The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c12.s2.15

c12.s2.15

The Middle Ages produced several types of republican states, aristocratic, oligarchic, and even democratic. The chartered towns of England and France, the Hanseatic cities of north Germany, and the Italian cities like Florence, Venice or Naples, are the best examples of such republics. But the English and French cities never claimed "sovereign" rights; the German cities were formally "free" but actually semi-dependent, as they had to acknowledge more or less the jurisdiction of feudal lords, markgrafs, or emperors; it was only the Italian cities that may be said to have approached the ancient Hellenic city-states in real autonomy and independence. "North Italy is the only region in medieval Europe where the greater part though not the whole of a continuous territory is divided up into the domains of a number of city states just as the more civilized portion of ancient Greece was."¹