The Story of Milan

by Ella Noyes

This blow seems to have crushed the vitality of Milan. For centuries she remained in a weak and depressed condition. During the Lombard domination, which swept away the brief authority of the Eastern Empire established by the arms of Narses, her pre-eminence in North Italy was usurped by Pavia, which Alboin and his successors chose as the capital of their new realm, now first called Lombardy. The broken palaces of the once imperial metropolis no longer sheltered sovereigns. The Lombard kings delegated their authority in the city to a governor, whom they called Duke—whence the name Cordusio, still used in the centre of the city, a corruption of Corte Ducis, the palace or judgment-hall of the Duke—and only approached from time to time to hold a Diet within the vast melancholy area of her deserted circus. Even the successors of St. Barnabas and St. Ambrose abandoned her, and transferred the See to Genoa, where it remained till the next century, diminished in power and prestige by its exile from the city of the Ambrosian tradition, while the Roman Pontiffs, throughout the two centuries of Lombard supremacy, were quietly increasing their influence and making good that claim to supreme spiritual authority before which the Ambrosian Church was in the end to succumb.

The return of the episcopal See to Milan indicates some degree of revival in the city. But two hundred years more were to pass before her Church resumed its old importance, and Milan her rightful rank in North Italy. Under Charlemagne, who conquered Desiderio in 774, and created a so-called Kingdom of Italy, Milan held only the third place among the metropolitan Sees, yielding precedence after Rome to Ravenna. The Frankish king, whose great scheme of a restored Roman Empire included a united Latin Church under the Pope as supreme head, not only exalted the spiritual authority of Rome over the other Sees, but even endeavoured to suppress the peculiarities of the Ambrosian liturgy and force Milan into uniformity with the rest of the Latin Church. He is said to have descended upon the city and seized all the liturgical books, burning some and carrying others away into Germany. But even his will was helpless against the cherished custom of centuries. Some religious men, so the chronicler declares, succeeded in hiding copies of the books, and as soon as the Emperor had disappeared, they were unearthed and the old rites resumed as before.

The political changes of the ninth and tenth centuries favoured the revival of the Lombard See. With the disruption of Charlemagne’s swollen empire, and the removal of the temporal support, the spiritual sovereignty of Rome and the unity of the Church broke down, at least in practice, and the grand and comprehensive idea of a single rule of Christendom under the twin sceptres of Emperor and Pope—that inspiration of great minds in the Middle Ages—failed now, as later, of realisation. Amid the ungoverned turbulence of the Roman nobles and citizens the Papacy gradually sank to the lowest depths of corruption and impotence, and any deference to its authority once paid by the Milanese primates was soon forgotten.

For a while the Carlovingian kingdom of Italy held together in spite of constant wars, and under Louis II. Lombardy enjoyed a period of peace and great prosperity. But after his death in 875, the country, rent by the struggles of various claimants to the throne, and overrun by Huns and Saracens, was gradually reduced to a state of chaos, out of which the power of the feudal barons emerged as the only effective authority. The Counts and Viscounts, as the imperial ministers were properly called, lost their authority, or else preserved it as an hereditary and almost independent right from father to son, fitting themselves as time went on into the graduated order of the feudal system, which was extending itself into the whole organisation of society. The one stable power, that of the Church, based on an inextinguishable tradition, became paramount in the city, and in virtue of its vast possessions assumed the temporal as well as the spiritual dominion. By the tenth century the Archbishops of Milan appear as great feudal princes, the most powerful in North Italy, and practically independent of the Emperor. This position was largely due to the spirit and ability of the two great prelates of the previous century, Angilberto (824-59), and Ansperto (868-81). Ansperto openly refused the obedience claimed from him by John VIII. By assembling and presiding over the Diet of the princes of North Italy at Pavia, which elected Charles the Bald as successor to Louis II., and afterwards crowning the new monarch, he arrogated the right of conferring the Crown of Italy independently of the Papal approval. He appears in this election as a great temporal prince, leading the North Italian States, and expressing the revolt of Lombardy against the pretensions of the Pope in the Lateran to the heritage of the power which once dominated the world from the Capitol. Throughout the struggles of the next twenty years for the possession of the throne, Ansperto’s support was always given in opposition to the Pope. When summoned by John VIII. to a Council at Rome in 879, to answer for his offences against the Holy See, he shut the door against the papal legates, so that they were compelled to the undignified proceeding of shouting the pontiff’s complaint through the keyhole; and he and all his vast flock, which included, with the suffragan Sees, the whole of Lombardy, were totally indifferent to the excommunication stammered against them by the enraged and helpless Pope.

Archbishop Ansperto was the chief restorer of the city as well as of the Church of Milan. He rebuilt and repaired the broken walls, the buildings ruined by the barbarians, and by his wise and resolute government gave a much-needed security to the life and property of the citizens. It was a greatly increased power which he transmitted to his successors, who wielded it with the same autocratic spirit. In the confusion of the Carlovingian break-up, when no one knew who was the rightful sovereign of the old Lombard kingdom, or who held the prerogative of electing him, the Archbishops of Milan assumed the part of king-makers, and laid the Crown, now on the head of an Italian prince, now on that of some heir of the Carlovingian tradition. The constant aim of the archbishops was to increase and consolidate their power, and the weakness of the royal authority gave them their chance. The story of the city in these two centuries is chiefly composed of the contests of the Primates with the successive wearers of the Lombard crown, who in their turn endeavoured to tyrannise over the See by seizing the right to elect its occupant, and filling it with their own rapacious and arrogant favourites. These royal appointments were violently opposed by the people, so that the city was distracted by constant schisms and civil warfare. From 948 to 953 the strife between Adelmano, the choice of the citizens, and Manasses, an ambitious and intriguing foreign priest, whom Berengarius had appointed to the See, filled Milan with tumult and bloodshed, during which the Ambrosian Church was despoiled of much of its treasure. The election in 953 of a third aspirant, Walperto, to whom the others gave way, closed at last the miserable war. With the coronation of Otho the Great (964) in St. Ambrogio, by this archbishop, who had crossed the Alps in person to summon the German prince to the deliverance of Italy from the cruel tyranny of Berengarius, a blessed period of peace and consequent prosperity began for Milan, favourable to the development of those popular forces in the city—hitherto depressed by constant terror and insecurity—which were to make her history in the coming centuries.

The peace, however, soon bred in the city a restless vigour which could find no other vent than war. Under Ariberto d’Intimiano, who was elected archbishop in 1018, Milan, now restored to undisputed pre-eminence over her rival Pavia and the rest of the Lombard cities, started upon a career of conquest. In Ariberto the archiepiscopal pallium cloaked a potent statesman and warrior, who well knew how to defend that temporal power which the ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages looked upon as the best guarantee of their spiritual authority. When the Emperor Henry II., who followed the Othos, died in 1024, and the uncertainty as to his successor on the Lombard throne threatened new trouble to Italy, Ariberto hastened to Germany, and on his sole authority, according to one chronicler, though others say that he was supported by a party of Italian magnates, offered the kingdom to Conrad the Salic. Two years later (1026) he reasserted the right of the Primate of Milan to crown the King of Italy, by laying the circlet on the new monarch’s brow within the city itself. At Conrad’s subsequent coronation in Rome as Emperor, the Archbishop of Milan was the most important of the imposing company of ecclesiastical princes who attended on the occasion. His dignified withdrawal from a contest with the Archbishop of Ravenna for the place of highest honour was followed by a formal recognition of his primacy in a Papal Bull, while with less self-restraint his vast train of followers reduced the company of the Ravennese prelate to proper submission by apostolic blows and knocks in the streets of Rome, amid a tremendous uproar. Milan’s ecclesiastical superiority to Ravenna and all other Italian Sees was thus triumphantly settled.

Ariberto’s ambition for the glory and predominance of Milan was well supported by the people. They followed the militant prelate with enthusiasm to the subjugation of Pavia, which had refused to acknowledge Conrad as king (1027), and a little later they made a furious assault under his command upon the little neighbouring city of Lodi, and forced its freedom-loving inhabitants to submit to Ariberto’s yoke and accept a bishop of his choosing. Thus Milan, impelled by the pride and ambition and necessity of expansion bred of strength and riches, was the first to provoke that spirit of hatred and revenge among the sister cities of Lombardy, which could only be expiated by centuries of bloodshed and sorrow.

But neither leader nor people had any doubt of the righteousness of their military enterprises, which were indeed invested with a sort of religious consecration. Ariberto instituted the use of a sacred Car in times of war, which bore aloft in the midst of the host the tokens of the Christian Covenant, the Cross and the Altar of Sacrifice, in sanctifying association with the Vexillum of the city. Round these emblems of their faith and of their existence as a community the citizen soldiers would rally, bearing the Car forward to victory with irresistible enthusiasm in moments of advantage, or defending it with despairing resolve when defeat threatened. Thus was originated the Caroccio, adopted afterwards by all the Communes of Italy—an exalted and beautiful idea, which, though often debased by association with enterprises of greed or revenge, became also the guide and inspiration of the Lombard peoples in their noble struggle for liberty in the succeeding centuries.

That struggle was already foreshadowed in Ariberto’s time. The pride of the Archbishop and the city which he governed soon came into violent contact with the will of the Emperor. Conrad resented the prelate’s increasing encroachment upon the royal prerogatives. Besides the sovereign right of making war, the Archbishop claimed the privilege of investing the bishops of his jurisdiction and the secular nobles also with their fiefs. His assumption of autocratic authority provoked a large party of the lesser nobles, who made an insurrection against him in 1036, and being defeated and driven out of the city, united with the aggrieved citizens of Lodi and broke into open warfare. A fierce battle was fought at Campo Malo, in which Ariberto appears to have been worsted. The Emperor, regarding the moment as favourable for asserting his authority, crossed the Alps (1037) to restore peace. But on arriving in Milan he did not find the humility and submission which he expected, and offended, or perhaps alarmed, by the haughtiness of the Prince Prelate and the excited temper of the populace, he retired to Pavia, and there summoned Ariberto to appear before a Diet, to answer the accusations of his enemies. The Archbishop obeyed, and without allowing him time for defence, Conrad commanded his arrest. He was carried to Piacenza and there kept in captivity. But Conrad had hardly reckoned with the power which lay behind his great vassal. Instead of accepting this chastisement with resignation, Milan broke into an uproar of lamentation at the news of her pastor’s imprisonment. With fastings, processions and litanies, with oblations, and benefactions to the poor, the pious citizens hoped to propitiate Heaven on his behalf, while the more worldly-minded sought to procure his rescue. At last, after two months, Ariberto himself found a means of escape with the aid of the Abbess of the great convent of San Sisto in Piacenza. This lady, at the request of a trusty servant whom the prelate managed to send to her, despatched to him twenty mules laden with divers kinds of delicate meats, and ten waggon loads of wine, out of the goodly stores of the convent. With these provisions Ariberto made a great feast for his Teuton guards, who soon stupefied themselves with the good wine. The Milanese chronicler Landolfo describes the scene—‘ ... They became beyond measure intoxicated—persisting in their potations until the middle of the night, and each one provoking his neighbour to drink more and more.... They began to quarrel and threaten one another with rolling eyes and terrible voices, and then to weep with thick tears pouring down their faces, and so drunk were they with the wine that they did not know what they were doing, and their limbs would not serve their office so that they fell down prostrate. The servants of Ariberto, seeing them in this plight, were immensely rejoiced, and carrying them away one by one, laid them out on well prepared couches as if they had been dead men....’ While the Teutons lay thus and ‘snored terribly,’ the prisoner slipped quietly off to the river Po hard by, where he found a ship, sent by the Abbess, in readiness for him. Into this he entered, and soon reached Milan in safety, while his guards, awaking, half stupid from their drunken slumbers, went seeking for him everywhere with hideous clamour.

The fugitive was soon followed by the irate Emperor, with a great army, and Milan was closely besieged. Mighty deeds of valour were performed on either side, according to the Milanese chroniclers. But all the efforts of the great Emperor and his hosts were unavailing against the city, defended by its ancient Roman walls and by an enormous population. After a few months he raised the siege, and endeavoured with equal futility to overthrow Ariberto by deposing him and setting up another archbishop. His persecution of Milan provoked, the chroniclers tell us, a signal manifestation of the Divine wrath, in the person of St. Ambrose himself, who appeared one day in the midst of terrible thunder and lightning as the Emperor was listening to the Mass, and caused such consternation among those present that many fell down dead. Thus, worsted by supernatural as well as earthly means, Conrad retired to Suabia in 1038, leaving the Archbishop master of the situation, and to all intents and purposes potentate of Lombardy.