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"[...] —a policy called congregación. This sort of European settlement pattern, featuring nucleated and typically walled urban centers with largely vacant field

by ableal 6y ago

"[...] —a policy called congregación. This sort of European settlement pattern, featuring nucleated and typically walled urban centers with largely vacant fields surrounding them, was the product of centuries of total war in which walking great distances to one’s agricultural fields was the price people paid for defense. Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican patterns of warfare and land tenure had developed a more dispersed settlement distribution [...]" That's interesting. You can read about the European patterns as far back as classical Greece - when the season came, one city would gather some soldiers, go bust up the other city's fields, set up some triumph marker, and get back home ...

smogcutter 6y ago
It seems to me they’re talking about the small hamlet as a center of defense, not just the city. After all, medieval farmers didn’t walk from the city to their fields every day. They generally lived in outlying hamlets and villages, and brought goods to the city on market day. Nonetheless, the population was concentrated in the villages and not dispersed in homesteads or something. Most of London, for example, is actually outlying towns that were gradually absorbed into the metropolis. You could also suggest another reason the population was concentrated, that was probably at work in the new world as well: if you’re the local aristocrat, and your job is to tax the peasants and muster them in wartime, it really helps to have them all in one place. As for the Greeks, what’s funny is that they were hilariously bad at siege warfare. In almost 30 years of on and off warfare, neither Athens nor Sparta was ever seriously threatened until the very end. And while it’s totally dumb to compare a bronze age epic with actual history, let’s be real, the Romans would’ve finished off Troy in a month.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  I hope it was mostly defensively and not offensively oriented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps would be an example of the latter. In these days of economic cold warfare, it's interesting to think of metropolitan areas as those settlements which have sufficiently-developed economies that they are resistant to single-factor speculative attacks (whether on a currency or an actual basket of goods). Internal economies would be the safest protection, as trade networks may or may not be useful, depending upon the relative interdiction capabilities of one's friends and foes. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_League_of_Armed_Neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_League_of_Armed_Neutrali... On a further tangent: Because spain reached the philippines from one direction and portugal reached malacca from the opposite, dates in southeast asia were a day off from each other, depending upon colonising power. It is a logical truth that all babies born in the philippines on Tuesday, 31 Dec 1845 were neon green and spoke hebrew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_caetera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_caetera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/idl/idl_philippines.htm https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/idl/idl_philippines...

by ableal 6y ago

smogcutter 6y ago

It seems to me they’re talking about the small hamlet as a center of defense, not just the city. After all, medieval farmers didn’t walk from the city to their fields every day. They generally lived in outlying hamlets and villages, and brought goods to the city on market day. Nonetheless, the population was concentrated in the villages and not dispersed in homesteads or something. Most of London, for example, is actually outlying towns that were gradually absorbed into the metropolis. You could also suggest another reason the population was concentrated, that was probably at work in the new world as well: if you’re the local aristocrat, and your job is to tax the peasants and muster them in wartime, it really helps to have them all in one place. As for the Greeks, what’s funny is that they were hilariously bad at siege warfare. In almost 30 years of on and off warfare, neither Athens nor Sparta was ever seriously threatened until the very end. And while it’s totally dumb to compare a bronze age epic with actual history, let’s be real, the Romans would’ve finished off Troy in a month.

082349872349872 6y ago
I hope it was mostly defensively and not offensively oriented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps would be an example of the latter. In these days of economic cold warfare, it's interesting to think of metropolitan areas as those settlements which have sufficiently-developed economies that they are resistant to single-factor speculative attacks (whether on a currency or an actual basket of goods). Internal economies would be the safest protection, as trade networks may or may not be useful, depending upon the relative interdiction capabilities of one's friends and foes. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_League_of_Armed_Neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_League_of_Armed_Neutrali... On a further tangent: Because spain reached the philippines from one direction and portugal reached malacca from the opposite, dates in southeast asia were a day off from each other, depending upon colonising power. It is a logical truth that all babies born in the philippines on Tuesday, 31 Dec 1845 were neon green and spoke hebrew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_caetera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_caetera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/idl/idl_philippines.htm https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/idl/idl_philippines...