- On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities by Giovanni Botero
When, back in 1588, Giovanni Botero published this intriguing little book about what makes the world’s cities large and splendid, he initiated a literary genre, as well as the field of investigation that accompanies it and continues to flourish, known as urbanism, or, more broadly, the study of the life and death of cities. He thus stands at the head of a line of distinguished writers that include Max Weber, Jane Jacobs, and, most recently, Katherine Boo. Botero was hardly the first person to ask what makes some cities thrive while others fail, but he was the first to ask the question in a mostly impartial way that was global in its perspective. He [End Page 449] looked honestly at Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as his own Europe. Earlier treatments of cities in the Western literary tradition had focused on a city’s potential for territorial expansion and rule – could it become another Rome? – or on the ways in which a city’s street plan and monuments, in conforming with a harmonic aesthetic ideal, might make it morally and politically superior to other cities. Botero tossed aside such imaginings. The age of the city state was over. Yet cities still had a huge, if subordinate, role to play in the world of nation-states, empires, and trading nexuses that was taking shape in the later sixteenth century.
What was it that made some cities successful, so that they continued to attract and support large populations? Botero offers no theoretical explanation, and certainly no simple answer. Rather, he lists the various reasons why some cities had thrived. Book 1 discusses the siting of cities (along rivers, as ports, in a fertile region), while book 2 treats the factors that can attract a population (serving as a political or religious centre, urban pleasures, a resident nobility, a university). The book’s considerable charm, enhanced by Geoffrey Symcox’s careful English translation and commentary, lies chiefly in its details. At Cairo, “[t]he plague is hardly ever absent.” The Spanish king knowingly suffers great losses from the trade of Mexico with the Philippines in order to draw the idolatrous Mexicans “to the bosom of the Catholic Church.” The cannibals of Brazil like to roast human fetuses. The Chinese have an “herb from which they obtain a delicious juice … that keeps them safe from those ills caused among us by the excessive consumption of wine.” Probably this was tea. He also writes, “In truth we Italians are too fond of ourselves and are too much the uncritical admirers of our own ways.”
Botero, who had a complicated relationship with the Jesuit order and a close connection with Saint Carlo Borromeo, is best known for his influential book On Reason of State, which attacked Machiavelli for teaching that statecraft is best exercised in the absence of Christian morality. Yet here in his book on cities, as indeed throughout his writings, Botero demonstrates the remarkable degree to which, willing or not, he belonged to Machiavelli’s intellectual world. The “causes” of his title are studied in terms of their effects, not their presumed, intended goals. Botero, like his precursor Machiavelli and like his contemporary Francis Bacon, preferred to study what Aristotle had called “efficient” and “material” causes, while excluding or bracketing out what he had called “final” and “formal” causes. Thus the grandezza, or “greatness,” of the title refers to a city’s size, not its intrinsic superiority. Magnificence, long troublesome for theologians since it came riskily close to luxuria and was a virtue no poor man could exercise, pertains here unproblematically to cities, not persons. Religion figures in a relatively small way: the largest cities are in China. In a development that [End Page 450] distinguishes him from Machiavelli while taking him further along the same road, numbers now matter. In his concern to give population figures Botero reveals unsparingly just how small a share of the globe’s...