Early Life
Guy was the second son of Guy I of Spoleto and Itta, daughter of Sico of Benevento. Guy I was the son of Lambert I of Nantes and his second wife, Adelaide of Lombardy, who was a daughter of Charlemagne's second eldest son, Pepin of Italy. In 842, the former Duchy of Spoleto, which had been donated to the Papacy by Charlemagne, was resurrected by the Franks to be held against Byzantine catapans to the south, as a Frankish border territory by a dependent margrave.
Consequently, Guy’s family had been important players in Italian politics since the early ninth century. Although in 876 Guy and his elder brother, Lambert, Duke of Spoleto, had been commissioned by Charles the Bald to accompany Pope John VIII to Naples to break up the alliances that many of the southern Lombard states had made with the Saracens, the family’s interests were generally hostile to the papacy, a policy that Guy initially followed.
With Lambert’s death in 880, he bequeathed to Guy the march of Camerino, and in 882 Guy supported his nephew’s (Guy II of Spoleto) invasion of the Papal States. This brought him into conflict with the Emperor Charles the Fat, and in 882, at an assembly at Verona, the emperor dispossessed him of his fiefs, together with a significant number of other important, but minor, Italian nobles. Rising up in rebellion, Guy allied himself with the neighbouring Saracens and began acquiring further territory. At this point, at a diet at Ravenna, the emperor declared him guilty of high treason, and Berengar of Friuli was commanded to strip him of his fief by force.
In 883, Guy inherited his nephew's title of Spoleto and reunited the dukedom, henceforth as the "Duchy of Spoleto and Camerino" bearing the title of dux et marchio, and by the end of 884, Emperor Charles III was forced to make peace with Guy, where he formally recovered his titles. Then in 885, he fought his occasional allies, the Saracens of the Garigliano.
Read more about this topic: Guy III Of Spoleto
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