Italian city-states

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After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, urban settlements in Italy generally enjoyed a greater continuity than in the rest of western Europe. Many of these towns were survivors of earlier Etruscan and Roman towns which had existed within the Roman Empire. The republican institutions of Rome had also survived. Some feudal lords existed with a servile labour force and huge tracts of land, but by the 11th century, many cities, including Venice, Milan, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Siena, Lucca, Cremona and many others, had become large trading metropolises, able to conquer independence from their formal sovereigns.

Florence was one of the most important city-states in Italy

Early Italian city-states[edit]

The first Italian city-states appeared in northern Italy as a result of a struggle to gain independence from the German Holy Roman Empire.[1] The Lombard League was an alliance formed around at its apex included most of the cities of northern Italy including Milan, Piacenza, Cremona, Mantua, Crema, Bergamo, Brescia, Bologna, Padua, Treviso, Vicenza, Venice, Verona, Lodi, Reggio Emilia and Parma, though its membership changed through time. Other city-states were associated to these "commune" cities, like Genoa, Turin and, in the Adriatic, Ragusa.

In central Italy there were the city-states of Florence, Pisa, Lucca, Siena and Ancona, while south of Rome and the Papal States there were the city-states of Salerno, Amalfi, Bari, Naples and Trani which in 1130 were united in the newly created Norman Kingdom of Sicily.[2]

Around 1100, Genoa and Venice emerged as independent Maritime republics. For Genoa — nominally — the Holy Roman Emperor was overlord and the Bishop of Genoa was president of the city; however, actual power was wielded by a number of consuls annually elected by popular assembly. Pisa and Amalfi also emerged as maritime republics: trade, shipbuilding and banking helped support their powerful navies in the Mediterranean in those medieval centuries.[3]

Difference from northern Europe[edit]

Between the 12th and 13th centuries, Italy was vastly different from feudal Europe north of the Alps. The Peninsula was a melange of political and cultural elements rather than a unified state. Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel have argued that geography determined the history of the region; other scholars emphasize the absence of central political structures. The very mountainous nature of Italy's landscape was a barrier to effective inter-city communication. The Po plain, however, was an exception: it was the only large contiguous area, and most city states that fell to invasion were located there. Those that survived the longest were in the more rugged regions, such as Florence or Venice, which was protected by its lagoon. The rugged terrain of the Alps prevented the German Princes from attacking Northern Italy, safeguarding the country from German political control. Largely for these reasons, no strong monarchies emerged as they did in the rest of Europe; instead there emerged the independent city-state.

The Most Serene Republic of Venice used to be a city-state but then expanded and conquered several territories in mainland Italy and abroad


  • a rise in population―the population doubled in this period (the demographic explosion)
  • the rebuilding of the great cathedrals
  • an agrarian revolution
  • the development of commerce

In recent writing on the city states, American scholar Rodney Stark emphasizes that they married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of capitalism.[4] He argues that these states were mostly republics, unlike the great European monarchies of France and Spain, where absolute power was vested in rulers who could and did stifle commerce. Keeping both direct Church control and imperial power at arm's length, the independent city republics prospered through commerce based on early capitalist principles, ultimately creating the conditions for the artistic and intellectual changes produced by the Renaissance.

Cambridge University historian and political philosopher Quentin Skinner[5] has pointed out how Otto of Freising, a German bishop who visited central Italy during the 12th century, commented that Italian towns had appeared to have exited from feudalism, so that their society was based on merchants and commerce. Even northern cities and states were also notable for their merchant republics, especially the Republic of Venice.[6] Compared to absolutist monarchies or other more centrally controlled states, the Italian communes and commercial republics enjoyed relative political freedom conducive to academic and artistic advancement. Geographically, and because of trade, Italian cities such as Venice became international trading and banking hubs and intellectual crossroads.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson[7] points out that Florence and Venice, as well as several other Italian city-states, played a crucial innovative role in world financial developments, devising the main instruments and practices of banking and the emergence of new forms of social and economic organization.



In the 1300s, just as the Italian Renaissance was beginning, Italy was the economic capital of Western Europe: the Italian States were the top manufacturers of finished woolen products. However, with the Bubonic Plague in 1348, the birth of the English woolen industry and general warfare, Italy temporarily lost its economic advantage. However, by the late 1400s Italy was again in control of trade along the Mediterranean Sea. It found a new niche in luxury items like ceramics, glassware, lace and silk as well an experiencing a temporary rebirth in the woolen industry.

However, Italy would never regain its strong hold on textiles. And though it was the birthplace of banking, by the 1500s German and Dutch banks began taking away business. Discovery of the Americas in the late 1400s as well as new trade routes to Africa and India (which made Portugal a leading trading power) brought about the decline in Italian economic power.[8]

Literacy and numeracy[edit]

By the 13th century, northern and central Italy had become the most literate society in the world. More than one third of the male population could read in the vernacular (an unprecedented rate since the decline of the Western Roman Empire), as could a small but significant proportion of women.

The Italian city states were also highly numerate, given the importance of the new forms of bookkeeping that were essential to the trading and mercantile basis of society. Some of the most widely circulating books, such as the Liber Abaci by Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, included applications of mathematics and arithmetic to business practice[9] or were business manuals based on sophisticated numeracy and literacy.

Indeed Luca Pacioli helped create the banking system of the Italian city-states with his "double-entry bookkeeping":[10] his 27-page treatise on bookkeeping contained the first known published work on that topic, and is said to have laid the foundation for double-entry bookkeeping (of Genoese merchants) as it is practiced today.[11]


During the 11th century in northern Italy a new political and social structure emerged ― the city-state or commune. The civic culture which arose from this urbs was remarkable. In some places where communes arose (e.g. Britain and France), they were absorbed by the monarchical state as it emerged. They survived in northern and central Italy as in a handful of other regions throughout Europe to become independent and powerful city-states. In Italy the breakaway from their feudal overlords occurred in the late 12th century and 13th century, during the Investiture Controversy between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor: Milan led the Lombard cities against the Holy Roman Emperors and defeated them, gaining independence (battles of Legnano, 1176, and Parma, 1248; see Lombard League).

Similar town revolts led to the foundation of city-states throughout medieval Europe, such as in Russia (Novgorod Republic, 12th century), in Flanders (Battle of Golden Spurs, 14th century) in Switzerland (the towns of the Old Swiss Confederacy, 14th century), in Germany (the Hanseatic League, 14th-15th century), and in Prussia (Thirteen Years' War, 15th century).

Some Italian city-states became great military powers very early on. Venice and Genoa acquired vast naval empires in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, some of which threatened those of the growing Ottoman Empire. During the Fourth Crusade (1204), Venice conquered a quarter of the Byzantine Empire.

Italy in 1494, after the Peace of Lodi

The Maritime Republics were one of the main products of this new civic and social culture based on commerce and exchange of knowledge with other areas of the world outside western Europe. The Republic of Ragusa and the Republic of Venice, for example, had important trade communications with the Muslim and Hindu world and this helped the initial development of the Italian Renaissance.

By the late 12th century, a new and remarkable society had emerged in Northern Italy; rich, mobile, expanding, with a mixed aristocracy and urban abitante (burgher) class, interested in urban institutions and republican government. But many of the new city-states also housed violent factions based on family, confraternity and brotherhood, who undermined their cohesion (for instance the Guelphs and Ghibellines).

Princely states[edit]

By 1300, most of these republics had become princely states dominated by a Signore. The exceptions were Venice, Florence, Lucca, and a few others, which remained republics in the face of an increasingly monarchic Europe. In many cases by 1400 the Signori were able to found a stable dynasty over their dominated city (or group of regional cities), obtaining also a nobility title of sovereignty by their formal superior, for example in 1395 Gian Galeazzo Visconti bought for 100,000 gold florins the title of Duke of Milan from the emperor Wenceslaus.

Regional states[edit]

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Milan, Venice, and Florence were able to conquer other city-states, creating regional states. The 1454 Peace of Lodi ended their struggle for hegemony in Italy, attaining a balance of power (see Italian Renaissance).

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, apart from some minor city-states like Lucca or San Marino, only the republican Venice was able to preserve her independence and to match the European monarchies of France and Spain and the Ottoman Empire (see Italian Wars).


  1. ^ (Italian) Italian "Comuni"
  2. ^ Franco Cardini & Marina Montesano. Storia Medievale. Le Monnier Università. Florence, 2006
  3. ^ G. Benvenuti Le Repubbliche Marinare. Amalfi, Pisa, Genova, Venezia. Newton & Compton editori, Roma 1989.
  7. ^ Ferguson, Niall, The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World. Penguin, 2008
  8. ^ Matthews and Platt. The Western Humanities. Volume I: "Beginnings through the Renaissance". Mountain View: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1992
  9. ^ Stark, Rodney, The Victory of Reason. Random House, New York: 2005
  10. ^ Carruthers, Bruce G., & Espeland, Wendy Nelson, Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 97, No. 1, July 1991, pp. 37
  11. ^ vSangster, Alan: "The printing of Pacioli's Summa in 1494: how many copies were printed?" (Accounting Historians Journal, John Carroll University, Cleveland, Ohio, June 2007)

See also[edit]

References and sources[edit]