Italian medieval communes

The Italian city-states were a political phenomenon of small independent states mostly in the central and northern Italian peninsula between the 9th and the 15th centuries.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, urban settlements in Italy generally enjoyed a greater continuity than in the rest of western Europe. Many of these towns were survivors of earlier Etruscan, Umbrian and Roman towns which had existed within the Roman Empire. The republican institutions of Rome had also survived. 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 very first Italian city-state can be considered the Republic of Venice, which de facto broke apart from the Byzantine Empire since 742 (when the Doge title was finally subtracted from the appointment of the Byzantine emperor), becoming also de jure independent in the following centuries. The other first Italian city-states appeared in northern Italy as a result of a struggle to gain greater autonomy when not independent from the German Holy Roman Empire. The Lombard League was an alliance formed around at its apex included most of the cities of northern Italy including Milan, Piacenza, Cremona, Mantua, Crema, Bergamo, Brescia, Bologna, Padua, Treviso, Vicenza, Verona, Lodi, Reggio Emilia and Parma, though its membership changed through time. Other city-states were associated to these "commune" cities, like Genoa, Turin and, in the Adriatic, Ragusa. Venice was never subjected to the Holy Roman Empire, but chose anyway to patronize the Lombard League, to oppose strong imperial control of the mainland.

...
Wikipedia