Italy in the Middle Ages

Timeline The history of Italy in the Middle Ages can be roughly defined as the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance.

The "Middle Ages" proper begin as the Byzantine Empire was weakening under the pressure of the Muslim conquests, and most of the Exarchate of Ravenna finally fell under Lombard rule in 751.

[2] In the 11th century, in the Northern and Central parts of the peninsula, began a political development unique to Italy, the transformation of medieval communes into powerful city-states, many of them, modelled on ancient Roman Republicanism.

Cities such as Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Bologna among others, rose to great political power, becoming major financial and trading centers.

[4][5] The precarious balance between these powers came to an end in 1494 as the duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza sought the aid of Charles VIII of France against Venice, triggering the Italian War of 1494–98.

He subsequently ruled in Italy for seventeen years as rex gentium, theoretically under the suzerainty of the eastern Roman emperor Zeno, but practically in total independence.

The Goth minority, of Arian confession, constituted an aristocracy of landowners and militaries, but its influence over the country remained minimal; the Latin population was still subject to Roman laws, and maintained the freedom of creed received by Odoacer.

[10] The Latin culture flourished for the last time with figures like Boethius, Theodoric's minister; the Italian Kingdom was again the most powerful political entity of the Mediterranean.

The eastern half of the Empire, now centred on Constantinople, invaded Italy in the early 6th century, and the generals of emperor Justinian, Belisarius and Narses, conquered the Ostrogothic kingdom after years of warfare, ending in 552.

The areas in central-northern Italy which remained under Byzantine control (mostly the current Lazio and Romagna, plus a short corridor between Umbria that connected them, as well as Liguria) became the Exarchate of Ravenna.

[15] After the Lombard invasion, the popes were nominally subject to the eastern emperor, but often received little help from Constantinople, and had to fill the lack of stately power, providing essential services (ex.

A conquest of Benevento, otherwise, would have meant the total encompassment of the Papal territories, and probably Charlemagne thought it was good for his relationships with the Pope to avoid such a move.

However, Naples, Gaeta, Amalfi, the Tyrrhenian cities, and Venice (in North Italy) retained some allegiance to Byzantium until the 11th century-long after becoming de facto independent.

Adelchis vacillated between nominal fealty to the Carolingian and Byzantine emperors, but, in fact, by his alterations to the Edictum Rothari, he acknowledged himself as the legitimate Lombard "king."

When in 960 Berengar attacked the Papal States, King Otto, summoned by Pope John XII, conquered the Kingdom of Italy and on 2 February 962 had himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor at Rome, reviving the empire of Charlemagne.

Not until 1004 could the new German King Henry II of Germany, by the aid of Bishop Leo of Vercelli, move into Italy to have himself crowned rex Italiae.

While besieging Milan in 1037, he issued the Constitutio de feudis in order to secure the support of the vasvassores petty gentry, whose fiefs he declared hereditary.

Norman rule in what had once been Byzantine territory naturally angered Constantinople, which in 1155 made a last attempt under Emperor Manuel I Komnenos to reassert its authority in Southern Italy.

Thanks to the marriage between the Emperor Henry VI and Constance, heiress to the Sicilian throne, the Kingdom of Sicily was in a personal union with the Holy Roman Empire from 1194 to 1254.

[29] Keeping both direct church control and imperial power at arm's length, the many independent city states prospered through commerce, based on early capitalist principles, ultimately creating the conditions for the artistic and intellectual changes produced by the Renaissance.

[32] Compared to feudal and absolute monarchies, the Italian independent communes and merchant republics enjoyed relative political freedom that boosted scientific and artistic advancement.

Milan, Florence and Venice, as well as several other Italian city-states, played a crucial innovative role in financial development, devising the main instruments and practices of banking and the emergence of new forms of social and economic organization.

[35] From the 11th to the 13th centuries these cities built fleets of ships both for their own protection and to support extensive trade networks across the Mediterranean, leading to an essential role in the Crusades.

In the north, a Lombard League of communes launched a successful effort to win autonomy from the Holy Roman Empire, defeating Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano in 1176.

High Medieval Northern Italy was further divided by the long running battle for supremacy between the forces of the papacy and of the Holy Roman Empire.

The county of Savoy expanded its territory into the peninsula in the late Middle Ages, while Florence developed into a highly organized commercial and financial city-state, becoming for many centuries the European capital of silk, wool, banking and jewelry.

Florence took Pisa in 1406, Venice captured Padua and Verona, while the Duchy of Milan annexed a number of nearby areas including Pavia and Parma.

Particularly detrimental was the fact that most of the victims were young adults in their prime working years, which left behind an "hourglass" population structure comprised heavily of children and older people, with fewer in-between.

France traditionally had high birth rates, but Italy's fertility was lower to begin with and especially after the Plague had ravaged the region, many cities such as Florence, Verona, and Arezzo had populations where more than 15% of people were over the age of 60.

Since overall life expectancy in Europe did not increase by any significant margin during this period, the aging cohort in some areas can be almost completely blamed on the effects of the Plague.