32

Between 1100 and 1300, medieval Paris became the largest city in the Western world. The urban space in Paris was and remained divided between large ecclesiastical seigneuries, who established settlements and legal structures in their urban, and especially suburban, territories, thus securing their dominion over their quarters of the future metropolis. By doing so, they came into competition with kings and bishops, who since the twelfth century had also striven after ownership of urban space, judicial authority, and revenues in Paris. Taking into account this context, this research project on Parisian neighborhoods and censives raises the following questions: When did immigration begin in these areas? When did these areas lose their purely agrarian imprint? How did landowners—in the case of Paris, the ecclesiastical seigneuries—face the challenges posed by urbanization? What integration mechanisms existed for the city and developing neighborhoods? What role did the king, in Paris in particular and as lord of the city, play in this process? And under what conditions did the city of Paris become this “incomparable” metropolis (“Paris without peers”) that—not only in terms of size, but also in the perception it and others had of it—transformed itself into Europe’s largest city? To answer these questions, this article focuses on the example of the censive of the priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs and its rich collection of legal and administrative documents. The preserved charters of Saint-Martin-des-Champs can provide insight into the administration of the territory of the priory in Paris in very ancient times, which extended around the place of its foundation and along the old rue Saint-Martin to places on the right bank of the Seine. The charters indicate that in the middle of the twelfth century the monastery began to sell land in its Parisian village and to bind the buyers to it by subjecting them to cens and other seigneurial rights.