The purpose of the article has been to analyse the way the big Prussian towns presentedtheir own political organisation and especially the form they exercised their power.The author attempts to answer the question to which extent the presented image took intoconsideration the contribution of the citizens’ community in the control over the townand in the creation of the governing bodies, and to which extent the town was presentedas a community under the control of the Council. The basis for the conclusions were writtensources. The author has proved that until the beginning of the 16th century the townwas represented as a community of its citizens, acting directly in corpore and through itsadministrative and judicial bodies. The fact that at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuriesthe regime in big Prussian towns became soviet in its character caused that also in therepresentation of the town the control of the council over the commune was started to beemphasised. In spite of the monopolising of power by the merchant oligarchy and in spiteof the regime reality the town was presented as a community whose citizens participatedin making laws and decisions in the interests of the common good. That was the modelof communal power that was especially emphasised in times of internal conflict and externalthreats. Yet, unlike the homogenous community of commune civitatis or dy burgeralgemeyne that appeared in the sources from the 13th century and the first half of 14thcentury the late Middle Ages commune seems to have been a diversified community createdby various professional groups (merchants, artisans) and it acted through differentbodies: a council, courts of law, guilds.