Free Imperial City of Frankfurt

Free City of Frankfurt¹
Freie Stadt Frankfurt¹
State of the Holy Roman Empire State of the German Confederation
1372–1806 1806–1815: Grand Duchy 1816–1866
Flag Coat of arms
Location of Frankfurt within the German Confederation
Capital		Frankfurt am Main
Languages		Hessian
Government		Republic
History
•	Gained Imperial immediacy	1372
•	Annexed by Napoleon	1806
•	Puppet grand duchy	1810–13
•	Restored	9 July 1815
•	Annexed by Prussia	8 October 1866
Population
•	1864 est.	91,150
Currency		South German gulden (from 1754)
Succeeded by Province of Hesse-Nassau
1: Until 1806, Frankfurt was known as the "Free Imperial City of Frankfurt" Freie Reichsstadt Frankfurt. With the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, the imperial part of the name was dropped upon the city-state's restoration in 1815.

For almost five centuries, the German city of Frankfurt was a city-state within two major Germanic entities:

Frankfurt was a major city of the Holy Roman Empire, being the seat of imperial elections since 885 and the city for imperial coronations from 1562 (previously in Free Imperial City of Aachen) until 1792. Frankfurt was declared an Imperial Free City (Reichsstadt) in 1372, making the city an entity of Imperial immediacy, meaning immediately subordinate to the Holy Roman Emperor and not to a regional ruler or a local nobleman.

Due to its imperial significance, Frankfurt survived mediatisation in 1803. Following the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, Frankfurt fell to the rule of Napoleon I, who granted the city to Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg; the city became known as the Principality of Frankfurt. The Catholic clergy Dalberg emancipated the Catholics living with the city boundary. In 1810 Dalberg merged Frankfurt with the Principality of Aschaffenburg, the County of Wetzlar, Fulda, and Hanau to form the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt. After the defeat of Napoleon and the collapse of the Confederation of the Rhine, Frankfurt was returned to its pre-Napoleonic constitution via the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and became a sovereign city-state and a member of the German Confederation.