The Italians (4 page)

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Harry Lime in
The Third Man

I
t was Christmas Day in the year 800. The king of the Franks, Charles I, who would come to be known as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, was attending Mass in the old basilica of Saint Peter’s. Some years earlier, the then pope had appealed for the protection of the Franks, a Germanic people who had carved out a kingdom that stretched from today’s Germany across most of modern-day France to the Pyrenees. Charlemagne’s father, Pepin, had come to the aid of the papacy and his son regarded himself as its guardian. He was making what was to prove his last journey to Rome. His biographer, Einhard, wrote that he had gone to restore order in the city after Pope Leo III had been set upon by Romans who “tore out his eyes and blinded him.”
¹

A later chronicler wrote that “when the king . . . rose up from prayer, Pope Leo placed on his head a crown; and he was acclaimed by the whole populace of Rome.”
²
Historians have since raised skeptical eyebrows at the implication—that the pope simply caught Charlemagne unawares. But the king’s biographer Einhard insisted that Charlemagne “at first had such an aversion [to the title of ‘Emperor’] that he declared that he would not have set foot in the church . . . if he could have foreseen the design of the Pope.”
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Whatever the truth of the matter, Leo’s initiative and the events that surrounded it were to have momentous consequences for Europe, and for Italy in particular. Very little of the subsequent history of the peninsula is comprehensible without some understanding of their effects, some of which can be felt even today.

Until Pope Leo crowned Charlemagne, the history of Italy had followed a pattern not unlike that of the rest of Western Europe. The disintegration of the western half of the Roman Empire had laid open broad swathes of the continent to invasion by the wandering, mostly Germanic tribes that had gained military ascendancy over the Roman legions. The Italian peninsula, the heart of the original empire and the place where Roman culture and affluence reached its height, was particularly tempting to them.

By the end of the fifth century, most of modern-day Italy was being ruled more or less peacefully by Theodoric, the able leader of the Ostrogoths, the eastern branch of the Gothic nation. Had his state endured, it might have left behind a greater sense of Italy as a natural political unit. But the Ostrogoths were to rule Italy for only sixty years. One of the few reminders of their passing is Theodoric’s magnificent white marble mausoleum, which can be seen to this day outside Ravenna.

Although independent in effect, Theodoric was a viceroy. He had been sent to claim the peninsula as an agent of what, until the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire, had been its eastern half: the state with its capital at Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), which later historians would call the Byzantine Empire.
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As the Italians were about to find out in the most violent fashion, the Byzantine emperor had not forgotten that Italy was still part of his domain.

In 535, he dispatched an army to take back Italy from Theodoric’s successors. It was the start of one of the goriest wars in history. The so-called Gothic War lasted almost twenty years and, according to most estimates, reduced the population by more than half. The Byzantine forces eventually emerged victorious. But Italy, drained of its human and other resources, was in no position to resist a new wave of Germanic invaders: the Lombards.

Their arrival ushered in another thirty-odd years of intermittent warfare as the newcomers embarked on the bloody task of trying to drive out the Byzantines. They never fully succeeded. By the early years of the seventh century, Sicily, Sardinia and much of the south were all still held by Constantinople. So, at least nominally, was a broad stretch of territory that ran across the peninsula from Ravenna in the northeast, where the Byzantine governor had his seat, to south of Rome, where, amid the turmoil, the papacy had begun to play an increasingly prominent role in the administration of the city and its surrounding areas.
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When in 751 Ravenna fell to the Lombards, there was every chance that Rome, which was theoretically under Byzantine protection, would follow in due course. Which is why Leo’s predecessor had sought the help of the Franks. They did exactly what was expected of them. And more. After overcoming the Lombards, Charlemagne’s father, Pepin, handed to the papacy the right to govern not only Rome and its environs, but the entire band of territory in north central Italy that was nominally part of the Byzantine Empire. In doing so, he created the Papal States, a theocracy at the heart of Europe that was to remain in existence for well over a thousand years.

Leo’s coronation of Charlemagne, an already crowned monarch, was more than just an expression of gratitude for the Franks’ military intervention. The pope was declaring him to be the emperor of a reborn Western Roman Empire. Although the title conferred on Charlemagne was renounced for a while by his successors, it was revived in the middle of the tenth century and never subsequently relinquished. The territory that the emperors ruled eventually came to be known as the
Holy
Roman Empire—a reflection of their claim to a legitimacy that derived from the papacy, and through the papacy from God. Like the Papal States, the Holy Roman Empire would survive into the nineteenth century. At its greatest extent, it covered much of northern Italy, Sardinia, parts of eastern France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Germany, some of western Poland, the modern-day Czech Republic and most of today’s Slovenia.

The interaction between the papacy and the Frankish kings may have been momentous, but it was also richly ironic. Pepin had little enough right to hand Byzantine territory to the popes. But Leo had no right whatever to confer on Pepin’s son the title of Roman emperor. The claim of later popes to be the true heirs of Augustus and his successors was based on a document known as the Donation of Constantine. This purported to show that before making Byzantium his capital in 330, Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, had entrusted the western part of his domains to the then reigning pope. But the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, a lie. It had been concocted in the papal chancellery at some point in the eighth century.

By crowning Charlemagne, Pope Leo may have felt he was asserting the right of the papacy to decide who should be emperor in the West. But he was also creating a rival heir to the legacy of ancient Rome. The competing pretensions of the papacy on the one hand and of Charlemagne’s successors on the other would again and again bring death and destruction to medieval Italy. After 962, the emperors were Germans and every time the emperor of the day felt the need to reassert his power or replenish his coffers, an army would come marching through the Alps. Cities would be sacked, the surrounding countryside ravaged. There would be slaughter, rape and looting.

But the creation of this new empire did not just bring about conflict. It also led, in Italy as in Germany, to an abnormal degree of political fragmentation. Though a few of the Holy Roman emperors opted to rule from Rome, most spent their lives on the other side of the Alps. The popes, for their part, were often more concerned with ecclesiastical and theological matters than with the mundane details of civil administration. And in any case their military resources were limited: they relied for the protection of the Papal States to a large extent on moral authority and mercenary troops.

The result was a power vacuum in the northern half of Italy in which many towns and cities, particularly those that had once enjoyed a degree of autonomy under the original Roman Empire, started to govern themselves. Successive popes, keen to curb the power of the Holy Roman emperors, encouraged the spread of these miniature semidemocratic republics known as communes. When the communes began to be replaced by more personal and autocratic forms of government in the fourteenth century, Italy north of the Papal States became a patchwork of semi-independent principalities, duchies, marquisates, counties and tiny lordships dotted with the odd surviving republic. Wars between them were common.

The inhabitants of northern and north central Italy in the late Middle Ages may have been divided and vulnerable. But for as long as the communes survived, their citizens enjoyed a degree of control over their own affairs that was unthinkable in most of the rest of Europe. They were also increasingly prosperous: a surge in economic growth began toward the end of the eleventh century and lasted on and off until the start of the fourteenth, laying the material foundations for the Renaissance.

The most powerful of the republics in the north was Venice. But it was also the least typical. Venice’s lagoon-dwelling inhabitants—originally refugees from the German tribal invasions—had never been subject to the Holy Roman Empire. They had elected their first duke, or doge, back in the eighth century after cutting themselves loose from the Byzantine Empire. Enriched by trade with the East, especially after the start of the Crusades, the Venetian Republic, or Serenissima,
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grew to be an important naval power. By the end of the fifteenth century, the doges had an empire of their own that stretched as far as Cyprus.

By casting a protective mantle over the rest of northern and central Italy, the emperors not only encouraged the region to fracture internally, but cut it off from the south. In the thousand years that followed Charlemagne’s coronation, alliances were sometimes forged that involved this or that southern state. From time to time, an emperor would lead his army into the Mezzogiorno. And for a while, the two halves of Italy were nominally reunited as part of the empire. But for the rest, the affairs of the north and the south were separate, and they developed as quite different societies.

Sicily was gradually conquered by Muslim forces in the ninth century and remained an Islamic emirate until the end of the eleventh. The foot and heel of the Italian boot still came under direct Byzantine rule. But Muslim raiders established another, relatively short-lived emirate around Bari in the ninth century. A Lombard principality centered on Benevento survived for almost three hundred years after the Frankish invasion (it was divided after the middle of the ninth century). And when the Muslim occupation of Sicily isolated the emperors in Constantinople from their remaining possessions farther west, several territories nominally belonging to the Byzantine Empire became effectively independent.

Sardinia was one. Provincial governors who were also judges took over the administration of the so-called
giudicati
into which the island was split. The
giudicati
soon became hereditary kingdoms, one of which survived as an independent state into the fifteenth century. On the western seaboard of the Italian mainland, a number of the ports together with their hinterlands—first Naples, then Gaeta, Amalfi and, briefly, Sorrento—became self-governing. Amalfi in particular enjoyed a golden age of wealth and influence in the tenth and eleventh centuries based on trade with the Byzantine Empire and a good deal of diplomatic opportunism. (Like the rulers of the other southern maritime states, the dukes of Amalfi had no qualms about forging alliances with Muslim potentates, or even pirates.)

Sicily prospered too, and for longer. Under the emirate, Palermo was probably the biggest city in Europe after Constantinople. Muslim rule there was snuffed out in the same way as Byzantine control of the mainland: by Norman mercenaries who had come to take part in the incessant conflicts that raged among the petty states of southern Italy and between them and the Byzantine forces stationed there. By 1071, Byzantine rule in Italy had ended, and twenty years later a Norman was master of Sicily.

Fanatically Christian descendants of the Vikings, the Normans proved to be unexpectedly tolerant and intelligent rulers. On Sicily, they allowed a fusion of Arab, Jewish, Byzantine and Norman elements to take place, creating a dazzlingly eclectic culture. And it was a Norman who in the twelfth century brought Sicily and the mainland together as part of a unified kingdom. The south was to remain territorially united for most of the next seven hundred years, even though for much of that period Sicily and the mainland were governed as separate entities under the same crown.

In 1194, the emperor Henry VI conquered the Kingdom of Sicily, as the united state was misleadingly called, and for the next seventy years the whole of present-day Italy, with the exception of Sardinia, was brought within the Holy Roman Empire. For thirty of those years, under Frederick II, it was the rest of the empire stretching to the Baltic that was ruled from the Kingdom of Sicily and specifically from Palermo, where the emperor had grown up. Frederick’s reign saw perhaps the most determined effort before the nineteenth century to bring all of Italy under the direct control of a single authority. But his efforts were resisted by the communes and resulted in almost thirty years of warfare. Vigorously opposed by the papacy, Frederick failed, and within a few years of his death a French dynasty had wrested the Kingdom of Sicily from the grip of the empire.