This chapter documents the development of the wartime Grand Alliance between Britian, the Soviet Union, and the United States, with particular reference to the personal roles, outlooks, and interactions of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. Without the deep personal bonds of the ‘Big Three’, the Grand Alliance may have been stillborn or collapsed under the pressures, contradictions, and challenges of war.

Chivalry, the martial ethos of knighthood, with its emphasis on honour and prowess, shaped contemporary perceptions of the proper conduct of war; and war – properly conducted – was a key component of medieval kingship. Writing during Edward II’s reign, the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi quoted a letter sent to the king’s confessor: ‘a king is so styled from the fact of ruling, as one who should rule his people with laws and defend them with his sword from their enemies’. This summed up a commonplace view of kingship, a duality reflected in the iconography of the kings of England: since the reign of William the Conqueror, the Great Seal had depicted the king enthroned in majesty on the front; and on the reverse, armed, mounted on a charging warhorse, wielding a sword – the very image of chivalric knighthood.

During the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, polycentric political structures based on fragmented forms of sovereignty, the importance of multinuclear urban systems and respect for constitutional, legal and cultural diversity were predominant in the most densely populated European regions, and even within consolidated monarchical systems, such as the Spanish Monarchy. The strong jurisdictional component of these power structures – the result of the existence of numerous corporations, communities, guilds, estates and militias capable of political action and exclusive rights – explains the need to challenge monolithic and homogeneous visions of the state. In this chapter, this vision is replaced by an urban, bottom-up perspective that follows the experience of early modern legal and political theorists as well as citizens. Cities were the primary stage for political action, where assemblies, councils and guilds competed with one another or joined forces to form common spaces of negotiation with sovereigns or other institutions.

Gender is fundamental to how towns shaped themselves. Women were often, not always, the majority, which had implications for how they inserted themselves in and contributed to shaping the identity of towns. Similarly, where men predominated, their experience and the character of the town could vary appreciably. Gender tensions, over work and political rights, for example, influenced formal and informal urban economies and polity. Economic, political and social transitions through networks, global exchanges, imperial and colonial exploits had important implications for both the character of the urban and the perceptions of gender. Simultaneously, gender shaped urban culture. Historians interrogating femininity and masculinity have expanded our understanding of gender dynamics in the urban world, and furthermore recognised the kaleidoscope of sexual identities in society. Gender relations vary over space and time and are not the same from one city to another. Differences of race and ethnicity further complicate the picture. This chapter examines shifts in gender from a bourgeois ideal to a contemporary vision articulated in a radically changed urban world, where the vote is nominally universal, where equal pay and equal opportunity are mantras for a ‘modern’ democratic city. Transitions were not straightforward and there was no continuous road to modernity.

The cities of Byzantine and Ottoman Europe developed under distinct political and cultural influences, but both empires shared certain commonalities in their urban development. The city of Constantinople/Istanbul, as the capital of both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, served as a hub for the political, economic, cultural, and scientific power of the two empires. At the same time, a number of fundamental differences can be identified when comparing the cities of Byzantine and Ottoman Europe. The late Byzantine provincial cities were small and often confined to the fortified areas, serving primarily a defensive purpose. In contrast, the Ottoman cities developed during a time of political stability and significant population growth. Neither Byzantine nor Ottoman cities enjoyed the same level of independence and development as their Western counterparts. Nevertheless, the role of centralisation should not be overstated when considering the development of Byzantine and Ottoman cities.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

The clergy were important to the crown because they were (compared with today) very numerous – historians have described the country as ‘swarming with clerics’ and their ‘vast numbers’ as ‘one of the surprises of medieval history’; collectively they were very rich, owning perhaps 20–30 per cent of England’s landed wealth; many had skills which few laymen possessed; and, most importantly, they could, through their performance of religious ritual, send souls to paradise or perdition – hell – in the everlasting world to come. Religion was the way that medieval people made sense of the world; it was not an optional extra in life but affected all aspects of society. Everyone was a church member.

This chapter surveys the evolution of urbanisation in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The discussion follows the urban geography of the region, how and why it changed, and the relationship to industrialisation, capitalist production, market and transport networks. It considers the ways in which cities and towns along the Channel coast and North Sea, the coast of the Atlantic, and along the Mediterranean both substantiate and exhaust the vision of ‘Western Europe’ and evidence the richness of European patterns of urban life. Emphasis is on the density of the urban network as well as the multiplicity and distinctiveness of urban society in Western Europe as it evolved over time. Attention is given to the bourgeois and working-class experience, the rise of urban reform and planning, and the dissemination of Western European urban patterns as a model of modernity. The chapter recounts the fate of cities in the first and second world wars. It gives full attention to the late twentieth century and how Western European urban life changed under the influence of modernisation schemes, post-industrial society and globalisation.

Italian cities were at the forefront of cultural change during the period 1400-1700, with innovations in architecture and urban design being adopted widely across the rest of the continent. During the early modern period, many Italian cities took on key elements of the built appearance that they retain to this day. Monumental form and the application of increasingly ordered urban planning regulations were achieved thanks also to well-organised administrations that levied taxes that could in part subsidise urban improvements. The wealth of urban elites likewise contributed to this process through widespread participation in the construction of residential palaces and new religious buildings. Cities, and the concentrations of people and wealth that assembled there, were at the very heart of the cultural renewal that is associated with the period; literary, artistic and intellectual culture was defined by its urban nature, whether this was within a courtly or civic setting.

On 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to a treaty of non-aggression, paving the way for the outbreak of war in Europe. Though this Nazi-Soviet Pact stunned contemporary observers, this chapter argues that the decision for partnership – and the military, economic, and intelligence cooperation it portended – had a long prehistory. Here, the Soviet-German relationship is traced from its inception in 1917 through Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941. It focuses on four distinct periods: early contacts during and immediately following the First World War, the Rapallo era of extensive cooperation between 1921 to 1933, the collapse of the Soviet-German relationship after 1933, and the resumption of partnership in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This chapter concludes that the two periods of Soviet-German cooperation were ultimately decisive factors in the breakdown of the post-war European status quo.

Volume II charts European urbanism between 700 and 1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world’s most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious and cultural histories of cities and towns.