History glossary
City-state
an independent city that controls its surrounding land like a small country.
- Category
- Political system
What it means
A city-state is a city with its own government, laws, army, and nearby farmland or villages. Many early Greek and Mesopotamian communities were city-states before larger kingdoms and empires absorbed them.
Related terms
Stories using this term
The Roman Empire
From Augustus to the fall of the Western Empire, Rome built a vast imperial system whose law, cities, armies and ideas shaped the ancient and medieval worlds.
The Roman Republic
From the expulsion of Rome’s kings to the rise of Augustus, the Roman Republic built a powerful mixed constitution, expanded across the Mediterranean, and ultimately collapsed into civil war and one-man rule.
The Aztec Empire
From migrants to empire, the Aztecs built a powerful civilisation before collapsing after Spanish conquest.
Feudalism and Medieval Society
From the estates of Charlemagne's empire to the flowering of Gothic cathedrals, this story explores how feudal hierarchies, manorial agriculture, and Church authority shaped the lives of kings, knights, and peasants alike.
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece was a civilisation of city-states, sailors, philosophers, soldiers, artists, and political experiments whose influence reached far beyond the Aegean world. From Athens and Sparta to the Persian Wars, democracy, philosophy, drama, and Alexander the Great, Greek history helped shape ideas about citizenship, empire, knowledge, and culture. Its legacy survived through Rome, Byzantium, Islam, and modern Europe, making Ancient Greece central to the story of the classical world.
Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World
From Philip II's military reforms to the fall of the last Hellenistic kingdom, this story follows Alexander's conquests, the wars of his successors, and the spread of Greek culture across the ancient Near East.
Mesopotamia
Ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was one of the birthplaces of urban civilisation. In this Tigris and Euphrates civilization, communities built some of the first cities, developed cuneiform writing, organised law codes, and created early empires. From Sumer and Akkad to Babylon and Assyria, this history of Mesopotamia shows how farming, irrigation, temples, kingship, trade, and record-keeping helped create the structures of complex society. It also works as a Mesopotamia timeline and Mesopotamia civilization overview, with clear Mesopotamia facts tracing how Mesopotamian civilization grew from villages into states and empires.
The Renaissance
From Petrarch to printing, from Florence to northern Europe, the Renaissance transformed learning, art, politics, religion, and science while linking medieval inheritance to modern change.
