Italian city-states

The ancient Italian city-states were Etruscan (Dodecapolis), Latin, most famously Rome, and Greek (Magna Graecia), but also of Umbrian, Celtic and other origins.

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, Lucca, Cremona, Siena, Città di Castello, Perugia, and many others, had become large trading metropoles, able to obtain independence from their formal sovereigns.

The other early Italian city-states to appear in northern and central Italy arose as a result of a struggle to gain greater autonomy during the rule of the Holy Roman Empire.

Around 1100, Genoa, Pisa and Ancona emerged as independent maritime republics too: trade, shipbuilding and banking helped support their powerful navies in the Mediterranean in those medieval centuries.

With the Bubonic Plague in 1348, the birth of the English woolen industry, and general warfare, Italy temporarily lost its economic advantage.

It found a new niche in luxury items like ceramics, glassware, lace and silk as well as experiencing a temporary rebirth in the woolen industry.

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.

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).

[10] 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.

But many of the new city-states also housed violent factions based on family, confraternity and brotherhood, which undermined their cohesion (for instance the Guelphs and Ghibellines).

For example in 1395 Gian Galeazzo Visconti bought the title of Duke of Milan from the King Wenceslaus for 100,000 gold florins.

[11] At the beginning of the 16th century, apart from some city-states like Genoa, Lucca or San Marino, only the Republic of Venice was able to preserve its independence and to match the European monarchies of France and Spain and the Ottoman Empire (see Italian Wars).