Under the German kings Italy came under the same influences as the other two Imperial kingdoms. Principalities grew up; free cities grew up; but, while in Germany the principalities were the rule and the cities the exception, in Italy it was the other way. ♦Growth of a system of commonwealths in Italy.♦ The land gradually became a system of practically independent commonwealths. Feudal princes, ecclesiastical or temporal, flourished only in the north-western and north-eastern corners of the kingdom. But, if the range of the German cities was less wide, and their career less brilliant, than those of Italy, their freedom was more lasting. ♦Tyrants grow into princes.♦ The Italian cities gradually fell under tyrants, and the tyrants gradually grew into acknowledged princes. ♦Growth of the dominion of the Popes.♦ The Bishops of Rome too, by a series of claims dexterously pressed at various times, contrived to form the greatest of ecclesiastical principalities, one which stretched across the peninsula from sea to sea. ♦Four stages of Italian history.♦ The geographical history of Italy consists of four stages. In the first the kingdom fell asunder into principalities. In the second the principalities vanished before the growth of the free cities. In the third the cities were again massed into principalities, till in the fourth the principalities were at last merged in a kingdom of united Italy.
Under the Saxon and Frankish Emperors the old Lombard names of Neustria and Æmilia pass away. Several small marches lie along the Burgundian frontier, as Savona on the coast, Ivrea among the mountains to the north-west, between them Montferrat, Vasto, and Susa, whose princes, as special guardians of the passage between the two kingdoms, bore the title of Marquess in Italy. It was in this region that the feudal princes were strongest, and that the system of free cities had the smallest developement. ♦The Marquesses of Montferrat, 938-1533.♦ The Savoyard power was already beginning to grow up in the extreme north-west corner; but at this time a greater part in strictly Italian history is played by the Marquesses of Montferrat, who for many centuries kept their position as important feudal princes quite apart from the lords of the cities. In the north-east corner of the kingdom the place of the old Austria is taken by the border principalities where the Italian, the German, and the Slave all come in contact, and which fluctuated more than once between the Italian and the German crowns. We have here the great march of Verona, beyond it that of Friuli, Trent, the marchland of the marchland, between Verona and Bavaria, and the Istrian peninsula on the Slavonic side of the Hadriatic. Between the border districts on either side lay the central land, Lombardy, in the narrower sense, the chosen home of the free cities. ♦Growth of the Lombard cities.♦ Here, by the middle of the twelfth century, every city had practically become a separate commonwealth, owning only the most nominal superiority in the Emperor. Guelfic cities withstood the Emperor; Ghibelin cities welcomed him; but both were practically independent commonwealths. ♦Wars of the Swabian Emperors.♦ Hence came those long wars between the Swabian Emperors and the Italian cities which form the chief feature of Italian history in the second half of the twelfth century and the first half of the thirteenth. ♦Milan and Pavia.
The other Lombard cities.
Alessandria, 1168.♦ Round the younger and the elder capital, round Guelfic Milan and Ghibelin Pavia, gathered a crowd of famous names, Como, Bergamo, and Brescia, Lodi, Crema, and Cremona, Tortona, Piacenza, and Parma, and Alessandria, the trophy of republican and papal victory over Imperial power. ♦Verona and Padua.♦ The Veronese march was less rich in cities of the same historical importance; but both Verona itself and Padua played a great part, as the seats first of commonwealths, then of tyrants. Further north and east, the civic element was weaker again. ♦Trent.
Aquileia.♦ Trent gradually parted off from Italy to become an ecclesiastical principality of the German kingdom; and the Patriarchs of Aquileia grew into powerful princes at the north-eastern corner of the Hadriatic. ♦The lords of Romano and Este.♦ Within the Veronese or Trevisan march itself, the lords of Romano and the more important marquesses of Este also demand notice. Romano gave the Trevisan march its famous tyrant Eccelino in the days of Frederick the Second, and the Marquesses of Este, kinsmen of the great Saxon dukes, came in time to rank among the chief Italian princes. ♦The north-eastern march falls off from Italy.♦ The extreme north-eastern march so completely fell off from Italy that it will be better treated in tracing the growth of the powers of Venice and Austria.
♦Tuscany, Romagna, and the March of Ancona.♦
In the more central lands of the kingdom, in the old exarchate, now known as Romagna, in the march variously called by the names of Camerino, Fermo, or Ancona, and above all in the march of Tuscany on the southern sea, the same developement of city life also took place, but somewhat later. North of the Apennines, along the Hadriatic coast, arose a crowd of small commonwealths which gradually passed into small tyrannies. ♦The Tuscan commonwealths.♦ Tuscany, on the other hand, was parted off into a few commonwealths of illustrious name. For a while one of these ran a course which stood rather apart from the common run of Italian history. ♦Pisa;
her wars with the Saracens 1005-1115.♦ Pisa, then one of the great maritime and commercial states of Europe, became, early in the eleventh century, a power which forestalled the crusades and won back lands from the Saracen. Though she was in every sense a city of the Italian kingdom, Pisa at this time held a position not unlike that which was afterwards held by Venice. Like her, she was a power which colonized and conquered beyond the seas, but which came only gradually to take a share in the main course of Italian affairs. ♦Genoa.♦ Beyond the borders of Tuscany, the same position was held by Genoa on the Ligurian gulf. ♦Occupation of the island of Sardinia by Pisa, and of Corsica by Genoa.♦ Pisa won Sardinia from the Saracen; Genoa, after long disputes with Pisa, obtained a more lasting possession of Corsica. Returning to Tuscany, three great commonwealths here grew up, which gradually divided the land between them. ♦Lucca, Siena, Florence.♦ These were Lucca and Siena, and Florence, the last of Italian cities to rise to greatness, but the one which became in many ways the greatest among her fellows. ♦Perugia.♦ In the centre of Italy, within the bounds of old Etruria but not within those of modern Tuscany, Perugia, both as commonwealth and as tyranny, held a high place among Italian cities. ♦Rome.♦ Of Rome herself it is almost impossible to speak. She has much history, but she has little geography. Emperors were crowned there; Popes sometimes lived there; sometimes Rome appears once more as a single Latin city, waging war against Tusculum or some other of her earliest fellows. ♦Claims of the Popes.♦ The claims of her Bishops to independent temporal power, founded on a succession of real or pretended Imperial and royal grants, lay still in the background; but they were ready to grow into reality as occasion served.
♦Second stage, c. 1250-1530.♦
The next stage of Italian political geography may be dated from the death of Frederick the Second, when all practical power of an Imperial kingdom in Italy may be said to have passed away. ♦Growth of tyrannies.♦ Presently begins the gradual change of the commonwealths into tyrannies, and the grouping together of many of them into larger states. We also see the beginning of more definite claims of temporal dominion on behalf of the Popes. ♦Dominion of Spain, 1555-1701.♦ In the course of the three hundred years between Frederick the Second and Charles the Fifth, these processes gradually changed the face of the Italian kingdom. It became in the end a collection of principalities, broken only by the survival of a few oligarchic commonwealths and by the anomalous dominion of Venice on the mainland. Between Frederick the Second and Charles the Fifth, we may look on the Empire as practically in abeyance in Italy. The coming of an Emperor always caused a great stir for the time, but it was only for the time. ♦Grant of Rudolf, 1278.♦ After the grant of Rudolf of Habsburg to the Popes, a distinction was drawn between Imperial and papal territory in Italy. ♦Imperial and papal fiefs.♦ While certain princes and commonwealths still acknowledged at least the nominal superiority of the Emperor, others were now held to stand in the same relation of vassalage to the Pope.
We must now trace out the growth of the chief states which were formed by these several processes. Beginning again in the north, it must be remembered that all this while the power of Savoy was advancing in those north-western lands in which the influences which mainly ruled this period had less force than elsewhere. Montferrat too kept its old character of a feudal principality, a state whose rulers had in various ways a singular connexion with the East. ♦Palaiologoi at Montferrat, 1306.♦ As Marquesses of Montferrat had claimed the crown of Jerusalem and had worn the crown of Thessalonica, so, as if to keep even the balance between East and West, in return a branch of the Imperial house of Palaiologos came to reign at Montferrat. To the east of these more ancient principalities, two great powers of quite different kinds grew up in the old Neustria and Austria. ♦Duchy of Milan. Venice.♦ These were the Duchy of Milan and the land power of Venice. Milan, like most other Italian cities, came under the influence of party leaders, who grew first into tyrants and then into acknowledged sovereigns. ♦The Visconti at Milan, 1310-1447.♦ These at Milan, after the shorter domination of the Della Torre, were the more abiding house of the Visconti. Their dominion, after various fluctuations and revolutions, was finally established when the coming of the Emperor Henry the Seventh generally strengthened the rule of the Lords of the cities throughout Italy.
♦Grant of the Duchy by King Wenceslaus, 1395.♦
At the end of the fourteenth century their informal lordship passed by a royal grant into an acknowledged duchy of the Empire. The dominion which they had gradually gained, and which was thus in a manner legalized, took in all the great cities of Lombardy, those especially which had formed the Lombard League against the Swabian Emperors. ♦County of Pavia.♦ Pavia indeed, the ancient rival of Milan, kept a kind of separate being, and was formed into a distinct county. ♦Extent of the duchy.♦ But the duchy granted by Wenceslaus to Gian-Galeazzo stretched far on both sides of the lake of Garda. Belluno at one end and Vercelli at the other formed part of it. It took in the mountain lands which afterwards passed to the two Alpine Confederations; it took in Parma, Piacenza, and Reggio south of the Po, and Verona and Vicenza in the old Austrian or Venetian land. Besides all this, Padua, Bologna, even Genoa and Pisa, passed at various times under the lordship of the Visconti. But this great power was not lasting. The Duchy of Milan, under various lords, native and foreign, lasted till the wars of the French Revolution; but, long before that time, it had been cut short on every side. ♦Decrease on the death of Gian Galeazzo, 1402.♦ The death of the first Duke was followed by a separation of the duchy of Milan and the county of Pavia between his sons, and the restored duchy never rose again to its former power. ♦The eastern cities won by Venice, 1406-1447.♦ The eastern parts, Padua, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, were gradually added to the dominion of Venice. By the middle of the fifteenth century, that republic had become the greatest power in northern Italy. ♦House of Sforza, 1450-1535.
Claims of the Kings of France, 1499-1525.♦ In the duchy of Milan the house of Sforza succeeded that of Visconti; but the opposing claims of the Kings of France were one chief cause of the long wars which laid Italy waste in the latter years of the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth. The duchy was tossed to and fro between the Emperor, the French King, and its own dukes. Meanwhile the dominion which was thus struggled for was cut short at the two ends. ♦Cession to the Alpine Leagues, 1512-1513.♦ It was dismembered to the north in favour of the two Alpine Leagues, as will be hereafter shown more in detail. ♦The Popes obtain Parma and Piacenza, 1515.
Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, 1545.♦ South of the Po, the Popes obtained Parma and Piacenza, which were afterwards granted as papal fiefs to form a duchy for the house of Farnese. Thus the Duchy of Milan which became in the end a possession of Charles the Fifth, and afterwards of his Spanish and Austrian successors, was but a remnant of the great dominion of the first Duke. The duchy underwent still further dismemberments in later times.
♦Land power of Venice only.♦