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how the commercial cities like milan,piza bologna etc.grown?

The Italian city-states were a political phenomenon of small independent states mostly in the central and northern Italian peninsula between the 10th and 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 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, Siena, Lucca, Cremona and many others, had become large trading metropolises, able to conquer independence from their formal sovereigns.
The first Italian city-states appeared in northern Italy as a result of a struggle to gain independence 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, among others, Milan, Piacenza, Cremona, Mantua, Crema, Bergamo, Brescia, Bologna, Padua, Treviso, Vicenza, Venice, Verona, Lodi, Reggio Emilia and Parma, though its membership changed through time.
In central Italy there were the city-states of Florence, Pisa, Lucca, Siena and Ancona, while south of Rome and the Papal States there were the city-states of Salerno, Amalfi, Bari, Naples and Trani which in 1130 were united in the newly-created Norman Kingdom of Sicily.
Pisa and Amalfi also emerged as maritime republics: trade, shipbuilding and banking helped support their powerful navies in the Mediterranean in those medieval centuries.


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