The Kingdom of Italy, also called Imperial Italy (Italian: Italia Imperiale; German: Reichsitalien), was one of the constituent kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire, along with the kingdoms of Germany, Bohemia, and Burgundy. It originally comprised large parts of northern and central Italy. Its original capital was Pavia until the 11th century.
Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and the brief rule of Odoacer, Italy was ruled by the Ostrogoths and later the Lombards. In 773, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, crossed the Alps and invaded the Lombard kingdom, which encompassed all of Italy except the Duchy of Rome, the Republic of Venice and the Byzantine possessions in the south. In June 774, the kingdom collapsed and the Franks became masters of northern Italy. The southern areas remained under Lombard control, as the Duchy of Benevento was changed into the independent Principality of Benevento. Charlemagne called himself king of the Lombards and in 800 was crowned emperor in Rome. Members of the Carolingian dynasty continued to rule Italy until the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887, after which they once briefly regained the throne in 894–896.
In 951, King Otto I of Germany, already married to Queen Adelaide of Italy, invaded the kingdom and proclaimed himself king. Otto defeated the previous king and conquered Pavia in 961, and then continued on to Rome, where he had himself crowned emperor in 962. The union of the crowns of Italy and Germany with that of the so-called "Empire of the Romans" proved stable. Burgundy was added to this union in 1032, and by the twelfth century the term "Holy Roman Empire" had come into use to describe it. The emperor was usually also king of Italy and Germany, although emperors sometimes appointed their heirs to rule in Italy and occasionally the Italian bishops and noblemen elected a king of their own in opposition to that of Germany. The absenteeism of the Italian monarch led to the rapid disappearance of a central government in the High Middle Ages, but the idea that Italy was a kingdom within the Empire remained and emperors frequently sought to impose their will on the evolving Italian city-states. The resulting wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the anti-imperialist and imperialist factions, respectively, were characteristic of Italian politics in the 12th–14th centuries. The Lombard League was the most famous example of this situation; though not a declared separatist movement, it openly challenged the emperor's claim to power.
The century between the Humiliation of Canossa (1077) and the Treaty of Venice of 1177 resulted in the formation of city states independent of the Germanic emperor. A series of wars in Lombardy from 1423 to 1454 reduced the number of competing states. The next forty years were relatively peaceful in Italy, but in 1494 the peninsula was invaded by France.
After the Imperial Reform of 1495–1512, the Italian kingdom corresponded to the unencircled territories south of the Alps. Juridically the emperor maintained an interest in them as nominal king and overlord, but the "government" of the kingdom consisted of little more than the plenipotentiaries the emperor appointed to represent him and those governors he appointed to rule his own Italian states. The 250 to 300 lesser feudal lords of the Reichsitalien nonetheless frequently appealed to the imperial courts and jurisdiction to settle conflicts with the prominent princes.
The Habsburg rule in several parts of Italy continued in various forms but came to an end with the campaigns of the French Revolutionaries in 1792–1797, when a series of sister republics were set up with local support by Napoleon and then united into the Italian Republic under his presidency. In 1805 the Italian Republic became the Kingdom of Italy with Napoleon as the new king. This state was disbanded with the collapse of Napoleonic rule in 1814.
The modern Italian region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol and part of Friuli-Venezia Giulia were also located in the Empire, but were not part of the Kingdom of Italy.
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Lombard Kingdom
After the Battle of Taginae, in which the Ostrogoth king Totila was killed, the Byzantine general Narses captured Rome and besieged Cumae. Teia, the new Ostrogothic king, gathered the remnants of the Ostrogothic army and marched to relieve the siege, but in October 552 Narses ambushed him at Mons Lactarius (modern Monti Lattari) in Campania, near Mount Vesuvius and Nuceria Alfaterna. The battle lasted two days and Teia was killed in the fighting. Ostrogothic power in Italy was eliminated, but according to Roman historian Procopius of Caesarea, Narses allowed the Ostrogothic population and their Rugian allies to live peacefully in Italy under Roman sovereignty. The absence of any real authority in Italy immediately after the battle led to an invasion by the Franks and Alemanni, but they too were defeated in the Battle of the Volturnus and the peninsula was, for a short time, reintegrated into the empire.
The Kings of the Lombards (Latin: reges Langobardorum, singular rex Langobardorum) ruled those Germanic people from their invasion of Italy in 567–68 until the Lombardic identity became lost in the ninth and tenth centuries. After 568, the Lombard kings sometimes styled themselves Kings of Italy (Latin: rex totius Italiæ).
The actual control of the sovereigns of both the major areas that constitute the kingdom – Langobardia Major in the centre-north (in turn divided into a western, or Neustria, and one eastern, or Austria and Tuskia) and Langobardia Minor in the centre-south, was not constant during the two centuries of life of the kingdom. An initial phase of strong autonomy of the many constituent duchies developed over time with growing regal authority, even if the dukes' desires for autonomy were never fully achieved.
The Lombard kingdom proved to be more stable than its Ostrogothic predecessor, but in 774, on the pretext of defending the Papacy, it was conquered by the Franks under Charlemagne.
Carolingian Kingdom of Italy
After the conquest of Lombard Kingdom in 774, Charlemagne was crowned as Lombard king, thus establishing a distinctive polity in his Italian possessions, within the wider Carolingian Empire. Already in 781, his young son Pepin was also crowned as Lombard king and designated to rule the Italian realm. King Pepin died in 810, and his son Bernard became the new Lombard king, governing the Italian realm until 817, when he was deposed by his uncle, emperor Louis the Pious. The Italian realm passed to Louis′ son Lothair I, who was also the co-emperor and emperor (817-855). Under the Treaty of Verdun (843), Carolingian Italy became part of the Middle Frankish Kingdom, ruled by emperor Lothair I.
The death of the Emperor Lothair I in 855 led to his realm of Middle Francia being split among his three sons, under the Treaty of Prüm. The eldest, Louis II, inherited the imperial crown, and rule over the Carolingian Italy. His realm included all of Carolingian possessions in northern and central Italy, as far south as Rome and Spoleto, but the rest of Italy to the south was under the rule of the Lombard Principality of Benevento, or the Byzantine Empire.
Following Louis II's death without male heirs (875), both the imperial crown and rule over the Italian realm was disputed among the Carolingian rulers of West Francia (France) and East Francia (Germany), with first the western king (Charles the Bald) and then the eastern claimants (Carloman of Bavaria and Charles the Fat) attaining the prize.
Post-Carolingian Kingdom of Italy
Following the deposition and death of emperor Charles the Fat (888), local nobles such as Berengar of Friuli, and his opponents Guy of Spoleto and Lambert of Spoleto, disputed over the Lombard crown and rule in the Italian realm, and outside intervention did not cease, with Arnulf of Eastern Francia and later Louis of Provence both claiming the Imperial throne and rule over Italy, while other contestants for the Lombard crown and consequent rulers of the Italian realm also were Rudolph II of Burgundy (922), Hugh of Arles (926) and his son Lothair II (947), and their opponent Berengar II (950).
During that period, Italy was also beset by Arab raiding parties from Sicily and North Africa, while central royal authority was frequently challenged. Order was finally imposed from outside, when the German king Otto I invaded Italy and seized both the Italian and Imperial thrones for himself in 961-962.
Imperial Italy
In 951, King Otto I of Germany married Adelaide of Burgundy, the widow of late King Lothair II of Italy. Otto was proclaimed king of Italy at Pavia despite his rival Margrave Berengar of Ivrea. In 952, March of Verona was annexed by the Duchy of Bavaria and remained part of the Kingdom of Germany until its disintegration. When in 960 Berengar attacked the Papal States, King Otto, summoned by Pope John XII, conquered the Italian kingdom and on 2 February 962 had himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor at Rome. From that time on, the Kings of Italy were always also Kings of Germany, and Italy thus became a constituent kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire, along with the Kingdom of Germany (regnum Teutonicorum) and – from 1032 – Burgundy. The German king (Rex Romanorum) would theoretically be crowned in Pavia as a prelude to the visit to Rome to be crowned Emperor by the Pope.
In general, the monarch was an absentee, spending most of his time in Germany and leaving the Kingdom of Italy with little central authority. There was also a lack of powerful landed magnates – the only notable one being the Margraviate of Tuscany, which had wide lands in Tuscany, Lombardy, and the Emilia, but which failed due to lack of heirs after the death of Matilda of Canossa in 1115. This left a power vacuum – increasingly filled by the Papacy and by the bishops, as well as by the increasingly wealthy Italian cities, which gradually came to dominate the surrounding countryside. Upon the death of Emperor Otto III in 1002, one of late Berengar's successors, Margrave Arduin of Ivrea, even succeeded in assuming the Italian crown and in defeating the Imperial forces under Duke Otto I of Carinthia. Not until 1004 could the new German King Henry II of Germany, by the aid of Bishop Leo of Vercelli, move into Italy to have himself crowned rex Italiae. Arduin ranks as the last domestic "King of Italy" before the accession of Victor Emmanuel II in 1861.
Henry's Salian successor Conrad II tried to confirm his dominion against Archbishop Aribert of Milan and other Italian aristocrats (seniores). While besieging Milan in 1037, he issued the Constitutio de feudis in order to secure the support of the vasvassores petty gentry, whose fiefs he declared hereditary. While Conrad stabilised his rule, however, the Imperial supremacy in Italy remained contested.
Staufer
The cities first demonstrated their increasing power during the reign of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1152–1190), whose attempts to restore imperial authority in the peninsula led to wars with the Lombard League, a league of northern Italian cities, most of the times headed by Milan, and ultimately to a decisive victory for the League at the Battle of Legnano in 1176, that had as its leader the Milanese Guido da Landriano, which forced Frederick to make administrative, political, and judicial concessions to the municipalities, officially ending his attempt to dominate Northern Italy. From then, Italy became a patchwork of autonomous duchies and city-states only nominally tied to the Holy Roman Empire.
The scene was similar to that which had occurred between Pope Gregory VII and Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor at Canossa a century earlier. The conflict was the same as that resolved in the Concordat of Worms. Did the Holy Roman Emperor have the power to name the pope and bishops? The Investiture controversy from previous centuries had been brought to a tendentious peace with the Concordat of Worms and affirmed in the First Council of the Lateran. Now it had recurred, in a slightly different form. Frederick had to humble himself before Pope Alexander III at Venice. The emperor acknowledged the pope's sovereignty over the Papal States, and in return Alexander acknowledged the emperor's overlordship of the Imperial Church. Also in the Treaty of Venice, a truce was made with the Lombard cities, which took effect in August 1178. The grounds for a permanent peace were not established until 1183 in the Peace of Constance, when Frederick conceded their right freely to elect town magistrates. By this move, Frederick recovered his nominal domination over Italy, which became his chief means of applying pressure on the papacy.
Frederick's son Henry VI managed to extend Hohenstaufen authority in Italy by his conquest of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, which comprised Sicily and all of Southern Italy. Henry's son, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor – one of the greatest monarchs of the Middle Ages and the first emperor since the 10th century to actually base himself in Italy – attempted to return to his father's task of restoring imperial authority in the northern Italian Kingdom. This incurred fierce opposition from a reformed Lombard League and from the Popes, who had become increasingly jealous of their temporal realm in central Italy (theoretically a part of the Empire), and concerned about the hegemonic ambitions of the Hohenstaufen emperors.
Frederick II was one of the most powerful figures of the Middle Ages and ruled a vast area, beginning with the kingdom of Sicily in the south and stretching through Italy all the way north to Germany. Given the appellation Stupor mundi ('Wonder of the World') by contemporaries, he was figure of vast ambitions and manifold ability, and seemed to view himself as a direct successor to the Roman emperors of antiquity. Frederick would prove the most formidable, dynamic, and imaginative architect of an administratively unified Italian state until the mid-19th century. In the Kingdom of Sicily he built upon the work of his Norman predecessors and forged an early absolutist state bound together by an efficient secular bureaucracy. Frederick's firm grip on his southern kingdom would survive invasion, conspiracy, excommunications, and war with his enemies in Lombardy and the papacy.
Decline
The Italian campaigns of the Holy Roman emperors decreased, but the kingdom did not become wholly meaningless. In 1310 the Luxembourg King Henry VII of Germany with 5,000 men again crossed the Alps, moved into Milan and had himself crowned king of Italy (with a mock-up of the Iron Crown), sparking a Guelph rebellion under Lord Guido della Torre. Henry restored the rule of Matteo I Visconti and proceeded to Rome, where he was crowned emperor by three cardinals in place of Pope Clement V in 1312. His further plans to restore the Imperial rule in northern Italy and to expand the empire, invading the Kingdom of Naples, were aborted by his sudden death the next year.
Successive emperors in the 14th and 15th centuries were bound in the struggle between the rivaling Luxembourg, Habsburg and Wittelsbach dynasties. In the conflict with Frederick the Fair, King Louis IV (reigned until 1347) had himself crowned emperor in Rome by Antipope Nicholas V in 1328. His successor Charles IV also returned to Rome to be crowned in 1355. None of the emperors forgot their theoretical claims to dominion as kings of Italy. Nor did the Italians themselves forget the claims of the emperors to universal dominion: writers like Dante Alighieri (died 1321) and Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275 – c. 1342) expressed their commitment both to the principle of universal monarchy, and to the actual pretensions of Emperors Henry VII and Louis IV, respectively.
The Imperial claims to dominion in Italy mostly manifested themselves, however, in the granting of titles to the various strongmen who had begun to establish their control over the formerly republican cities. Most notably, the emperors gave their backing to the Visconti of Milan, and King Wenceslaus made Gian Galeazzo Visconti the duke of Milan in 1395. Other families to receive new titles from the emperors were the Gonzaga of Mantua, and the Este of Modena and Reggio.
Imperial fiefs in the modern period
By the beginning of the early modern period, the Kingdom of Italy still formally existed but had de facto splintered into completely independent and self-governing Italian city-states. Its territory had been significantly limited – the conquests of the Republic of Venice in the "domini di Terraferma" and those of the Papal States had taken most of northeastern and central Italy outside the jurisdiction of the Empire.
In many aspects, the Imperial claims to feudal overlordship over the Italian territories had become practically meaningless: the effective political authority, as well as the power to raise taxes and spend resources, was in the hands of the Italian princes and dukes. However, the presence of the Imperial feudal network in Italy continued to play a role in the history of the peninsula. It gave to Emperors Sigismund and Maximilian I the pretext to intervene in Italian affairs. Furthermore, the Imperial rights were notably asserted during the Italian Wars by Charles V (also king of Spain, Naples and archduke of Austria). He drove the French from Milan after the Battle of Pavia, and prevented an attempt by the Italian princes, with French aid, to reassert their independence in the League of Cognac. His mutinous troops sacked Rome and, coming to terms with the Medici Pope Clement VII, conquered Florence where he reinstalled the Medici as dukes of Florence after a siege. Charles V was crowned king of Italy with the Iron Crown in medieval fashion and, upon the extinction of the Sforza line of Milan in 1535, claimed direct possession of that territory as an Imperial fief. After Charles divided his possession between a Spanish and Austrian branch, Milan became a possession of the Spanish Empire of Charles's son Philip II of Spain, whereas the title of Holy Roman Emperor and the rights connected to Imperial Italy were transferred to Charles's brother, Ferdinand I. Milan continued to be a state of the Holy Roman Empire so that, in his position as duke of Milan, Philip II was, at least formally, a vassal of Emperor Ferdinand. However, following the reign of Charles V, no Holy Roman Emperor of the Austrian Habsburgs was crowned king of Italy and the title effectively ceased to be used for two centuries and a half.
In 1559, the Kingdom of France ended its ambitions over the Imperial fiefs in Italy, abandoning its claims to Savoy and Milan and withdrawing from Tuscany and Genoese Corsica by the terms of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. The major imperial fiefs in Italy were known as "Feuda latina", whereas the smaller ones were known as "Feuda Minora". Italian princes did not send representatives to the Imperial Diet, but their forces also joined the Imperial Army, as in the case of the Hungarian campaign of Maximilian II against Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566.
Dissolution
The status of Imperial Italy was more or less stable up to 1789. There was even a serious push by the Savoyards (backed by Prussia) to raise Savoy to electorate status in 1788, which would make it only the second non-German state to become so (after Bohemia, which was after the crushing of Bohemian estates in 1620 dominated by German-speaking aristocrats). This came to nothing as the French Revolution of 1789 would quickly shatter the old order.
During the French Revolutionary Wars, the Austrians were driven from Italy by Napoleon Bonaparte, who set up republics throughout northern Italy, and by the Treaty of Campo Formio of 1797, Emperor Francis II relinquished any claims over the territories that made up the Kingdom of Italy. The imperial reorganization carried out in 1799–1803 left no room for Imperial claims to Italy – even the Archbishop of Cologne was gone, secularized along with the other ecclesiastical princes. Napoleon's victory in the War of the Second Coalition saw this reconfirmed in the Treaty of Lunéville. In 1805, while the Holy Roman Empire was still in existence, Napoleon, by now Emperor of the French as Napoleon I, claimed the crown of the new Kingdom of Italy for himself, putting the Iron Crown on his head at Milan on 26 May 1805. He also directly annexed most of the former Imperial Italy (including Piedmont-Savoy, Genoa and Tuscany) into France. The Empire itself was abolished the next year on 6 August 1806. The Congress of Vienna following Napoleon's defeat did not bring back the Holy Roman Empire nor the Kingdom of Italy, and the restored Italian kingdoms and duchies now either became fully sovereign in their own right or became a part of the newly-declared Austrian Empire (which also annexed the former Venetian Republic).