Free Imperial City

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Reichsstadt redirects here. See also Reichstadt (Zákupy).

In the Holy Roman Empire, a free imperial 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 (1000), Worms (1074), Mainz (1244, revoked 1462), Ratisbon (1245), Strasbourg (1272), Speyer (1294) and Cologne (1475). Although the legal detail would vary greatly case by case, originally a Free City had more rights and privileges than an Imperial City: the former only had, for instance, to support the Emperor during the crusades and organise the protection of their own city, while the latter also had to pay taxes to the Emperor and supply troops for his military campaigns. Over time, the difference became more and more blurred so that the "Free and Imperials Cities" were collectively known in the diet as "Free Imperial Cities". Rather than legal matters, what mattered more was the difference in wealth: 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. In the later Middle Ages, many free cities formed alliances (Städtebünde); most notably the Hanseatic League, although some of their members were never Free cities and joined with the permission of their territorial ruler.

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 pawned away by the Emperor such as Mühlhausen, Duisburg and Offenburg, although the latter was able to regain its immediacy.

Free and imperial cities were only officially admitted as a Reichsstand to the Reichstag in 1489, and even then their votes were usually considered only to be advisory 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 most powerful Reichsstädte included Augsburg, Bremen, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Lübeck and Nuremberg. The number of imperial free cities varied greatly over the centuries as did their geographic distribution. In general, in areas with a more diverse and scattered political structure, many more free cities existed than in areas, where larger territories had established themselves. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica mentions a list drawn up in 1422 with 75 free cities, and another drawn up in 1521 with 84. As the process of territorial consolidation continued over time, the number had sunk to the 51 cities present at the 1792 Reichstag towards the end of the Empire, many of which were in the Southwest and Franconia, none in the East and some in the North and West, with most of them former members of the erstwhile powerful Hanseatic League.

In the 16th and 17th century, another trend different from internal consolidation led to a number of free cities being separated from the Empire: external territorial change. The maréchals of Louis XIV seized a great number of cities based on claims produced by his Chambers of Reunion. That way, in Alsace, Strasbourg and the ten cities of the Décapole were annexed, as had been the free cities connected to the Three Bishoprics of Metz, Verdun and Toul a century earlier by the troops of King Henry II. Also, when the Swiss Confederacy gained its independence from the Empire in 1648, the Swiss imperial cities such as Basel, Berne and Zürich left the Empire as cantons of the confederacy.

With the rise of Revolutionary France in Europe, this trend would accelerate enormously. First between 1789 and 1792 the areas west of the Rhine were annexed by the revolutionary armies ending the long tradition of free cities such diverse as Cologne, Aachen, Düren, Speyer and Worms. Then, the Napoleonic Wars led to the reorganization of the Empire in 1803 (see German Mediatisation), where 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. Finally, 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 and the need to compensate Prussia for its territorial losses under the Greater Hamburg Law, it was annexed to the latter 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, which had never been a free city in its history, also received the status of a state after the war due to its status in divided post-war Germany.