But the city is older than the "citizen." It attracts first the calling-classes, which as such are outside the symbolic estates, and, when urban, take form as guilds. Then it draws in the primary estates themselves; the minor nobility moves its castles, the Franciscans their cloisters, within the contour. As yet, not much is inwardly altered. Not only Papal Rome, but all Italian cities of this time are filled with the fortified towers of the families, who issued thence to fight out their feuds in the streets. In a well-known fourteenth-century picture of Siena these towers stand up like factory chimneys round the marketplace.[1] As for the Florentine palace of the Renaissance, if, in respect of the bright life within, it is the successor of Provençal courts, it is equally, with its "rusticated" façade, an offshoot of the Gothic castles that the French and German knights were still building on their hills. It was, in fact, only slowly that the new life separated out. Between 1250 and 1450, throughout the West, the immigrant families concentrated, vis-à-vis the guilds, into the patriciate, and in so doing detached themselves, spiritually as in other respects, from the country nobility. It was exactly the same in early China, Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire, and it is only in the light of this that we become able to understand the older Classical city-leagues (such as the Etruscan and, it may be, even the Latin) and the sacral connexions of colonial daughter-cities with their mother city. It was not the Polis as such, so far, that was the backbone of events, but the patriciate of phylas and phratrias within it. The original Polis is identical with the nobility, as Rome was up to 471, and Sparta and the Etruscan cities throughout. Synœcism grew out of it, and the city-state was formed by it. But here, as in other Cultures, the difference between country- and city-nobility was at first quite unimportant as compared with the strong and deep distinction between the nobility (in general) and the residue.
The burgher proper emerges when the fundamental distinction between town and country has brought the "families and the guilds," in spite of their otherwise implacable hostility to one another, to a sense of unity vis-à-vis the old nobility, the feudal system generally, and the feudal position of the Church. The notion of the "Third Estate" (to use the catchword of 1789) is essentially only a unit of contradiction, incapable of definition by positive content, and having neither customary-ethic of its own — for the higher bourgeois society took after the nobility, and the urban piety after the older priesthood — nor symbolism of its own — for the idea that life was not for the service of practical aims, but for the consistent expression of a symbolism of Time and Space, and could claim true dignity only to the extent that it was the worthy vessel of these, was necessarily repugnant to the urban reason as such. This reason, which dominates the entire political literature of the Late period, asserts a new grouping of estates as from the rise of cities — at first only in theory, but finally,
- ↑ Another example (beloved of artists) stands to this day in the town of San Gimigniano, which is almost nothing but a group of family towers ranging up to 150 ft. in height. — Tr.
