Kingdom of Italy (medieval)
| History of Italy | |
|---|---|
 This article is part of a series |
|
| Ancient history | |
| Prehistoric Italy | |
| Etruscan civilization (12th–6th c. BC) | |
| Magna Graecia (8th–7th c. BC) | |
| Ancient Rome (8th c. BC–5th c. AD) | |
| Ostrogothic domination (5th–6th c.) | |
| Middle Ages | |
| Italy in the Middle Ages | |
| Byzantine reconquest of Italy (6th–8th c.) | |
| Lombard domination (6th–8th c.) | |
| Italy in the Carolingian Empire and HRE | |
| Islam and Normans in southern Italy | |
| Maritime Republics and Italian city-states | |
| Early modern period | |
| Italian Renaissance (14th–16th c.) | |
| Italian Wars (1494–1559) | |
| Foreign domination (1559–1814) | |
| Italian unification (1815–1861) | |
| Modern history | |
| Monarchy (1861–1945) | |
| Italy in World War I (1914–1918) | |
| Fascism and Colonial Empire (1918–1945) | |
| Italy in World War II (1940–1945) | |
| Republic (1945–present) | |
| Years of lead (1970s–1980s) | |
| Topics | |
| Historical states | |
| Military history | |
| Economic history | |
| Genetic history | |
| Citizenship history | |
| Fashion history | |
| Postal history | |
| Railway history | |
| Currency history | |
| Musical history | |
|
Italy Portal |
The Kingdom of Italy (Latin: Regnum Italiæ or Regnum Italicum) was a political entity under control of Carolingian dynasty first, after the defeat of the Lombards, and later part of the Holy Roman Empire. The Lombard kingdom proved to be more stable than its Ostrogothic predecessor, but in 774, on the pretext of defending the Papacy, the Franks, led by Charlemagne, conquered the Lombard kingdom. They kept the Italo-Lombard realm separate from their own, but the kingdom shared in all the partitions, divisions, civil wars, and succession crises of the Carolingian Empire of which it became a part until, by the end of the ninth century, the Italian kingdom was an independent, but highly decentralised, state. In 951 the Italian throne was claimed by Otto the Great, already King of Germany. The two thrones together under one crown formed a basis for the Holy Roman Empire. Central government in Italy disappeared rapidly in the High Middle Ages, but the idea of the kingdom carried on. By the Renaissance it was little more than a legal fiction and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) did away with most of it even in law, but it may have lasted in titulo until the dissolution of the Empire in 1806, by which time Napoleon Bonaparte had established his own Regno d'Italia with no regard for the medieval ghost.
Contents |
Lombard kingdom, 568–774
After the Battle of Taginae, in which the Ostrogoth king Totila was killed, the Byzantine general Narses captured Rome and besieged Cumae. Teia, the new Ostrogothic king, gathered the remnants of the Ostrogothic army and marched to relieve the siege, but in October of 552 Narses ambushed him at Mons Lactarius (modern Monti Lattari) in Campania, near Mount Vesuvius and Nuceria Alfaterna. The battle lasted two days, and Teia was killed in the fighting. Ostrogothic power in Italy was eliminated, but Narses allowed the few survivors to return to their homes as subjects of the empire. The absence of any real authority in Italy immediately after the battle led to an invasion by the Franks, but they too were defeated and the peninsula was, for a short time, reintegrated into the empire.
The Kings of the Lombards (Latin: reges Langobardorum, singular rex Langobardorum) ruled that Germanic people from their invasion of Italy in 567–68 until the Lombardic identity became lost in the ninth and tenth centuries. After 568, the Lombard kings sometimes styled themselves Kings of Italy (Latin: rex totius Italiæ). From 774, the kingdom came under the Frankish domination of Charlemagne. The Iron Crown of Lombardy (Corona Ferrea) was used for the coronation of the Lombard kings and the kings of Italy thereafter for centuries. The primary sources for the Lombard kings before the Frankish conquest are the anonymous 7th-century Origo Gentis Langobardorum and the 8th-century Historia gentis Langobardorum of Paul the Deacon. The earliest kings (the pre-Lethings) listed in the Origo are almost certainly legendary. They purportedly reigned during the Migration Period; the first ruler attested independently of Lombard tradition is Tato.
The actual control of the sovereigns of both the major areas that constitute the kingdom — Langobardia Major (Langbardland in ancient Germanic) in the centre-north (in turn divided into a western, or Neustria, and one eastern, or Austria and Tuskia) and Langobardia Minor in the centre-south, was not constant during the two centuries of life of the kingdom. An initial phase of strong autonomy of the many constituent duchies developed over time with growing regal authority, even if the dukes' desires for autonomy were never fully achieved.
Constituent of the Carolingian Empire, 774–962
The death of the Emperor Lothair I in 855 led to his realm of Middle Francia being split among his three sons. The eldest, Louis II, inherited the Carolingian lands in Italy, which were now for the first time (save the brief rule of Charlemagne's son Pepin in the first decade of the century), ruled as a distinct unit. The kingdom included all of Italy as far south as Rome and Spoleto, but the rest of Italy to the south was under the rule of the Lombard Principality of Benevento or of the Byzantine Empire.
Following Louis II's death without heirs, there were several decades of confusion. The Imperial crown was initially disputed among the Carolingian rulers of West Francia (France) and East Francia (Germany), with first the western king (Charles the Bald) and then the eastern (Charles the Fat) attaining the prize. Following the deposition of the latter, local nobles — Guy III of Spoleto and Berengar of Friuli — disputed over the crown, and outside intervention did not cease, with Arnulf of Eastern Francia and Louis the Blind of Provence both claiming the Imperial throne for a time. The kingdom was also beset by Arab raiding parties from Sicily and North Africa, and central authority was minimal at best.
In the 10th century the situation hardly improved, as various Burgundian and local noblemen continued to dispute over the crown. Order was only imposed from outside, when the German king Otto I invaded Italy and seized both the Imperial and Italian thrones for himself in 962.
Constituent of the Holy Roman Empire, 962 – ca 1500
After 962, the Kings of Italy were always also Kings of Germany, and Italy thus became a constituent kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire, along with Germany and (after 1032) Burgundy. The German king would be crowned by the Archbishop of Milan with the Iron Crown of Lombardy in Pavia as a prelude to the visit to Rome to be crowned Emperor by the Pope.
In general, the fact that the monarch was generally an absentee, spending most of his time in Germany, left the Kingdom of Italy with little central authority. There was also a lack of powerful landed magnates — the only notable one being the Margraviate of Tuscany, which had wide lands in Tuscany, Lombardy, and the Emilia, but which failed due to lack of heirs after the death of Matilda of Canossa in 1115. This left a power vacuum which was increasingly filled by the Papacy and the increasingly wealthy cities, which gradually came to dominate the surrounding countryside.
The increasing power of the cities was first demonstrated during the reign of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1152–90), whose attempts to restore imperial authority in the peninsula led to a series of wars with the Lombard League, a league of northern Italian cities, and ultimately to a decisive victory for the League at the Battle of Legnano in 1176, which forced Frederick to recognize the autonomy of the Italian cities.
Frederick's son Henry VI actually managed to extend Hohenstaufen authority in Italy by his conquest of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, which comprised Sicily and all of Southern Italy. Henry's son, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor — the first emperor since the 10th century to actually base himself in Italy — attempted to return to his father's task of restoring imperial authority in the northern Italian Kingdom, which led to fierce opposition not only from a reformed Lombard League, but also from the Popes, who were increasingly jealous of their temporal realm in central Italy (theoretically a part of the Empire), and concerned about the universal ambitions of the Hohenstaufen emperors.
Frederick II's efforts to bring all of Italy under his control were as unavailing as those of his grandfather, and his death in 1250 marked the effective end of the Kingdom of Italy as a genuine political unit. There continued to be conflict between Ghibellines (Imperial supporters) and Guelfs (Papal supporters) in the Italian cities, but these conflicts bore less and less relation to the origins of the parties in question.
The Kingdom was not wholly meaningless, however. Successive emperors in the 14th and 15th centuries returned to Rome to be crowned, and none forgot their theoretical claims to dominion as Kings of Italy. Nor were the claims of the Emperors to universal dominion forgotten in Italy itself, where writers like Dante Alighieri and Marsilius of Padua expressed their commitment both to the principal of universal monarchy, and to the actual pretensions of Emperors Henry VII and Louis IV, respectively.
The Imperial claims to dominion in Italy mostly manifested themselves, however, in the granting of titles to the various strong men who had begun to establish their control over the formerly republican cities. Most notably, the Emperors gave their backing to the Visconti of Milan, and King Wenceslaus created Gian Galeazzo Visconti Duke of Milan in 1395. Other families to receive new titles from the emperors included the Gonzaga of Mantua, and the Este of Ferrara and Modena.
Shadow kingdom, ca 1500–1806
By the beginning of the early modern period, the Kingdom of Italy still existed, but was a mere shadow. Its territory had been significantly limited — the conquests of the Republic of Venice, which considered itself independent of the Empire, in the “domini di Terraferma” had taken most of northeastern Italy outside the jurisdiction of the Empire, while the Popes claimed full sovereignty and independence in the Papal States in Central Italy. Nevertheless, the Emperor Charles V, owing more to his inheritance of Spain and Naples than to his position as Emperor, was able to establish his dominance in Italy to a greater extent than any Emperor since Frederick II. He drove the French from Milan, prevented an attempt by the Italian princes, with French aid, to reassert their independence in the League of Cognac, sacked Rome and brought the Medici pope Clement VII to submission, conquered Florence where he reinstalled the Medici as Dukes of Florence (and later, Grand Dukes of Tuscany), and, upon the extinction of the Sforza line in Milan, claimed the territory as an imperial fief and installed his son Philip as the new Duke.
This new Imperial dominance, however, did not remain with the Empire, in which Charles was succeeded by his brother Ferdinand, but rather was transferred by Charles to his son, who became King of Spain.
Nevertheless, the Imperial claims to suzerainty remained, and were actually called forth in the early 17th century when the Duchy of Mantua fell vacant in 1627. Emperor Ferdinand II used his rights as feudal overlord to prevent the heir, the French Duke of Nevers, from taking over the Duchy, leading to the War of the Mantuan Succession, a part of the much larger Thirty Years' War. In the early 18th century, during the War of the Spanish Succession, imperial claims to suzerainty were used again to seize Mantua in 1708, which was now attached by the Austrian Habsburgs to the newly-conquered Duchy of Milan.
This was the last notable usage of Imperial power, as such, in Italy. The Austrians retained control of Milan, and intermittently, other territories (notably Tuscany after 1737), but the claims to feudal overlordship had become practically meaningless. The imperial claims to Italy remained only in the secondary title of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne to be "Arch-Chancellor of Italy". During the French Revolutionary Wars, the Austrians were driven from Italy by Napoleon, who set up republics throughout northern Italy, and the imperial reorganization carried out in 1799–1803 left no room for Imperial claims to Italy — even the Archbishop of Cologne was gone, secularized along with the other ecclesiastical princes. In 1805, while the Empire was still in existence, Napoleon, by now Emperor Napoleon I, claimed the crown of Italy for himself, putting the Iron Crown on his head at Milan on 26 May 1805. The Empire itself was abolished the next year, ending even the theoretical existence of the Kingdom of Italy.
|
|||||