H. G. Koenigsberger, through his many publications and through his devoted service to the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, has made many important contributions to our knowledge of the forms of representative government in early modern Europe. But most of the institutions to which he has drawn our attention have been subordinate parts of royal governments, helping to govern nations and provinces under the sovereign rule of a king, as the Sicilian and Netherlandish estates in the realms of the Spanish crown. There was, of course, another form of representative government in the period, of similar age and importance. That was the form of government dominated by representative councils that developed in cities, particularly in those parts of Europe in which cities claimed independence of any sovereign lord – such as Italy and Switzerland – or even in those areas in which cities conceded sovereignty to a distant emperor in order to deny it to any local lord – such as the Holy Roman Empire. It is upon this second type of representative government that this chapter concentrates.

This chapter concentrates, furthermore, upon the period of the early sixteenth century, because many of these representative city governments then became intimately involved in the initial stages of the Protestant Reformation with consequences of some importance for their forms of government.