Europe's cities experienced many political changes after the Middle Ages but there was substantial continuity in the persistence and organization of urban elites. There were regional variations. The participation of the landed nobility was always much stronger in the towns of Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula than it was in the Netherlands or the British Isles. The role of merchants and entrepreneurs in urban elites reflected the extent to which individual urban centers owed their economic expansion to commerce and industry. Mercantile elites were prominent in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Hamburg, while in those cities whose earlier commercial success they had overtaken, such as Lübeck and Venice, there was a growing rentier element, based on income from land and housing. Some similar comparisons can be drawn from France in the nineteenth century, where merchants dominated Marseilles and Caen, but Nice moved in the opposite direction from its earlier German counterparts, changing from a rentier town to a wine-exporting port and tourist center.