Kingdom of Italy (medieval) - Constituent of The Holy Roman Empire

Constituent of The Holy Roman Empire

In 951 King Otto I of Germany had married Adelaide of Burgundy, the widow of late King Lothair II of Italy and assumed the Iron Crown of Lombardy at Pavia against rivalling Margrave Berengar of Ivrea. 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 be crowned by the Archbishop of Milan with the Lombard Crown in Pavia as a prelude to the visit to Rome to be crowned Emperor by the Pope.

In general, the fact that the monarch was generally an absentee, spending most of his time in Germany, left 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 which was increasingly filled by the Papacy and 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 was able to assume the Italian crown and to defeat the Imperial forces under Duke Otto I of Carinthia. Not until 1004 the new King Henry II of Germany could move into Italy to have himself crowned rex Italiae. Nevertheless Arduin was the last domestic King of Italy until the accession of Victor Emmanuel II in 1861.

The increasing power of the cities was first demonstrated during the reign of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1152–90), whose attempts to restore imperial authority in the peninsula led to a series of wars with the Lombard League, a league of northern Italian cities, and ultimately to a decisive victory for the League at the Battle of Legnano in 1176, which forced Frederick to recognize the autonomy of the Italian cities.

Frederick's son Henry VI actually 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 — 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, which led to fierce opposition not only from a reformed Lombard League, but also from the Popes, who were increasingly jealous of their temporal realm in central Italy (theoretically a part of the Empire), and concerned about the universal ambitions of the Hohenstaufen emperors.

Frederick II's efforts to bring all of Italy under his control were as unavailing as those of his grandfather, and his death in 1250 marked the effective end of the Kingdom of Italy as a genuine political unit. There continued to be conflict between Ghibellines (Imperial supporters) and Guelfs (Papal supporters) in the Italian cities, but these conflicts bore less and less relation to the origins of the parties in question.

The Kingdom was not wholly meaningless, however. Successive emperors in the 14th and 15th centuries returned to Rome to be crowned, and none forgot their theoretical claims to dominion as Kings of Italy. Nor were the claims of the Emperors to universal dominion forgotten in Italy itself, where writers like Dante Alighieri and Marsilius of Padua expressed their commitment both to the principal 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 strong men 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 created Gian Galeazzo Visconti Duke of Milan in 1395. Other families to receive new titles from the emperors included the Gonzaga of Mantua, and the Este of Ferrara and Modena.