During the late Middle Ages, the map of Europe was dominated mostly by large feudal kingdoms
and principalities, ruled by monarchs who, either directly or through their vassals,
controlled vast swaths of territory. There were, however, some exceptions to this rule,
one of which being the peninsula of Italy. Ironically, the land that had once been the
center of a united Empire which dominated from Britain to Mesopotamia, was, throughout
the middle ages, one of the most politically splintered regions in Europe. In this video,
we will discuss Italy’s fragmentation, and explore the reasons behind why Rome’s erstwhile
heartland spent the middle ages divided among tiny city-states, and dominated by foreign powers.
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Italy was first unified when a young Roman Republic finished conquering the peninsula in the
200s BC, and for the next 700 years would remain united as the heartland of a mighty Empire. Even
after the western half of the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, the regimes of Odoacer, the Ostrogoths,
and Justinian’s Eastern Roman Empire ruled as the sole masters of the peninsula, save for periods
of transition between them. This, however, would change with the invasion of the Lombards in 568:
a centuries-long process which saw Italy split into two spheres of power: one ruled
by the Lombard dukes, and another by Byzantine officials in conjunction with the Pope in Rome.
This division was further entrenched with the conquest of the Lombard Kingdom by the Frankish
king Charlemagne in 776, and the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy within the Carolingian
Empire. By the end of the ninth century, northern and central Italy was well consolidated under the
rule of the Carolingian kings who also exerted great influence over a nascent Papal State.
Meanwhile, the south of Italy was geopolitically defined by a constantly
fluctuating power struggle between the Eastern Roman Empire, remnant Lombard principalities,
and various Muslim states which would endure up until the 11th century, when the Normans would
unify Southern Italy under their overlordship. After the death of the Carolingian Emperor
Charles the Fat in 888, Northern and Central Italy collapsed into a period of civil war
where the great magnates of the realm vied for the crown of the Kingdom of Italy. The victors of this
struggle were a Saxon dynasty, the Ottonians, who were crowned Kings of Italy in 962, thus bringing
the ancient heartland of the Latins under the rule of Germanic Emperors. It is in these years that
the origins of the Italian city-states, the type of government that would dominate the region for
the following centuries, would emerge. Italy had been extremely urbanized during the Roman Empire.
While the overall population of these cities had suffered during the early Middle Ages, the cities
themselves mostly survived. Due to needing to administer to other regions in their Empire,
the Ottonian Emperors were often absent from the Italian peninsula, and thus would make use
of the bishops of Italy, who were based in the cities, to administer the region in their stead.
To help them in their task and to ensure taxes reached Imperial coffers,
numerous imperial privileges, including the ability to control taxation, trade and land
rights, were delegated by the Ottonian Emperors to the urban bishops of Italy.
Consequently, the cities these Bishops ruled from grew in political and economic importance.
Much like the rest of Europe, Italy had a caste of feudal nobles, but with the
movement of the political power to the towns, the traditional style of land-owning nobles in
Italy were either marginalized, or had to move to the cities to maintain their importance.
Although the cities of Italy nominally owed their allegiance to the Ottonian Emperors,
their effective control over the peninsula was never particularly strong,
for the Emperor could only directly govern the region when he was physically present, something
he could not do often as he had to spend most of his time keeping his German territories in line.
This was true both for the Ottonians and their successors, the Salians, who not only exercised
little direct control over Italy, but ended up embroiling themselves in a fifty-year-long
conflict with the Papacy known as the Investiture Controversy. It is during the tumultuous reign of
the Salians that a breakdown of the remnant of Imperial administration in Italy took place, and
by the start of the 12th century, Imperial palaces and administration in Italy were in complete ruin.
During the second half of the 11th century, a slow transfer of power occured in Italy’s cities,
wherein the power accrued by the bishops began transferring to the citizenry.
This transfer was facilitated by the Investiture Controversy, where during the feud between the
Pope and the Emperor, many northern and central Italian bishops and their powerful vassals
supported the Emperor, which ended up with many of them being excommunicated or being deposed.
This diminishment of church power allowed new social groups to emerge.
This process was expedited by the Holy Roman Emperors of the first half of the twelfth century,
who continued to concede privileges to some Italian towns in order to avoid needing to travel
there and rule them themselves. These political developments, which took place mainly between
1080 and 1130, allowed the majority Italian towns, in different ways and forms, to give
themselves new institutions and elect consuls that would rule the city with an assembly, resulting
in the rise of the Medieval Italian commune. To be able to survive as an urban entity in
the middle ages, Italian cities needed an economic base that could support their urban population, a
base that had developed in the previous centuries. At the end of the high middle ages, between
9th and 11th centuries, Europe saw a general improvement in its prosperity. The land became
mostly safer as the raids of Vikings and Magyars ceased, while the use of water mills became more
widespread, and the extraction and production of iron improved. Moreover, agricultural output
rose with the introduction of better tools such as the heavy plough and the harrow, while the
expanding use of the triennial crop rotation system, where fields would produce two harvests
every three years instead of one every two, increased the area of land that yielded produce.
Together with the increase of arable land and a more favourable climate, these elements created
a surplus of food production that allowed for the support of a bigger population: As a result,
Europe grew from a population of 20 million in the 13th century, to 70 Million in 1350.
This economic and population growth took place in all of Europe, and Italy was no exception.
As Italy’s agricultural production system changed, so did its society.
During the 13th century, the Italian agricultural landscape was centered around big villas owned by
great landlords or monasteries. However, the breakdown of Imperial power in the peninsula
created a new group of elites in the countryside, the milites, mounted soldiery who were originally
the vassals of counts or dukes legitimized by the emperors to help keep control over the territory.
After the decline of Imperial power, these milites struck out on their own,
creating small power bases in the countryside by use of force, often around the many castles
that had been built to defend against the raids coming from outside of Italy.
This new armed presence in the Italian countryside drove some peasants to urban centers to escape
oppression, while at the same time, the new milite elite would themselves move to the cities,
which they recognized as the true centers of power, further bolstering their populations.
Another factor contributing to the growth of city life at this time was the fact that landlords had
begun demanding that the peasants who worked their land paid them with coin, rather than with crops,
as they had previously been required to. To acquire this coin, farmers had to sell
their produce in the cities, which brought more food there to sustain the growing population.
Between the years 1100 and 1350, Italy was the most urbanised region in Europe, having three
cities with more than 100.000 inhabitants, while sixty others had a population between 10 and 80
thousand. The increase of population in these cities allowed for a boom in small businesses of
artisans, increasing the production of specialized goods, which with the circulation of coins in the
countryside and the improvement of extraction of raw materials like lumber and minerals, increased
mercantile activities not just within the Italian cities themselves, but also the greater European
and Mediterranean area. During this time, a new class of artisans, merchants, administrators and
lawyers emerged, who would become the backbone of the communal institutions that developed in
the following centuries. At the same time, the use of standardized currency increased,
and it was in these decades that the maritime republics began to expand their commerce overseas.
To maintain their power and to get access to the resources needed to facilitate further urban
expansion, it was crucial for Italian city-states to expand and maintain control over the “contado”,
the neighbouring territory that often comprised the dioceses of the local bishop or old feudal
counties. The territorial expansion and consolidation undergone by Italian cities was
a slow and heterogeneous process which varied from place to place, and also depended on the subjects
present on the territory. Villages created rural communes to govern themselves and contrast the
power of the rural nobility, over whom the cities expanded their influence by sending
officials to collect taxes and by entering into agreements. Feudal lords would often be invited to
become citizens of the town, and thus having to be subject to its laws and swear an oath of loyalty,
in exchange for keeping privileges and rights in their lands. Other ways city-states expanded their
territorial influence included cases where one of its prominent citizens bought an old noble title,
and with it its land. If all that failed, military conquest was a possibility,
but this was a rare occurrence. Overall, as the prominent cities of Italy began casting out their
webs of influence, it created various degrees of local autonomy and different administrations
within the borders of their communes, bringing further complications to the political map.
Differences in administration were also present at a regional level. For example,
places like Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia featured bigger cities controlling larger territories,
which relied on old feudal-style landed nobility for the development of the communal institutions.
Meanwhile, the region of Liguria was dominated by the powerful city of Genoa,
which subjugated the other coastal towns in the region. In Piedmont, the region was dominated
by many rural lordships, in particular the nobles of Savoy, Montferrat and Saluzzo,
and the towns did not manage to obtain the same level of authority except for the centre of Asti.
Tuscany and Emilia were other regions in which the cities didn’t gain as much political dominance, as
they were home to a great number of small feudal lords who managed to keep their independence.
In central Italy, the Papal State managed to expand its rule over a great number of
towns in central Italy, but like with the Emperors, this control depended greatly on
the political situation and the strength of the current Pope. Other ecclesial states like
the Patriarch of Aquileia and the Bishop of Trent consolidated their rule over their large dioceses.
Finally, Sardinia was divided into four Giudicati, while southern Italy and Sicily had been unified
by the Normans, although their powerful Kingdom would become a hotbed of dynastic conflict once
their ruling line, the Hautevilles, died out. Although the political fragmentation of Italy
was well established by the 1150s, there were still those who tried, mostly in vain,
to unify the peninsula. Most famously, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa spent many decades warring
against the cities of the Lombard League to strip away the many rights and privileges that, in the
Emperor's eyes, had been wrongly appropriated by the towns without imperial approval.
He would find initial success, culminating with the destruction of Milan in 1162.
Still, the other Communes continued to rebel until the Emperor was defeated at the Battle of Legnano,
forcing him to compromise with the towns and recognise their autonomy.
Barbarossa’s grandson, Frederick the Second, would also attempt to expand his influence over
the towns unsuccessfully, and after his death, the authority of the imperial crown collapsed,
allowing the Italian states to continue developing with minimal imperial interference.
Around the middle of the 14th century, some of the more powerful Italian urban centers
like Milan and Florence began to expand at the expense of their neighbours, followed by
Venice at the start of the 1400s, which took control of the regions of Veneto and Friuli.
Despite this, by the year 1454, when the Peace of Lodi was signed, there were still around 120 more
or less independent states in Italy, and while their numbers would gradually dwindle down in
the following centuries, it was only during the Italian unification wars of the 19th century that
the Italian peninsula, with the exception of San Marino and the Vatican state, would be unified.
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