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A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. [1] They have existed in many parts of the world throughout history, including cities such as Rome, Carthage, Athens and Sparta and the Italian city-states during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, such as Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan.
Beginning in the early first millennium, independent city-states in Greece began to flourish, evolving the notion of citizenship, becoming in the process the archetype of the free city, the polis. [16] The agora, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the polis. [17]
During the 11th century in northern Italy a new political and social structure emerged. In most places where communes arose (e.g. France, Britain and Flanders), they were absorbed by monarchical states. But in northern and central Italy, some medieval communes developed into independent and powerful city-states.
Map showing the source languages/language families of state names. The fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, the five inhabited U.S. territories, and the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands have taken their names from a wide variety of languages. The names of 24 states derive from indigenous languages of the Americas and one from Hawaiian.
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 [ 7 ...
Other city-states survive as federated states, like the present day German city-states, or as otherwise autonomous entities with limited sovereignty, like Hong Kong, Gibraltar and Ceuta. To some extent, urban secession , the creation of a new city-state (sovereign or federated), continues to be discussed in the early 21st century in cities such ...
The model, however, fares no better than any other. City-states no doubt existed, but so also did many poleis that were not city-states. The minimum semantic load of this hyphenated neologism is that the referent must be a city and must be a sovereign state. As a strict rule, the definition fails on its exceptions. [20]
Free city (antiquity) a self-governed city during the Hellenistic and Roman imperial eras; City-state, an independent sovereign city; Free imperial city, self-governed city in the Holy Roman Empire subordinate only to the emperor Free City of Augsburg, for over 500 years in what is now Germany; Free City of Besançon, in what is now eastern France