Italy

Byzantine Italy was different from the Lombard lands in obvious and crucial respects. It was not independent; it was not ruled by an incoming, ethnically distinct group; and it gave more political space to the church. Perhaps above all, it still exacted the land tax and thus could afford a salaried army and a far more complex administrative system than the Lombards ever had. But in some respects it had a very similar development. The local power of the army and the constant need for defense led to the formation of a militarized landed aristocracy and indeed to a military identity for free landowners at all levels and thus to social patterns that were not at all unlike those in the Lombard states. For that matter, the foreign origin (Greek or Armenian) of many newly landed army leaders made the ethnic mix in the Byzantine lands almost as visible as in the lands of their Germanic neighbours. The civilian aristocracy of the Roman Empire vanished; Roman landowners who wished to maintain political influence had to become militarized and “Byzantinized,” at least if they did not attach themselves to the bureaucratic network around the popes and the archbishops of Ravenna.

Even the church became increasingly militarized; by the 9th century the bishop and the duke of Naples were sometimes the same person. The dominance of local military aristocracies in ecclesiastical politics appeared most clearly in the civil wars in Rome in the late 760s, the first period of effective papal independence and one in which rival families fought it out for the papal office. Roman politics was to take on this internecine character again when popes became politically independent; the next sequences of violence occurred in the years around 900 and in the early 11th century. Similarities between Lombard and Byzantine states

The Lombard states and the Byzantine provinces in Italy thus resembled each other more than either did the Roman Empire of the 5th century. The Lombard kings had a far less complex administrative system than had existed before 550, based as it was on royal landowning rather than the complex tax-raising mechanisms of the Roman world. One example of this is that they usually minted only a high-value gold currency rather than the gold, silver, and bronze coins normal under the empire; their state did not need as complex a financial system as the Romans had had. But the complexity of public life could more easily survive in Lombard Italy than farther north in Germanic Europe, owing above all to the vitality of Italian city society: in this sense, the Lombards looked far more Roman than did the Franks or, still less, the Anglo-Saxons. This city society must have been fairly similar on both sides of the Lombard-Byzantine frontier, in Ravenna as in Pavia, in Rimini or Naples as in Lucca or Verona. And, as the Byzantines developed local military aristocracies resembling those of the Lombards, so the cultural traditions of the two parts of the peninsula tended to move in the same direction. They were never identical, however; major Byzantine cities seem to have been larger than Lombard ones, and the Byzantine political system remained the more complex and articulated of the two to the end. Carolingian and post-Carolingian Italy, 774–962 The kingdom of Italy

The Carolingian kingdom of Italy occupied the northern and central peninsula down to Rome, with the sole exception of the nominally Byzantine duchy of Venice; the former exarchate and all the Lombard lands except Benevento (to be dealt with separately) were part of it. Charlemagne called himself “king of the Franks and the Lombards,” thus recognizing the separate identity of Italy inside the Carolingian empire. He left the Lombard dukes and gastalds in place unless they openly rebelled against him. Indeed, Italy was so much more tightly governed than Francia that to some extent it served as a model for Charlemagne’s governmental reforms. However, these reforms were intended for the entire empire, and, in general, the reign of Charlemagne in Italy (774–814) effected the slow integration of the latter into the political world of the Franks. Frankish names for institutions and offices replaced Italian ones; for example, dukes and gastalds became counts, gasindi (private military dependents) became vassi (“vassals”), and minor judicial officials were henceforth called scabini, as their counterparts were called north of the Alps. As in Francia, the church acquired greater political importance, for the Carolingians in Italy used bishops in their central and local administrations almost as much as they used counts. And, as long as the Carolingian empire remained united, its legislation, with some modifications, was as valid south of the Alps as it was to the north. The Frankish conquest began, then, a period of slow change rather than rupture; certainly, there was less rupture than with the Lombard conquest in 568. Few Franks, in fact, settled in Italy. These were mostly aristocrats, and indeed they made up almost the entire body of Italian counts appointed after about 800. The Lombard aristocracy, however, remained in the cities and supplied most of the bishops, and bishops were steadily gaining in political importance.

Carolingian government, which is better-documented than that of the Lombards, seems to have slowly increased in sophistication. Carolingian rule in northern and central Italy (774–887) brought a century of uninterrupted peace, and kings had time to perfect the already systematic ties between Pavia and the increasingly literate city-based administrations. The king’s messengers regularly brought royal commands to the cities, and appeals came back to a complex judicial network in Pavia. Locally, legal procedures became standardized and reliable, as surviving documents of court cases show. This does not mean that government or laws were equitable or just, and there is plenty of evidence to indicate they were not, but they were at least systematic. This administrative network remained, even after the crisis of royal power in the early 10th century.

For most of the 70 years after 774, the kings of Italy were either children or living in the north of Europe. Charlemagne rarely came to Italy; his son Louis the Pious (814–840) never did. Charlemagne was at least involved with Roman politics, and Pope Leo III crowned him emperor in 800; but this title held little practical significance until the German emperors reestablished it in 962, and Louis was anyway crowned emperor in Aachen (now in Germany), not in Rome, in 813. Louis’s brother Pippin was subking of Italy until his death in 810, and he was succeeded by his son Bernard (812–817). Louis, however, replaced Bernard with his own son Lothar I (817–855); Bernard revolted, but he was captured and blinded, and he died in 818. Lothar, like his father and grandfather, was more interested in Frankish politics, particularly during the Frankish civil wars of the 830s.

After the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the Carolingian empire began to be divided between the male heirs of the dynasty; West Francia (roughly, modern France), East Francia (roughly, modern Germany), and Italy were the major new kingdoms that emerged. Lothar’s son Louis II (844–875) was king-emperor only in Italy. Louis II, whose reign was in many ways the high point of the Carolingian kingdom in the peninsula, was an active interventionist king. He used both the Pavia administration and new legislation to restore royal authority, which had slipped a little during the civil wars in Francia. His laws of 850, in particular, directed against robbery and the abuse of power by the rich, attest to the seriousness of his intent. Louis, and an entourage of powerful bishops and lay aristocrats (notably the Supponids, relatives of his wife Engelberga), reestablished firm royal hegemony in northern Italy in the 850s. The role of Rome

Rome was in practice part of Carolingian Italy, but the popes had a great deal of autonomy and also religious status. Nicholas I (858–867), for example, was particularly influential in Francia. The 9th-century popes controlled a complex local administrative apparatus and, like their predecessors, played an important role in military defense, particularly against Arab sea raids from North Africa and Sicily (which was conquered by the Arabs in the years 827–902). Leo IV (847–855) in particular refortified Rome; John VIII (872–882) tried hard to develop military alliances against the Arabs; John X (914–928) eventually succeeded in this, and a coalition of cities uprooted the Arabs from their stronghold on the sea near Gaeta in 915.

The Arabs were a threat to southern Italy too, particularly after they occupied Bari in 847 during the Beneventan civil war (839–849). Louis II helped to negotiate an end to that war and was interested in rebuilding Liutprand’s southern hegemony. In 866–867 he called up a large army, probably the largest seen in Italy in the entire century, and marched on Bari, which fell to a Frankish, Beneventan, and Byzantine coalition (largely owing to a Byzantine-Slavic naval blockade) in 871. Louis, however, did not leave the south; the Beneventans had to capture him and hold him prisoner for a few days to induce him to return home. This debacle ended Carolingian attempts at hegemony over the entire peninsula; their Ottonian successors were to have no better luck. The reign of Berengar I

Louis II died in 875 without male heirs. He was succeeded by a series of short-lived uncles and cousins, who came from either France or Germany and stayed in Italy as short a time as possible. But after the fall of the last of these, Charles the Fat (king in Italy 879–887), most of the Carolingian kingdoms turned to non-Carolingian aristocratic families to rule them. In Italy, Berengar I, a female-line Carolingian and also marquess of the still-important border area of Friuli, was well placed to be elected as a king with genuine Italian commitments in 888. However, since Carolingians did not have a monopoly over the succession, anyone could claim the kingship; indeed, Berengar during his long reign (888–924) faced five such rivals, most of them militarily more successful than he was. Berengar was, in fact, not only long-lived but also unpopular; he spent much of the early part of his reign confined in his power base, Friuli. Even when he did not have internal rivals, as in 898–900, he was unlucky; in 899 the Hungarians invaded Italy, destroying Berengar’s army and initiating a series of raids that were to last, off and on, until the 950s.

Berengar I’s reign was a key period in Italian history. At its beginning the Italian kingdom was still a powerful and coherent institution, worth fighting civil wars to control. By his death the relevance of kingship itself was in doubt. This development resulted partly from Berengar’s personality, which was unadventurous and, militarily, unusually inept—but only partly. As the Carolingian political system had settled in, over four generations, local politics had become more stable and inward-looking. Hereditary families had taken over many counties, particularly the big marches of Friuli, Tuscany, and Spoleto. Sometimes local power was balanced between count and bishop, and the king’s capacity to intervene locally increasingly depended on their ability to maintain this balance of power. They usually accomplished this by supporting bishops, conceding more judicial and administrative power to them, particularly after 888. Sometimes, as at Bergamo or Cremona, counts were excluded from inside the city walls altogether. This was occasionally dangerous, for bishops, however loyal, were not royal officials and were more interested in the politics of the city than in those of the kingdom; it also represented a clear move toward both the institutionalization of local power autonomous from kings and the fragmentation of that power. In the face of the Hungarian danger, Berengar took this development one step further and localized military defense; after 900 he issued large numbers of grants to private persons, lay and ecclesiastical, of rights to build and fortify castles. His intention was carefully strategic, and his defense in depth was quite effective, but these castles in turn slowly became local centres of personalized military power, and they gained rights of private justice by the 11th century as well.

Carolingian government had always worked better when strengthened by private relationships of a political and military nature; for example, counts relied on their vassals more than on other subordinates to do their bidding, for vassals had sworn personal oaths of loyalty to them. In the castles of the 10th century, personal military bonds became the basis for effective local action. The office of count too was to become more and more the basis for private family power, particularly with the appearance in the counties during the early 10th century of newer ruling families with primarily local roots and fewer national pretensions. Cities remained important administrative centres, but they increasingly became points of reference for the family politics of the military aristocracy rather than bases for royal intervention. These processes had begun well before 888 and were not to be complete until the 11th century, but it is arguable that Berengar’s reign marked the turning point. They were crucial for the development of later urban autonomies, culminating in the city communes, but they were disastrous for kings.

Berengar gained 15 years of unopposed rule (905–921) by his cessions of rights and lands after 900. But power was slipping away. Tuscany and Spoleto were semiautonomous under their marquesses; so was the Rome of John X (pope 1914–18) and of the powerful senator Marozia and her son, the princeps (prince) Alberic, who were able and effective rulers between 924 and 954. Hugh of Arles (king 926–947) found the situation irreversible. He could no longer use Carolingian-style procedures, such as new legislation or local administrative intervention, to assert his power. His most typical solution was to overthrow all obvious rivals and replace them with his own relatives, who would in theory be more loyal to him. As a result, he seemed simply violent and high-handed. But the fact is that royal power by now seemed to consist of outside intervention; kings, though still influential and rich, were outsiders to most of Italy. When Hugh faced a coup in 945, his support melted away, and he fell. When Otto I of Germany conquered the Italian kingdom, almost bloodlessly, in 962, his entirely non-Italian power base may simply have seemed to the Italians the logical conclusion of the kingship’s increasing marginality. The Italian kingdom was to survive as a coherent administrative structure at least until the 1080s, and Frederick Barbarossa even in the 1150s could seek to revive it with some success, but it was by now external to the immediate interests of most of its subjects. After Hugh, no king could establish stable power in the peninsula without a foreign power base and a foreign army. The south, 774–1000

When Charlemagne conquered central and northern Italy, Duke Arichis II of Benevento (758–787) responded by titling himself prince and claiming the legitimist tradition of the Lombards. Lombard princes then ruled in the south for 300 years, until the Norman conquest. Arichis and his son Grimoald III (787–806) were powerful rulers who held off the Franks, even if Grimoald temporarily had to pay tribute to Charlemagne after an invasion in 787. They controlled the entire southern mainland except for the Bay of Naples and the end of the “heel” and “toe” of the peninsula, using a governmental system similar to that in the north. But this area is largely barren mountain land and difficult to rule completely; many of the remoter gastalds were independent-minded and resentful of Beneventan power. Two of the early 9th-century princes were murdered in aristocratic plots—Grimoald IV in 817 and Sicard in 839. The second of these plots sparked a 10-year civil war that resulted, in 849, in the creation of two rival principalities, based at Benevento and Salerno. The gastald of Capua, Landulf I (815–843), also was interested in independence, and by the end of the century Capua was in effect a third state in the old Beneventan principality.

Even Naples, though much smaller, was affected by this move toward local autonomy, for the mid-9th century saw the effective secession of nearby Amalfi from Neapolitan control, and the consuls of Gaeta, on the coast toward Rome, were autonomous from the 860s onward. These three cities, like Venice in the Adriatic, were becoming important maritime powers in this century; Salerno was to join them later. The disintegration of the political system of the 8th century was pushed further by the Arabs, who conquered Sicily from the Byzantines after 827 and established bases such as Bari on the coasts of the Italian mainland from the 840s. Gaeta and Amalfi probably owed much of their naval activity and early commercial development to alliances with the Arabs; but others found the Arabs a rather serious danger, notably Bari’s neighbours in Puglia and the great monasteries inland from Capua—Montecassino and San Vincenzo al Volturno, which were sacked in 883 and 881, respectively.

It was this confused world that Louis II wished to dominate in his great expedition of 867–871, but he failed. More successful was the Byzantine emperor Basil I (867–886), who followed up his blockade of Bari with a set of campaigns that aimed at taking the whole southern mainland from the Lombard princes. Shortly after his death, the latter were pushed out of the plains of Puglia, and by 900 only parts of the Capua-Salerno plain and of the south-central Apennines remained Lombard. In that year the count of Capua, Atenulf I, conquered Benevento, and the Lombard-Byzantine border stabilized. Capua-Benevento maintained a certain cohesion under a single dynasty until the 980s, its most notable prince being Pandulf I (Ironhead; 961–981).

After the departure of the Arabs (except from Sicily) and the straightening out of the political boundaries, the south was much more peaceful in the 10th century than it had been in the 9th. The Byzantines dominated the south through a local ruler, or catepan, who headed an administrative and fiscal system that was apparently more complex and stable than that of the exarchs had been. Culturally, the Byzantines were by now entirely Greek, and southern Calabria was, as already noted, Greek-speaking; in Puglia, however, the Italian-speaking Lombards dominated, and the Byzantines had to rule through them. They managed this effectively until a series of urban uprisings in 1009–18 brought more autonomy for the Puglian cities—as well as the first Norman mercenaries.

The Lombard states and the independent coastal cities were much weaker. They recognized some sort of Byzantine hegemony, except for the brief periods when the Ottonian emperors sent armies from the north. Their internal structures were less coherent than those of the territories under direct Byzantine rule. During the 10th century castles were built everywhere in southern Italy, just as in the Po plain; in the south (including the papal territories and the march of Spoleto), however, their social effect was in many areas more considerable than in the north, because the scattered population living in the territory of a castle tended to move, or be moved, inside its walls. This process, called in Italian incastellamento, created a network of fortified hilltop settlements, some of which still survive. The state could direct and control this process, as in the Byzantine lands, but in Lombard areas private landowners undertook it, which greatly extended their local control. The Lombard princes could not control this steady political localization, particularly in the mountains. They instead concentrated on the richer plains between Gaeta and Salerno. Unfortunately, in this small area there were by now six independent states—Gaeta, Capua, Benevento (when it regained independence in the 980s), Naples, Amalfi, and Salerno. They spent a great deal of time fighting each other after Pandulf I’s death in 981, and the Normans in the next century had little difficulty conquering them. The only local success story was international trade, which benefited all the coastal cities (Amalfi being the best known); their fleets had good relationships with Arabs, Byzantines, and Latin Christians and conveyed goods among all three. They dominated long-distance commerce in the western Mediterranean until the rise of the more militarily aggressive cities in the north—Genoa and Pisa—in the 11th century. Literature and art

The early Middle Ages produced relatively few complex literary works; the elaborate educational system of the Roman Empire depended on a level of aristocratic wealth and a style of civilian culture that did not outlast the Gothic wars, and the ecclesiastical educational traditions that succeeded it were not well rooted in Italy outside Rome until the 9th century. Italy’s—and antiquity’s—last great philosopher, Boethius (died 524), had no successors, nor did Pope Gregory the Great (died 604) in the field of theology. Hagiography, an important early medieval genre in Francia, became almost unknown in Latin Italy after Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. The writing of history too was only rarely practiced in this period: Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, dating from the 790s, is far shorter than Gregory of Tours’s history of the Franks or Bede’s of the English, and it had few parallels except for episcopal histories in Rome, Ravenna, and Naples. Nor did the Rule of St. Benedict, written by Benedict of Nursia (died c. 547) for his monastery, Montecassino, have immediate successors, and as yet it indeed had relatively little effect on Italian culture: 8th-century monasteries did follow it, but the Rule owes its international importance to the Anglo-Saxons and to the patronage of the court of Louis the Pious in Francia.

Italy did not lose all of its cultural traditions, and it developed new ones around the emerging centres of political power of the early Middle Ages. Rome maintained a level of intellectual life owing largely to its links with the Greek culture of the East; it experienced a flowering of new writing in the 9th century around international figures such as Anastasius the Librarian (died c. 878), who had contacts with both Constantinople and the courts of the Frankish kings. Pavia, for its part, developed a largely secular court culture; Paul the Deacon, who was a poet and an orator as well as a historian, was partially trained there, and later so was Liutprand of Cremona (died c. 972), whose Antapodosis is a florid but highly literate satire of the kings of the first half of the 10th century. Charlemagne’s court drew Italian intellectuals to it and away from the peninsula, but Carolingian patronage returned to the cities of northern Italy in the mid-9th century, and systematic literary education began to develop in several of them. Tenth-century writers included not only Liutprand but also Atto of Vercelli (died 961), who wrote his denunciations of contemporary society in a Latin so difficult that few have ever understood it. The major intellectual activity in early medieval Italy was, however, law. The lawyers at Pavia were already a big group in the 9th century; in the 10th century they undertook a large-scale compilation of Lombard law and its Carolingian updatings, usually called the Liber Papiensis. This text was the source for 11th-century glosses and expositions and juristic arguments over legal theory that led directly to the 12th-century revival of Roman law at Bologna. The study of law in the Lombard and Carolingian capital may have been early medieval Italy’s major contribution to the development of intellectual life in Europe.

The visual arts showed a more obvious continuity. The architects of Ravenna’s monumental mosaic churches and secular buildings from the Ostrogothic kingdom and the years following the Byzantine reconquest developed new styles, but they did so as an expansion of late Roman ideologies of public buildings along Byzantine lines. In Ravenna the great period had ended by 700; in Rome, however, the same tradition continued, if at a reduced level, throughout the early Middle Ages. Sixth-century popes were builders, and their 7th-century counterparts, though less ambitious, were at least rebuilders; from Adrian I onward there was an intense revival reaching its height with large, richly decorated constructions such as the church of Santa Prassede built by Paschal I (817–824). Rome’s surviving early medieval buildings are mostly churches, which is not surprising given its rulers; here as elsewhere, however, one must reckon with secular buildings that have not survived and, of course, with a continuous occupation and reuse of the huge array of Classical monuments.

In Lombard Italy, building on a monumental scale continued as well, notably in the royal palaces at Pavia and at Monza outside Milan (these do not survive, but Paul the Deacon described parts of the latter). This type of monumental architecture may have incorporated a fairly strong tradition of decorative figured stonework, with central European analogues, that survives best at Cividale del Friuli. What has been excavated or otherwise studied in the north, however, is strikingly small in scale, such as the urban monastery of San Salvatore (shortly thereafter renamed Santa Giulia) at Brescia, set up by King Desiderius about 760; the late 8th-century chapel at Cividale del Friuli; and the tiny frescoed church of Santa Maria at Castelseprio, which may date from the early 9th century. It may be that the Lombards, including their kings, had lost the rhetoric of size that the Romans had had (and that the early medieval Romans kept). The late Roman tradition that survived best was an emphasis on internal decoration, and Italy had many separate schools of fresco painters (as well as, more rarely, mosaicists) by the 9th century. However, 9th-century buildings could be large, as was the case with the monastic buildings of San Vincenzo al Volturno on the Benevento-Spoleto border, which were excavated in the late 20th century. They were sumptuously frescoed in both northern and southern Italian artistic styles during the first half of the 9th century. Building techniques declined in sophistication in the early medieval period, and older materials were frequently reused. However, artisans apparently continued to cut and make good-quality stone and brick in a Roman tradition. It is likely that there were far fewer builders than during the empire but that they continued ancient traditions in major cities. A price book for northern Italian builders from the early 8th century shows that they could make sophisticated private housing. Urban excavations now reveal, however, that more buildings were constructed of wood than would have been the case under the empire.

Outside the medieval town walls of Montagnana, Italy.Dal Pra/M. Grimoldi Economy and society Socioeconomic developments in the countryside

Early medieval Italy was an overwhelmingly agrarian society, as it had been before and as it was to be for centuries. Wealth thus derived above all from the ownership of landed estates. Estates were exploited by subsistence tenants on a standard medieval pattern. The slave plantations of 1st-century central Italy had long disappeared, and the word servus now usually just meant a tenant without public rights as a freeman; the remaining slaves on the land were mostly skilled specialists. Free and servile tenants essentially paid rent, in money or kind, to their landlords. For the late 8th and 9th centuries, at least in northern Italy and Tuscany, there is evidence of more organized estates, which were the equivalent of the manors of England and the villae of 9th-century northern France. Here tenants also had to work without pay on the lord’s demesne, an area whose produce went entirely to the lord. These estates, mostly royal or ecclesiastical, could be huge, as were, for example, those of Bobbio and Santa Giulia at Brescia, whose estate records survive. They produced a sizable agricultural surplus, which the estates’ owners often sold in the cities (Santa Giulia, at least, had its own merchants). Not all estates, however, were organized this tightly; elsewhere demesnes, though common, tended to be smaller and less economically important; and in the south they were always rare.

In the 10th century, Italian landowners increasingly took money rents rather than crops from at least their free tenants, as is known from their surviving written contracts (libelli). Money rents were more flexible and could better survive the fragmentation of property between coheirs or its alienation in bits to others, both practices being very common in Italy. It should be stressed that tenants’ ability to pay in coin demonstrates that by this point a fair amount of small-scale commercial exchange was taking place in the countryside; indeed, the new castles of the 10th century, which themselves commanded estates, typically had markets. In the 10th century too, more and more servile tenants gained their freedom, whether legally (by formal manumission) or illegally; a law of Otto III in the 990s that intended to restrict the rights of “slaves gasping for freedom” had little effect. On the other hand, by 1000, with landlords’ acquisition of private judicial powers over tenants, there were new methods of rural coercion that did not depend on tenants’ servile status, since landlords could also apply these methods to free peasants. Subsistence cultivation

Italian agriculture was organized for subsistence first; growing crops exclusively for sale was rare in the early Middle Ages. Thus, rents in kind tended to reflect what peasants grew for themselves. One finds standard Mediterranean crops such as grain (rye in northern Italy, wheat elsewhere) and wine on 9th-century rent lists; olive oil was common in central and southern Italy but rare in the north (as it is today), except in specialist farms on the Italian lakes. Early medieval Italy was far more forested than it is today, and peasants seem to have depended substantially on woodland gathering to supplement their diet. Italian peasants probably ate a fair amount of meat too, more than they were to eat in later centuries. Meat was, however, becoming a sign of an aristocratic lifestyle by the end of the early Middle Ages; Liutprand of Cremona looked down on the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus II Phocas (963–969) for eating vegetables. Specialist stock raising was still rare; sheep, cows, and pigs were raised by subsistence cultivators. As a result, specialists probably did not yet make cloth and leather either, except for luxury goods made by urban craftsmen with an aristocratic clientele. Large-scale urban cloth working, a central part of high medieval Italian life, still lay in the future. The clearest exception to this was perhaps the linen produced in 10th-century Naples.

Not all subsistence cultivators were tenants; there were many free peasant owners in early medieval Italy. How many of them were descended from small Roman proprietors, how many from Roman tenants who had seized their chance in the confusions of the 6th century, and how many from the rank and file of the Lombard army is unclear. Ethnic Lombards must have been a small minority, but by the 8th century nearly all landowners in the Italian kingdom professed Lombard law. Most landowning in the 8th and 9th centuries was highly fragmented, with even great landlords owning hundreds or thousands of small parcels of land that were scattered among those of other owners, whether aristocratic, peasant, or ecclesiastical. Such a pattern gave a certain independence to village life, where small local owners may often have been quite influential. (Great lords more often lived in cities, farther away from direct participation in local society.) Village communities were, however, usually still informal bodies with little of the coherence they were to gain from the 12th century onward. The growing power of the aristocracy

The existence of this stratum of free smallholders gave a certain reality to the Lombard, and indeed Frankish, constitutional tradition that based royal power on the nation of free warriors at arms. The rise of the aristocracy, however, gravely challenged this tradition. Already in the Lombard period the aristocracy was in practice politically dominant, and probably always had been, in patterns unbroken from the Gothic and Roman period. Yet the 8th-century aristocracy does not seem to have been as wealthy as either its Roman predecessors or its Carolingian and post-Carolingian successors, and this may imply a relative independence for the free peasantry. Under Charlemagne and his descendants this slowly changed. Incoming Frankish nobles acquired large lands, and churches dramatically increased their holdings. That these developments were often at the expense of the poor is shown by a number of 9th-century court cases in which peasants claimed their land, or sometimes their freedom, usually without success; in some of these cases, peasants were clearly in the right. Kings themselves confirmed this, for in the 9th century they worried greatly that the oppressions of the poor would lessen the latter’s participation in the public obligations of all freemen—army service, attendance at court, and road and bridge building—and they made laws against such exploitations. The laws were futile, however, and aristocratic landowning and political dominance continued to grow.

In the 10th century, with the breakdown in royal power, these tendencies developed further. In the countryside, castles became the centres of de facto political power that great landowners exercised over their free neighbours. A new, highly militarized small nobility began to emerge, based on these castles. Their ancestors had been of mixed origins—vassals of counts, local diocesan landowners, and even rising free peasants—but they now held, as a group, a virtual monopoly over armed force; indeed, in the sources they are frequently called milites (“soldiers”). Counts, where they kept their own power, did so only as leaders of private armies of these milites, who, though still their vassals, were now much more autonomous. Churches, to keep control over their extensive lands, had to give much of it out in lease or fief to such military families, and only the strongest churchmen, such as the archbishop of Milan, managed to keep any real power over their new military dependents. This new castle-holding stratum was to become the basic aristocratic class of the 11th to 13th centuries, with only a few of them aspiring to the official titles of count or viscount. Such a tendency was, in fact, common throughout Europe; in Italy the chief difference was that milites were never quite as dominant as elsewhere, for cities remained powerful political and military centres, and peasant owners continued to exist in the countryside. The major exception to this was probably the south, where the new pattern of fortified settlements kept the peasantry within a more rigid political framework than existed in the more scattered villages of the north. Even within such a framework of political control, however, some of these fortified villages achieved a new sort of prosperity, for artisans could work in them, and merchants would come there too. Socioeconomic developments in the city

Most Roman cities survived into the early Middle Ages as political and economic centres. (The majority of those that failed were in the Apennines and, to a lesser extent, on the coast.) Their function as political centres has already been discussed; there is more dispute about their economic role, however. They must certainly have looked dilapidated, with their Roman monumental structures serving as quarries for rebuilding elsewhere; early medieval public buildings were, as noted, smaller and also probably fewer in number—the cathedral and the local royal palace being the most important ones by far. Archaeologists in cities such as Brescia or Verona have found a much less dense settlement network inside the walls of the early medieval cities than in the preceding or later ones, with lower buildings, more courtyards, many more open spaces used for agriculture, and, often, a trend toward building in wood. But both of these cities and several others still followed Roman street plans. It is likely that many cities maintained an urban economic identity, with some commercial and artisanal specialization (at least in luxury goods). Lucca’s documents in the 8th century show, among others, gold workers, cauldron makers, physicians, and builders, and such figures also appear in texts for Milan and other cities in the 9th century. Essentially, this kind of artisanal activity relied on the city’s role as the residence not only of bishops, dukes, counts, and administrative officials but also of a high proportion of the local aristocracy. The local political interests of the latter can be seen in a wave of competitive church building in the 8th and early 9th centuries; dozens of (probably very small) churches existed in each major centre by 900.

Commerce was undoubtedly far weaker in the early Middle Ages than under the Roman Empire. Archaeology shows it very clearly: the large number of African amphorae and fine ceramics found on every late Roman site in peninsular Italy decreases sharply in the 5th century, and these artifacts vanish in the 6th century. Only from the 8th century onward is there evidence again of pottery-exchange networks, but exclusively on the level of the city territory and, as far as is yet known, only around some cities—notably Rome, which remained the largest city in Italy, though it was only a fraction of its former size. City-country exchange networks were probably relatively weak in the 7th and 8th centuries, although they never altogether disappeared. From the 9th century onward, however, consistent documentary evidence of urban markets shows that these networks were developing again.

Most Classical cities had not been major centres of international commerce, or, at least, such commerce was less important as a reason for their existence than the fact that major landowners lived in them. The sharp decline of this commerce in the early Middle Ages was thus not in itself a threat to city life. But its slow revival from about 750 onward did help these cities, for they were still at the nodes of surviving Roman river and road networks that, with few changes, were to become the commercial routes of the High Middle Ages.

In the early 8th century King Liutprand issued a text that regulated the salt trade from the Venetian lagoon up the Po River. In the following century this trade developed and increasingly came into the hands of local rather than Venetian merchants. Cremona, among other cities, had become a major mercantile centre by the late 10th century, and not, by then, only for salt; the Venetians, on their way to Pavia, brought—among other wares—spices, ivory, and Byzantine cloth. Venice itself was the focus of this international trade by the 9th century; the will of its duke Giustiniano Parteciaco (also spelled Partecipazio), dating from 829, includes the first reference in medieval history to capital investment, in ships and their goods. By the end of the 10th century the Venetians dominated the trade of the Adriatic Sea and controlled much of its eastern coast.

Inland, however, the spread of both international and local commerce was bringing a new and visible prosperity by the 10th century to many cities, including Cremona, Pavia—the old political capital still automatically visited by many traders from Venice—the southern cities, and, above all, Milan, which was fast becoming the major economic centre of the Italian kingdom. The northern Italian trade routes, along the Adriatic coast, up the Po River, and across the Alps, were coming to rival the older routes around the western coast of Italy, via Amalfi and Gaeta (or, later, Pisa and Genoa) and up the Rhône River. Both routes were to develop dramatically in the following centuries. But they did not in themselves create urban life in Italy; that was done by the local aristocracy. The continuing domination of Italian cities by landed aristocrats was to condition much of their future history. Christopher John Wickham John Foot Italy, 962–1300 Italy under the Saxon emperors

In the second half of the 10th century, Italy began a slow recovery from the turmoils of late Carolingian Europe. During the previous century the Po River valley had been exposed to Magyar raiders. Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily had fallen to the Muslims; even Rome had felt their threat. In the north the Lombard kingdom was little more than a collection of great lordships vying with one another for the Carolingian inheritance. In the south the peninsula was shared by the remnants of the Byzantine and Lombard states and by local powers. The 10th-century papacy had fallen into the hands of various Roman aristocratic factions. But already there were signs of revival. Genoa, Pisa, and Venice were joining other cities in developing local and international trade. In Germany the last of the East Frankish Carolingians had died, and in 911 Conrad I of Franconia became king, to be succeeded in 919 by the energetic Henry the Fowler, duke of Saxony and founder of the Saxon dynasty of German emperors. In France the Carolingians yielded to the Capetians before the century was out. In the monasteries of Burgundy and Lorraine a new spirit of religious reform arose, which reached outward to the whole of Latin Europe and soon influenced the rich monastic traditions of Italy. The Ottonian system

In the midst of these favourable signs, the Italian political landscape offered little ground for optimism. The only hope for stability and eventual unity lay with the contenders for the former Carolingian kingdom of Italy. Hugh of Provence, nominally king of Italy, cast ambitious eyes across the mountains to the Po valley; he aimed to pull together the fragments of the original Lotharingia, including Italy. But at his death in 947 his son Lothar and later his son’s widow, Adelaide of Burgundy, faced strong opposition from Berengario, marchese d’Ivrea e di Gisla, who assumed the crown of Italy as Berengar II. Adelaide summoned the German king, Otto I (936–973), son of Henry the Fowler, to her aid. Although much involved in affairs in Germany, he came to Italy in 951 and married Adelaide, but he returned quickly to Germany to deal with a rebellion by Liudolf, duke of Swabia, his son from an earlier marriage. Moreover, events in Germany forced him to fight the Magyars in 955 at the Battle of Lechfeld, where his decisive victory ended their attacks on German lands.

At the request of Pope John XII (955–964), Otto returned to Italy, where in 962 he realized his dream of securing the imperial crown. The coronation of Otto as emperor was, like that of Charlemagne, a recognition of a political reality. Otto was the leading figure among all European rulers of his day. He was a great military victor and a champion of order. He also had built a close alliance with the German bishops. The imperial title, which had dwindled into a virtually worthless symbol, once again legitimated effective political power.

After his coronation, Otto proceeded to consolidate his power by moving against Berengar II, the enemy of his wife’s family. Pope John XII, recognizing the emperor’s intention of exerting imperial supremacy over the papacy, began to fear for his own future. His activities provoked Otto to move against him. At a Roman synod in December 963 the assembled bishops, mostly loyal supporters of Otto from northern Italy, deposed John and replaced him with Leo VIII (963–965). Otto’s decisive action paved the way for his mastery of the kingdom of Italy.

Within two years Berengar was captured. The papacy entered a turbulent decade that ended with the election of Benedict VII (974–983). Otto built his rule on the foundation provided by bishops loyal to the empire; these bishops, many of German origin, owed their promotion to Otto himself. He also relied upon the support of such powerful figures as the marquess of Tuscany and the duke of Spoleto. He pressed his imperial claims with the Byzantines even as he aggressively supported the Latinization of the southern Italian hierarchy (i.e., subjection to the jurisdiction of Rome rather than Constantinople). The chief fruit of his policy in southern Italy was the marriage of his son, Otto II, to the Byzantine princess Theophano. Otto I had laid the foundation for strong imperial rule in Italy, but he lacked the means to bring it to fruition. Nonetheless, fragile as his foundation in Italy was, it represented a move away from the anarchy of the previous age toward a new era of prosperity and hope for the future.

The focus of imperial policy on Italy under Otto II (973–983) was an inevitable result of the achievements of his father. One should not, however, view Otto II’s efforts as a desertion of Germany in quest of the glories of ancient Rome. Rather, the policy of the German monarchy, while grounded partly in the idealization of the ancient Roman Empire, aimed to achieve a vision of Europe that derived from the pragmatic realities of the Carolingian age. The transfer of power on the death of Otto II in 983 to his son, Otto III (983–1002), a mere child, demonstrates the widespread acceptance of this policy. While the succession did arouse a conflict over the regency in Germany, the succession itself faced no serious challenge. The brilliant Gerbert of Aurillac, former abbot of Bobbio and later Pope Sylvester II (999–1003), served as principal adviser and tutor of the young king, whose mother, Theophano, controlled the regency until her death in 991. Otto’s grandmother, Adelaide, still an indomitable figure, then served as regent until he assumed power in 994. Despite his youth, Otto was both able and vigorous. He continued the Italian policy of his father and grandfather but expressed it more explicitly.

Many scholars have argued that Otto III’s Byzantine connections shaped his conception of imperial rule. Some have suggested that his ideas were anachronistic; others that he failed to follow the path dictated by the national interests of Germany and Italy. But Otto, who had been schooled in a hard and practical court, aimed in his Italian policies at creating an enduring transnational unity in imperial administration under the imperial chancellor. When his seal employed the style “Renovatio imperii Romanorum” (“Renewal of the empire of the Romans”), this invoked an image not so much of Roman antiquity as of the empire of Charlemagne. The “renewal” referred to a new commitment to the Carolingian design for Europe, viewed from the vantage point of the 10th century. Otto’s imperial coronation in 996 by Pope Gregory V (996–999), his own nominee, was reminiscent of that of his grandfather in that he did not hesitate to intervene in Roman affairs. When influential Romans drove out Gregory and thought to placate Otto by the election of his former Greek tutor Johannes Philagathus as pope (John XVI; antipope 997–998), the emperor returned and in 998 exacted a terrible price from all. He also secured the election of Gerbert of Aurillac as Sylvester II. He did not, however, subscribe to the view of the papal position found in the Donation of Constantine. He rejected this forgery, which purported to list the rights and properties conferred on Pope Sylvester I. Otto supported the claims of the Italian bishops against the lesser aristocracy, who were attempting to make their lands, which they leased from the church, virtually hereditary. For him as for his predecessors, support of the bishops helped establish royal control over the cities of central and northern Italy.

Otto III died on Jan. 23, 1002. His body was quickly taken to Aachen (now in Germany) and laid to rest beside Charlemagne. The German princes elected the duke of Bavaria, who became Henry II (1002–24), the last emperor of the Saxon dynasty. Notwithstanding reassurances to his German supporters of his commitment to effective rule in Germany, Henry’s view of his imperial role differed little from that of his Ottonian predecessors. In Italy he supported the bishops and opposed Arduin of Ivrea, who had seized power after the death of Otto III. It was not, however, until 1013 that Henry was free to come to Italy. After his coronation by Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24) in 1014, he returned to Germany, leaving the bishops the task of disposing of Arduin. In 1021 Henry returned to Italy once more but was unable to extend imperial rule in the south beyond the Lombard principalities of Benevento and Capua. Social and economic developments

The 10th and early 11th centuries witnessed significant changes in the social and economic life of all parts of Italy. As noted earlier, the upheavals of the early 10th century had vastly increased the need for security, leading in the countryside to the fortification of villages. While this process provided security for the peasants, it also strengthened the control over them by both lay and ecclesiastical lords. The reliance of the Ottonian emperors on the lay and ecclesiastical aristocracy tended to consolidate this arrangement. The number of great noble families grew rapidly as a direct result of imperial action. These families, often from north of the Alps, were part of the effort to subject Italy more directly to imperial authority. At the same time, however, increases in population, the growth of the cities, and the development of a landed class of knights and lesser nobles (vavasours), began to undermine the Ottonian system based on the support of the bishops and the great marquesses. The entry of these new social groups into the quest for land created competition not merely between clergy and laity but also within these groups; indeed, the interests of clergy and laity were often interconnected. The reform movement and the Salian emperors

Profound dissatisfaction with the pervasive violence, rapacity, and greed of the age, combined with concerns particularly among the monks about their own vulnerability and that of the poor and weak, fueled a movement for monastic reform. Some early monastic reformers identified their cause with that of the Ottonians. St. Romuald of Ravenna, for example, actively supported the missionary program of Otto III. The empire represented order and stability, ideals that appealed to many monks. But some were also beginning to perceive that the imperial order helped foster the competition for rights and domains. The reign of Conrad II (1024–39), the first emperor of the Salian dynasty, permitted and even encouraged such competition. Conrad took the side of the vavasours, who wanted their lands to be hereditary, against the bishops, and he generally supported the interests of the lay aristocracy. Although there is no indication that he intended any permanent change in imperial relations with the bishops—his ties to the papacy were close enough—his actions certainly alarmed Italian ecclesiastical circles. Ultimately, Conrad’s policy did not cause any major adjustment in relations between the bishops and the empire.

Conrad’s son and successor, Henry III (1039–56), was energetic, strong-willed, and devout. He was no innovator, but his attachment to the church served to reduce the tensions that his father’s rule had created. Indeed, he resumed the close relations between the crown and the monastic reformers that had characterized the reign of Otto III and Henry II. His Italian policy bears striking resemblance to that of Charlemagne and Otto I. But he lived in different times. His efforts to settle differences among the factions disputing the archbishopric of Milan and his intervention in papal affairs in Rome placed him in the Ottonian tradition.

Henry supported reform, and reform in turn supported the empire. Some historians have portrayed his actions, particularly his interventions in papal elections, as inimical to the interests of the empire, but they too often overlook this point. By emphasizing Henry’s piety and his attachment to reform, these historians have de-emphasized the political aspects of his policy. Actually, there was a concurrence between his goals and the desires of the reformers. When Henry arrived in Rome in 1046, he found the papacy in disarray. In the continuing competition among leading Roman families for control of the papacy, the Tusculan faction had elected the corrupt Benedict IX (1032–44), but the Romans drove him from the city and replaced him with the candidate of the Crescentians, Sylvester III (1045). Benedict regained the papacy in 1045, but he sold the office to a supporter of reform, John Gratian, who was then elected as Gregory VI (1045–46). Henry therefore faced an uncertain situation just when he was seeking imperial coronation. The synods of Sutri and Rome resolved the difficulty by deposing the three previous claimants. At the behest of Henry, the bishop of Bamberg was elected as Clement II (1046–47). The new pope immediately proceeded to Henry’s coronation on Christmas Day, 1046. The Carolingian precedent—Charlemagne’s coronation also took place on Christmas Day—could hardly have been lost on his audience.

Henry III took Gregory VI back to Germany with him, aiming in this way to prevent a resurgence of internal conflict in Rome. But death soon overtook Clement, and Benedict IX again reclaimed the papacy. Henry ordered Boniface of Tuscany to drive Benedict from Rome once again and had the German Damasus II (1048) installed as pope, but Damasus died within a month. Again Henry intervened, securing the election of Bruno of Toul, who took the name Leo IX (1049–54). Leo combined strong attachment to the imperial cause with dedication to the cause of reform. Profoundly influenced by the monastic centres of reform in Germany and Burgundy, he turned especially to them for collaborators in the work of rebuilding the battered prestige of the Roman church. He brought to Rome men like the theologian Frederick of Lorraine, Hugo Candidus, and Humbert of Moyenmoutier, who became cardinal-bishop of Silva Candida, a Roman suburban diocese. The deacon Hildebrand, who had accompanied Gregory VI to Germany as his secretary, also returned to Rome and joined the papal entourage. Under Leo’s leadership the ancient body of cardinals was transformed into an effective instrument for administration of the church and promotion of reform. Leo held synods in northern Europe and Italy aimed at stirring local commitment for the program of the reformers. That program was chiefly directed at freeing churches from lay control, especially by the appointment of unworthy candidates to ecclesiastical office through simony (i.e., the practice of buying church offices), and at forbidding the pervasive practice of clerical marriage and concubinage, which threatened the substance of the church. Leo’s efforts drew their inspiration from the monastic reform movement, which had already succeeded in regaining control of many monastic properties and preventing their further alienation not only at the hands of the laity but also at those of other ecclesiastics. Although couched in moral terms, the program of the reformers served eminently practical ends. The papacy and the Normans

Having arrived in southern Italy in small groups just prior to 1020, perhaps in part as petitioners at the court of Pope Benedict VIII and in part as pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, Normans joined Lombard rebels in their effort to throw off Byzantine rule in Bari. Although this proved a failure, Norman mercenaries continued to enlist in the armies of various southern Italian rulers. In 1030 Sergius, duke of Naples, granted the county of Aversa to the Norman Rainulf in return for his support against Pandulf of Capua. Rainulf was able to add Gaeta to his holdings, and his nephew, Count Richard, who had succeeded to Aversa in 1047, added the principality of Capua. The next wave of Normans, led by the sons of a lesser Norman landholder, Tancred of Hauteville, undertook a full-scale effort to conquer the south. Robert Guiscard, Tancred’s fourth son, assumed a commanding role in southern Italian affairs.

Leo, who remained committed to the imperial ideal, opposed the Normans because he felt that they threatened not only Rome and the papacy but also the interests of the German emperor and relations between East and West. The continued expansion of the Normans in southern Italy and their aggressive assertion of titles—William de Hauteville (William Iron Arm), for example, assumed the title of count of Puglia—influenced Leo to forge an alliance of papal, imperial, and Byzantine forces. With himself in the company of imperial troops but without awaiting the arrival of promised help from the Byzantines, he met the Normans at Civitate on June 16, 1053. The ensuing defeat was a deep humiliation for Leo, though the Normans treated him with respect. The forced peace profoundly disturbed the balance that he had sought in Italy.

His policy also received a serious setback from the conflict that arose in Constantinople between his legates (Humbert of Silva Candida, Frederick of Lorraine, and Peter, archbishop of Amalfi) and the Eastern patriarch, Michael Cerularius. Scholars differ on the reasons for this conflict, but it arose at least in part from the clash between the papal policies of Latinization of the churches in southern Italy and the claims of Constantinople to jurisdiction in that region. Scholars have often viewed the mutual excommunications launched by the legates and the patriarch in 1054, after the death of Leo, as the beginning of the schism between the Eastern and Western churches; however, that view probably overstates the significance of these events. More particularly, the breach with Constantinople closed the door on the approach taken by Leo IX and led to a major shift in papal policy in favour of the Normans.

Leo’s successor, Pope Victor II (1055–57), formerly the bishop of Eichstätt (Bavaria), the fourth pope chosen under the aegis of Henry III, tried to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor. But the death of Henry in 1056 and the failure of Leo’s policies in southern Italy limited his role. The Normans continued to strengthen their position in southern Italy. Victor II thus was constrained not only by the failed mission to Byzantium but also by the threat from the south. Moreover, on Henry III’s death, the empire came to his six-year-old son, Henry IV (1056–1106), with his mother, Agnes of Poitou, as the regent. Although the succession to the throne was not in doubt, the inevitable intrigues surrounding the regency deprived the papacy of imperial support. When Victor died in 1057, a party of the reformers moved to take advantage of this vacuum. They acted quickly to elect Frederick of Lorraine as pope, under the name Stephen IX (or X; 1057–58), without any effort to consult the regency.

Stephen, who had succeeded to the papacy while abbot of Montecassino, summoned Peter Damian from the monastery of Fonte Avellana to become cardinal-bishop of Ostia. The election of a pope whose brother had been a rebel against the regency suggests that the strong ties that had bound the reform movement to the empire had been somewhat weakened. At the same time, the position of the reformers in Rome was also weakened. When Stephen died in 1058, the Roman nobles supported the election of Bishop John of Velletri as Benedict X (antipope 1058–59), thereby attempting a return to the pro-aristocratic and pro-Roman policies of Benedict VIII and Benedict IX. These circumstances forced the reformers to seek support from the empress Agnes. Their candidate, the Burgundian bishop of Florence, Gerard, was installed on the papal throne as Pope Nicholas II (1059–61).

The reign of Nicholas was pivotal. Not only did Nicholas preside over a major shift in the papacy’s relations with the Normans but he also issued a decree in 1059 regulating future papal elections that began the process of concentrating electoral powers in the hands of the cardinals. The consequences of the papal defeat at Civitate in 1053 had already laid the foundation for a change in papal relations with the Normans. Leo IX had earlier appointed Humbert of Silva Candida as archbishop in Sicily and now entrusted the conquest of Calabria and Arab-dominated Sicily to the Normans with the provision that they should remain a hereditary fief of the papacy. This assertion of papal overlordship, often read solely in political terms, represented an effort on the part of the papacy to ensure its claims to jurisdiction over the churches of the still-unconquered lands against the claims by Constantinople. Nicholas’s Norman alliance was less a dramatic diplomatic revolution than a response to the changes that confronted the papacy from Civitate onward. The alliance safeguarded papal interests in the south, ensured a measure of stability in Rome during a period of imperial impotence, and promised the independence that the reformers had sought in their notion of libertas ecclesiae (i.e., church immunity from secular control and jurisdiction). But the weakness of the empire also led the papacy to seek support in northern Italy. The Investiture Controversy

The kingdom of Italy, a creation of the Lombards, had all but ceased to exist as a separate entity in the early 11th century. Pavia no longer functioned as an administrative centre after 1024, when the royal palace was destroyed. The great beneficiary of the new situation was Milan, whose archbishop Heribert (Ariberto) of Antimiano had played the role of kingmaker in the selection of Conrad II as Italian king in 1026. But the archbishop faced considerable opposition from his lesser vassals, the vavasours, who revolted on his return to Milan after supporting Conrad in Burgundy. The roots of this revolt lay in a dispute between two ranks of Milan’s warrior elite, the capitanei and the vavasours, over the inheritance of fiefs. Conrad was able to restore peace between these factions in 1037 by the Constitutio de feudis, which made the fiefs of the vavasours hereditary. The settlement, however, did not create a lasting peace. A group of vavasours and lower clergy led by Arialdo and Erlembaldo opposed the archbishop, who was supported by the capitanei. The dissidents, known as pataria (most probably meaning “rag pickers”), also had ties to the reform movement. There were also disorders in a number of other cities. Nearby Brescia, for example, forced its bishop to flee the city. In Florence, John Gualbert, one of the leaders of the monastic reform movement, opposed the city’s bishop, an admitted simoniac (i.e., a person guilty of using money to obtain clerical office). Yet the unrests were too varied to fit a simple explanation. The experience of Lucca, for example, differed substantially from that of Florence. Bishop Anselm of Lucca, one of the strongest leaders of the reform movement among the Italian bishops, was chosen by the cardinals as the successor of Nicholas II in 1061 and became Pope Alexander II (1061–73). His position at Lucca was due in large measure to the support of Countess Matilda of Canossa, a principal figure in Italian politics throughout the period. She provided the necessary weight to support papal reform policies in northern Italy and provided the papacy with a counterbalance to the risky alliance with the Normans.

The threat posed to the imperial order in northern Italy by the cities and the crucial role of the reform papacy and its ally, Countess Matilda, evoked a strong response from the imperial party at the death of Pope Nicholas. The Lombard bishops and their allies called upon the youthful Henry to provide a successor. Even though the reformers had already selected Anselm of Lucca as Alexander II in accordance with the election decree of 1059, Henry proceeded to appoint Cadalo, bishop of Parma, who took the name Honorius II as antipope in 1061. The Cadalan schism brought together segments of the Roman nobility and the Lombard bishops, who were opposed to reform. The empire, which had been a partner in reform, was emerging as the enemy of reform. Under the legitimate pope, Alexander II, Hildebrand, former secretary of Pope Gregory VI and now archdeacon of the Roman church, succeeded Humbert of Silva Candida as the leading architect of reform. The papacy increasingly reached out beyond Italy in its effort to extend the influence of the reform movement. Alexander II lent his support, most probably with the advice of Hildebrand, to the conquest of England by William, duke of Normandy, in 1066. Likewise, the papacy became more fully involved in the efforts of the kings of Spain to reconquer lands from the Muslims. The internationalization of the Roman Curia, begun by Leo IX, continued to attract important leaders of the reform to Rome. Under Alexander II the papacy succeeded in escaping the shadows of Roman aristocratic domination and imperial control and in moving onto the European stage.

Against this background, King Henry IV reached his majority and began to assert his rights in both Germany and Italy. Alexander and Hildebrand continued papal support for the pataria in Milan; as noted, the reformers demanded an end to marriage of the clergy, to the buying of church offices, and to lay control of appointments to church offices. The issue of lay investiture (the practice whereby secular rulers formally presented to clerics the symbols of their various offices) gained paramount importance in Alexander II’s reform program. The reformers’ opposition to lay investiture was a major challenge to the Ottonian system, which rested in part on the emperor’s long-standing rights to appoint and control church officials. The issue drove a deep wedge between the advocates of reform and the supporters of the empire, even dividing the reformers themselves.

From the imperial point of view, it was impossible to separate the issue of lay investiture from the changes occurring in the political life of the northern Italian cities. Indeed, the struggle over lay investiture lent legitimacy to movements directed against imperial bishops. Milan was one among a number of northern Italian cities in which a reform movement struggled to secure greater independence from imperial control. Similar movements developed in southern Italy as well. The religious confraternity dedicated to St. Nicholas, whose body had been brought to Bari from Anatolia, served to rally local sentiment. The 11th-century reform movement grew partly out of the emergence of communes, the political organizations of the towns, particularly in central and northern Italy.

The climax of the Investiture Controversy came under Alexander II’s successor, Hildebrand, who took the name Gregory VII (1073–85). With Gregory the reform movement achieved its most revolutionary form, although Gregory hardly thought of himself and his contemporary reformers in such terms. Their ideal was a restoration of the church to its primitive freedom, summed up in the Donation of Constantine, a document forged in the 8th century but generally regarded as genuine throughout the Middle Ages. According to this document, the emperor Constantine in the 4th century had granted to Pope Sylvester I and his successors spiritual supremacy and temporal dominion over Rome and the entire Western Empire. Gregory and the reformers, for whom the freedom of the church meant freedom from imperial intervention and the ability of the pope to act without restraint for the good of Christendom, used the Donation of Constantine to bolster their program of reform. That the Donation cast a long shadow over the program of Gregory VII is especially evident in the Dictatus Papae (“Treatise of the Pope”), a list of brief statements inserted in Gregory’s register asserting papal claims. For example, the eighth title states that the pope alone can use the imperial insignia (the symbols of temporal power). Fruit of an assiduous combing of various sources, the Dictatus (which dates to 1075) seems to anticipate the controversies of the coming years. Certainly, it suggests the direction in which the thought of the Roman Curia was moving. The notion of a revival of a golden age also found its expression in the artistic and architectural works of the period—for example, in the mosaics of the basilica constructed at Montecassino by Abbot Desiderius and in the newly built cathedral of Salerno.

The conflict between Gregory VII and Henry IV (1056–1106) over lay investiture was a culmination of developments in Italy that had their origins in the last years of the pontificate of Leo IX. At the Roman synod of 1075, Gregory signaled his determination to bring an end to the practice of lay investiture. There could be no doubt that this policy would have its most drastic impact on Germany and northern Italy, where the remains of the Ottonian system constituted important vestiges of imperial control. Henry IV and his counselors realized these implications and replied at the synod of Worms in 1076. Henry employed a frontal attack on Gregory, challenging the legitimacy of his election. Gregory’s response was equally provocative: he excommunicated Henry, which released his subjects from their allegiance. This calculated political response aimed at undermining Henry’s position with the German aristocracy. Faced with rebellion, Henry made his celebrated trek across the Alps to meet the pope before he could come to Germany. Pope and emperor met at Matilda’s castle in Canossa. There, amid the snows of winter, Henry stood for three days as a penitent until the pope received and absolved him. Henry’s action at Canossa saved him temporarily, but he remained in jeopardy. When the conflict resumed in 1080, Gregory again excommunicated Henry, who proceeded to gather his supporters. A synod at Brixen under Henry’s control elected Guibert of Ravenna as pope under the name Clement III (elected antipope in 1080; enthroned antipope in 1084–1100). Henry led his army into Italy and laid siege to Rome. Gregory turned for assistance to Robert Guiscard and the Normans, who drove Clement and Henry from Rome but also sacked the city (1084). Gregory went south with Guiscard and the Normans, where he died in Salerno in 1085.

Gregory’s defeat did nothing to strengthen the position of the empire in northern Italy, while it drove the papacy closer to the Normans. The election of Abbot Desiderius of Montecassino as Pope Victor III (1086–87) illustrates this change, since Desiderius had long functioned as an intermediary between the papacy and the Normans. The election of Urban II (1088–99), formerly a monk of Cluny in Burgundy and a strong supporter of Gregory’s policy, showed the continued strength of the Roman Curia’s resolve and at the same time initiated closer ties to the Capetian kings of France as a counterweight to the empire and an alternative to the Normans. Urban was also effective in gaining support for reform among the cities of northern Italy. Yet his most dramatic endeavour was his summons of the Crusade" class="md-crosslink">First Crusade at Clermont in 1095, presaged by his earlier meeting with Byzantine envoys in Italy. Urban’s commitment to the Crusade proceeded from his desire to heal the schism between the Eastern and Western churches, to extend the papal reform program to the Eastern churches, and to forge a new alliance within Christendom against Islam, its foremost external enemy. The Crusade offered new opportunities for the maritime cities of northern Italy, which for some time had been opposing Muslim power in Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily. Urban also worked closely with Roger I, count of Sicily, to reestablish the Latin church on the island, but he came into conflict with him over the degree of direct papal control to be exercised there. The apostolic legation that he granted to Roger and his son limited direct papal intervention in the ecclesiastical affairs of the island and thereby joined the reconstruction of the church to the interests of the Norman monarchy (see below). At his death in 1099, Urban had greatly enhanced the prestige of the papacy, yet the conflict with the empire remained unresolved.

The settlement of the investiture struggle that finally emerged under Popes Paschal II (1099–1118) and Calixtus II (1119–24) had a far-reaching impact on the church and on civil society. The settlement represented a compromise between the reformist church and the empire. The agreement reached between Paschal II and King Henry I of England, which limited the role of the king in the appointment of bishops, marked the direction for the eventual solution reached by Calixtus II and Henry V (1106–25) in the Concordat of Worms in 1122. Thenceforward, the emperor was denied the right to invest prelates with the spiritual symbols of their offices; however, as their temporal overlord he retained certain rights (the ones for Germany differing substantially from those for Burgundy and Italy). An earlier attempt at settlement had proposed a near-total severance of the ties between the bishops and the monarchy and thus an end to the Ottonian system. While such an arrangement would have satisfied every aim of the reformers, it would have plunged the empire into chaos. The bishops, well aware of their role as linchpins, objected strongly to such a radical solution, and the plan foundered. But the compromise at Worms was also fraught with danger for the empire. The reformers gained much more than the actual agreement granted. The chief beneficiary was the papacy, which succeeded in freeing itself from imperial restraints. In the temporal sphere, however, and largely by accident, northern and central Italy also faced a new situation as a result of this settlement. The rise of communes

During the 12th century, communes, or city-states, developed throughout central and northern Italy. After early beginnings in cities such as Pisa and Genoa, virtually every episcopal city in the north formed a communal government prior to 1140. The origins and developments of communes are complex, and attempts to explain them in simple terms are doomed to failure. The emphasis of 19th-century liberal historians on communal revolts against ecclesiastical repression as well as the later Marxist focus on class conflict in the development of the communes have proved too narrow. They have failed to recognize both the many different causes of violence in the communes and the diversities within the communal movement. Violence resulted from such diverse factors as the conflicting interests of ecclesiastical institutions, the complex ties of loyalty that bound men to one another and to the institutions of their society, and shifts in the distribution of power.

The Investiture Controversy focused the efforts of the higher clergy on consolidating their rights against infringement not merely by the lay aristocracy but also by ecclesiastical competitors. Examples of conflict from various places and periods show how relationships changed dramatically, often within a short period. At Brescia, for example, the bishops, who contested the abbots of Leno for control of the church of Gambara, drew support from a faction of the milites, the landed aristocracy, as well as from the popolo, which was composed of professional people, craftsmen, and merchants. Elsewhere, local circumstances dictated other alliances. During the period in which the cities were expanding their power into the contado (the region surrounding the city), elements drawn from town and countryside continually struggled for control of the commune. Alliances shifted depending on the success or failure of these efforts. At Lucca the bishop and the commune were jointly concerned about the claims of the Abbey of Fucecchio because of its ties to neighbouring Pisa. But the efforts of bishops to establish their rights in the contado could also provoke conflict with the commune. Much depended on the makeup of the commune, which varied widely not only from city to city but also from period to period. The relative influence of urban merchants or rural landholders depended on the size of each group within a particular community. Where one group was small, it allied itself with others. The quest for power led to shifting and, at times, strange alliances; for example, at Brescia in the early 13th century, one faction of local magnates drew support from heretics. Even when the commune brought together various factions in sworn associations, it still faced not only the problem of its enemies in the city and countryside but also that of the fragile nature of the coalition on which it rested. Communes created elaborate systems of checks on power that aimed to prevent dominance by any single faction. Term limits were imposed to force changes in the ruling councils. The consuls, so named from Roman precedent, similarly faced limits on their power.

From its inception it was clear that communal government aspired not merely to political independence but also to control of the contado. As a result, a complex relationship developed in which the contado found markets for its products, offered opportunities for investment for city dwellers, and suffered oppression from urban interests. The city, in turn, offered opportunities to the people of the countryside and helped to ensure a measure of security. There is probably no way for scholars to establish the balance of benefits and disadvantages, but one may be certain that it shifted continuously, depending on region, local conditions, and the general economic climate at a given time.

It is evident, however, that the communes of northern and central Italy benefited from the Investiture Controversy. The ineffectiveness of imperial power in Italy during the first half of the 12th century, which favoured the development of the communes, stemmed largely from the struggle over investitures and the attendant political instability in Germany. These external factors, however, do not in themselves account for the rise of the communes. For that, one must turn to internal factors, particularly the dynamics among various factions and the social dislocations during and following the Investiture Controversy that accompanied rising populations and increased prosperity. The reformers’ success in weakening the bonds between church and empire remained a decisive force throughout the 12th century and well into the 13th century. The partisan perspectives of contemporaries oversimplified the Investiture Controversy, showing it either as a struggle for the freedom of the church from lay power or as an effort to preserve the traditional—that is, imperial—order within society. Actually, however, given the complex network of local loyalties within both church and secular society, the controversy fragmented loyalties of both the clergy and the laity. If the old order was weakened, it was not merely a secular order that lost but an ecclesiastical order as well. Nor was it merely the unreformed monasteries and imperial bishoprics that lost; at times, communal authority emerged stronger than any ecclesiastical power in the region. Certainly, by the early 13th century this was true in Genoa, and it was soon to be the case in Milan, Florence, Bologna, and elsewhere. The age of the Hohenstaufen

During the 12th century a new political order developed in Italy. It was not a tidy process, however. In the south the ascendancy established by the Normans of Capua and by the Hautevilles gained strength with the conquest of Sicily from the Muslims in the late 11th century. Following the death of Robert Guiscard, his brother, Roger I, count of Sicily, went to the mainland to consolidate his position. His son, Roger II, succeeded in establishing a Norman kingdom. Recognition for it, however, was slow in coming. Roger first obtained it from the antipope Anacletus II (1130–38) and then, under conditions that revealed the weakness of the papacy before Norman power, from Pope Innocent II (1130–43) in 1139. The papacy continued to seek support from the French monarchy in order to offset growing Norman influence. On the other hand, victory in the Investiture Controversy, even though compromised, created a situation that enabled the 12th-century papacy to assume leadership of the reform movement throughout Europe. The Lateran Councils of 1123, 1139, and 1179 marked important stages in the development of the reform papacy. From Urban II on, the central administration of the church expanded. By the mid-12th century—about the time that the monk Gratian was compiling his Decretum, the most important collection of ecclesiastical law up to that time—Rome’s position as a court of appeals was growing faster than its judicial machinery could possibly accommodate. The process of definition and extension of papal control over ecclesiastical matters inevitably led to conflict with secular rulers. The determination of the papacy to protect its independence and, after the death of Matilda of Canossa in 1115, to hold onto the vast inheritance she had bequeathed to the Roman church in central Italy, as well as the ties that united the papacy to the reform bishops and to many of the laity who had supported the reform in their cities, signaled changes that had taken place since the Concordat of Worms in 1122. Finally, the keystone of the new order lay in the strength, as yet untested, of the communes. Vestiges of imperial support certainly remained both in the cities and in the countryside, but the old cause had given way before the real interests that were taking shape during this period.

Italy in the late 12th century.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The emperors of the Hohenstaufen dynasty that succeeded the Salian dynasty attempted to revive the imperial position in Italy. The first efforts of both pope and emperor in the period following the Concordat of Worms were, however, based upon the assumption that something of the old relationship remained. In part, this attitude may have been encouraged by the slight attention that Lothar II (or III; 1125–37) and Conrad III (1138–52) paid to Italian affairs. Lothar’s efforts against the Normans were ineffectual, and he focused primarily on civil war in Germany. His rival and successor, Conrad III, the first Hohenstaufen king, devoted considerable energy to the Crusade" class="md-crosslink">Second Crusade, which had been promoted by the Cistercian monk and monastic reformer Bernard of Clairvaux. The dominant role of Bernard of Clairvaux certainly influenced the selection of his former disciple, Eugenius III (1145–53), as pope. Forced to seek refuge in France by the political situation in Rome, where the radical reformer Arnold of Brescia stirred both feelings of independence and a demand for more-extreme reforms within the church, Eugenius cooperated with Bernard in the preaching of the Second Crusade. Although the Crusade was conceived originally as an enterprise to be led by the Capetian monarch Louis VII (1137–80), Conrad III was included when it became clear that there would be large-scale German participation. The Crusade fell well short of expectations, and Conrad returned to Germany in 1149 to resume his imperial program. Eugenius, who faced Arnold and the rebellious Romans and who was heavily dependent on Roger II of Sicily during Conrad’s absence on Crusade, hoped that Conrad’s return would provide the means to reestablish papal control in Rome, but turmoil in Germany prevented the realization of his desire. Conrad died without being able to journey to Italy to receive imperial coronation. Eugenius died the following year. Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa)

The reign of Conrad’s successor and nephew, the duke of Swabia, Frederick I (1152–90), brought a major reassertion of imperial rule in Italy. Frederick saw himself not as the heir to a compromise but as a restorer of the Romano-Carolingian heritage of the German monarchy. Papal-imperial relations

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, nationalistic and liberal historians popularized a view of Frederick I, whom the Italians called Barbarossa (“Redbeard”), that was surrounded by legend and embroidered by myth. Since World War II, however, scholars have moved away from nationalistic interpretations to reevaluate the imperial-papal relationship within its actual historical context. For example, the Treaty of Constance of March 23, 1153, by which both pope and emperor dedicated themselves almost to a return to the former status quo in both northern and southern Italy, demonstrated their effort to retain essential elements of the traditional order. But events soon showed how illusory this effort was. There was in fact little trust between the papal and imperial sides. Frederick made his descent into Italy in 1154 in order to secure his coronation as emperor. His troops were few, chiefly a band of knights under Henry III (the Lion), duke of Saxony. He put Milan under the ban of the empire for refusing to answer charges laid against it by Lodi, Pavia, and Cremona. But he could do little else. He moved quickly to Rome, where a new pope, Adrian IV (1154–59), the only Englishman ever to hold the papal see, had succeeded Pope Anastasius IV (1153–54). Adrian had little choice but to continue the arrangements made at Constance, although he and his chief adviser, Cardinal Roland Bandinelli (who later succeeded Adrian as Pope Alexander III), opposed Frederick’s reassertion of imperial claims to participate in papal elections. Still, they needed his support to quell the continuing unrest created by Arnold of Brescia. The emperor captured Arnold and turned him over to the prefect of the city, who hanged him, burned his body, and scattered his ashes in the Tiber River. Frederick, however, did not move against the Normans, although King Roger II of Sicily had died, and Adrian concluded a treaty with King William I (1154–66) of Sicily in 1156. Frederick’s first Italian trip thus served chiefly to demonstrate the impossibility of the kind of restoration that Frederick had envisaged in the Treaty of Constance, but that did not mean that he was prepared to surrender the rights of the empire. Quite the contrary, it helped to move the issues into a new arena.

Crusades; Frederick IFrederick I (Frederick Barbarossa) as a Crusader, with (right) Henry of Schaftlarn dedicating to him a copy of the History of the First Crusade by Robert of St. Remy; miniature from a manuscript in the Vatican Library (MS. Vat.lat.2001).Courtesy of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

Perhaps no more dramatic expression of the nature of this change could be imagined than the event that took place at Besançon, where the cardinals Bernard of San Clemente and Roland met with Frederick in October 1157 and delivered a letter from Pope Adrian. The pope reminded Frederick of his imperial coronation and informed him that he wished to confer great beneficia on him. The term, which could mean either favours or, in a more specific sense, offices, was translated into German by Frederick’s imperial chancellor Rainald of Dassel as “fiefs,” which implied that the emperor held the empire from the pope as a vassal. This caused an uproar among those present, particularly since Cardinal Roland went on to ask: “From whom then does he receive the empire…?” Although Pope Adrian denied the interpretation made by Rainald, the damage was done. More importantly, however, this incident shows that contemporaries were quite aware that they were treading on new ground. Frederick firmly rejected any implications of papal overlordship and asserted that he held the empire “from God alone by the election of the princes.” That his policies were grounded in political realities is confirmed by his actions in 1158, when again he set forth to Italy. This time he sought neither a rapprochement with the papacy nor a return to the old order. He came as a ruler intent on restoring order in his domains. Having humiliated Milan, which had attempted to oppose him, he met with the cities on the plain at Roncaglia to define the royal regalia (rights) on the basis of customary law. Four Bolognese lawyers joined 28 urban representatives in this task. The text of the three laws issued at Roncaglia, however, shows the increasing influence of Roman law at Frederick’s court. Institutional reforms

Already in the second half of the 11th century, studies of Roman law underwent a revival at the University of Bologna under the influence of the jurist Irnerius and his school. Earlier emperors had, in fact, employed Roman law in their judgments and legislation. But Frederick was more conscious of its importance as a source justifying imperial actions. He issued a special privilege for scholars studying law, the so-called “Authentica Habita” (c. 1155), and played a leading role in the gradual evolution of the law schools at Bologna. Roman law, however, was merely one source that contributed to the development of more clearly defined social and political institutions in the 12th century. The profound changes occurring in Italy in this period made innovation inevitable. Communes everywhere were experimenting with new political forms, often concealing their novelty behind traditional names. In the Norman kingdom the effort to fashion royal institutions for disparate regions and populations led not only to a layering of administrative institutions within the royal court but to a great diversity from one region to another. Everywhere, attempts at reconciling widely divergent legal and customary arrangements demonstrated a desire for legal uniformity; the view that each group should live by its own law no longer served the needs of society. More and more, Roman and canon law provided sources useful for reconciling differences. Frederick Barbarossa saw himself as an agent of unification. Although he represented the traditional order and was so viewed by his numerous enemies in Italy, he identified himself with the changing order that was emerging in the mid-12th century. Roncaglia was a new constitutional statement despite its conservative reliance on regalian right. Northern Italy

Roncaglia laid the foundation for a new regime in northern Italy. The regalia produced an enormous income from such sources as minting coinage and collecting tolls, making Frederick the wealthiest of all European monarchs. This led him to reconceive the position of Italy within the empire. His aggressive policies could not help but alarm Milan and its allies, and they also caused profound concerns for the papacy. The death of Adrian IV in 1159 revealed a division among the cardinals. A pro-imperial group supported Octavian of Monticello, while the opposition chose Cardinal Roland of Siena. Amid angry recriminations, the two claimants assumed the papal title, Octavian as Victor IV (antipope 1159–64) and Roland as Alexander III (1159–81). At a poorly attended council in Pavia, Frederick abandoned his neutrality and supported Victor IV. But Victor found little support beyond the boundaries of the empire. Even Bishop Eberhard of Bamberg, one of Frederick’s closest advisers, made his acceptance of Victor conditional on Victor gaining recognition from the whole church. Nevertheless, Frederick’s support was sufficient to give life to the schism. Alexander III relied chiefly on France, England, the Lombard cities allied with Milan, and the Normans in southern Italy and Sicily. On the whole, Frederick’s position was the weaker one, but he refused to make concessions. Failing to win over Louis VII of France, he journeyed once again to Italy, only to face strong opposition from the patriarch of Grado, who organized the anti-imperial League of Verona. When Victor IV died in 1164, Rainald of Dassel arranged for the election of the strongly imperial Paschal III (antipope 1164–68) as a rival to Alexander III. But Alexander also faced difficulties. The controversy between King Henry II of England and Archbishop Thomas Becket threatened to deprive Alexander of English support. Moreover, feeling increased uncertainty about his position in France, where he had fled to in 1162, Alexander returned to Rome in 1165 and sought support from the Normans. The death of William I of Sicily in 1166 prevented the realization of this goal, and he once again had to look to France as his mainstay.

Frederick sought a decisive solution in Italy in 1166. He marched with a large force to Rome, but a devastating outbreak of malaria among his troops while in the city put an end to the emperor’s plans. In 1167 the Lombard cities formed a league to defend against Frederick’s expedition that included Milan, Venice, Padua, Mantua, Brescia, and Lodi.

Despite his setback, Frederick was determined to stay the course. Indeed, by this time, he could hardly turn back without accepting a near-total surrender. Failing to muster support in Germany, Frederick was forced to rely on the limited resources left to him. On May 29, 1176, he met his enemies at Legnano in northern Italy. The army of the Lombard League, under the leadership of Milan, and Frederick’s army engaged in a pitched battle, in which the supporters of the empire were thoroughly routed. Accepting the realities created by his defeat, Frederick waged a diplomatic campaign that secured the remarkable treaty concluded with Alexander (whom he now recognized as pope) and the Lombard communes in Venice in July 1177. This agreement settled little definitively, but Frederick obtained a six-year truce with the Lombards and was able to hold onto the Mathildine lands in Tuscany for 15 years. He restored his position in Germany and recovered from the losses endured in Rome. In 1183 Frederick converted the truce of Venice into the Peace of Constance, in which he renounced the regalia claimed at Roncaglia but preserved the administrative rights of the crown. From defeat he thus managed to salvage a considerable portion of his imperial power.

Frederick launched his final expedition to Italy in 1184, where he met with Pope Lucius III (1181–85). He also witnessed a diplomatic turnabout on the part of the Norman ruler, William II (1166–89), who espoused his aunt Constance, the daughter of Roger II of Sicily, to Henry, the second son of Frederick. Although Constance was not expected to inherit the Sicilian throne, because William and his queen might still have children, the implications of the agreement were nonetheless momentous. The papacy found itself faced with an intolerable situation. Frederick, now aiming to build a power base in Tuscany instead of Lombardy, attempted to annex the Mathildine lands. Although he failed in this, he secured the spolia (spoils) and regalia of vacant bishoprics and abbacies from Clement III (1187–91). Yet Frederick did not live to consolidate this effort. The defeat of the Crusader army at Ḥaṭṭīn in the Holy Land in July 1187 and the subsequent fall of Jerusalem sent a great shock through the West and inspired the Third Crusade. Frederick took the cross; the kings of England and France followed suit. Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the Saleph River in Anatolia on June 10, 1190. The Crusade was able to save ʿAkko (Acre) and assure the continued Crusader presence in the East, but it left Jerusalem in Muslim hands. Economic and cultural developments

Frederick was the giant of the 12th-century Italian stage. He lived through a period of dramatic social and economic changes. Genoa, Pisa, and Venice became international powers during this period, with commercial interests stretching from northern Europe to Africa and the Levant. The growth of population in both town and countryside brought about an increase in public works, ranging from town walls to canals. The development of guilds and confraternities reflected the growing complexity of economic organization. Even the smallest cities had their professional elite of judges and notaries alongside the nobles, merchants, and craftsmen. The vigour of the economy found its expression in the construction of new and larger cathedrals, the one at Pisa being among the most notable. Overseas trade and investment increased domestic wealth, leading to the embellishment of cities.

Culture, in turn, produced its own coin. In the Norman south, medical studies developed in Salerno. Although the kingdom of Sicily did not become a major centre for the transmission of Byzantine and Islamic cultures to Europe as did Spain, it nonetheless played a significant subsidiary role. Al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī, the famous Arab geographer, dedicated his three major works on geography to Roger II of Sicily. George of Antioch and, later, Eugenius the Admiral were important translators of Greek works into Latin. Capua, Montecassino, Benevento, and Salerno contributed to the Latin cultural tradition from their own rich patrimonies. Historical writing flourished in the hands of Amatus of Montecassino, Romuald of Salerno, Geoffrey Malaterra, and Falco of Benevento. Already in the 11th century an international clerical culture had emerged in the writings of reformers such as Humbert of Silva Candida and Peter Damian, and it grew under the influence of figures such as Bernard of Clairvaux and John of Salisbury. On the local level, Roman civic culture found its expression in clerical circles around the great basilicas and in secular circles around the prefect and, later, the senators. The north produced an early harvest of the civic spirit in the annals of the Genoese Caffaro di Caschifellone and his successors. Although imperial themes often found a place in these cultural developments, underlying loyalties were local. Only slowly did signs of an international lay culture—largely under French influence—emerge. By the late 12th century the whole of Italy had undergone a major economic and cultural transformation that was to provide a rich basis for the 13th century. Henry VI

The death of Frederick Barbarossa’s eldest son, Frederick of Swabia, on the Crusade brought to the German throne his second son, Henry VI (1190–97), who had stayed behind in Germany. Thus, strangely, the son who had not expected to become king and who was husband to a princess who also had not expected to inherit a throne found himself in a position to claim both the German and the Sicilian crowns. In Germany the strength of Henry’s support and the prestige of his father made succession certain, the more so because he defeated his father’s enemy, Henry the Lion, and held his sons hostage. But the Sicilian inheritance of Constance was another matter. The nobility of the kingdom supported the popular Tancred of Lecce (1190–94), as did the English king, Richard I (the Lion-Heart), the old ally of King William II of Sicily. But Henry had secured a promise of imperial coronation from Pope Clement III prior to his death, and his successor, Pope Celestine III (1191–98), who deliberately stalled by engaging in negotiations with Henry, nonetheless proceeded with the coronation on the day following his own consecration. Henry immediately turned his attention to his wife’s Sicilian inheritance, but an outbreak of typhus forced him to abandon his plans and return north. Constance herself was captured and held in Salerno. Pope Celestine declared for Tancred and recognized him as king. In Germany much of the Rhineland joined Richard the Lion-Heart and Celestine against Henry. But the capture of Richard on his return from the Crusade strengthened the emperor’s hand; Henry demanded an enormous ransom and conspired with King Philip II of France to keep Richard a prisoner. When Henry finally reached an agreement with Henry the Lion in the spring of 1194, the way was open for his return to Italy.

Some scholars have speculated that Henry’s Italian policy implies a program of world domination, but such a view is too grandiose. Henry was essentially a practical man. He was also an opportunist. Lacking sources that would provide real insight into his thinking, one can only conclude that he was aware of the policies of his father and that his own aims were extensions, with some modification due to changed circumstance, of those policies. The crown of Sicily was the chief new element. In 1194 he returned to Italy and conquered the Sicilian kingdom; Tancred had died shortly before his campaign began. Aided by the Pisans and Genoese, Henry entered Palermo and was crowned as king on Christmas Day. Constance had remained at Jesi, where she gave birth to a son named Constantine, to be known as Frederick Roger (later Frederick II) in honour of his paternal and maternal grandfathers. Henry aimed to establish German control over the bureaucracy of the Sicilian kingdom and to integrate its administration into that of the empire, employing imperial ministeriales for this purpose. These were originally servants of unfree origin who had risen to become important administrators in the imperial government of the Hohenstaufen. Henry gave the trusted ministerial Markward of Anweiler the duchy of Ravenna and the march of Ancona as hereditary fiefs, thereby ensuring that the land route between the kingdom of Italy and the kingdom of Sicily was in safe hands. These measures reveal the centralizing goals that were at the heart of his vision. He tried to ensure that the German (i.e., imperial) crown would be hereditary in his family, a plan that was on its way to realization when, amid his preparations for a Crusade, he succumbed to typhus in Messina and died on Sept. 28, 1197. In Germany the Hohenstaufen future rested with the efforts of Henry’s younger brother, Philip of Swabia, to secure the succession for Frederick Roger. In the kingdom of Sicily, Constance succeeded immediately and moved to assert her authority. Otto IV

In northern Italy, Henry had endeavoured to preserve the gains that Frederick Barbarossa had made. But Frederick’s departure on Crusade and Henry’s own concern with the kingdom of Sicily permitted the communes to recover from the reassertion of imperial control after the Peace of Constance in 1183. Henry’s death and the ensuing imperial election bought still more time for the communes. The empress Constance withdrew her son, the heir to the kingdom of Sicily, as a candidate for the German throne and entrusted him to the regency of the newly elected pope, Innocent III (1198–1216), before she died in 1198. Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick, son of Henry the Lion of the Welf dynasty, contested the German election. But when on June 9, 1208, Otto of Wittelsbach assassinated Philip in a private quarrel, Otto IV (1208–15) emerged triumphant and began preparations for his coronation, which took place on Oct. 4, 1209. Despite his concessions to the pope, Otto had no intention of dropping imperial claims in Italy; the practical aims that had driven the Hohenstaufen shaped his policy as well. When the new emperor made clear his intention to move on the kingdom of Sicily, Innocent had no choice but to excommunicate him (1210). On the advice of King Philip II of France, the pope transferred his support to the young Frederick, thus paving the way for his accession to the German throne. Frederick II Relations to the papacy

The youthful king of Sicily knew little peace during the years following the death of his mother. Though Innocent III was nominally his guardian, Markward of Anweiler attempted to control the child-king, basing his claim to the regency on Henry VI’s last will. After Markward’s death in 1202, Frederick was caught between factions in the kingdom. Only after his marriage to Constance of Aragon in 1209 did his position improve. Then, in 1211, Innocent III turned to him as his candidate for the German throne. This dramatic reversal on the part of the pope and his seeming willingness to jeopardize what most historians have viewed as the papal position in Italy has raised serious questions. True, Innocent exacted a promise from Frederick to maintain the German kingdom separate from the kingdom of Sicily, with his son Henry to be king of Sicily while he became emperor. But acceptance of such a solution raised the question whether the papacy was really committed to any long-term policy, at least one that was consistently dedicated to the separation of the Sicilian kingdom from the German empire. In any case, Frederick spent the next eight years in Germany pursuing and consolidating his position as head of the German kingdom. The kingdom of Sicily was again thrown into turmoil by the competing factions among the nobility, by the efforts of towns and cities to assert greater independence, and by growing tensions between Sicilian Muslims and their Christian neighbours. In northern Italy, imperial authority atrophied; in most places it was little more than a hollow shell. Even in Germany, the new king found that he needed to gain the support of the German church through a broad grant of privileges. In addition, Frederick took the cross at Aachen in 1215, aligning himself with the plan of Innocent III for a new Crusade.

Historians concerned chiefly with papal-imperial conflicts have often missed the positive tone in the relationship between Frederick and the papacy during these early years. The keynote of these years was papal-imperial cooperation, especially on the successful completion of a Crusade. The limited results of the Third Crusade and the bitter fruit of the Fourth Crusade, which had led to the capture of Constantinople and large parts of the Byzantine Empire, had prompted Pope Innocent III to reformulate papal involvement in the Crusades, as outlined in the decree Ad liberandam (“To Free the Holy Land”) at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Innocent’s program required a level of commitment never before achieved, especially in financial and logistical terms. Frederick’s assumption of the cross demonstrated his support for Innocent’s program but raised problems, chiefly because of the uncertain state of affairs in Germany, even after the defeat of Otto IV by Philip Augustus at Bouvines in 1214, and outstanding issues in northern Italy. With the death of Innocent III in 1216, many thought the papal plan for a Fifth Crusade was in jeopardy, but his successor, Honorius III (1216–27), strove to maintain Innocent’s schedule as much as possible. Honorius pressed Frederick and other leaders of the Crusade to hasten their preparations. Although the first contingents from the north were prepared to leave in 1217, Frederick was not among them, partly because he underestimated his capacity to resolve his problems in Germany and Italy and partly because of the speed of preparations for the Crusade. It was not until 1220 that Frederick came to Italy for his imperial coronation and to reenter his Sicilian kingdom. His repeated postponements of his departure for the East, granted by a cooperative Honorius, ultimately prevented him from joining the Crusade. The defeat of the Crusaders in Egypt in 1221 delivered a serious blow to the policy of cooperation initiated by Innocent III and nurtured by Honorius.

Nevertheless, it was a notable period of cooperation. Even the various Italian cities increasingly relied on mediation to settle differences. While Frederick made few concessions, Honorius showed that he was willing to trust in Frederick’s promises to reach a final settlement of the Mathildine lands and to keep the administration of the kingdom of Sicily separate from that of the empire. Frederick promulgated imperial laws against heresy, based on the decrees of the fourth Lateran Council. Following his coronation, he began to restore royal authority in the kingdom of Sicily. His Assizes of Capua (1220) set forth a program to regain control of royal rights alienated since the reign of Henry VI. He also began to establish a more effective central administration. He worked to secure the support of important members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, including the abbots of Montecassino and La Cava as well as the bishops of the kingdom. He built support among the great nobles, especially the counts of Aquino, but he also encountered considerable resistance from a large segment of the nobility. Faced with this opposition and a revolt among the Muslims of Sicily, he again had to postpone his participation in a new Crusade, although he was careful to send aid and troops. The death of Honorius III in 1227 and Frederick’s cancellation of his departure for the East because of illness broke the dam of recriminations and distrust that had been building. The new pope, Gregory IX (1227–41), excommunicated Frederick for his repeated postponements and his alleged abuse of the rights of Sicilian churches during papal vacancies. The kingdom of Jerusalem

An excommunicated Frederick embarked for the East, where he negotiated an agreement with the sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil of Egypt for the return of Jerusalem on terms somewhat less favourable than the sultan had earlier offered the Crusaders in return for Damietta. Frederick, who had married the heiress to the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1225 and had an infant son Conrad from this marriage, laid claim to the kingdom. He set up a regency and embarked on a program to strengthen royal administration. In the meantime, Gregory IX, claiming provocation by the imperial vicar Reginald (or Rainald) of Spoleto, gathered an army and invaded the kingdom of Sicily. Frederick returned from the East, defeated the papal forces, and reached an agreement with the pope at Ceprano in 1230 that did much to restore the basis for cooperation. He could at last devote his efforts to Italy. The Sicilian kingdom

The kingdom of Sicily was Frederick’s first priority. It had long suffered neglect from his absence and internal strife. The Constitutions of Melfi, or Liber Augustalis, promulgated by Frederick in 1231, was a model of the new legislation developing from the study of Roman and canon law. The intent of this legislation was to bring together the disparate elements within the kingdom and to unify them more effectively under royal leadership. It provided for improvements in royal administration, greater efficiency in the courts, and a rationalization of civil and criminal procedures in the interests of justice. Frederick also worked to promote the general welfare of his kingdom. In 1224 he founded the University of Naples. His legislation then dealt with medical education and licensing, public health, and air and water pollution. But he did not lose sight of the place that the kingdom occupied within imperial thinking. Increasingly in the 1230s he was drawn into affairs in northern Italy and Germany that made him conscious of the importance of the Sicilian kingdom as a base for his imperial power. Very possibly, circumstance played a greater role than ideology in forcing this conclusion upon him. The war in northern Italy

As a part of the settlement reached between him and Honorius III at the time of his coronation in 1220, Frederick had arranged to have his son Henry crowned as king of the Romans (i.e., ruler of Germany) while retaining the imperial, Italian, and Sicilian crowns for himself. Henry, encouraged by some people at his court, embarked on a policy that threatened Frederick’s relations with the German aristocracy. As a result, Frederick moved against Henry and placated the German nobles with his Constitution in Favour of the Princes (1232). Yet, whereas Frederick was willing to trade away some of his authority in Germany, he was determined to assert imperial rights in northern Italy. The Lombard cities, as early as 1226, had renewed the Lombard League. While Frederick was dealing with the problems caused by Henry’s rebellion between 1233 and 1235, the Lombards grew increasingly restless. Frederick confirmed their fears with his decision to summon a diet to Piacenza in 1236 to impose his imperial authority on them. His action demonstrated his lack of interest in papal efforts to arrange compromises between him and the Lombards. Moreover, the emergence of his chancellor, Pietro della Vigna, as his chief spokesman signaled a shift away from the quiet diplomacy between emperor and papacy that he had carried on with the aid of Hermann von Salza, the grand master of the Teutonic Order, a man respected by the pope and the Roman Curia. Pietro’s rhetoric was well fashioned for a propaganda war. On his side, Gregory appointed the strongly anti-imperial Cardinal James of Palestrina as his new legate in northern Italy and blocked Frederick’s planned diet. In his propaganda Frederick portrayed himself as the champion of orthodoxy working to prevent the spread of heresy in Lombardy, thus building on the theme of the cooperation between him and Honorius III aimed at stopping the growth of heresy. Gregory’s rhetoric appealed to papal claims based on the Donation of Constantine and expressed his earlier concerns about Frederick’s abuse of ecclesiastical rights.

The growing rift between Frederick and the papacy was not merely a revival of the papal-imperial conflict of the 12th century, though it certainly had elements in common. It had its immediate roots in the failure of the policy of cooperation employed under Innocent III, Honorius, and even Gregory himself. There is every indication that Frederick valued this relationship, but he increasingly came to see it as an obstacle to securing his imperial rights in northern Italy. The papacy had also worked to preserve good relations. But fear of Frederick’s policies in northern Italy evoked memories of Frederick Barbarossa among members of the Curia. Above all, neither the emperor nor the pope could turn back the clock on the development of the communes. In fact, from the very outset Frederick seemed more a pawn of the emerging forces in northern Italy than a restorer of the ideal of empire. The new forces were represented above all by two tyrants, Ezzelino and his brother, Alberigo, from the ancient da Romano family, who were working to expand their lordship from their base in Verona at the expense of towns such as Padua, Vicenza, and Brescia. Frederick relied on them for support, and in doing so he provoked the opposition of earlier supporters, such as Azzo, marchese d’Este, who now sided with the Lombards. Potentates such as the Romanos were the potential beneficiaries of Frederick’s military activities, more so than the emperor himself.

Buoyed by early success in northern Italy, Frederick returned to Germany. He even hoped to repair his differences with Gregory, who proved amenable. However, the attempted settlement broke down. On Nov. 27, 1237, Frederick, back in Italy, dealt the Lombards a heavy blow in the Battle of Cortenuova. He followed his military success with a strong propaganda attack, chiefly directed against Gregory IX. But the victory won at Cortenuova proved difficult to convert into permanent gains. Milan continued to hold out. In the following summer Frederick laid siege to Brescia but failed to take the city. Gregory excommunicated the emperor, repeating previous papal criticisms. What was at stake, however, was not some ideological high ground but recognition that Frederick had violated the rights of the church in the kingdom of Sicily. Gregory attempted to use the machinery developed for the Crusade to the East to gather money and manpower to oppose Frederick, who, in turn, warned his fellow rulers of the danger that these efforts posed. The papacy accused Frederick of failing to support the Crusade mounted by Thibaut of Champagne in 1239 and delaying its departure for the East. Gregory wished to recall him to the program on which the papacy had been insisting since the reign of Innocent III, but Frederick’s own concerns were with his European domains. It was not that he opposed the papacy’s desire for a Crusade; he wanted to settle matters in Italy first. The factors shaping political factions

The breach between emperor and pope that marked the remainder of the reign of Gregory IX and that grew more intense under Innocent IV (1243–54) undoubtedly helped shape political factions in northern Italy throughout the 13th century. But it would be an exaggeration to say that the conflict over church and state determined political developments. As already noted, local and regional factors underlay the politics of the northern communes. The conflict of religious and political ideology emerged chiefly in the second half of the 13th century, but later debates often hearkened to the vituperative papal-imperial propaganda of the 1240s. In some respects the lines had already been drawn, at least in part, by the internal political disputes that had begun to dominate Italian urban life from the mid-11th century on. The role that the reform movement played in the emergence of political factions is known only in part, but its importance cannot be denied. However, it would be a mistake to view this influence solely as a clerical-lay dichotomy. The emergence of papalist and imperial parties that later in the century called themselves Guelf and Ghibelline, respectively—based on terms taken from the divisions between the Welf house of Otto IV and the Hohenstaufen (Waiblingen) house of Philip of Swabia and Frederick II—echoed the struggle over rights. The term pars ecclesiae (“party of the church”), which became more common in the second half of the 13th century, has generally been viewed as a reference to support for the papacy, but it also referred to support for local churches. Both meanings of the term are correct, and the earliest usages seem to favour a more local interpretation.

The changing character and composition of communes often followed the fortunes of this struggle over rights. Increasingly, divisions between landowning magnates and popolo concealed the process of coalition making characteristic of early 13th-century urban politics. The regime of the podesta (which had its origins in imperial appointees), formed in the second half of the 12th century to provide greater stability and protection against violence, was already becoming more professionalized in the age of Frederick II. The preference for professional officials, strongly evidenced by mid-century in the writings of Albertanus of Brescia and others, aimed to prevent the military aggrandizement of an Ezzelino da Romano or an Azzo d’Este and to defend communal values.

The pars ecclesiae very often controlled the commune and stood for communal independence. Although some disputes with bishops were an inevitable feature of the Italian urban scene, alliances between bishops and communes grew more common in the 13th century. Imperial ideology was largely driven from the field. Likewise, class-based economic disputes varied in importance from one place and time to another; these disputes reflected the fundamental concerns over rights, especially over property, on both the local and the imperial-papal level, that shaped Italian urban politics. The end of Hohenstaufen rule

The final decade of Frederick II’s reign marked the end of the imperial system in Italy. Although Frederick seemed at times on the verge of repeating Barbarossa’s achievement, he could not marshal the resources needed for the task. His kingdom of Sicily fell more and more victim to his need for money to fight his war in the north, which all but ended the efforts at good government that had motivated his Constitutions of Melfi (1231). Increasingly, Frederick mortgaged his income from the kingdom to Roman bankers and subordinated the interests of the kingdom to the needs of the empire. His relations with the northern Italian maritime powers, save for Pisa and to some degree Venice, continued to deteriorate in the 1240s, but he remained dependent on income from taxes on their trade and could not entirely break ties with them. Instead, he tried to compete directly with them and to control their access to the ports of the Sicilian kingdom. The pressures of war largely determined his policies. The death of Pope Gregory IX in 1241 at first promised the possibility of a resolution. But it soon became clear that the cardinals could not proceed to an election because of their internal division. It was only in 1243 that they finally selected the Genoese cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi, one of the leading legal experts of the period, who took the name Innocent IV. The new pope soon demonstrated his unwillingness to compromise with Frederick, identifying papal interests closely with those of the Lombard cities. Under threat from the Romans, the pope left Italy and summoned a general council of the church to meet in Lyon in 1245. This council sealed the rupture between Frederick and the papacy and ensured that there would be little chance for a reconciliation in future negotiations. Frederick’s position remained militarily secure, but threats of conspiracies and growing opposition marked the final years of his reign. He was the last medieval emperor to assert his rule in northern Italy.

The death of Frederick II at Fiorentino in Puglia on Dec. 13, 1250, ended an era and opened the way for a new political order. The papacy determined that it would no longer tolerate the rule of the Hohenstaufen in Italy and opposed Frederick’s son and successor, Conrad IV, as well as Frederick’s natural son, Manfred, who became de facto ruler in the kingdom of Sicily and, following Conrad’s death in 1254, secured the crown for himself. Conrad’s son, Conradin (Conrad V), continued, however, to be the official heir. Even before Innocent IV died in 1254, the papacy tried to secure aid from the English king Henry III (1216–72), promising the Sicilian crown to his younger son Edmund. Innocent’s successor, Alexander IV (1254–61), soon discovered the folly of this effort and began to search elsewhere. Meanwhile, Manfred consolidated his position in the kingdom and in the march of Ancona. In northern Italy the passing of Frederick enabled tyrants such as Ezzelino da Romano to assert their virtual independence under the guise of supporting Manfred. Even the death of Ezzelino in 1259 did not impede the trend toward military rule. Almost everywhere, the ethos of strong government overwhelmed the rule of the communes.

The death of Frederick and the virtual failure of his line left a power vacuum. The papacy turned for support to Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX (1226–70) of France. While Frederick was alive, Louis had remained aloof from the conflict and had even expressed his disapproval of the papacy’s actions against Frederick. However, after the death of Conrad, he supported his brother’s bid for the Sicilian kingdom against Manfred. At the same time, Charles’s arrival in Italy set a new direction for politics in the north, where the Guelfs welcomed him. He proceeded to Rome, followed by a Crusader army that had support from the pope, Clement IV (1265–68), himself a Frenchman. Charles fended off Manfred while awaiting his own army, which had traveled overland. On Feb. 26, 1266, he defeated Manfred and his forces on the plain of Grandella, near Benevento. This battle ended Hohenstaufen rule in Italy and began the Angevin dominance that lasted through most of the rest of the 13th century. Charles succeeded to the Sicilian throne (1266–85) and asserted his leadership in Rome and in northern Italy. He quickly defeated a futile challenge by Conradin and had him executed in Naples (1268).

The papal party of the Guelfs was dominant in the north; the papacy ruled in the centre; the Angevins were in control in Sicily and Naples; and the whole was held together by the strong personality and ambitious dreams of Charles of Anjou (Charles II). As matters turned out, many of his dreams differed but slightly from those of the Hohenstaufens. Moreover, despite their aggressive and grandiose character, most of them seem to have had little basis in reality. Charles had designs on the Byzantine Empire and North Africa, as is evident from Crusade" class="md-crosslink">Louis IX’s Crusade to Tunis in 1270, which ended in disaster. The north of Italy was growing more and more restive under the rule of Charles. Pope Nicholas III (1277–80), sensing the direction of things, removed Charles from his position as senator at Rome and from his vicarship in Tuscany. The papacy also spearheaded efforts at reconciliation between Guelfs and Ghibellines. But Charles resisted and endeavoured to increase his influence over the papacy. Pope Martin IV (1281–85), a strong Angevin supporter, restored him to his former offices. But before Charles could reap the benefits of his reinstatement, he faced an insurrection in Sicily. The so-called Sicilian Vespers—an uprising on Easter Monday of 1282, when citizens of Palermo attacked the French garrison—led to a protracted war known as the War of the Sicilian Vespers. The king of Aragon, Peter III, came to the aid of the rebellious Sicilians, while Charles received indirect support from his nephew, the king of France, as well as the papacy. After 20 years of intermittent warfare, the outcome was the division of the kingdom founded by the Normans. The mainland of southern Italy continued to be held by Charles’s successors (the Angevin dynasty), whereas the island of Sicily came under the rule of the Aragonese.

As the 13th century came to an end, Italy had not yet recovered from the disasters of the age of Frederick II. Milan was dominant among the Lombard communes and was soon to make its bid for hegemony in northern Italy. Florence, meanwhile, had increased in size, wealth, and power to become the dominant force in Tuscany and the chief bulwark against the ambitions of the Visconti, a powerful Milanese family. The papacy vacillated under Angevin influence, while the kings of Naples carried on a vain war to retake the island of Sicily from the Aragonese. External influences, especially from France, increasingly dominated the political life of Italy, culminating at the turn of the century in the disastrous conflict between Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) and King Philip IV (the Fair) of France (1285–1314). Italy had escaped imperial dominance only to fall under the shadow of the French. Perhaps there is a certain irony in the country’s exchange of one heir of Charlemagne for another. Economic developments

The 13th century witnessed an enormous increase in prosperity not only in the maritime cities but also in the growing centres of the cloth industry, especially the woolen textile industry in Tuscany. Venice came to dominate the rich trade with the Byzantine Empire, especially after the Fourth Crusade (1204). Genoa, which eclipsed Pisa in the latter part of the century, expanded its trade in the western Mediterranean and in Provence. During the second half of the 13th century, Florentine influence, benefiting from close ties with the Angevins and the papacy, prospered in the kingdom of Sicily. The new wealth left an imprint on Italian cities. By the end of the century, the first mansions of the rich, although small by later standards, began to adorn the cities, alongside new municipal buildings and the churches of the mendicant orders, especially of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Cultural developments

The culture of this period reflects both the new wealth and the tensions it generated in Italian society. The legal culture that had flourished in Bologna in the 12th century came of age in the 13th century and spread to other parts of Italy. Lawyers formed a large educated class with an appreciation of rhetoric and grammar and some taste for poetry, history, and philosophy. In the first half of the century the court of Frederick II was an important centre for these studies, as is evident in the letters of Pietro della Vigna, the emperor’s chief spokesman. The chronicle of Riccardo of San Germano proved the best that the century would produce. Frederick’s court also attracted figures such as Michael Scot, whose translation of mathematical and scientific treatises from Arabic into Latin made Sicily an important centre for their transmission. Frederick’s own study De arte venandi cum avibus (“On the Art of Hunting with Birds”) drew not only on earlier writings but also on his own and his contemporaries’ observations and experience. The incipient Dominican studium in Naples produced Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest thinker of the age. Frederick, however, did not continue the rich Norman tradition of mosaic art and architecture, best represented by the Palatine Chapel in Palermo and the cathedrals of Cefalù and Monreale. Instead, Frederick was more noted for his castles, especially his starkly beautiful Castel del Monte in Puglia.

Cosmati mosaic (c. 1085–1132); detail of the floor in the choir of the church of San Nicola, Bari, Italy.SCALA/Art Resource, New York

Thirteenth-century Rome saw a flourishing of the arts in sculpture and in the stonework and mosaics of the Cosmati that adorn the walls of such churches as San Paolo Fuori le Mura and Santa Maria in Trastevere. By the end of the century, Arnolfo di Cambio, whose work in Florence was to gain him greater fame, produced important sculpture in Rome. But Rome was chiefly the centre of the papacy and of an international clerical culture. Although the papal chancery grew apace in this period, producing thousands of polished letters in its distinctive style, other studies found little place there. It was more devoted to practice than to study.

Secular legal studies, grammar, and rhetoric took deep root in the north. Fresh ideas streamed across the Alps from France, influencing the writings of figures such as Albertanus of Brescia, while these same ideas drew numerous Italians northward, including the Florentine scholar Brunetto Latini. In Milan, Bonvesin da la Riva, poet and eulogist of his city, composed his De magnalibus urbis Mediolani (“Concerning the Great Works of the City of Milan”) in 1288. At Padua, Rolandino reacted against the incursions of Ezzelino da Romano in his Chronicle. While in exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri, the greatest of all Italian poets, completed his towering epic poem, The Divine Comedy. Dante’s literary art found its visual equivalent in the brilliant frescoes of Giotto di Bondone in Padua (Arena Chapel), Florence (Santa Croce), Assisi (Magdalen Chapel in the lower church of San Francesco), and Naples (destroyed). James M. Powell John Foot Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries Characteristics of the period

The failure of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II and his successor kings of Sicily to dominate Italy in the course of the 13th century left the peninsula divided among a large number of effectively independent political units. The inability of rulers from beyond the Alps to impose their authority upon it was clearly and finally demonstrated by the expedition (1310–13) of Henry of Luxembourg, crowned as Emperor Henry VII. An idealist who believed that he, as God’s secular vicar, had a divine mission to restore peace to “the garden of the Empire,” Henry entered Italy in 1310 with the consent of Pope Clement V (1305–14) and seemed at first to prosper. He sought, as an honest broker, to reconcile Guelf (i.e., pro-papal) and Ghibelline (i.e., pro-imperial) factions, but it was soon apparent that any attempt to override those old loyalties entailed a massive assault upon the political status quo, a revolution that would be fiercely resisted. Florence, in particular, opposed not only any concession to its enemies but any restoration of imperial power.

In these circumstances Henry was increasingly driven into exclusive alliance with the opponents of the Guelfs and became himself merely a leader of a faction. As a result, both the papacy and King Robert of Naples, who had originally favoured his coming to the peninsula, returned to their traditional anti-imperial stance. The dream of peace by imperial fiat dissolved, and Henry turned to war, but his death from fever at Buonconvento, near Siena, in August 1313 broke the hopes of the imperialists forever. Later emperors who intervened from the north—Louis IV (the Bavarian; 1327–30) and Charles IV of Bohemia (1354–55, 1368–69)—came with much more limited aims, not as universal monarchs but as short-time players on the Italian scene, seeking there such limited gains as the prestige of imperial coronation at Rome. However much these emperors maintained their formal de jure claims to rule, any imperial central authority in Italy had disappeared. In its place stood a complex, often chaotic grouping of many rival powers whose hostilities and alliances fill, in wearisome detail, the pages of contemporary chroniclers.

This political disunity went along with other divisions in a peninsula that manifested sharp regional differences in climate, land formation, economic development, customs, and language. (A 13th-century chronicler praises a contemporary as a skilled linguist because of his fluency in “French, Lombard, and Tuscan.” There was no common literary language before Dante—and then only in verse, not prose.) These very pronounced diversities have led many commentators to rule out any attempt to construct a general unified history of Italy in this period and to insist that a coherent synthesis must be based upon its constituent parts. For these authors, the only true history will consist of separate accounts of the six major powers—Sicily, Naples, the Papal States, Florence, Milan, and Venice—together with those of some 15 to 20 minor powers—such as Mantua, Montferrat, Lucca, and Siena—which were scattered among them. (This ignores the ambiguous case of Genoa, extremely powerful economically but pitifully weak politically.)

There is much in such contentions. It would be unwise to play down the overwhelming spirit of campanilismo (local patriotism; the spirit of “our campanile is taller than yours”) during the 14th and 15th centuries. Only a minority of people living at that time could ever have heard the word “Italia,” and loyalties were predominantly provincial. It is true that among certain classes, such as merchants who traveled beyond the Alps or scholars who looked back nostalgically to Roman republican or imperial glories, some elements of national consciousness survived. Dante—seeking in his De vulgari eloquentia (written 1304–07; “On the Eloquence of the Vernacular”) to find, amid what he described as “a thousand different dialects,” “the elusive panther” of some basis for a common vernacular literary language—argued that there were some “very simple standards of manners, dress, and speech by which our actions as Italians are weighed and measured.” However vague this claim may appear, one can certainly see in the peninsula some elements that, taken together, made a strong contrast to the world beyond the Alps: a common legal culture, high levels of lay education and urban literacy, a close relationship between town and country, and a nobility who frequently engaged in trade.

Yet ultimately one must conclude that the interest or importance of this period springs above all not from any “national” considerations or reflections upon the Italian peninsula as a unity but rather from three particular features that appeared in at least some parts of it. First there was the maturing, often in the face of severe challenges, of the remarkable economic development that had originated in earlier centuries. Though shaken in the course of the 14th century, northern and central Italian trade, manufacture, and mercantile capitalism, together with increasing urbanization, were to continue with extraordinary vigour and to have remarkable influence throughout much of the Mediterranean world and Europe as a whole—a development that served as the necessary preliminary for the expansion of Europe beyond its ancient bounds at the end of the 15th century. Second, in parallel with this, came the extension of de facto independent city-states, which, whether as republics or as powers ruled by one person or family (signorie, singular signoria; ruled by signori, or lords), created a powerful impression upon contemporaries and posterity. Finally, allied to both these movements was this society that produced the civilization of the Italian Renaissance, the Renaissance that in the 15th and 16th centuries was to spread to the rest of Europe. Italy to c. 1380 The southern kingdoms and the Papal States

Not all regions were to undergo favourable economic or constitutional development or to receive anything but reflected rays from the sun of the Renaissance. In the south the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 separated the island of Sicily for more than 150 years from the rest of the kingdom of Sicily, which until then had consisted of both the island and the southern mainland. On the mainland thenceforth, the successors of King Charles of Anjou ruled as vassals of the papacy. Normally described by contemporaries as “kings of Naples” (though resolutely continuing to call themselves “kings of Sicily”), they pursued a 90-year war against the Aragonese kings of (island) Sicily. They financed that war, which was ultimately unsuccessful, through harsh taxation of the only productive element in the kingdom—namely, its impoverished peasantry. This increase in the royal tax burden, already oppressive at the time of the Norman kings, fixed the region in wretched poverty and destroyed all possibility of native capitalist growth. As a result, during the 14th century almost all trade and banking came into the hands of northern Italians, particularly Florentines. At the same time, outside a few restricted areas (Sulmona, coastal Puglia, Campania) that produced considerable surpluses of grain, an arid climate and inferior soil made for poor agricultural development in the Kingdom of Naples.

Against this background, political unrest flourished. Under King Robert (reigned 1309–43; known to his literary flatterers as “Robert the Wise”), who made no less than five attempts to conquer the island of Sicily, the monarchy was able to resist the more extravagant demands of the nobility for rewards for their military and political support. But, with the accession of Robert’s granddaughter Joan I (1343–82), royal authority withered away, court factions dominated, and civil war (1347–52) ensued. Quelled for a time, baronial strife revived at the end of Joan’s reign in a conflict between two branches of the Angevin family (those of Durazzo versus those of Provence) that claimed recognition as heirs of the queen. The eventual victor, King Ladislas (1386–1414), benefiting from the turbulence provoked by the Great Schism (see below), was able to boast of considerable military success in central Italy and even gained—according to some observers—a brief predominance in the peninsula. But the accession of his sister, Joan II (1414–35), inexperienced and childless (that is to say, without obvious heirs), brought a renewal of anarchy to the Neapolitan kingdom, in which true power rested not with the monarchy but with a few powerful owners of vast estates (latifundia) who were allied to the monarchy through blood or service. Below these barons existed a large number of petty nobles with minuscule fiefs; still lower was the mass of peasants, who eked a bare subsistence from the soil.

Meanwhile, the island kingdom of Sicily—or Trinacria, as it was often called—was ruled from 1296 to 1409 by a cadet branch of the royal house of Aragon. This house, in rebellion against papal claims of suzerainty and engaged in constant war with the Kingdom of Naples, went through a pattern of monarchical weakness and economic decline similar to that shown by the Angevins of Naples. In Hohenstaufen and early Aragonese Sicily, extensive royal landholdings had given the monarchy effective power throughout the kingdom. With the death of King Frederick III (1337), however, substantial concessions of royal lands to a grasping baronial class increasingly divided the island. Of particular importance in this group were the three great families of the Ventimiglia, the Chiaramonte, and the Passaneto—men so powerful that contemporaries described them as “semi-kings,” having below them some 200 lesser, poor, and violent vassals. In these years, with an economy dominated largely by Catalan merchants, Sicily looked to Aragon (which in 1326 had also gained control of the island of Sardinia) and its great port of Barcelona rather than to the peninsula to the north.

If the southern kingdoms limped through the 14th century in internal strife and economic backwardness, so too did the Papal States lying to the north of the Kingdom of Naples. In March 1303 Pope Boniface VIII, in conflict with King Philip IV of France over papal jurisdiction, had been seized at the papal residence of Anagni by a small band of French and Roman adventurers. Though released almost immediately, he died a month later of, it was said, deep humiliation. The Papal States had been founded to preserve the independence and spiritual authority of the papacy, yet here, clearly, it seemed to have failed. Partly because of the menacing Roman baronage and partly again through the pressure of the French king, Pope Clement V decided to abandon the peninsula and seek refuge at Avignon. Here between 1307 and 1377 the papacy was to reside in greater safety. Italy was now “bereft”—as Dante, who witnessed these developments, testified—“of its two suns,” both the papacy and the empire.

The effects of that withdrawal were twofold. First, the “lands of the Crucified One,” as the church dramatically described its territorial state, were reinforced in their secular anarchy, and everywhere local “tyrants” seized power from papal officials. Yet, at the same time, the traditions of the church inevitably required that the papacy should return to the Rome where St. Peter had, it was said, preached and suffered. Hence, over the years, with fluctuating enthusiasm, the French popes struggled sporadically to establish obedience, peace, and control over their Italian lands. These efforts indeed played an important role in the foreign affairs of the Italian states in the period. Notable were the attempts at reconquest of the Papal States by Cardinal Bertrand du Poujet (1319–34) and Cardinal Gil Albornoz (1353–63). Yet the results were slight. After a heroic expenditure of money and blood, Albornoz attained some measure of order, largely by appointing the more amenable tyrants as “papal vicars” and by securing from them promises of payment of taxes and services in return for acknowledgment of overlordship. But even these muted successes proved unstable. With the outbreak of war between the Avignon papacy and Florence in 1375, most of the vicars cast off their allegiance. Three years later the Papal States fell into even greater disarray with the outbreak of the Great Schism (1378–1417). For almost four decades, until the Council of Constance, unity was shattered by rivalries between popes and antipopes—one French, one Italian, and later a third one, also Italian.

Amid the confused struggles that engulfed the Papal States in this period, one incident in particular stood out for men of the day and excited the imagination of posterity. The city of Rome, deserted by the papacy, presented a sombre picture of shepherds, herdsmen, labourers, and artisans dwelling by ruins that testified to past glory and were now taken over as the residences of powerful aristocratic families. The Colonna, Orsini, and Annibaldi established their fortifications amid the remains of the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Forum, and the Colosseum, and from there they fought out their ancient rivalries. Here in the 1340s rose the remarkable figure of Cola di Rienzo. A notary and the son of an innkeeper, possessing an imagination that easily accepted the most flattering fantasies, he gained esteem from the rumours he circulated that he was the son of Emperor Henry VII. An avid reader of Classical history and an interpreter of ancient inscriptions, intoxicated by the past splendours of Rome, he preached to his fellow citizens the recovery of its former greatness. Inspired by the Lex Regia, the supposed right of the Roman people to confer authority on the emperor, he announced that the citizens of his own day, under his leadership, could assume that right and resolve all disputes between rival claimants to the office. Achieving prominence as the most eloquent member of an embassy dispatched to Avignon to complain of the absence of the papacy, he excited the admiration of many (including the poet Petrarch) at the papal court. On his return in May 1347, with the help of some mercenary soldiers, he seized power in the city, and a parliament summoned at his command awarded him the title of “Nicolai, the Severe and Clement, the Tribune of Freedom, Peace and Justice, and Liberator of the Holy Roman Republic.”

The following month Cola invited all the Italian states to appear before him to discuss “the security and peace of Italy.” It is a remarkable testimony not so much to his eloquence as to their desperate wish for peace that no less than 25 communes answered his call. During a remarkable round of ceremonies, in the presence of the communes’ representatives, Cola announced that the Romans held jurisdiction over the whole world and conferred Roman citizenship upon all citizens of other Italian states. These chimerical pretensions (described by a contemporary as “fantastic stuff which won’t last long”) very soon came to be unveiled as such. In the following December, faced with an increasingly suspicious pope and a Roman citizenry satiated by novelties, Cola was driven from the city. He returned to Rome and was appointed senator in 1354 (essentially a puppet of Albornoz’s attempt to dominate the Papal States), but within less than three months he faced a popular revolt that ended with his death. Cola’s importance lay not so much in anything he had achieved as in the demonstration of how powerful an influence the thought of Classical Rome could exercise on men of the time. He survives in cultural history (as hero, for example, of the German composer Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi) and in the myths (certainly no more than myths) that he had planned the unification of Italy and was a prophet of the 19th-century Risorgimento. The popolo and the formation of the signorie in central and northern Italy

Meanwhile, in the course of a long process extending through the 13th and 14th centuries, within the towns of the Papal States and most towns of northern and central Italy, there arose from the old communes a new form of government, that of the signoria. The communes of the 13th century had become increasingly dominated by the conflicts of the nobility who controlled their governments. These divisions, though often moved by the Guelf and Ghibelline parties, in fact largely reflected personal, economic, or quite local political rivalries—all inflamed by ideals of chivalric honour and an everyday acceptance of the traditions of vendetta. In large part as a response to these conflicts, there had arisen within the communes the movement of the popolo—i.e., of associations of non-nobles attempting to win a variety of concessions from the nobility.

Within the ranks of the popolo were, in the first place, those who had gained wealth through trade, banking, exercise of a profession, or landholding and sought membership in the ruling noble oligarchies. The second group comprised prosperous members of the artisan or shopkeeping classes who, while not normally seeking a direct position in government, sought a more satisfactory administration of the finances of the commune (particularly a more equitable distribution of taxation), a greater voice in matters that most directly concerned them (for example, the licensing of the export of food), and, in particular, the impartial administration of justice between noble and non-noble. Above all, the popolo (like many of the nobility themselves) desired a civic order that would end violent party conflicts and lessen the effects of noble vendettas.

In some towns the popolo movement succeeded in bringing about constitutional change. In those communes where the nobility did not monopolize all wealth and where the development of trade, industry, and finance had created a complex social structure, the existing oligarchies agreed to come to terms. This came about more easily when the popolo succeeded in ending party struggles so violent that they could be described as a form of civil war. Here, often against the background of some disaster, such as defeat in war, it became normal to establish a council of the popolo, under a captain of the popolo, alongside the old council of the commune under its podesta, as a consultative element in what was now termed the government of “the commune and popolo.” In Florence, where the movement enjoyed its greatest success, the popolo, organized in seven major and five lesser guilds, assumed power in 1282 not simply as the partner of the commune in government but as the dominant element within it. Moreover, in January 1293, by the Ordinances of Justice, it declared that the members of 152 powerful families were “magnates” and, as such, excluded from personal participation in government and subject to particular disadvantages in law vis-à-vis non-magnates.

Nevertheless, in all but a few towns, the popolo proved unable to solve the problem of public order, and in these circumstances “the peaceful and tranquil state” of the cities came instead to be established by signori, who were powerful party leaders. From the second half of the 13th century, having triumphed over, destroyed, or permanently exiled their opponents, these men began to give institutional form to their power and to pass it on to their sons as a hereditary right. What they offered in return to their subject citizens was the hope of eliminating anarchic civil violence by the exercise of superior force. It was in this way that, in the course of the 14th century, signoria, or permanent legal rule by single families, began. From the communes the signori obtained their titles, the authority to control the communes “according to their own will,” and the right to pass on this grant to their chosen successors. With the passage of time, these usurped legislative trappings lent the appearance of legitimacy to their rule. By the end of the 14th century the signori normally sought some legitimization of their power by obtaining authorization from the emperor or pope to act as “vicars” over the territories that their families had come to rule. As such, during the 15th century these hereditary lordships—or, in effect, principalities—seemed to constitute the natural order in large areas of northern Italy.

So, in the Veneto, Verona fell to the della Scala (or Scaligeri) family in the 1260s, as did Vicenza from 1312, while Padua was subject to the Carrara (or Carraresi) family from 1318. In Lombardy the Bonacolsi and then, from 1328, the Gonzaga family came to be sole rulers of Mantua, while the Visconti achieved the signoria of Milan from 1311. During the next 35 years the Visconti extended their dominion by gaining power over Cremona (1334), Pavia, Lodi, Bergamo (1332), Como (1335), Piacenza (1337), Tortona, and Parma (1346). In Emilia the Este (Estense) family, already established at Ferrara from 1264, extended their power to Modena (1288) and Reggio (1290). In the northern sector of the Papal States the towns of the Romagna and the Marche fell to signori between 1315 and 1342; when Cardinal Albornoz’s attempts at reconquest failed, the papacy granted most of its territories to vicars, including these signori. Thus, between about 1250 and 1350, northern and central Italy had undergone a profound transformation in constitutional forms, political life, and attitudes toward authority. The rule of a city-state by one man was no longer seen as a strange and temporary expedient but as a normal aspect of life. Under the new regimes the councils of the communes and popolo still remained, but their role was limited to minor administrative tasks or to formal approval of the political decisions of the signori. Essentially, all that remained of the old communal system was its administrative service, a core of skilled notaries who kept the machinery of government in operation. Meanwhile, in return for their absolute power, the signori restored or created harmony within the upper classes of the towns and reconciled the interests of the popolo and the nobility.

Nonetheless, the emergence of the signorie, however important, was only one element in the constitutional history of the northern and central Italian towns in the 14th century. It was a movement largely confined to the Veneto, Lombardy, Emilia, the Marche, and—subject to the suzerainty of regional princes—Piedmont. In most towns of Umbria and Lazio (Latium) the papacy was able to prevent their establishment. In Tuscany they were largely unsuccessful. Lucca fell to signori in the first half of the 14th century, notably with the rule of the remarkable Castruccio Castracani between 1316 and 1328, but the town experienced a strong revival of republican government from 1369 to 1392. Republican Florence underwent only brief interludes of signorial governance. Florence conquered several of its neighbours—Volterra, Prato, Pistoia, San Gimignano—before any signorie arose in them. In Liguria, Genoa was continually unstable because of the violent conflicts of its noble houses. Rather than submit itself to any one family, the town oscillated between communal government and a series of popolo-granted life dictatorships—of which the most memorable was that of Simone Boccanegra, future hero of an opera by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. Two communes, Siena (at least in the 14th century) and Venice, rejected signorial government entirely in favour of republican institutions.

During the 14th century then, substantial parts of Italy remained outside the control of signori. Alongside the new principates there were some communal governments—including those of Venice and Florence, two of the most powerful cities in the peninsula, which both survived and developed into powerful territorial states with very strong republican traditions. These republics survived partly because it was much more difficult for signori to seize control over a patrician oligarchy of bankers and merchants than it was to dominate a society consisting of landowners, artisans, and rural workers. Societies with highly developed economies were much less amenable to princely control. In republics, an economy that would be menaced by internal disunity and a ruling class united at least in its pursuit of commercial advantage helped assure the preservation of public order and the repulsion of any individual or family seeking political domination. Venice in the 14th century

It was, in fact, in the 1290s and the hundred years that followed—broadly speaking, the same period in which the signorie were consolidating their position—that the two principal republics established and secured the essentials of their constitutions, which were to last (in the case of Florence) into the 16th and (in the case of Venice) even into the late 18th century. At the beginning of this period the dominion of Venice included the islands of the lagoon and the dogado, a thin strip of the mainland around the lagoon, along with an overseas empire consisting of most of the Dalmatian coast, the island of Corfu, various islands in the Aegean, the coasts of the Peloponnese, and Crete. The overseas territories were often valuable in themselves, and they served also as a series of staging areas for Venetian commerce. In the establishment of the city’s constitution, the key moment came in February 1297, when the Great Council, in which sovereignty resided, was expanded to take in more than 1,000 members. From that time forward, and in particular from the 1320s, admission to that body became more difficult, and from the 1390s it ceased altogether. What has been traditionally described as “the closing (serrata) of the Great Council”—that is, the creation of an oligarchic government dominated by a fixed hereditary caste—did not occur in 1297 but actually extended over some 100 years from that date.

Miracle of the True Cross at the Bridge of S. Lorenzo, oil painting by Gentile Bellini, 1500; in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice.SCALA/Art Resource, New York

From its members the Great Council elected the Senate, the Lesser Council, the Quarantia (judiciary), the Council of Ten, all the committees of government, and, by an extremely elaborate system of lot, the doge. The “Excellent Lord, by the Grace of God, Doge of Venice, Duke of Dalmatia and Croatia, the Most Serene Prince” enjoyed immense prestige and had an important role in the coordination of government. Yet, however powerful his personality, he was increasingly bound by his councils. In reaction against such control, the doge Marin Falier, from one of the greatest families of the city, conspired in April 1355 to overturn the sovereignty of the nobility. He paid for the attempt with his life. A century later (1457) the patriciate were to show their strength again when the Council of Ten deposed Francesco Foscari. The power of the doge diminished; henceforth, he could promote his own initiatives only by submitting them to the Great Council and the Senate.

Venice, view toward the Molo and the Piazzetta, showing the Old Library, Campanile, Doges' Palace, and domes of San Marco Basilica.Ralph Lieberman

The Venetian Senate originally comprised 60 members (the Pregadi), but by 1450 it had grown to 300 members, of whom some 200 had the right to vote. It was particularly concerned with foreign policy, war, and matters of commerce. Its chosen ambassadors constituted the first and finest diplomatic service in Europe. In addition to their regular dispatches, these men were expected on their return from duty to produce a detailed account (relazione) of the government and country to which they had been sent. The Senate also organized the fleets and the recruitment and supervision of condottieri (see below); it controlled the markets of grain, salt, wine, and oil; and it built the principal merchant galleys and organized the regular convoys (mudae) in which they sailed to “Romania” (Constantinople and the Black Sea), “Flanders” (London and Brugge), and Tunis. The Senate auctioned the lease of ships for each voyage, nominated their master mariners, and laid down elaborate regulations for their crewing and equipment.

Alongside the Great Council and the Senate stood the Council of Ten. In 1310 Baiamonte Tiepolo and other nobles had sought to seize power from the dominant faction in the Great Council. It was after the suppression of this conspiracy that the Great Council created the Council of Ten, armed with exceptional powers. At first it was to exist for a limited time to watch over the security of the state, but, after the attempted coup by Marin Falier in 1355, the Council of Ten became permanently established. Its members controlled the secret police, espionage, and counterespionage, and they exercised in some measure their own judicial system. From that power base they came to exert a strong influence on financial and diplomatic administration.

Below the patrician class, who formed and monopolized all the political offices of the Venetian state, existed a less-privileged class, that of the citizens. Consisting of about 2,500 males of the status of notaries and the like, they controlled the civil service. Their leader, the grand chancellor, though not a patrician, was, as head of the civil service, one of the most important men in the republic. Outside the ranks of the citizens were the disenfranchised majority of the population—labourers, shopkeepers, artisans, and, in great numbers, seamen.

Under this constitution the Serenissima (“Most Serene Republic”) produced the most satisfactory form of government and society known in the world at that time. Petrarch’s praises of

the most miraculous city of Venice, rich in gold but richer in fame, strong in power but stronger in virtue, built on both solid marble and the harmony of its citizens, secured more by the harmony of its citizens than by its surrounding seas,

echoed a virtually universal praise. Such rhetoric, typical of most discussions of the republic from the 13th to the 16th century, gained its persuasive power from the real social concord that the Venetian government, like no other, indeed provided. This outstanding success at home was matched by victories abroad. In the second (1294–99) and third (1351–55) Genoese-Venetian wars, the Genoese, the Venetians’ principal economic rivals, gained numerous victories against the republic, and in the fourth war (1378–81) they temporarily seized Chioggia and Malamocco, on the lagoon at the heart of Venice’s power. Yet in the end, with the superiority of its state structure and civic spirit, Venice always won these wars. In the overseas empire a careful administration secured from its peoples, if not passionate loyalty, at least a submission that drew no small strength from the threat of an alternative Turkish dominion. Florence in the 14th century

In Florence, the other great republic of northern Italy, the key constitutional moment came in 1293 with the Ordinances of Justice. Though modified somewhat two years later, they preserved a system in which sovereignty explicitly rested with the popolo, an elite class drawn from the seven major guilds, or arti maggiori—that is, the judges and notaries, the Calimala (bankers and international traders in cloth), the money changers, the silk merchants, the doctors and apothecaries, the wool merchants, and the dealers in furs. Together with dominant figures from five guilds of lesser status (the arti medie, or middle guilds, consisting of the butchers, the shoemakers, the smiths, the stonemasons, and the secondhand dealers), the popolo gathered every two months to elect six priors who ruled Florence as supreme magistrates.

Behind these forms, the men who effectively ruled were members of the popolo grasso (“fat people”), consisting of bankers and businessmen of great wealth, who professed allegiance to the Guelf party. Yet the survival of guild government was, in these years, often precarious. Fierce rivalries often split the dominant faction. So in 1302 the “Black” Guelfs, in alliance with Pope Boniface VIII, succeeded in expelling the “Whites.” Among the White Guelfs at this time was Dante (1265–1321), who had held public office. Doomed to spend the rest of his life in exile, he wrote La commedia (c. 1308–21), later named La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), whose pages still offer eloquent testimony to the extreme bitterness of domestic conflict in these years. Moreover, external pressures forced the city to accept the lordship between 1313 and 1322 of King Robert of Naples and then again, between 1325 and 1328, of Robert’s son, Charles of Calabria. It was perhaps fortunate for the continuance of the commune that Robert was too preoccupied with his own kingdom to establish any full and permanent control and that Charles died prematurely.

Yet, despite such political difficulties, Florence probably reached the apogee of its prosperity during the first three decades of the 14th century. Its population grew to about 95,000 people, and a third circle of walls, constructed between 1284 and 1333, enclosed an area that the city was not to surpass until the middle of the 19th century. In the 1290s, construction began on the new cathedral (Duomo) of Santa Maria del Fiore (the dome was not completed until 1436) and the fortress-residence of the Palazzo Vecchio—both potent symbols of the commune, to which was soon added a third, Giotto’s campanile.

Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) in Florence, constructed between 1296 and 1436 (dome by Filippo Brunelleschi, 1420–36).© Karel Miragaya—EyeEm/Getty Images

Up to the beginning of the 1340s, Florence reigned supreme in long-distance trade and in international banking. From that time, grave shocks struck its economy, and these, combined with failure in war, led to another brief experiment in signorial rule; in 1342 a protégé of King Robert, Walter of Brienne, titular duke of Athens, was appointed signore for one year. Almost immediately on his accession, Walter changed this grant to that of a life dictatorship with absolute powers. But his attempt to ally himself with the men of the lower guilds and disenfranchised proletariat, combined with the introduction of a luxuriant cult of personality, soon brought disillusion. An uprising in the following year restored, though in a rather more broadly based form than hitherto, the rule of the popolo grasso.

Guild rule then continued virtually unchallenged until 1378. In that year the regime was overthrown not by a signore but by factions within the ruling class, which in turn provoked the remarkable proletarian Revolt of the Ciompi. In the wool-cloth industry, which dominated the manufacturing economy of Florence, the lanaioli (wool entrepreneurs) worked on the putting-out system: they employed large numbers of people (9,000, by some calculations) who worked in their own homes with tools supplied by the lanaioli and received wages by the piece. Largely unskilled and semiskilled, these men and women had no rights within the guild and in fact were subjected to harsh controls by the guild. In the Arte della lana (the wool-cloth guild), a “foreign” official was responsible for administering discipline and had the right to beat and even torture or behead workers found guilty of acts of sabotage and theft. The employees, who were often in debt (frequently to their employers), subsisted precariously from day to day, at the mercy of the trade cycle and the varying price of bread. With them, among the ranks of the popolo minuto (“little people”), were day labourers in the building trades as well as porters, gardeners, and poor and dependent shopkeepers. On occasion these poor, in Florence as all over Italy, rioted when bread was scarce, but they were normally powerless to organize efficiently against guilds and governments—both of which could impose extreme penalties on anyone who defied their authority.

In effect, the poor rose to revolt only at the prompting of members of the ruling class. So it was in the Revolt of the Ciompi of 1378. In June of that year Salvestro de’ Medici, in an attempt to preserve his own power in government, stirred up the lower orders to attack the houses of his enemies among the patriciate. That action, coming at a time when large numbers of ex-soldiers were employed in the cloth industry, many of them as ciompi (wool carders), provoked an acute political consciousness among the poor. In their clamour for change, the workers were joined by small masters resentful of their exclusion from the wool guild, by skilled artisans, and by petty shopkeepers. Expectation of change and discontent fed upon each other. In the third week of July, new outbreaks of violence, probably fomented by Salvestro, brought spectacular change: the appointment of a ruling committee (balìa) composed of a few patricians, a predominating number of small masters, and 32 representatives of the ciompi. Michele di Lando, foreman in a cloth factory, was appointed to the balìa as “standard-bearer of justice.”

In their six-week period of rule, the men of the balìa sought to meet the demands of the insurgents. The balìa approved the formation of guilds for the wool carders and other workers to give standing to their members, established more-equitable taxation between rich and poor, and declared a moratorium on debt. Yet, angry at the slow pace of change, the poor remained restive. On August 27 a vast crowd assembled and proceeded to the election of the “Eight Saints of God’s People.” Then they marched on the Palazzo Vecchio with a petition that the Eight Saints should have the right to veto or approve all legislation. But by now all the temporary allies of the poor were alienated from the spirit of revolt. The rich resisted, won over Michele di Lando with a bribe, called out the guild militias, and drove the protesters from the scene.

Normality was reestablished within a few days. The new guilds were abolished, and the poor returned to the impotence that was, throughout Italy, their lot. Malnutrition quenched rebellion, leadership was lacking, and the limited horizons of their lives made any ideal of betterment short-lived. The main effect of the revolt was to introduce at the top of society a regime that was narrower and more oligarchic than that which had ruled for the previous 30 years. Economic change

Meanwhile, changes in the character of the economy in town and country profoundly affected the development of both the republics and the signorie. Although scholars today often contend that in this period an “urban economy” drove northern and central Italy, in contrast to the rest of Europe, most Italians still lived on the land, and the prosperity of any town depended greatly on its contado, or the rural territory that it governed. Here, despite differences in agriculture due to different climates and types of soil, certain patterns of development occurred within the peninsula. By the end of the 13th century, tenurial serfdom had virtually died away, and other forms of landholding were evolving to take its place. Sometimes peasants worked the land as freeholders (as in fact many peasants had always done, even at the very height of the manorial system). Sometimes (and this was particularly true of large ecclesiastical estates in northern Italy) lands were let out on perpetual hereditary lease for low rents—a procedure that, in effect, often led to the virtual dispossession of church proprietors in favour of secular tenants. But the most common new tenancy from the 13th century was that in which landlords offered short-term leases in return for heavy rents either in money or, more often, in kind. Among such leases the one that came to figure most prominently, especially in well-cultivated land in central and northern Italy, was sharecropping, particularly mezzadria. In contracts of mezzadria, the landlord provided half the seed sown and in return received half of the tenant’s fruits. Frequently the contract was renewable every year—a provision that held considerable insecurity for the lessee, who was obligated to leave the land at term. Often, in order to make sure that the landlord received a full return from his lease, detailed conditions were attached on rotation of crops, plowing, digging, and harrowing. In all, this form of tenure, which was to remain a central feature of northern Italian rural life up to the mid-20th century, can be seen less as an agreement to let land than one to hire labour.

At the same time, a system of more intensive farming was developing. Before the mid-13th century, large homogeneous estates were a rarity, and it was very unusual for one proprietor to own half or more of a parish. From that time on, however, scattered portions were increasingly consolidated into united farms such as the poderi of modern Tuscany. Profits from commerce were used to build drainage, plant trees, erect homesteads, and acquire livestock, manure, and agricultural instruments. In these areas the common-field system began to disappear, common pasture declined, and a growing number of individual properties were hedged in. Labourers came to live on the farm, leaving the village to house a reserve of casual workers. Thus, by the end of the 14th century, the old landscape of dispersed strips of land and fortified villages had frequently given way to broad estates dominated by country houses, the leisure seats of urban landowners. Yet these developments were in no way uniform, even in the Emilian plain and in Tuscany, where they were most common. In the south the latifundia, the large estates that only a few major landowners owned, continued to exist, but they were now farmed with hired labour.

Evidence of bonifiche (drainage works) and the clearing of wasteland suggests a continual expansion in agricultural production up to the 1340s. So, too, trade, manufacture, and banking also prospered in that period. Within the peninsula, communes had to engage in large-scale marketing of food simply to provision the cities. For a town such as Florence, which at the beginning of the 14th century could gain from its own territories just enough food to feed its population for five months of the year, this commerce was literally a matter of survival. But, at the same time, trade in food and other bulk goods was matched by long-distance commerce in luxuries. With the decline of Pisa in the 13th century, Venice and Genoa remained the principal centres of this traffic. Venetians and Genoese had their own quarters and consulates in Syria and Palestine and at Constantinople and Alexandria. Sailing from their ports or traveling inland to Damascus and Aleppo (heads of the Asian caravan routes), they held a virtual monopoly of East-West trade, exchanging wood, steel, and arms for “spices” (the generic name for all precious goods from the East, including pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, silk, dyes such as cochineal and indigo, cotton, drugs, and sugar).

To the northeast, traders from Italy penetrated the Black Sea to draw grain, fish, salt, and slaves from the Crimean Peninsula. Farther east still, they traveled to Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, and China. “The road from Tana [on the Sea of Azov] to Cathay,” a Tuscan merchant’s handbook told its readers, “is quite safe by day and by night according to the merchants who report having followed it.” Indeed, in the first half of the 14th century there were Italian merchant colonies (with husbands taking their wives along) and seven Italian missionary bishops in China.

In the West too, Italian commerce expanded its empire. The introduction of the compass to the Mediterranean, leading to new marine charts (the portolani, the earliest survivors of which date back to the 1290s), gave new wings to maritime daring. From at least 1277 the Genoese and from 1314 the Venetians sent annual galley convoys through the Strait of Gibraltar and thence, on a compass setting, across the Bay of Biscay to English and Flemish ports. Out into the Atlantic, Genoese navigators visited the Canary Islands. At the same time, shipbuilding technology advanced during the 14th century. Trireme galleys expanded from 50 to sometimes 150 tons, and Italian ports began to employ the cog, a square-sailed vessel capable of carrying 150 slaves and ideal for bulk cargoes. Meanwhile in banking, the most prominent of financial houses to extend their operations beyond the Alps were the Bonsignori company of Siena and the Florentine houses of the Acciaiuoli (with 53 branches throughout Europe), the Peruzzi (83 branches), and the Bardi (even larger than the Peruzzi). Within Tuscany again, beginning in the 14th century, the manufacture of textiles became a major industry.

Growth accompanied changes in the character of commerce. Resident capitalists emerged who held a tight grip on far-flung agents through a network of correspondence, and new mercantile techniques developed in which Italians could boast primacy—account books with Arabic numerals, double-entry bookkeeping, marine insurance, bills of lading, bills of exchange, and a mature law of the sea and law of commerce. The expansion of commerce was uneven; it was rudimentary in the south, and even in central and northern Italy most towns were no more than small market centres for the surrounding countryside. Nevertheless, the major commercial centres in the opening decades of the 14th century sustained an economy that was never again to expand so fast and be, in relation to the rest of Europe, so powerful. Famine, war, and plague (1340–80)

Italy’s thriving economy soon confronted severe challenges. Among these, first, were famines, which affected most of Italy in the years 1339–40, 1346–47, 1352–53, and 1374–75, and a general expansion and intensification of war compounded these catastrophes. The 13th century saw the diffusion of the crossbow, whose bolt far surpassed the arrow of the longbow in its power to penetrate. The crossbow obliged mounted knights to adopt heavier armour for better protection. Hence arose the need for stronger and more-numerous horses. Such technical developments began to make the practice of warfare much more expensive and professional, and in these circumstances mercenary troops came increasingly to supplement and then often to replace the old citizen militias. In the 14th century, Italian states raised these troops in ever larger numbers not by hiring individuals but by drawing up a condotta (contract) with a condottiere (contractor), who would engage to bring a band of up to several thousand soldiers in time of war to the aid of a commune or kingdom.

Stirrup crossbow, French, 14th centuryCourtesy of the West Point Museum Collections, United States Military Academy

Given the difficulties of securing political control over Italian military leaders (who might, it was feared, take over the state), it became common, beginning in the 1330s, to negotiate with non-Italian condottieri. Their forces rapidly grew to immense size. In the 1350s “The Great Company,” founded by Werner of Urslingen, comprised some 10,000 troops and 20,000 camp followers and had its own government, consultative council, bureaucracy, and foreign policy. Throughout the 1360s and ’70s these “mobile states”—for example, the companies of the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood and the Germans Albrecht Sterz and Hannekin Baumgarten—dominated war in Italy, and in times of peace they were all too likely to subject their former employers to a variety of blackmailing threats.

These changes in the practice of war went hand in hand with a considerable expansion in the power of governments. The weak, decentralized communes of the 13th century, with comparatively primitive administration and very light taxation, gave way in the 14th century to republics and signorie with much stronger political control and exclusive new means of fiscal exploitation. States raised revenues through property taxes, gabelle (e.g., taxes on contracts, sales, transport of goods into and out of town), and forced loans (prestanze), while they developed sophisticated measures, including the consolidation of state debts into a form of national debt, to service long-term deficit financing. At Florence, for example, where from 1345 state debtors were issued securities at 5 percent interest, negotiable in the open market, revenues rose from around 130,000 florins in the 1320s to more than 400,000 florins in the 1360s.

Such innovations—fruit of the interrelated needs of food provision, war, and taxation—brought about considerable growth in bureaucratic institutions and in the number of administrative officials. At the same time, however, these innovations allowed war to be waged on a larger scale, and states increasingly diverted productive wealth into war. That is, these innovations helped cause the setbacks that occurred in many sectors of the economy during the 1340s. In that decade, with trade already disrupted by the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War in France, the overextension of Italian (particularly Florentine) banks became clear. In 1343 the Peruzzi company collapsed, in 1345 the Acciaiuoli, and in 1346 the Bardi.

Still more disastrous was the arrival from the east of the Black Death. Galleys and cogs brought the plague in its bubonic and pneumonic forms to Messina in early October 1347. By January 1348 it had reached Genoa and Pisa, by February Venice. From these ports it spread throughout the peninsula and on to the rest of Europe. Estimates of the death toll vary between one-third and one-half of the population. Yet the effects were not confined to 1348, as plague was henceforth rooted in Italy. Although slackening in its power and appearing more sporadically, the disease returned to many parts of the peninsula, in both town and countryside, in 1361–62, 1363, 1371, 1373–74, 1382–83, 1398–1400, 1407, and 1410–12. Thereafter it continued as a town disease in individual, sporadic, but continually threatening assaults up to the 18th century.

The second pandemic of the Black Death in Europe (1347–51)Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Italy from c. 1380 to c. 1500 Political development, 1380–1454

From the 1380s to the 1450s Italy was torn by a long series of large-scale wars. The principal aggressor in these conflicts was the Visconti family, who, having seized the signoria of Milan, had extended their power to many other cities, from Asti in Piedmont to Reggio in Emilia. From 1385 the ruthless and energetic Gian Galeazzo Visconti (created duke of Milan by Emperor Wenceslas in 1395) embarked on a series of diplomatic and military campaigns that brought him virtual hegemony over northern and central Italy. He extended his power through a series of dynastic marriages—essentially, the bartering of Visconti wealth for noble blood—which gave the family immense prestige. Gian Galeazzo’s first wife was Isabella of Valois, daughter of King John II of France; his sister, Violante, was married (albeit briefly) to Lionel, son of Edward III of England; and his nieces were married to the dukes of Bavaria and Austria.

In 1387 Gian Galeazzo seized Verona and Vicenza from their signori; in 1388 he took Padua and other territories in the Veneto. These coups provoked the suspicions of Florence, and, after the failure of attempts to delineate their respective spheres of influence, three wars erupted between the two powers (1390–92, 1397–98, 1400–02). Gian Galeazzo apparently achieved an overwhelming predominance, for he was recognized as signore of Pisa and Siena in 1399 and of Perugia, Spoleto, and Assisi in 1400. In June 1402 he took Bologna. Florence was now encircled, and perhaps it was saved from conquest only by Gian Galeazzo’s death in September from plague. At his death the state that he had built up collapsed, and his son, the vicious and incompetent Giovanni Maria Visconti (duke 1402–12), was incapable of restoring the dynasty’s fortunes. With the accession of Giovanni’s brother, Filippo Maria Visconti (duke 1412–47), however, a new era of Visconti expansion dawned. By 1422 Filippo Maria had restored the family’s Lombard possessions. Thenceforward, until the middle of the century, there came a series of virtually continuous conflicts against an alliance of Florence and Venice.

Until the 14th century Venice had ruled only the lagoon, the eastern and Adriatic possessions that had served to maintain its commerce, and, on the Italian mainland, a thin strip of land bordering the lagoon. Yet the rise of Visconti power from the 1380s persuaded the Serenissima finally to establish itself as a territorial power on the peninsula. If the old signori—the della Scala at Verona and the Carraresi at Padua—had seemed from time to time in the past to threaten the free passage of goods from Venice over the Alpine passes or into Lombardy, the threat of the Visconti dukes with all their power could only reinforce Venetian apprehensions. With Gian Galeazzo’s death the republic turned accordingly to extending its control over the mainland. Between 1403 and 1405 it took over Verona, Vicenza, and Padua. Between 1411 and 1420 the city seized the wide territories of the ecclesiastical prince, the patriarch of Aquileia in Friuli. In 1426 it conquered Brescia and in 1428 Bergamo in Lombardy. These acquisitions proved immensely profitable. It was calculated in 1440 that taxes from the new possessions yielded 306,000 ducats, as against 180,000 from the colonial possessions (which were at the same time much more expensive to defend). The “Veneto,” as it came to be known, was rich, populous, and fertile—and a good market for the city’s trade. In the newly subjected towns the old civic oligarchies continued to hold a measure of local power, though now under the supervision of Venetian podestas and captains. Below them, peasants and urban workers acquiesced in a system that imposed some external check upon exploitation by the town patriciates.

Venetian expansion had taken place through an alliance with its fellow republic, Florence, against Milan. Yet this entente, in part through the Venetians’ very success, was shortly to disappear. On the death of Filippo Maria Visconti without male heirs (August 1447), some prominent citizens proclaimed Milan a republic. But they proved incapable of maintaining order in the state, which in 1450 surrendered to Filippo Maria’s son-in-law, the powerful condottiere Francesco Sforza. Francesco was swift to proclaim himself duke. This revolution soon led to a revolution in the diplomatic alignments of the peninsula, with Florence then and for more than 40 years afterward adhering to Milan as its principal ally in its search to maintain the status quo and its own power. Following the collapse of the Revolt of the Ciompi, Florence itself had come under the rule of a narrow oligarchic government under the personal domination of Maso degli Albizzi (1382–1417) and then of his son, Rinaldo (until 1434). The Albizzi regime successfully resisted the Visconti and then a temporary threat from King Ladislas of Naples in the years 1408–14, and it also contributed to Florence’s expansion over Tuscany, which since the mid-14th century had transformed the city-state into a territorial state like Milan and Venice. The city had absorbed Volterra in 1361 and Arezzo in 1384; now it went on to conquer Pisa, with its port, in 1406 and to purchase Livorno from Genoa in 1421. Seeking further expansion, however, it failed to conquer Lucca in a war fought between 1429 and 1433.

That failure was largely responsible for the fall of the oligarchy dominated by the Albizzi and its replacement with an oligarchy subordinate to Cosimo de’ Medici. Cosimo, who attained an unofficial personal dominance over the state in 1434, was to hold it until his death in 1464 and then pass it on to his descendants. Cosimo was the principal architect of an alliance with the Sforza of Milan that culminated in the Peace of Lodi (1454). By this pact Milan, Florence, Venice, and (in 1455) King Alfonso of Aragon and Naples and Pope Nicholas V bound themselves together in an “Italian League” against any power, Italian or foreign, that should disturb the existing balance of power. At the same time, the treaty established special machinery for the peaceful settlement of any disputes that might arise among the states. Despite some local conflicts, the creation of the Italian League brought about a much more peaceful era in the second half of the century. Peace was assisted, above all, by a general exhaustion among most of the major powers, whose economies and societies could no longer support the strains imposed upon them by wars. The states of Italy in the 15th century The southern monarchies and the Papal States

In the south, Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58) used the island kingdom of Sicily mainly as a base for his conquest of Naples. Thereafter Sicily was governed by viceroys who subjected its interests to those of Aragon, which became part of Spain in 1479. Examples of Sicily’s incorporation into the Spanish state were the establishment there of the Inquisition (1487) and its expulsion of the Jews (1492). So too the Kingdom of Naples, conquered by Alfonso between 1435 and 1442, underwent an unpromising development, its peace continually threatened by the rival claims of the Angevin and Aragonese dynasties. On his death in 1458, Alfonso left Naples to his illegitimate son, Ferdinand I (1458–94). Ferdinand maintained his rule only with difficulty, suppressing baronial revolt with an extreme severity that served to further alienate his subjects.

Ferdinand at least was able to retain control until the days of the French invasion (1494). The Papal States, on the other hand, had virtually dissolved at the time of the Great Schism. Southern Emilia, the Romagna, the Marche, and Umbria were given up to numerous signori acting as “papal vicars,” among whom the most celebrated were the Este of Ferrara and the Montefeltro of Urbino. In the cities of Bologna and Perugia, the Bentivoglio and Baglioni families, respectively, retained predominance, though without obtaining the vicariate. The church still ruled some territories directly, notably Ancona and much of southern Umbria, but in Lazio strong baronial families threatened its power—in Rome itself antipapal and republican sentiment still survived. Not until the reign of Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503) did the papacy make a determined attempt to assert authority over the whole state. Until then the popes enjoyed the worst of all worlds, condemned for the deep involvement in secular politics that their position as temporal rulers had thrust upon them while, at the same time, remaining largely powerless to extract obedience from their principal vassals. Venice

By contrast, Venice in the 15th century, with a population of perhaps 100,000 in the city and 1,000,000 on the mainland, enjoyed a golden age and could be considered a major European power. Its overseas empire expanded with the inheritance of Cyprus from the French Lusignan family in 1489, and its economy still generated large profits. In 1423 the doge Tommaso Mocenigo calculated that the Venetian marine consisted of 45 state and private galleys employing 11,000 seamen, 300 large cargo vessels with 5,000 seamen, and 3,000 smaller craft employing 17,000 men. Either from the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (“Warehouse of the Germans”) by the Rialto Bridge or in state-organized convoys, Venetian merchants continued to distribute the precious goods of the East through Europe. In industry, the state-owned Arsenal provided shipbuilding yards and dry and wet docks for the maintenance of huge numbers of vessels. Manufacture flourished, above all in silks and cottons, tanning, and, on the island of Murano, glassblowing. On the mainland, expansion continued with the acquisition of Ravenna in 1441 and of the agricultural Polesine region of Rovigo (north of Ferrara) in 1482–84. For observers throughout Europe, the “myth” of Venice excited admiration originating in surprise that so many could participate in government without producing anarchy. Venice’s social stability continued, assisted by a legal system that strove consciously to preserve equal justice for the powerful as well as the weak and by the particular attention given, through some 120 scuole, or charitable organizations, to the needs of the poor.

The Doges' Palace and Piazza San Marco, Venice, oil on canvas by Canaletto; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.Scala/Art Resource, New York

Yet, amid general prosperity, three developments during the second half of the century foreshadowed grave future problems. First, in July 1499 Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon from India with a small cargo of spices, threatening an end to the virtual monopolization by the Venetians of Eastern trade. Second, the Ottoman Turks, having taken Constantinople in 1453, continued their advance in Greece, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. In the course of the first Turkish war (1463–79), Turkish cavalry raided Dalmatia and Friuli; Venice lost the strategically important island of Negroponte (Euboea, or Évvoia) and agreed to pay tribute to the sultan. Meanwhile, Venice’s expansion on the mainland troubled the republic’s fellow Italian states, which feared that it might, in the words of Pope Pius II, “be seeking the monarchy of Italy.” However untrue, many contemporaries shared this sentiment, and they united in praising both the beauty of the city and the menace that they detected in its power. So the French statesman Philippe de Commynes, recalling his visit to Venice in 1495, wrote admiringly of its churches, monasteries, and palaces, its 30,000 gondolas, its Grand Canal (“the fairest and best-built street, I think, in the world”), the Basilica of St. Mark, the Arsenal, and other attractions. Venice was, he thought, “the most triumphant city that I have ever seen.” Yet its rulers were “so wise and so bent on enlarging their territories, that, if not prevented in time, all the neighbouring states may lament it too late.” The suspicion and opposition of its Italian neighbours were the third source of Venice’s future weakness, and they hindered the republic in the second Turkish war (1499–1503), which brought still greater losses. Florence

Venice in the 15th century remained, despite all, an immensely strong power, able to preserve its republican constitution unimpaired. In both these matters, it contrasted with Florence under the Medici. The foundation of the family’s fortune was laid by Giovanni di Bicci (1360–1429), who founded the Medici bank and in 1422 was appointed as banker to the papacy. His son Cosimo, who dominated the reggimento (principal patrician families) from 1434, united his vast financial resources with a keen intelligence. His natural simplicity of manner and plethora of folksy sayings were well designed to avoid offending (as far as possible) republicans. In a city proud of its traditions of “freedom,” he maintained his claim to be a private citizen, refused all titles of lordship, and held the powerful office of “standard-bearer of justice” for only three two-month periods.

Cosimo gained adherents by giving gifts and loans to all orders in society as well as to churches, confraternities, and religious orders and also by granting patronage to writers and artists. He granted commissions to the sculptor Donatello and the architects Michelozzo (Medici Palace) and Filippo Brunelleschi (the choir and nave of San Lorenzo) and constructed villas in the countryside at Careggi and Cafaggiolo. Founder of a great library, he subsidized the scholarship of the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, the humanist Poggio Bracciolini, and the collector of antiquities Cyriacus of Ancona. In politics he moved with moderation, gradually and sporadically. In no way could his rule be considered an exercise of despotic power. Cosimo always had to secure the support of a majority among the reggimento, who saw themselves as his allies in retaining their economic and social predominance in the state. By and large the Medici regime was acceptable to the patrician class because it stabilized the conflicts within it that had broken the unity of Florence before 1434.

Certainly, Cosimo’s influence was sufficient to allow his son, Piero, to take over this informal rule at his death in 1464. More remarkably, on the death of Piero in 1469, it passed to his son Lorenzo, then only 20 years old. Lorenzo later earned fame as “the Magnificent” (a title given to anyone of prominence at the time), partly as a tribute to the charm of his personality, partly by a careful projection of his own image, and partly through the perceptions of Florentines of a later generation who, looking back through the dark years that followed his death, tended to think of his era as a golden age. Yet in some respects that appellation is exaggerated. In foreign politics Lorenzo made a disastrous error in the 1470s when he attempted to prevent Pope Sixtus IV from establishing a power base in the Romagna. This led to the Medici bank’s loss of the papal account and a conspiracy between members of the pope’s family and the Florentine Pazzi family to overthrow Medici rule. In April 1478 the Pazzi assassinated Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano but failed to kill Lorenzo, and the insurgents, denied support by the citizens, were captured and executed. Yet the “War of the Pazzi” (1478–80) that followed, with Florence pitted against a papacy allied to Naples, proved dangerous and expensive, and Lorenzo emerged from it only with great difficulty.