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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]
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]
New York City displays many features associated with independent cities but is, in fact, a sui generis municipality that is coextensive with five counties. Counties invariably are administrative divisions of state government. In the case of New York City, however, they are also administrative divisions of city government.
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 ...
The walled city provided protection from direct assault at the price of corporate interference on the pettiest levels, but once a townsman left the city walls, he (for women scarcely travelled) was at the mercy of often violent and lawless nobles in the countryside. Because much of medieval Europe lacked central authority to provide protection ...
Other types of states include the Personenverbandsstaat, which is a type of state in the early and high Middle Ages, in which a ruler does not rule over a territory with specific land boundaries with the support of administrative officials, as in a territorial state, but rather his sovereignty is based on a personal relationship of dependence ...
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 ...