Medieval Paris: A Case Study
Paris is the single best worked example of a “subject town” — genuinely split in its governance between the crown, the bishop, and the university, each pulling in a slightly different direction, and it’s worth a dedicated look on its own merits.
The city sat on the Seine roughly 280 miles from the Atlantic, with a current gentle enough to power water mills reliably while still allowing boat traffic all the way to the English Channel, and — via the Loire — deep into central France as well: a genuinely ideal siting for a capital, geographically speaking. The appetite of the resulting population was staggering: one 14th-century estimate has Parisians getting through 3,420 sheep, 514 oxen, 306 calves, and 600 pigs every single week, a scale of consumption that makes the earlier “how do you feed a medieval town” question feel very concrete indeed.
Notre-Dame’s construction began in 1163 under Bishop Maurice de Sully, who deliberately wanted to rival the new cathedrals already rising at St-Denis, Senlis, and Sens — and, in a detail that genuinely delights, some of the stone used to build it was quarried from mining tunnels dug directly beneath the city itself, meaning parts of medieval Paris were, quite literally, hollowed out to build the cathedral standing above it.
Governance-wise, Paris is presented as the clearest possible case study of a “subject town” divided three ways — crown, bishop, and university all held genuine, overlapping authority, with the ordinary merchants and artisans who actually generated the city’s wealth left with a comparatively limited voice in how any of it was run.
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