The volume is devoted to external relations and relations into which the city inevitably entered as a community. The book offers for discussion the most important problems of political history - the ratio of centralization and autonomy, the interaction of power structures of different levels, the degree of participation of cities as autonomous units in general political events - and at the same time paints in vivid colors the episodes of the Crusades, Reconquista and Viking raids, in which the city played an active and "suffering" role. For historians, a wide range of readers interested in humanitarian knowledge.