I like this question. Why do we insist unwaveringly that the small polities which existed in Italy were City-States and not, more banally, just very small states?

And besides, didn’t some of these so-called city-states end up conquering their neighbors and presiding over vast zones of control? By the early Fourteenth Century, the Milanese state was larger than most German electorates and French duchies, with some of the ruling Visconti dynasty spending more time outside of Milan than in the city to boot. Calling the Viscontean-Milanese polity a city-state seems silly.

However, there is a big “But” in all this. Like no other place in Europe, urban governments in Italy formed the fundamental building block of the peninsula's political organization. Sure, cities existed in the rest of Europe and were important political players; no one can deny that. After all, urban-focused life and politics has its roots in the Roman Empire, and is a major component of shared cultural heritage in Latin Europe (whatever that means — how do I insert a shrug emoji?). But only in Italy are cities the linking dimension of all political organizations.

What this means, and how it happened, might not be difficult to imagine: it was not a consequence of happenstance that the center of the Roman Empire was a peninsula characterized by dense urbanization fostered by high agricultural productivity and strong internal and external trade links. And while over the Alps and across the seas the Empire might have disappeared, its institutions continued to exist in the Italian cities: the Basilica no longer housed markets and courtrooms, but rather the city’s religious leadership, which also in the Roman tradition had important political and organizational responsibilities. From the Bishop's religious leadership emanated the various institutions of urban leadership (never exactly alike in any two cities) with whom even the proudest or wealthiest persons, merchants or landowners, deferred to and worked to integrate themselves with (at least most of the time). Thus the Italian city retained a magnetism and political vivacity which would be unmatched in the rest of Europe for centuries (or for millennia, if we want to be bold).

So during the medieval period in Italy, without the city there could be no state, and there could be no state without a city. Even when a city was conquered by another, there was little to no thought spared to absorption, integration, or even expansion: One city had asserted itself over another, and that domination would be expressed through the very institutions of the subjugated city which would remain as intact as possible: Control was expressed either by filling the local council with sycophants, imposing sympathizers to executive offices leaders, or even merely accepting declarations of submission by the city authority. Thus the city remained the fundamental building block of Italian politics, both for the Milanese, the Venetians, or any other city-state which would go on to extend its rule over a vast geographic area, but also for the subjugated towns and cities over which they imposed their rule.

But wait, there’s more!

If we absolutely want to cover all our bases, there’s a whole tangent we can follow where some (including myself!) don’t actually like to use the phrase “City State,” even though it’s admittedly a convenient shorthand for the sort of political organizations which existed in Medieval Italy. Problem is, Medieval Italians had no conception of “State” (although they would develop a rudimentary one in the renaissance) meaning the city-as-state construct is a wholly modern categorization.

Most of the time, the phrase “Italian City State” is a convenient translation of the Italian word “Comune.” In my own writing, I actually translate “Comune” as “Commune” (and there are also those who won’t translate it altogether).

In modern Italian, the “Comune” is the city hall or local city or town authority. But to Medieval Italians, its meaning was closer to “Common Good,” similar to what the romans would have referred to as “Res Publica.” It was the collection of institutions which for Medieval Italians represented a local government system. And while Medieval Italians certainly understood that most commonly the “Comune” was organized around an urban space, it by no means needed to do so by definition. The institution of the "Comune" could transcend the geographic space of the city and its hinterland, even surviving its physical destruction (as happened in Milan in the 12th century) or geographic migration (as happened to Venice in the 10th century - Venice was actually initially a unique multi-community comune, although it’s legal and political heritage was also different from that of the rest of Italy).

But most importantly, the construct of the "Comune" was not the only political agent in the urban space: Merchant and Artisanal Guilds, the various permutations of landed aristocracy, religious institutions, and “The Empire,” all interacted in overlapping and shifting relationship of power. The urban space is a vital feature of the relationships, but it is not the only feature.

I will leave you with the quote that opens Lauro Martines' Political Conflict in the Italian City States: "When a local group of men, usually eminent or powerful nobles and cives, formed a sworn association putting ‘in comune’ their feudal jurisdictions and prerogatives, they consolidated their control over a sizeable and expanding portion of the public power in a given territory. The commune in the full sense of the word had come into being. By the end of the 11th century many of the most famous communes were already in existence: Milan, Genoa, Pisa, Pavia and Mantua. Verona, Lucca, Florence and Siena swiftly followed. Although the commune was by no means an urban phenomenon alone, the city led the way and it is the city we shall be watching..."