The great Elbe port-republic, second city of the Hansa and eventually its longest-lived member. A charter dated 7 May 1189 in the name of Frederick Barbarossa granted the city toll exemption on the Elbe below Hamburg, free trade in Holstein, its own court, and Elbe fishing rights — the charter Hamburg still celebrates as its harbour's birthday, though the surviving text is a 13th-century forgery. Its 1241 defensive alliance with Lübeck laid the foundation of the Hanseatic League; imperial freedom was formally conferred by Maximilian I in 1510, and the city was governed by a merchant Senate and Bürgerschaft.
Kept its Reichsfreiheit in the 1803 mediatization, was occupied and annexed by Napoleon (1810–1814) as capital of the department of the Bouches-de-l'Elbe, then restored as a sovereign free city of the German Confederation. Not an ending: it joined the North German Confederation in 1867 and the German Empire in 1871, and survives today as the Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, a Land of the Federal Republic.
Polity-specific study of the Hamburg republic's government and society across its last free-imperial century; verified on Open Library (/works/OL2988390W).
Standard history of the league Hamburg co-founded with Lübeck in 1241; verified on Open Library (/works/OL8094711W).