The commercial revolution brought a revival of the urban life that had been largely dormant since the fall of Rome. Trade inevitably centered on the towns. As trade increased, towns grew into cities and some of those cities became sovereign states. Many of the more important medieval towns, including Paris, London, Florence, Milan, and Naples, had existed in Roman times, but others were relatively new or had grown from humble beginnings. Venice was founded by refugees fleeing from the Lombard invasion. Other communities grew up around the castles of bishops or secular lords. Still others grew up at river crossings or heads of navigation, or near natural harbors.

The pattern of urban growth in frontier areas was different. Dozens of Spanish towns in New Castile and Extremadura were built on lands captured from the Muslims during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Laid out geometrically around a central plaza, they were apparently modeled on the Roman colonia whose function had been much the same. Along the Baltic coasts, in Silesia, and eastward into Poland and Ukraine, German towns were founded throughout this period, often by princely fiat, to secure newly acquired regions or to protect existing borders. Because Germany remained politically decentralized and because territories changed hands frequently owing to the vagaries of partible inheritance, princely foundations of this kind were common there as well. Though most were intended to be garrisons, market towns, or princely residences, a few were located with an eye to commercial development.

Whatever their origins, towns soon became a magnet for the unemployed, the ambitious, and the malcontent. The rapid increase in population after the tenth century coupled with more efficient agricultural methods tended to displace villagers whose labor was redundant and for whom no new land was available. These workers were "freed from the soil," an economist's euphemism for becoming unemployed, and moved to the towns in the hope of finding work as laborers. Some succeeded. If they survived, their descendants eventually became citizens and, in a few cases, grew rich. The Medici, arguably the greatest of Renaissance families, were descended from humble immigrants who came down from the Mugello during the thirteenth century to work as laborers in the wool shops of Florence.

Most immigrants, however, simply died. The rapid growth of medieval and early modern towns was almost purely a function of inward migration, for urban death rates greatly exceeded live births until the eighteenth century. Yet for some cities, including Venice, Florence, and Milan, populations reached 100,000 or more by the mid-thirteenth century, and several others topped 50,000.

Rapid increases in population and commercial activity mandated sweeping changes in town government. The old system of rule by a bishop or secular lord assisted only by a handful of administrators was no longer effective. Town life was not just becoming more complex. An increasingly wealthy and educated class of merchants, rentiers, and artisans was growing more assertive and less willing to have its affairs controlled by traditional authorities whose knowledge of commerce was deficient and whose interests were not always those of the business community. From an early date, these people began organizing themselves into what became communes or representative town governments. . .

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