Hamburg was a strictly bourgeois mercantile republic in which neither nobility existed, which was exiled since 1276, nor patricians in the strict sense of the formally defined class of governing elites found within the other free imperial cities. In contrast to the mediatised burgesses in the towns located in monarchies which were governed by authoritarianism Hamburg was characterized by its free citizens tied to the culture of England. Although a republic the town was not a democracy moreover an oligarchy because it was governed solely by the Hanseaten. They formed the small in Hamburg and Bremen purely bourgeois upper class of society in the sovereign and republican states Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck.