Kingdom of Italy (Holy Roman Empire)
The Kingdom of Italy, also called Imperial Italy, was one of the constituent kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire, along with the kingdoms of Germany, Bohemia, and Burgundy. It originally comprised large parts of northern and central Italy. Its original capital was Pavia until the 11th century.
Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and the brief rule of Odoacer, Italy was ruled by the Ostrogoths and later the Lombards. In 773, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, crossed the Alps and invaded the Lombard kingdom, which encompassed all of Italy except the Duchy of Rome, the Republic of Venice and the Byzantine possessions in the south. In June 774, the kingdom collapsed and the Franks became masters of northern Italy. The southern areas remained under Lombard control, as the Duchy of Benevento was changed into the independent Principality of Benevento. Charlemagne called himself king of the Lombards and in 800 was crowned emperor in Rome. Members of the Carolingian dynasty continued to rule Italy until the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887, after which they once briefly regained the throne in 894–896.
In 951, King Otto I of Germany, already married to Queen Adelaide of Italy, invaded the kingdom and proclaimed himself king. Otto defeated the previous king and conquered Pavia in 961, and then continued on to Rome, where he had himself crowned emperor in 962. The union of the crowns of Italy and Germany with that of the so-called "Empire of the Romans" proved stable. Burgundy was added to this union in 1032, and by the twelfth century the term "Holy Roman Empire" had come into use to describe it. The emperor was usually also king of Italy and Germany, although emperors sometimes appointed their heirs to rule in Italy and occasionally the Italian bishops and noblemen elected a king of their own in opposition to that of Germany. The absenteeism of the Italian monarch led to the rapid disappearance of a central government in the High Middle Ages, but the idea that Italy was a kingdom within the Empire remained and emperors frequently sought to impose their will on the evolving Italian city-states. The resulting wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the anti-imperialist and imperialist factions, respectively, were characteristic of Italian politics in the 12th–14th centuries. The Lombard League was the most famous example of this situation; though not a declared separatist movement, it openly challenged the emperor's claim to power.
The century between the Humiliation of Canossa and the Treaty of Venice of 1177 resulted in the formation of city states independent of the Germanic emperor. A series of wars in Lombardy from 1423 to 1454 reduced the number of competing states. The next forty years were relatively peaceful in Italy, but in 1494 the peninsula was invaded by France.
After the Imperial Reform of 1495–1512, the Italian kingdom corresponded to the unencircled territories south of the Alps. Juridically the emperor maintained an interest in them as nominal king and overlord, but the "government" of the kingdom consisted of little more than the plenipotentiaries the emperor appointed to represent him and those governors he appointed to rule his own Italian states. The 250 to 300 lesser feudal lords of the Reichsitalien nonetheless frequently appealed to the imperial courts and jurisdiction to settle conflicts with the prominent princes.
The Habsburg rule in several parts of Italy continued in various forms but came to an end with the campaigns of the French Revolutionaries in 1792–1797, when a series of sister republics were set up with local support by Napoleon and then united into the Italian Republic under his presidency. In 1805 the Italian Republic became the Kingdom of Italy with Napoleon as the new king. This state was disbanded with the collapse of Napoleonic rule in 1814.
The modern Italian region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol and part of Friuli-Venezia Giulia were also located in the Empire, but were not part of the Kingdom of Italy.
Lombard Kingdom
After the Battle of Taginae, in which the Ostrogoth king Totila was killed, the Byzantine general Narses captured Rome and besieged Cumae. Teia, the new Ostrogothic king, gathered the remnants of the Ostrogothic army and marched to relieve the siege, but in October 552 Narses ambushed him at Mons Lactarius in Campania, near Mount Vesuvius and Nuceria Alfaterna. The battle lasted two days and Teia was killed in the fighting. Ostrogothic power in Italy was eliminated, but according to Roman historian Procopius of Caesarea, Narses allowed the Ostrogothic population and their Rugian allies to live peacefully in Italy under Roman sovereignty. The absence of any real authority in Italy immediately after the battle led to an invasion by the Franks and Alemanni, but they too were defeated in the Battle of the Volturnus and the peninsula was, for a short time, reintegrated into the empire.File:Iron Crown.JPG|thumb|left|The so-called Iron Crown of Lombardy, a votive crown from the Monza Cathedral said to contain a nail of the Passion, became a symbol of Lombard rule over Italy during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period. It was for centuries a symbol of the Kings of Italy
The Kings of the Lombards ruled those Germanic people from their invasion of Italy in 567–68 until the Lombardic identity became lost in the ninth and tenth centuries. After 568, the Lombard kings sometimes styled themselves Kings of Italy.
The actual control of the sovereigns of both the major areas that constitute the kingdom – Langobardia Major in the centre-north and Langobardia Minor in the centre-south, was not constant during the two centuries of life of the kingdom. An initial phase of strong autonomy of the many constituent duchies developed over time with growing regal authority, even if the dukes' desires for autonomy were never fully achieved.
The Lombard kingdom proved to be more stable than its Ostrogothic predecessor, but in 774, on the pretext of defending the Papacy, it was conquered by the Franks under Charlemagne.
Carolingian Kingdom of Italy
After the conquest of Lombard Kingdom in 774, Charlemagne was crowned as Lombard king, thus establishing a distinctive polity in his Italian possessions, within the wider Carolingian Empire. Already in 781, his young son Pepin was also crowned as Lombard king and designated to rule the Italian realm. King Pepin died in 810, and his son Bernard became the new Lombard king, governing the Italian realm until 817, when he was deposed by his uncle, emperor Louis the Pious. The Italian realm passed to Louis′ son Lothair I, who was also the co-emperor and emperor. Under the Treaty of Verdun, Carolingian Italy became part of the Middle Frankish Kingdom, ruled by emperor Lothair I.The death of the Emperor Lothair I in 855 led to his realm of Middle Francia being split among his three sons, under the Treaty of Prüm. The eldest, Louis II, inherited the imperial crown, and rule over the Carolingian Italy. His realm included all of Carolingian possessions in northern and central Italy, as far south as Rome and Spoleto, but the rest of Italy to the south was under the rule of the Lombard Principality of Benevento, or the Byzantine Empire.
Following Louis II's death without male heirs, both the imperial crown and rule over the Italian realm was disputed among the Carolingian rulers of West Francia and East Francia, with first the western king and then the eastern claimants attaining the prize.
Post-Carolingian Kingdom of Italy
Following the deposition and death of emperor Charles the Fat, local nobles such as Berengar of Friuli, and his opponents Guy of Spoleto and Lambert of Spoleto, disputed over the Lombard crown and rule in the Italian realm, and outside intervention did not cease, with Arnulf of Eastern Francia and later Louis of Provence both claiming the Imperial throne and rule over Italy, while other contestants for the Lombard crown and consequent rulers of the Italian realm also were Rudolph II of Burgundy, Hugh of Arles and his son Lothair II, and their opponent Berengar II.During that period, Italy was also beset by Arab raiding parties from Sicily and North Africa, while central royal authority was frequently challenged. Order was finally imposed from outside, when the German king Otto I invaded Italy and seized both the Italian and Imperial thrones for himself in 961-962.
Imperial Italy
In 951, King Otto I of Germany married Adelaide of Burgundy, the widow of late King Lothair II of Italy. Otto was proclaimed king of Italy at Pavia despite his rival Margrave Berengar of Ivrea. In 952, March of Verona was annexed by the Duchy of Bavaria and remained part of the Kingdom of Germany until its disintegration. When in 960 Berengar attacked the Papal States, King Otto, summoned by Pope John XII, conquered the Italian kingdom and on 2 February 962 had himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor at Rome. From that time on, the Kings of Italy were always also Kings of Germany, and Italy thus became a constituent kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire, along with the Kingdom of Germany and – from 1032 – Burgundy. The German king would theoretically be crowned in Pavia as a prelude to the visit to Rome to be crowned Emperor by the Pope.File:San Michele crop.JPG|thumb|San Michele Maggiore, Pavia, where almost all the kings of Italy were crowned up to Frederick Barbarossa.
In general, the monarch was an absentee, spending most of his time in Germany and leaving the Kingdom of Italy with little central authority. There was also a lack of powerful landed magnates – the only notable one being the Margraviate of Tuscany, which had wide lands in Tuscany, Lombardy, and the Emilia, but which failed due to lack of heirs after the death of Matilda of Canossa in 1115. This left a power vacuum – increasingly filled by the Papacy and by the bishops, as well as by the increasingly wealthy Italian cities, which gradually came to dominate the surrounding countryside. Upon the death of Emperor Otto III in 1002, one of late Berengar's successors, Margrave Arduin of Ivrea, even succeeded in assuming the Italian crown and in defeating the Imperial forces under Duke Otto I of Carinthia. 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. Arduin ranks as the last domestic "King of Italy" before the accession of Victor Emmanuel II in 1861.
Henry's Salian successor Conrad II tried to confirm his dominion against Archbishop Aribert of Milan and other Italian aristocrats. 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. While Conrad stabilised his rule, however, the Imperial supremacy in Italy remained contested.