ITALY
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ITALY
"Konige der Germanen", Munich, 1861-97). Rome
itself was on the point of falhng into their hands, when
Pope Stephen II made his famous journey across the
Alps and persuaded King Pepin (754J to intervene and
save the Romans from a yoke that they equally feared
and detested. He took from the Lombards the Pen-
tapohs and Romagna, former Byzantine territory,
twenty-four cities, and gave them to the Roman
Church (see Pepin the Short). Again in 774, at the
call of Pope Adrian, Charlemagne entered Italy,
suppressed the Lombard kingdom, united it with his
own, and by new gifts added the greater part of the
exarchate to the papal possessions.
The generosity of the faithful, the political results of the attempt to spread Iconoclasm in Italy, the hard need of self-defence, and culpable neglect on the part of the Byzantine court, had already done much to make the papacy a quasi-sovereign power. Thus arose in Italy the States of the Church (Stato Ecclesiastico, Patrimonium Petri, Temporal Power; Duchesne, "Les premiers temps de I'^tat pontifical", 2nd ed., Paris, 1904; Miles, "History of the States of the Church; Schniirer, "Entstehung des Kirchenstaats", 1894). At Christmas, 800, Charlemagne was crowned Western emperor by Leo III in the Basihca of St. Peter (J. de la Serviere, "Charlemagne et I'Eglise", Paris, 1904), and for the next two centuries his de- scendants laid claim to, and occasionally enforced the title of King of Italy, constantly disputed by the Italian descendants of great Prankish nobles and by other ambitious and violent rivals, foremost among them the factious nobles of Rome, represented typi- cally by the Counts of Tusculum, whose rule in the tenth century was the occasion of shameful ecclesias- tical disorder (see Papacy). While in Northern and Central Italy during the ninth and tenth centuries, the bishops often represented, as missi dominici, the imperial power, the Lombard duchies to the south (Spoleto, Friuli, Benevento) were never able to over- come their chronic anarchy long enough to withstand a new peril, the invasion of the Saracens. In the ninth century the latter seized on Corsica and (848) advanced to the gates of Rome; in the eleventh cen- tury they conquered Sardinia and Sicily, and mean- while set foot firmly in some districts of Southern Italy, the greater part of which, however, continued always subject to Constantinople, and took on in this period strongly accentuated Greek characteristics (C. Lenormant, "La Grande Grece", Paris, 1884).
With Otto I the German imperial authority reas- serted (951) its right to the crown of Italy, and hence- forth made use of the episcopal sees, especially in Northern and Central Italy, in order to sustain its claims (CantCl, "Storia degli Italiani", 4th ed., Turin, 1893-96; M. Hartmann, " Ge.sch. Italiens im Mittel- alter", 1897-1903; Leo, "Gesch. der ital. Staaten", 1829-32). Secularly minded l^ishops were only too often imposed on the population of these cities, which soon resented the feudal rights and privileges of their spiritual rulers, while these, on the other hand, found support in the German emperor, whose ambitious aims at that period culminated in the world-empire that Otto III (d. 1002) hoped to realize (Dresdner, " Kultur- u.Sittengesch.d. ital. Geistlichkeit im 10. u. 11. Jahrhundert", Berhn, 1890; A. Vogel, " Ratherius V.Verona u.das 10. Jahrhundert", 1854; Atto of Ver- celli," De pre.ssuris ecclesiasticis ", in P. L., CXXXIV). The second half of the eleventh century ushered in the long and disastrous conflict between the papacy and the empire, whose protagonists were Gregory VII (d. 1085) and Henry IV (d. 1106). Meanwhile a new political power, tlie Normans, had been growing up in Southern Italy at the expense of the Byzantines, the Saracens, and the remnants f)f the former Loml)ar(l duchies. During the first hiiif of the eleventh century descendants of the ninth- and tenth- century Northmen had sought fortune in these lands and found it; by
1070 their new kingdom was held as a fief of the Apos-
tolic See, a new order of things made possible by the
length and intensity of the conflict between the papacy
antl the Western Empire and the wTetched weakness of
the Byzantines (Von Sehack, " Normannen in Sicil-
ien", 1889; Von Heinemann, " Normannen in LTnter-
italien u. Sicihen ", I, 1894; Chalandon, "Domination
normande en Itahe et en Sicile", Paris, 1907; Don-
dorff, " Normannen u. ihre Bedeutung f . europ. Cultur-
leben", 1875). Owing to them, and to the hearty
support of the Lombard League of cities, the papacy
was victorious in the first phase of its conflict with the
empire (Peace of Venice, 1177).
Matilda, Countess of Tuscany (1064-1115), had meanwhile passed away, and left to the papacy her vast possessions in central Italy (Reggio, Lucca, Modena, Mantua, Ferrara, etc.), a new bone of contention with the empire that asserted its overlordship over rights of inheritance and administration (Tosti, " La Contessa Matilde", 3rd ed., Rome, 1886; Ren^e, "La grande Italienne", Paris, 1859; M. Huddy, "The Countess Mathilda", London, 1905). When Emperor Henry VI married in 1194 Constance, heiress of the great Norman house, the Kingdom of Sicily (with Southern Italy) passed into the hands of the Hohenstaufen, a combination most odious to the papacy, which rightly feared the near extinction of its independence. Out of this union of the imperial Cierman crown and the royal crown of Sicily arose the second phase of the great medieval conflict between pope and emperor (see Frederick II ; Gregory IX, Pope ; Honorius III, Pope) that ended (1265) in the complete ruin of the Hohenstaufen and the establishment of a French dy- nasty, the House of Anjou, on the throne of Naples. Only a few years did Charles of Anjou retain Sicily, for the native population came to detest the French knights and in the famous "Sicilian Vespers" (12S2) cast off the yoke of France and called in tlie Spanish line of Aragon (Broglio, " Storia del Vespro Siciliano ", Milan, 1858; see "Scienza e Fede", 1882, 241-61).
Meantime, Italian genius had been culminating va- riously during this stirring thirteenth century. Edu- cation had Ijeen nobly fostered by the growth of universities like Bologna and Padua, created or pro- tected by the papacy; law and order had been put on a solid basis by the growth and academic acceptance of the Roman Law (see Law; Pandects); and by the new codification of the canon law (Decretals, Papal; Corpus Juris C.a.nonici); rehgion had been hon- oured and confirmed by the rise of the Mendicant orders (Franciscans, Dominicans) ; the fine arts had thriven despite feudal and municipal conflict end- lessly various and passionate (Cimabue, Ciiotto, the Pisani); the civic spirit had developed with the growth of the communes in wealth, population, and self-consciousness, especially in Northern and Central Italy. Commerce and intlustry had taken on vast proportions (Venice, Flcironce, Milan, Genoa, Pisa); a glorious vernacular literature had sprung up (Dante), and in general Italy had entered deeply into all the phases of human activity that she was soon to develop so rapidly and so richly. At the same time the papacy, which with Innocent III (d. 1216) had entered the "trecento" as arbiter of rulers, peoples, and nations and the acknowledged conscience of Europe, touched its lowest depths of humiliation when the century ended.
French ambition and interests had gradually been supplanting the immemorial imperial influence, and with the death of Boniface VIII (1303) and the estab- lishment of Avignon (1307) as the future seat of the papacy, a new ixilitical onler set in for the peninsula. The .\ngevin kings ddniiiuitcd the south, while in the north the last traces of ( iernian overlordship (imperial vicars) (li.s:ip[ieaicil after the ill-fated attempts of Henry VII (i:;()S 13) and Louis the Bavarian (1314- 47) to dominate in Italy after the manner of the Ottos
