City states (Abrittus)

== The Golden Age of City-States at the World's Threshold Into Modernity == A major difference between this timeline and OTL is the absence of an age of feudalism. The Roman revolution of the 260s and the successful political model it brought forth, the quicker development of crafts and technology in a non-slave-owning market economy, and the early increase in long-distance and (almost) world-wide trade due to peaceful relations between the Celtic, Roman, Sassanid and Aksumite Empires went hand in hand with the ascendancy of an alternative political model to that of medieval feudalism: the city-state.

City-states had existed in history prior to our PoD (the ancient Mesopotamian city-states, the Phoenician city-states and the Greek poleis, the city-states of the Pyu), and they were the dominant type of polity in the civilizations of pre-Columbian America (Nahua Altepetl, Mayan Cah, Mississippi culture). Even with feudalist territorial monarchies dominating as a political model from late antiquity up to the building of (equally territorially defined) modern nation states in OTL, there were still some historically important city-states in OTL, too: the republics of Novgorod and Pskov or the Italian republics of Florence, Genoa, Venice and Pisa, for example.

In the Abrittus timeline, for the above-mentioned reasons, the last centuries of the 1st millennium CE are dominated by an omnipresence of the city-state as a political model, which experienced its "golden age" during this era. While there are similarities among all city-states:
 * crafts and commerce dominate;


 * professions develop and diversify and education gains importance;

between individuals are less based on personal or familial ties and the coherence of the polity results from immediate local proximity;
 * relations

there are also significant differences in how they emerged in different geo-regions, how they structured their society and held it together, how they related to the countryside around them, how they conducted their internal political affairs, how they co-operated with other city-states, how they managed to stay independent and to what extent they were part of larger confederal or federal political constructions.
 * for their survival, individuals depend less on nature and more on the integrity of the social fabric they are part of,

Six different "ideal types" from different geo-regions and cultures are described below. OTL-ATL identical Mesoamerican city-states are not included (because they are identical - pre-contact means that the differences caused by the PoD have not yet affected OTL Mesoamerica / ATL Southern Atlantis). Note that there is one very important global exception to the rule of dominant city-states in this timeline: China, a highly centralised empire, whose regional and local units possess only very limited autonomies - even less than in OTL China around the 10th century.

The six models will be described in descending order from the model with the greatest independence of each city to that where city-states are integrated rather closely into greater units.

The Civitates and the Res Publica of the Romans and the Celts
It has often been stated that the Roman Empire has itself developed from a city state. It is equally true that, while the First Roman Republic and the Principate saw a considerable centralisation, "municipia" and "coloniae" enjoyed far-reaching administrative autonomies. The concept of "civitas", derived from the model of the civitas urbis Romanae, meant a semi-autonomous middle level of administration, comprised of the city (municipium or colonia) and its surrounding countryside. Even during the First Republic and the Principate, they were not governed by Roman proxies, unlike the next higher level of provinces, but chose their own leadership. Also, while provinces were often arbitrarily redrafted according to political or military circumstances, "civitates" and their boundaries remained quasi-sacrosanct. (The "quasi" may even be considered inappropriate here, since at least the boundaries of towns and cities built by the Romans were indeed defined in a religious ceremony.)

When the central power eroded during the crisis of the 3rd century CE, it was only natural that a political rebirth came from these functioning units and built the new republican polity on them. Because Roman civitates always defined themselves as (self-confident and autonomous, but loyal) constituent elements of the Roman Empire, they have always enjoyed (and aimed for) a limited status of autonomy, which is not as far-reaching as that of the Silk Road city states or the communes of the Imaziyen. The Second Roman Republic is not confederal - political initiative does not rest solely with the civitates -, it is federal: the Senate and its elected republican Consuls, Praetors, Censors, Aedils and Quaestors pursue their own political agenda and keep the interests of the entire empire in mind, and the republican army, led by the Maximum Collegium Militum, is a strong unitary force, too, with bottom-up elective and top-down command structures of its own. But while this limits the independence of Roman civitates, it also guarantees their maximum safety and peace - nowhere else in the world are cities and their inhabitants so safe from invasion, annexation and foreign domination than in the Roman in Celtic Empires -, and it facilitates the integration of the rural population into the communal structures of the same polity.

Within their sphere of autonomy, Roman civitates pursue very different educational, religious, economic and social policies, and many civitates, especially in the peripheral regions, pursue their own foreign policy agendas, too. While reforms beginning in the 6th century strengthened the federal level in the Roman Empire, there was a simultaneous decentralisation in the Celtic Empire, which was only partly reverted in the 9th and 10th centuries.