History of Free Cities

Cities that made their own law

For several centuries in Europe the city was a jurisdiction in its own right. At the Peace of Constance in 1183 the Emperor conceded that the northern Italian communes could elect their own councils and pass their own legislation. Venice ran as a republic from the early Middle Ages until Napoleon ended it in 1797. In the Empire, a free imperial city answered to the Emperor alone and to no intervening prince, and about fifty of them still sat in the Imperial Diet in 1792.

The Hanseatic League was something else again, and the most interesting precedent for the present. It held no territory the way a state does. It was a network of towns, perhaps two hundred at its widest extent, bound by shared commercial law and anchored by four great trading houses at Novgorod, Bergen, London and Bruges, each with its own treasury, seal and rulebook. Members joined and drifted away. Nothing about it looked like a country, and for three hundred years it worked.

Why they disappeared

They were not simply crushed. Hendrik Spruyt’s account of the period treats the sovereign territorial state, the city league and the city-state as three competing designs, and argues that the territorial state won on the merits of its age. It could make binding treaties, because someone could speak for the whole of it, and a league of self-interested towns could not. The Hanse held its last diet in 1669 and quietly dissolved. The imperial reorganisation of 1803 wiped out all but six Free Cities, the Congress of Vienna confirmed four, and Prussia took Frankfurt in 1866, leaving Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck to carry the old titles as ordinary federal states.

The Free Cities of the twentieth century were a different thing wearing the same name. Danzig, Kraków and the Free Territory of Trieste were diplomatic compromises over contested ground, administered by outside powers, and each was extinguished within a generation. Free ports lasted longer but ended for a duller reason: Hamburg closed its Freihafen in 2013 because average tariffs had fallen from roughly thirty per cent to three, and the exemption had become paperwork. What a Free City is worth has always been a function of how bad the surrounding regime is.

The thread to the present

What these cities had in common was not a political programme but a position. They sold predictable law and low friction in a world short of both, and people and capital moved to them far out of proportion to their size. Livorno’s charters of the 1590s offered exemption from guild restrictions and freedom of worship, and drew Jewish, Dutch, English and Greek merchants to a small Tuscan port. Hong Kong after 1841 did the same thing on a far larger scale. Jurisdictional variety also made it hard for any European ruler to close off every exit, which is the deeper reason this period keeps being argued over.

The modern movement is a bet that the same still holds. It runs from the founding of the Seasteading Institute in 2008 and Paul Romer’s charter cities argument in 2009, through the Honduran ZEDE law of 2013, to Titus Gebel’s Free Private Cities and the network state. The Hanse’s answer to territory, a network of places bound by common rules rather than by a border, is being proposed again by people who mostly do not realise they are repeating it.