The banking capital of Renaissance Germany, raised to the rank of a free imperial city in 1276 and holding that rank, through many changes of constitution, until 1806. Its merchant princes the Fuggers and the Welsers financed Habsburg emperors and rivalled the Medici of Florence; with Nuremberg it anchored the trade route from Italy to northern Europe. It gave its name to the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and to the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, and after 1648 it was governed by a formally parity constitution splitting offices between Catholics and Protestants.
One of the six cities that kept their Reichsfreiheit in the 1803 mediatization, but its independence did not survive the Empire: on the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire it passed under the sovereignty of Bavaria in 1806 and remains a Bavarian city today.
Translated primary sources on the government, guilds and confessional politics of the Augsburg city-republic; verified on Open Library (/works/OL16646204W).
Current standard survey covering the Peace of Augsburg and the imperial cities' constitutional status; verified on Open Library (/works/OL17595795W).