A Weser port-republic that spent four centuries prising itself loose from its own prince-archbishop. The Gelnhausen privilege of 1186 guaranteed the townsmen's personal liberties and became the charter Bremen cited ever after for imperial immediacy; the claim was only conceded by Ferdinand III in 1646, when Bremen received the privileges of a free imperial city. Its Hansa career was intermittent — admitted 1283, expelled 1285, not readmitted until 1358 — but it outlasted almost every other member, and its Rathaus and Roland statue still stand for its civic liberty.
One of the six cities left with its Reichsfreiheit in 1803; annexed by Napoleon and made capital of the department of the Mouths of the Weser from 1810 to 1813, then restored as a sovereign free city of the German Confederation. Not an ending: it joined the North German Confederation in 1867 and merged into the German Empire in 1871, and survives today as the Freie Hansestadt Bremen, a Land of the Federal Republic.
The standard multi-volume city history of Bremen, covering the imperial-city centuries; verified on Open Library (/works/OL2883965W).
Standard history of the league Bremen joined, was expelled from, and rejoined; verified on Open Library (/works/OL8094711W).