certain nodes, such as Magdeburg law eastwards to Kyiv, among others, and Lübeck law northwards into Baltic towns. A key element of European urban form was a central public space: the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the Italian piazza, the Romance place/plaza, the German Platz, the Russian ploshchad.
Architectural Greek and Roman antiquity defined classicism in European building. It was a form of language which, in spite of its ups and downs in the cycles of taste, never left European – and overseas migrated – architecture until the mid-twentieth-century victory of the modernist movement. It could even blend with modernism, as in some of the best architecture of Italian fascism – for instance, EUR, the exhibition complex built in Rome for the World Exhibition that never was. Indeed, modern nationalism, first of all French Revolutionary and Napoleonic symbolism, drew more heavily on the classical heritage than the ancien régime preceding it, in pageantry, painting, nomenclature – the Temple of Reason, the Field of Mars, the Pantheon and, in monumental architecture, the Vendôme Column and the Triumphal Arch. The new United States was very much part of the early-nineteenth-century so-called Greek Revival, as the public buildings of Washington, D.C., testify. Pre-modern European architecture developed a whole repertoire of styles, which in the nineteenth century were often blended into something known as Historicism or Eclecticism. Classicism apart, the most important element of the repertoire was the medieval Gothic, from the French ‘era of the cathedrals’. It made a powerful comeback in the nationalist age.
Before the Nations
The paradigmatic European nation-state grew out of an existing prenational state, and its capital evolved out of a long pre-national history. Although our proper story begins with nation-states and national capitals, because of the strong pre-national legacy in most of Europe, some prologue history might be helpful.
The Church, the land, the city and the king sum up the prehistory of nation-states and of national capitals. The Church was the decisive conduit of the classical heritage in the Dark Ages. The Classical Pantheon, built under Agrippa just before the Christian era and reconstructed by Hadrian around 130 CE, was consecrated as a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and All the Martyrs in 609. When the popes started to rebuild Rome after their return from Avignon (in the late fourteenth century), one of their contributions was to add a Christian statue and/or an inscription of themselves to the imperial columns. Two famous examples are the columns of Trajan and of Marcus Aurelius Antonius (at what is now Piazza Colonna), then provided with statues of Saints Peter and Paul, respectively, on top, and an inscription commemorating the contribution by Pope Sixtus V.
The Church was the monumental builder of the Middle Ages and also later, from Renaissance and Baroque Rome to seventeenth-century London after the Great Fire. The Cathedral of Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey and the later Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Cathedral of Saint Stephen and the Basilica of Saint Peter were the unrivalled pre-modern constructions of Paris, London, Vienna and Rome. So was the Matthias Corvinus Church in Budapest. El Escorial outside Madrid was both a monastery and the most awe-inspiring of the royal palaces. Only the Kremlin of the Muscovy Tsars and the city hall of the rich merchants and manufacturers of provincial Brussels indicated overwhelming secular power or wealth.* Berlin was not a medieval city of significance and became architecturally ambitious only in the second half of the eighteenth city. In other words, Berlin had no important pre-modern centre of monumentality, but there was the castle of the Hohenzollern, electors of Brandenburg-Prussia.†
The Church organized the rituals of the collectivity, from Mass to royal coronations and funerals, and church buildings provided the most important space for homage and remembrance of worldly figures: royal, aristocratic and occasionally even poetical tombs, statues and busts.* London’s Westminster Abbey, since Tudor times, and Saint Paul’s Cathedral seem to have harboured a larger number and, more certainly, a wider range of commemorative monuments than most major churches of Europe.† On the whole, tombs had a very important place in dynastic monumentality, most famously, perhaps, in the abbeys of Saint-Denis and of Westminster and the Viennese Kapuzinergruft of the Habsburgs.
Occasionally – and in papal Rome frequently – the townscape was also adorned with saintly statues and votive monuments, such as the early-eighteenth-century Plague Columns in Vienna and in Buda (now part of Budapest), or the Charles Church in Vienna, also built in gratitude for relief from the plague.‡ In the seventeenth century, Christopher Wren built not only a new Saint Paul’s Cathedral but fifty other churches in the City of London.1
Papal Rome, from its height to the end of its full splendour, contributed two further features to urban monumentality, the Cathedral of Saint Peter apart. One was the straight axial road with its long urban vista, the Via Pia, from the Quirinale to Porta Pia, constructed from 1561 to 1562, long antedating the wider Nevsky Prospekt, the Champs-Élysées and all the others.2 The second was the grandiose piazza in front of Saint Peter’s, capable of receiving in a grand manner the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims coming to Rome. It got its final shape with Bernini’s colonnades from the years around 1660, becoming arguably the most elegant monumental public space in the world.
The Rise of Territorial Capitals
Before any central urban monumentality could emerge, there had to be a capital city. The European Middle Ages started out as a massive reruralization of social and political life. The idea of a capital city passed away.3 Even the greatest of early medieval rulers, Charlemagne, did not need one, although Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) was his preferred residence in the latter part of his reign. Paris became caput regni only in the first half of the fourteenth century.4 And that was not irreversible. In the last decades of the long and powerful reign of Louis XIV, Paris became a huge suburb of Versailles. In his last twenty-two years, Louis visited Paris only four times. Until the revolution, the relationship of Paris to Versailles was never quite clear.5
London assumed permanent capital functions by the twelfth century. Before that, Winchester was the modest political capital of England, where the regalia and the royal treasure were kept and where the survey results for the Domesday Book were returned.6 However, the capital functions centred around Westminster, that is, around the royal palace and the Abbey, which was the coronation church. The City of London was still for some time rather a twin city to Westminster, some kilometres down the river to the east.
Vienna became the permanent capital of the Habsburgs in the course of the seventeenth century – Prague was the major alternative – and definitely only when the Ottomans began to be rolled back, after their failed siege of Vienna in 1683.7 Russia grew out of Muscovy, but Peter I moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg after his decisive victory in the Northern War at Poltava in 1709. After the October Revolution, Moscow became again the main capital: ‘main’ because in Tsarist Russia, the USSR and post-Communist Russia, the two cities both have both a special standing as stolitsy, capital cities (originally meaning ‘throne cities’).
Berlin had housed the main residence of the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns since the 1440s, but that meant more a feudal manor than a national centre. In the eighteenth century, when Brandenburg-Prussia was becoming a great power, Potsdam was alongside Berlin the official ‘residence city’, the one much preferred by Frederick II (the Great). To the Hohenzollerns, Potsdam was a possible capital even of the German Reich; Bismarck had to push the new German emperor into accepting Berlin.8
The Spanish royal court moved to Madrid in 1560 and the city soon became very dominated by the court and its needs, but the former kept an ambulatory life for another good half-century, with El Escorial as the grandest and most important alternative in the surrounding region. Even when a permanent royal palace was built in the 1630s, the Buen Retiro Palace, it was actually (just) outside the city. This led to the symbolic and highly ceremonial entry into Madrid of a new king or queen through one of the city gates, the Puerta de Alcalá.9
Ofen, or Buda, had gathered most of the capital functions in Hungary after the abortive revolution in 1848, at the onset of which the Hungarian Diet met in Pozsony, currently Bratislava. It became Budapest only in 1873, uniting the three cities of traditionally German Buda (Ofen), the rapidly growing economic centre Pest across the Danube and ancient and aging Obuda, a bit to the north, where the