? If the interview proved convincing, the immigrant would be registered in a dedicated Libro dei forestieri (Book of foreigners). The records that have come down to us, going back to the seventeenth century and continuing into the eighteenth¹⁰, reflect a consistent “open door”-policy that Trento maintained in making immigration functional to the needs of the urban context. Not so in the case of “vagrants”, the poor, and bandits (individuals who had been served with a ban for a crime committed in some other territory): the orders issued against these persons evince a policy aimed at keeping all undesirable movement under control, particularly at critical conjunctures, which especially in the sixteenth century were following each other in close succession¹¹.

The impact that famines had on urbanization and the movement of people can readily be appreciated from a list drawn up in Trento in July 1559 to estimate the presence of stranieri, meaning “persons who are not natives of Trento”¹². Rapid urbanization – a “multitude of people who every day come to this city of Trento to stay” – was exacerbating the effect of food shortages within the city walls¹³. Proclamations were issued expelling the undesirables lingering in the city, but these measures did not have the desired outcome, while the city administration was proving itself incapable of stemming the tide of new arrivals.

In 1559 a tally was made of all “foreigners” – canvassing the entire city quarter by quarter, house by house – and the number came out to 3,069. On the basis of this list, it can be estimated that about half the inhabitants of Trento were first-generation immigrants. In the list we can also find immigrants who had been living in Trento for twenty, even thirty years, having settled in the city from various other places, but who had no real estate to their name and so were excluded from the count and were exempted from paying taxes. Many were women on their own, like Margherita and Caterina, two “German widows”, in Trento for thirty-five years; Somer, the “German” shopkeeper, in Trento for twenty-five years; or Ursula, likewise identified as “German” and widowed, in Trento for twenty-eight years¹⁴.

In the San Pietro neighbo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Migration and the European City
• I. Overviews
• II. Communities
• III. Policies
• IV. Representations
• Contributors