

The evolution of some German cities into self-ruling constitutional entities of the Empire was slower than that of the secular and ecclesiastical princes.

An imperial city held the status of Imperial immediacy, and as such, was subordinate only to the Holy Roman Emperor, as opposed to a territorial city or town ( Landstadt) which was subordinate to a territorial prince – be it an ecclesiastical lord ( prince-bishop, prince-abbot) or a secular prince ( duke ( Herzog), margrave, count ( Graf), etc.). In the Holy Roman Empire, the collective term free and imperial cities ( German: Freie und Reichsstädte), briefly worded free imperial city ( Freie Reichsstadt, Latin: urbs imperialis libera), was used from the fifteenth century to denote a self-ruling city that had a certain amount of autonomy and was represented in the Imperial Diet. The free imperial cities in the 18th century For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.You should also add the template to the talk page.A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at ] see its history for attribution. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation.If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality.Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,075 articles in the main category, and specifying |topic= will aid in categorization.Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
