Merchant capitalism of the sort long familiar in the Muslim Near West only really managed to establish itself—quite late, compared with the situation in the rest of the medieval world—when merchant capitalists managed to secure a political foothold in the independent city-states of northern Italy—most famously, Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Milan—followed by the German cities of the Hanseatic League.126 Italian bankers ultimately managed to free themselves from the threat of expropriation by themselves taking over governments and by doing so, acquiring their own court systems (capable of
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