ABSTRACT
The outcomes varied from Nuremberg, where the guilds were early on suppressed, through Ulm and Strasbourg, where noble/merchant elites shared civic governance with the guilds, to Basel, where, following the city's joining the Swiss Confederation in 1501, nobles and large merchants were excluded from the regime. Such documents deal with the issues that stirred the middling and lesser citizens: taxation, political inclusion of guilds, procedures for selecting magistrates, external ties of the patrician elites, and by the entire body of full citizens. At around 20,000 inhabitants, Strasbourg was then a major southern city of the Empire, subject to the emperor alone, and possessing extensive rights of autonomy. The alliance of urban nobles and larger merchants, on which this contract rested, remained solid for the remainder of Strasbourg's history as a free city. At Strasbourg, the committees of the XV and the XIII were responsible respectively for internal and external security, and their members were co-opted for life.
