The picture of a walled city, around which fields and villages are spread out, is the most typical picture of the medieval world, which requires no explanation. However, A. Hilferding came across one text about Slavic cities, which made me look a little differently at the history of cities:
What's interesting here: the city appears as a TEMPORARY PLACE OF GATHERING people from villages without a permanent population of its own. That is, there is no common king-prince who rules the villages, and his retinue outside the walls of the city initially does not exist. But there are representatives of the clans (usually a village is a collection of houses of one large family), who decide between themselves on a neutral territory - a city.
But there is one term in history that means the gathering of people itself - ἐκκλησία (ecclesia, from κᾰλέω - "to call, to call"), which began to be translated as "church".
After all, initially the Church is a fenced-in place for gathering people. That is why among its attributes stand out the bells (of course, they were not originally), which are designed to call people to a prayer service (already under Christianity), that is, everyone in one place, and the cross, which symbolizes the consolidation of society. That is, the symbolism and purpose of the church fully reflects the role of the city in society described above.
So it turns out that the first cities are churches. In principle, it remained so later - in each Kremlin there are cathedrals and chapels. And this, it turns out, was not a religious education. However, at some point, the city (read, church) ceased to be a gathering place for the people and became a source of dominant power. That is, the one who extends his influence to the nearby villages (which were the founders of this church). From this perspective, it becomes more or less clear why the royal power goes hand in hand with the church, and in the case of Catholic countries, so in general, all power went from the Pope to the provinces, which only after a while achieved their political independence.
Author: peremyshlin