Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (35 page)

The Ottonians’ victory over the Magyars at Lechfeld in 955 stabilized the Empire’s south-east frontier, enabling Austria to develop from a thinly populated frontier region to become a firm part of the German kingdom by the eleventh century. Austria continued to expand south and east through the creation of new march lordships, notably Carinthia and Krain, as well as Tirol in the Alps to the west. All these jurisdictions were eventually raised to ducal status during the later Middle Ages.

Eastwards migration after 1140 transformed the northern march lordships along the Elbe originally established by the Ottonians to protect Saxony during the tenth century. Meissen at the exit through the mountains between Bohemia and Saxony was eventually absorbed into the electorate of Saxony around 1500. By contrast, Brandenburg, emerging around what would become Berlin, acquired distinct status as an electorate in the mid-fourteenth century. The Slavic principalities of Mecklenburg and Pomerania were Christianized in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, facilitating their incorporation into the Empire under their indigenous rulers despite counter-claims from Denmark and Poland (see
pp. 213–14
).

Italy

Charlemagne preserved Lombardy as a separate kingdom when he conquered it in 774, but it was known as the kingdom of Italy from 817. Having been the object of struggles between the main Carolingian kings from 875 to 888, the Italian royal title passed to local Carolingian lords, initially the margraves of Friaul and then the dukes of Spoleto. This succession of Italian kings had sufficient influence to be crowned emperors by the popes. A new round of competition after 924 saw the intrusion of Burgundian lords, chiefly the counts of Arles
(Provence) who secured the Italian title but not the imperial crown, which fell vacant until 962. The Provencials were in turn being displaced by the margraves of Ivrea after 945. Otto I’s invasion secured control of northern Italy for the German kings by 966, ending 78 years of instability during which there had only been 18 years with a single, unchallenged Italian king.
¹⁰

The settlement did not go entirely unchallenged thereafter, especially as the later Ottonians were often absent in Germany. The imperial position was weakened by a crushing defeat by the Saracens at Cotrone on the Calabrian coast (13 July 982). After further setbacks, the situation was deemed so precarious that Otto III’s death in Italy on 23 January 1002 was concealed until reinforcements arrived to collect his corpse. Discontented Italian aristocrats elected Margrave Arduin of Ivrea as their king on 15 February. The new German king, Henry II, needed two major expeditions in 1003–4 to neutralize Arduin, who only formally abdicated in 1015. Problems resurfaced at Henry’s death in 1024 when it took his successor, Conrad II, three years to remove another Italian rival. Conrad foiled a final conspiracy by Italian bishops to depose him in 1037, and there was no opposition on his death in 1039 to Henry III’s succession or subsequently against later German kings.
¹¹

The Italian kingdom changed considerably across these three centuries. Charlemagne continued the recovery of royal power begun under the Lombards around 740, defeating a lordly revolt in 794. Although the actual realm remained restricted to the original Langobardia (Lombardy) in the north, it had a relatively well-organized core around Pavia and access to the wealth of the Po valley with its numerous towns. Pavia remained the capital of Italian kings from 888 to 962, kings who, like later emperors, always found relations with Rome difficult.
¹²
The Carolingians appropriated parcels of former Lombard royal land, including the former Byzantine outpost at Ravenna that remained a key imperial base into the early thirteenth century, as well as the area around Cremona and a strip from Vercelli south to Genoa. The king also possessed palaces in the towns plus considerable influence over most of the senior clergy, including the archbishop of Milan.

The rest of the kingdom was already divided into numerous fairly small jurisdictions reorganized as counties by Charlemagne, in contrast to the large German duchies. Additional marcher lordships (marquisates)
were established on the frontiers: Ivrea covering Piedmont and Liguria in the north-west; Tuscany to the south securing access to Rome; and four created in 828 from the former Lombardy duchy of Friaul to block Magyar raids from the north-east. The counties remained fairly stable, but the marquisates fragmented during the tenth century, except Tuscany, which developed under the Attoni family based at their castle of Canossa after 940. The Attoni benefited by backing Otto I and Conrad II before it was clear that either would be victorious in Italy. Rich rewards followed, expanding Tuscany north to the Po and south over the Apennines almost to Rome itself, making it the largest feudal conglomeration in Italy.
¹³

The patriarchate of Aquileia, which lay along the Isonzo river at the head of the Adriatic, was detached from Byzantium by Charlemagne. Existing since the third century, the see of Aquileia exercised superior spiritual jurisdiction west along the Alps to Lake Como. Although declining, the city still offered a potential counterweight to the secular lords. Having consolidated his hold over Italy by 1027, Conrad II gave Aquileia its own secular jurisdiction, which was later expanded by Henry IV after his difficulties in reaching Canossa in 1077 to secure an alternative route over the mountains. These changes underscore how medieval rulers saw physical geography in terms of access rather than ‘natural frontiers’. Neighbouring Venice developed from refugees who escaped the Lombard invasion of 568 by fleeing to the lagoons, and thereafter it secured autonomy by recognizing papal spiritual jurisdiction whilst leaning politically towards Byzantium. Medieval emperors tolerated this, because Venice provided a useful commercial and diplomatic intermediary between the Empire and Byzantium. Venice rapidly conquered Aquileia’s secular jurisdiction after 1418 and this was recognized by Emperor Sigismund as Venice’s Terra Firma in 1437. Although Friaul was seized by Austria in 1516, the rest of the Terra Firma was essentially independent of the Empire after 1523. Aquileia’s spiritual jurisdiction was dissolved in favour of its subordinate bishoprics in 1752.
¹⁴

The pope had the largest secular jurisdiction of any western cleric, having acquired property across Italy, Sicily and Sardinia during late antiquity. These possessions were known as St Peter’s Patrimony (
Patrimonium Petri
) by the sixth century, but contracted to the area around Rome during the Lombard era of the late sixth to late eighth century. As part of his alliance with the pope in 754, Pippin promised to restore
the lost lands, adding some precision to what these were by identifying Ravenna and five towns known as the Pentapolis. Their acquisition promised to push papal jurisdiction across the Apennines to the Adriatic and establish control of all north–south movement. The reluctance of later emperors actually to relinquish these lands added a geo-strategic element to papal-imperial disputes.

Otto I renewed Carolingian arrangements whereby the pope held the Patrimonium under imperial suzerainty as part of the Empire.
¹⁵
Pope Leo IX began to widen his autonomy and this was finally conceded by the emperor in the Concordat of Worms in 1122. From 1115, popes claimed the huge Tuscan inheritance bequeathed them by their faithful ally, Matilda of Canossa. Lothar III and Henry VI temporarily reasserted imperial jurisdiction over this, but the Staufers’ demise allowed the papacy to consolidate its claims after 1254.
¹⁶
A key factor in this was the post of imperial vicar, developed during the eleventh century to provide a guardian of imperial prerogatives in Italy during the emperor’s absence. By the early thirteenth century, popes claimed this position as part of a wider imperial authority they now asserted as their own. However, such claims meant that Tuscany never entirely lost its association with the Empire, allowing its reintegration within it during the late fourteenth century.

The Frankish conquest interrupted the revival of Lombard royal power over the central and southern Italian duchies, which had enjoyed an autonomous existence since the sixth century. The Carolingians largely abandoned efforts to conquer the south, concentrating instead on subduing Spoleto, straddling the Apennines halfway down the peninsula. Their concern to retain Ravenna and the Pentapolis stemmed from the access they gave from Lombardy to Spoleto, which in turn covered the route southwards, as well as offering a good post from which to supervise the pope. Spoleto’s strategic significance led to it being entrusted in 842 to the (then) loyal Widonen family, who were sufficiently powerful by the 880s to challenge the later Carolingians for the Italian title. The Ottonians would also give Spoleto to trusted vassals, as well as carving out the marquisate of Ancona in 972 as a check against Spoleto becoming too powerful. Again, this shows how fragmentation could serve royal interests rather than simply being an indication of weakness.

The south remained distant to the kings of Italy throughout the
Middle Ages. The large Lombard duchy of Benevento controlled most of the south in 800, except for the Byzantine outposts of Calabria (Italy’s toe), Apulia (the heel), along with Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi.
¹⁷
The entire south was raided by the Arabs, who had conquered Sardinia and Sicily from Byzantium by 827. The later Carolingian emperors briefly established authority between 867 and 876, but lost this to a Byzantine rival amidst the disorders of the later ninth century. Otto I recovered influence a century later, but Benevento fragmented in the process, adding new duchies at Salerno and Capua ruled by lords claiming Lombard descent. Otto tried to integrate these into the Empire by enfeoffing Pandulf Ironhead, the ruler of Capua and Benevento, with Spoleto.
¹⁸
Pandulf’s death in 981 was followed a year later by the disaster at Cotrone, in which his two sons died, eliminating the emperor’s most reliable southern partners.

Weak imperial and Byzantine influence cancelled each other out, creating a vacuum filled by the Normans, who arrived from the west around 1000 as pilgrims and adventurers on their way to the Holy Land. Originally the ‘north men’ (i.e. Vikings), the Normans had conquered north-west France during the early tenth century. A century later, Normandy was too crowded to accommodate ambitious nobles who also saw rich pickings in southern Italy, which (thanks partly to Byzantine influence) was one of the few places in the west where gold coins still circulated. The Norman conquest of southern Italy was even more impressive than their better-known invasion of England in 1066. Whereas that expedition was backed by the full apparatus of the duchy of Normandy and comprised 8,000 well-armed troops, there were rarely more than a few hundred Norman freebooters in southern Italy. They were not inherently militarily superior to the locals, but proved skilful in adapting to circumstances and gained ground through intermarriage with Lombard and Byzantine elites. Something of their ruthless opportunism can be gauged from the contemporary nicknames for their leader, Robert d’Hauteville: ‘the Weasel’ and ‘the Terror of the World’.
¹⁹

Renewed Byzantine-imperial conflict over southern Italy in the 1020s allowed the Normans to gain a foothold by playing both sides. They controlled the entire south by 1077, conquering Sicily within another 20 years, ending nearly three centuries of a four-cornered contest between the Empire, Byzantium, Lombard dukes and Saracens.
The Salians persisted in futile efforts to subdue the newcomers. By contrast, the papacy copied the traditional imperial response to assertive barbarians and legitimated their possession of the south in 1054 in return for accepting papal suzerainty, establishing an uneasy but mutually beneficial alliance lasting into the late twelfth century.
²⁰
The high point came in 1130 when the pope recognized the Normans as kings in return for formal vassalage to the papacy on behalf of Sicily and the southern mainland, which became known as Naples after its capital.

The Investiture Dispute disturbed the political balance within the kingdom of Italy, enabling numerous towns to escape lordly control and acquire jurisdiction over their own hinterlands, often with papal backing (see
pp. 512–15
). Civic emancipation was temporarily interrupted by an imperial resurgence under the Staufers, who benefited from the Normans’ heavy involvement in the Crusades after 1095. Henry VI acquired a claim to Sicily by marrying the Norman heiress Constanza and asserted this after hard fighting in 1194.
²¹
Henry’s programme of uniting Sicily and Naples to the Empire (
unio regni ad imperium  
) was symbolized in the choice of Staufer and Norman names for his son born in 1194: Frederick Roger, the future Emperor Frederick II. Henry’s bold stroke simultaneously deprived the pope of his main ally and placed Staufer territory on three sides of the Papal States. Determination to prevent the union drove papal policy throughout the next fifty years, including Innocent III’s intervention in the double election and subsequent Staufer–Welf civil war of 1198–1214.
²²

A new balance emerged as the pope sanctioned the liquidation of the Staufers through the Anjou (Angevin) family, an offshoot of French royalty who conquered Sicily and Naples in the 1260s. The papacy re-established the indirect influence it had enjoyed with the Normans by recognizing the Angevins as kings in return for their acceptance of papal suzerainty. Sicily fell to the king of Aragon in 1282 and through him eventually to Spain along with Sardinia, but an Angevin line persisted in mainland Naples till 1442, before that too passed via Aragon to Spain.
²³
Feudal jurisdiction over Sicily and Naples bolstered the pope’s international standing, but never amounted to effective control of either territory, the rulers of which occasionally used their obligation to protect the papacy as cover for unwelcome intrusion into its affairs. The real Papal State remained much as it had been during the earlier Middle Ages. In 1274 Rudolf I accepted his predecessors’ transfer of imperial
rights, effectively emancipating the Patrimonium from the Empire and extending it to include Spoleto, Ancona and (finally) Ravenna and its surrounding region known as the Romagna. In practice, the pope governed these possessions indirectly through lesser secular lords who were often heavily involved in papal politics. After two decades of renewed consolidation, the Papal States were rocked by a massive popular revolt involving over 60 towns and 1,577 villages between 1375 and 1378. Although order was restored, in the process Tuscany was lost for good.