Imperial Free City
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- Reichsstadt redirects here. See also Reichstadt (Zákupy).
In the Holy Roman Empire, an imperial free city (in German: freie Reichsstadt) was a city formally responsible to the emperor only — as opposed to the majority of cities in the Empire, which belonged to a territory and were thus governed by one of the many princes (Fürsten) of the Empire, such as dukes or prince-bishops. Free cities also had independent representation in the Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire.
To be precise, a distinction on paper was made between imperial cities (Reichsstädte) and free cities (freie Städte). The latter were each formerly governed by a prince-bishop and had managed to gain independence from their bishop during the High Middle Ages. They were Basel (date?), Strasbourg (1272), Speyer (1294), Worms (date?), Mainz (1244, revoked 1462), Cologne (1475) and Regensburg (1245). In practice, however, there was little distinction between the imperial cities and the free cities; the distinctions lay more between rich cities and poor: rich cities such as Lübeck or Augsburg, for examples, were genuinely self-ruling enclaves within the Empire, waging war and making peace, controlling their own trade and permitting little outside interference.
The cities gained (and sometimes lost) their freedom among the vicissitudes of medieval power politics. Some favored cities gained a charter by gift and others were wealthy enough to purchase theirs from a prince in need of cash; some won it by force of arms, others usurped it during times of anarchy; a number of cities secured their freedom through the extinction of dominant families, like the Hohenstaufen.
Free cities might lose their privileges. Some free towns placed themselves voluntarily once more under the protection of a territorial magnate. Some, like Donauwörth in 1607, were stripped of their privileges by the emperor on genuine or trumped-up offenses; others were separated from the Empire by conquest: Besançon passed into the possession of Habsburg Spain; Strasbourg, Colmar, Hagenau and other free cities were seized by the maréchals of Louis XIV. Others, such as Basel, left the Empire in order to join the Swiss Confederation.
The most powerful Reichsstädte included Augsburg, Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Lübeck and Nuremberg. In the southwest, which had a more diverse and scattered political structure, many more free cities existed than in the north and in Bavaria, where larger territories had established themselves.
In the later Middle Ages, many free cities formed alliances (Städtebünde); most notably the Hanseatic League.
Free and imperial cities were only officially admitted as a Reichsstand to the Reichstag in 1489, and even then their votes were less significant compared to the Benches of the Kurfürsten (Electors) and the Princes. The leagues of cities divided themselves into two groups, or benches, in the Imperial Diet, the Rhenish and the Swabian. By the time of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the cities constituted a formal third "college" in the Diet.
The number of imperial free cities varied greatly over the centuries. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica mentions a list drawn up in 1422 with 75 free cities, and another drawn up in 1521 with 84, but at the 1792 Reichstag, a mere 51 cities were left bearing this status, most of them small towns in Swabia. During the reorganization of the Empire in 1803 (see German Mediatisation), all of the free cities but six — the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, and the cities of Frankfurt, Augsburg, and Nuremberg — were eliminated.
Napoléon dissolved the Empire in 1806. By 1811, all of the free cities had been eliminated — Augsburg and Nuremberg had been annexed by Bavaria, Frankfurt had become the center of the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt, a Napoleonic puppet state, and the three Hanseatic cities had been directly annexed by France as part of its effort to enforce the Continental Blockade against Britain. Hamburg and Lübeck with surrounding territories formed the département Bouches-de-l'Elbe.
When the German Confederation was established in 1815, Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen and Frankfurt were once again made free cities. Frankfurt was annexed by Prussia in consequence of the part it took in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The three Hanseatic cities remained as constituent states of the new German Empire, and retained this role in the Weimar Republic and into the Third Reich, although under Hitler this status was purely notional. Due to Hitler's distaste for Lübeck, it was annexed by Prussia in 1937. In the Federal Republic of Germany which was established after the war, Bremen and Hamburg became constituent states (Länder), a status which they retain to the present day. Berlin also received the status of a state after the war.
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- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition{{#if:{{{article|}}}| article {{#if:{{{url|}}}|[{{{url|}}}}} "{{{article}}}"{{#if:{{{url|}}}|]}}{{#if:{{{author|}}}| by {{{author}}}}}}}, a publication now in the public domain.
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