page_title: City-state
section_title: Central Europe
hierarchical_section_title: City-state / Historical background / Central Europe
caption_attribution_description: English: The Free Imperial Cities of the Holy Roman Empire in 1792. The map shows the 50 cities that took part in the assembly of the Imperial Diet that year, plus Buchau and Gelnhausen. Not shown are the many enclaves and exclaves, with the exception of Cuxhaven, the distant exclave of Hamburg located at the mouth of the Elbe River.
context_page_description: A city-state is a political system where an independent sovereign city serves as the center of political, economic and cultural life over its contiguous territories. Historically, this included cities such as Rome, Athens, Carthage, and the Italian city-states during the Renaissance. As of 2020, only a handful of sovereign city-states exist, with some disagreement as to which are city-states. A great deal of consensus exists that the term properly applies currently to Monaco, Singapore, and Vatican City. Singapore, in particular, is considered the only truly sovereign city-state in the world as it has the full right and power to govern itself and its citizens, without any interference from outside governments. It also has its own currency, a technologically advanced military and a significant population of 5.6 million.
  A number of other small states share similar characteristics, and therefore are sometimes also cited as modern city-states—namely, Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Malta, which each have an urban center comprising a significant proportion of the population, though all have several distinct settlements and a designated or de facto capital city.
context_section_description: In the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806) over 80 Free Imperial Cities came to enjoy considerable autonomy in the Middle Ages and in early modern times, buttressed legally by international law following the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Some, like three of the earlier Hanseatic cities – Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck – pooled their economic relations with foreign powers and were able to wield considerable diplomatic clout. Individual cities often made protective alliances with other cities or with neighbouring regions, including the Hanseatic League (1358 – 17th century), the Swabian League of Cities (1331–1389), the Décapole (1354–1679) in the Alsace, or the Old Swiss Confederacy (c. 1300 – 1798). The Swiss cantons of Zürich, Bern, Lucerne, Fribourg, Solothurn, Basel, Schaffhausen, and Geneva originated as city-states.
  After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, some cities – then members of different confederacies – officially became sovereign city-states, such as the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (1806–11 and again 1813–71), the Free City of Frankfurt upon Main (1815–66), the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (1806–11 and again 1814–71), the Free and Hanseatic City of Lübeck (1806–11 and again 1813–71), and the Free City of Kraków (1815–1846). Under Habsburg rule the city of Fiume had the status of a  corpus separatum (1779–1919), which – while falling short of an independent sovereignty – had many attributes of a city-state.
caption: The Free imperial cities as of 1792.
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