Italy’s diversity was determined by its geography, its climate and its pattern of human settlement, all of which encouraged the growth of different cultures and customs. That diversity had been formed long before the Romans united the peninsula politically in the first century BC.
Mythology is also a part of that diversity. The family of Julius Caesar claimed it was descended from Aeneas, celebrated as the ancestor of the Roman people; in doing so it also added the goddess Venus, the mother of Aeneas, to the family tree. As Virgil recounts it in the Aeneid, this ancestor was a Trojan exile determined to follow his destiny despite the persecutions of gods and men and plagues and harpies. After spurning the love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, he sailed to Italy, killed the warrior Turnus and married Lavinia, his victim’s fiancée. He then united his victorious Trojans with the defeated Latin natives and became subsequently revered as the founder of the Roman race.
Some 400 years later, in the early eighth century BC, a descendant of Aeneas was raped by the god Mars. The twin products of this violation, Romulus and Remus, were removed by their maternal grandfather and abandoned on the banks of the Tiber. Suckled by a she-wolf and nursed by a shepherdess, they grew up and bickered over which one should found a city. When his brother started building on the Capitoline Hill, Remus mocked him by jumping over his meagre walls. An enraged Romulus reacted by killing him and carried on building, appealing to outcasts and vagabonds to come and populate his new town. Realizing his dream could have no future without women, he then organized the kidnapping of the young women of a neighbouring tribe, an abduction known as ‘the Rape of the Sabine Women’.
‘Wolf’s milk, exile and fratricide were an unusual ancestry’, as the historian Robin Lane Fox has observed.1 So, one might add, are a divine rape and a mass abduction, the latter episode acknowledged and recounted without embarrassment by descendants. The foundation myths of Rome are, obviously, just myths; so are Aeneas and Romulus. Yet they manage to tell us something about the city – and indeed the empire – that Rome later became. Romulus may have made his town an asylum for fugitives because he needed fighters, but later Romans also pursued hospitable policies on immigration and citizenship – to the amazement of the Greeks, who themselves refused to make citizens of freed slaves or former enemies. Such attitudes made it impossible to think of Romans as a race of their own. From the beginning their city was inhabited by Sabines, Albans and Etruscans as well as by Romulus and his outcasts. ‘Romanness’ was a political identity – and later a juridical term – but it had no racial connotation. You did not have to be born in Rome to be successful there. None of the great poets came from the city, and many of the emperors were born outside Italy.
In history, though not in myth, early Rome was ruled by several Etruscan kings, who were expelled at the end of the sixth century BC. In their place two Roman consuls were appointed to govern for one year at a time, and under them emerged a complex administrative structure of quaestors, praetors, censors, senators, aediles and tribunes. The early republic managed to produce a capable ruling class, its officials generally enjoying a reputation for high-mindedness and incorruptibility. All male citizens, including the ‘plebs’, had a vote in the assemblies that passed laws and elected officials, though in practice the voting was weighted in favour of the upper classes by a complicated system of block-voting. Besides, since elections had to take place in Rome, few of the poor outside the city turned up for the occasion. Nevertheless, by 69 BC there were nearly a million voters on the census, a suffrage numerically unsurpassed in any European country until the nineteenth century.
The proclaimed virtues of the Roman Republic are not ones that many later Italians have thought desirable to emulate. The senator Cato the Elder, who successfully urged the destruction of Carthage, prided himself on his parsimony and austerity; for him luxury and Greek culture were abominations. His brand of rigid morality was shared by compatriots who delighted in being regarded as hardy and resolute and who exulted in the qualities of gravitas, frugalitas, severitas and simplicitas. In many ways the traits of the early Romans seem, superficially at least, to be the opposite of those belonging to the Italians of later eras: military prowess, political stability and respect for the law, combined with a lack of artistic originality, commercial enterprise, individualism and charm. The rare shared attributes include building and engineering – and a civic pride in the achievement.
One characteristic prefigured in the legends of Aeneas and Romulus was militarism. Rome’s citizens were forced to serve in the army, and its consuls and other magistrates were ineligible for office until they had endured ten years of military service. Anyone in public life during the early republic was thus also a soldier. Historians used to claim that Rome was essentially a defensive power which became expansionist in circumstances not of its own deciding. Some of its conflicts that resulted in conquest may indeed have been forced upon it, but others, including all three of the Carthaginian Wars, were not. Inside the structure, innate and inbuilt, were a thirst to fight and a desire to dominate.
Within a span of only seventy years Rome transformed itself from middling city-state to supremacy in the Italian peninsula. In 338 BC the Romans defeated an alliance of Latin neighbours, Volscians and Campanians, and in 295 BC they reduced the Samnites and their coalition of Umbrians, Gauls and Etruscans. A few years later, they went south to the Greek cities, many of which welcomed them, before attacking recalcitrant Tarentum, which not even King Pyrrhus of Epirus, with his elephants and his pyrrhic victories, could save. By 272 BC they dominated Italy south of the Po but felt they needed something more: a few years later, they decided they needed an empire.
The wars within Italy seldom led to outright annexation. The defeated foes were usually absorbed within the Roman sphere by a system of treaties that turned them, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, into allies or socii. Rome’s chief requirement of its allies was a supply of troops, which they had to raise and pay for, in times of war. However reluctant they may sometimes have been, the allies remained loyal even at moments when disloyalty might have led to the destruction of Rome. The Carthaginian general Hannibal spent fifteen years in Italy, defeating the legions, trying to persuade the socii to join him and finally sulking in Calabria. Yet except for the one with Capua in Campania, the second-largest city in Italy, most of Rome’s alliances held, including all those with the Latin towns. In the north both the Ligurians and the Veneti remained faithful although they were the people most at risk when the Carthaginian army came over the Alps and was reinforced by Gallic tribesmen in the Po Valley.
The allies doubtless calculated that life under Rome was preferable to a future under north Africans and their uncouth Gallic associates. Yet there were advantages too in the relationship, including military aid in times of trouble. However brutal the Romans were in conquest and in retribution, they were often reasonable and lenient with their arrangements afterwards. In 381 BC they gave the Latin city of Tusculum all the privileges of Roman citizenship and allowed it to retain its government as well. Roman justice was not an oxymoron.
The favour the allies most desired was citizenship, the right to say in Cicero’s phrase civis romanus sum and thus feel protected against any high-handed behaviour from Roman officials. Yet most of them had to put up with lesser rights until the lifetime of Caesar. While the inhabitants of certain Latin cities were granted citizenship in the fourth century BC, others had to make do with ‘Latin status’ for another two and a half centuries. Latin rights, later extended through much of the peninsula, accorded certain privileges, mainly social and legal, such as the right of Latins to marry Romans and of their children to become citizens. By the time of Hannibal’s invasion towards the end of the third century, much of the peninsula enjoyed these rights. Thereafter the process stalled, and the goal of citizenship, which brought tax advantages as well as the right to stand for Roman office, remained elusive. In 122 BC, when Gaius Gracchus proposed giving Latins full citizenship, he was countered by people who claimed that in consequence there would be no room for Romans to attend games and festivals.2
For more than a century after Hannibal the resentments of the allies fermented: they had fought several wars for Rome and had received meagre consideration. Finally an explosion took place in 91 BC after the Senate had again rejected a proposal to extend citizenship. The ensuing Social War engulfed the peoples of the eastern centre, the Marsians and Picenes, and some in the south such as the Samnites and Lucanians; but it did not involve the colonies of Magna Graecia or the Etruscans and Umbrians in the north. The causes of the war are still disputed, historians traditionally claiming that the rebels were fighting for Roman citizenship while revisionist scholars argue that launching a savage war was an odd way of pursuing such a goal. According to the latter, the aim of the insurgents was quite the reverse: independence from Rome and a separate state called Italia.3 Both views seem to discount the possibility that the various allies might have had different motives, different goals and different emotions. Yet the apparatus of the infant state, with its consuls, capital and senate, suggests that a good many rebels did want independence; so does the numismatic evidence, the quickly minted coins stamped with the name Italia and its Oscan equivalent víteliú.
Rome won with a combination of military suppression and political inducement: the moderate rebels were literally disarmed by the grant of citizenship to those who laid down their arms. Citizenship was also awarded to the Latins and other socii, most of whom had again remained loyal, but those north of the Po received only Latin rights until Caesar turned them into full citizens in 49 BC. All free Italians then received Roman citizenship. Two hundred and fifty years later, the whole population of the empire was given the same privilege by the Emperor Caracalla, the psychopathic fratricide and builder of the eponymous baths in Rome. Yet by then citizenship had lost much of its meaning: citizens no longer retained their exemptions from taxation and they had long lost their right to vote.
The incorporation of the allies into the body politic took place during a century of intensive ‘Romanization’, a process that included the absorption of a great deal of Hellenic culture. Roman architecture burgeoned in the Italian cities, Roman villas became ubiquitous in the countryside, Latin vanquished Etruscan and the Italic languages, and municipalities and their officials followed the Roman model. The chief agent of the process was the army, marching along straight Roman roads, living in legionary camps and communicating in Latin. Its soldiers were also influential in retirement. Rome had long been placing settlements in strategic areas, especially the Po Valley, and it now constructed many more for the veterans of Pompey’s and Caesar’s huge armies.
In this, the last century before the birth of Christ, an idea of Italy did emerge, not the Italia of the Social War but the concept of a peaceful, united, Romanized Italy, a reconciliation of the peoples of the peninsula after centuries of warfare. A sense of harmony is projected by a coin depicting Roma in martial costume greeting Italia holding a cornucopia, roles and symbols that soon became familiar and persisted for centuries. In 1926, in commemoration of the 2,000th anniversary of his birth, the citizens of Mantua erected a big bronze statue of Virgil, their city’s most famous son, gesticulating in mid-piazza on a pedestal between marble statues representing Rome the ruler and Italy the mother. Mantua also has a much older statue, dating from the thirteenth century, which restricts Virgil’s role to that of seated scholar with his book; evidently the medieval mind had been undistracted by the idea of Italy.4
Virgil was the laureate of this Italia. Perhaps he may be considered the first Italian and, if so, maybe the last (except perhaps for Machiavelli) for another 1,800 years. Mantua is a northern city surrounded by water and flat land and cloaked in fog for an average of seventy-one days a year, so it is not surprising that the poet was enraptured by the quality of light and the sylvan landscape of central Italy and Naples. Fortunate was the man, wrote Virgil, who had ‘come to know the gods of the countryside, Pan and old Silvanus and the sisterhood of the nymphs’. Edward Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam identified the essential ingredients of a good picnic as bread, wine, a book of verses, the bough of a tree and a lover who can sing, but the Persian poet had been anticipated a millennium before by the Roman who recommended ‘elegant hampers’
to condiment
our meal with the delights of nature: a breeze
touched with some blossom, a pattern of clouds, birdsong,
and the babble of running water (in which wine jugs
lie, waiting like sleeping mistresses).5
Mantua became formally part of Roman Italy only during Virgil’s lifetime, so again it is easy to understand the poet’s enthusiasm for the idea of fusion. In the Aeneid he had Aeneas tell tragic Dido ‘italiam non sponte sequor’ – ‘[it is by divine will] not my own that I pursue Italy’ – and in the narrative he fused Greek, Trojan and Italic peoples to create a Roman ancestry. Earlier, in the Georgics, he had united Rome and Italy in a natural partnership beneficial to both: ‘the great mother of crops … the great mother of men’ uniting with the great capital of the world. As Richard Jenkyns has observed, the poet illustrated the idea by evoking the Umbrian river Clitumnus mingling with the Tiber and then jointly flowing to Rome.6 Virgil’s poetry was a powerful influence on Dante and Milton, and his depiction of the Italian countryside has had an enduring visual impact. When we look at a painting by Claude, we may see a mythical or biblical scene transposed to the Roman campagna, but we also see an enchanted pastoral landscape, a mellow arcadia in the evening light, which the artist conjured both from his reading of Virgil and from his observations in the countryside. The poet can hardly be blamed if he also inspired the shepherdesses of Dresden china or Marie-Antoinette’s petit hameau at Versailles.
Virgil’s laus italiae (‘praise of Italy’) had a political purpose too. Accepting that the country was a place of extraordinary variety, he believed its strength and destiny lay in ‘unity in diversity’. For him Roman Italy was not a glorified city-state but an entity that resembled a nation, a territory of shared values and experience. When he wrote of Actium, the naval action between the former allies Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus), he described the battle not as part of a Roman civil war (which it was) but as a struggle between Octavian’s Italians and their un-Roman oriental enemy personified by the decadent and sensuous Antony and his Egyptian lover, Cleopatra.
Augustus, who according to tradition preserved the Aeneid despite the dying wish of its author, was less lyrical about the idea of Italy. He used it for political ends, claiming that tota italia (‘all Italy’) had sworn an oath of allegiance and supported him in his war against Antony. But he did not put her on his coins or regard her as a nation. For him Italy was an administrative convenience not a cohesive unit, and when he divided it into eleven regions he was careful to preserve ethnic boundaries. Umbrians, Etruscans, Picenes and Ligurians each had their own regions; amalgamations of ethnic groups determined the shapes of all but two of the rest – Latins and Campanians, Sabines and Samnites, Lucanians and Bruttians.
Another man who had spoken of totius italiae – ‘the whole of Italy’ – was Cicero, the orator and statesman who after Caesar’s death had argued that Octavian must free Italy from the tyranny of the drunk and debauched Antony – an argument that may have been just but was certainly premature (Octavian and Antony were then about to become allies) and led to his murder a few months later. As a minor aristocrat from Arpinum and a politician in need of votes, Cicero had seen like Virgil the advantages of diversity. He appreciated the place of his birth, its ‘charming and health-giving’ landscape, and he adored Rome, where he lived in grandeur on the Palatine. Yet he did not think of Italia as a whole as his homeland or patria. When his friend Atticus asked if he had two home cities or a single homeland, Cicero replied that he, like everyone born outside Rome, had two homelands, one by birth and one by citizenship: while Arpinum was his ancestral fatherland, Rome was his homeland as a citizen. The orator was content with a double identity. Ennius, a poet from Apulia, proclaimed a triple one, declaring he had three hearts, Greek, Oscan and Latin. It was romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century – and its more sinister successors – that insisted on a single heart.
While citizens generally had patriotic ties both to Rome and to their native city, they seldom thought of the rest of Italy as their homeland. The poet Catullus may have felt at home in both Rome and Verona but would not have had emotional links with places in between, other towns founded by the Romans such as Piacenza (Placentia – the pleasing) or Florence (Florentia – the flourishing). This dual but limited sense of patriotism was a product of the treaties of alliance between Rome and the various Italic peoples. These had been bilateral deals between the dominant power and the subject cities; the Romans did not encourage or even permit similar accords between the cities themselves. Roman Italy was thus not a federation of Italic territories but a kind of radial unit in which the political spokes, like the roads, all led to the capital.
The Romans of the first century BC were not nationalists and never had been; apart from other considerations, much of their culture was foreign – Hellenic. Their Italy was essentially a land of city-states running themselves under the biggest city-state of all. The idea of Italy had its moment with Virgil and his fellow Augustans, but it was being superseded even at the time by imperial considerations. Rome transformed itself from city-state to empire so rapidly that there was no room for nationalism, no time for an ethnic Italian identity to emerge. In fact the Romans had chosen the imperial path long before they controlled the whole of Italy.
The crucial year was 260 BC, when they decided to build a navy from scratch with which to drive the Carthaginians out of Sicily. Since the Romans had no nautical traditions while the Carthaginians (and their Phoenician ancestors) had been sailing across the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, this was an audacious move that achieved an astonishing success: victory gave them not only their island goal but Corsica and Sardinia as well. Sicily soon became a classic case of imperial exploitation, an example to be imitated in other places by European empires more than 2,000 years later. It became peaceful and prosperous – its wheat yields were higher than in the twentieth century – and provided wealth and a reliable supply of grain for Rome. Cato described it as the ‘republic’s granary, the nurse at whose breast the Roman people is fed’.7 Most of the grain was produced by slave labour.
The second Carthaginian War, the war against Hannibal between 218 and 201 BC, gave Rome much of Iberia and control of the western Mediterranean. It was followed by two Macedonian Wars, which gave it Greece and supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean, and by the third Carthaginian War, which expunged Carthage from the earth and turned much of north Africa into a Roman province. Empire-building rather than nation-building was always the priority.
There is much for the modern sensibility to dislike about the Roman Empire, the crucifixions and the slavery, the gladiatorial contests, the corruption and degeneracy of its rulers. There can hardly be a human contrast starker than that between the great men of the republic – the Scipios, the Gracchi, the Catos, Cicero – and the collection of sadists, psychotics and delinquents – Caligula, Nero, Elagabalus and others – who formed so large a proportion of the imperial leadership. The Roman republicans became consuls after serving in the army and the government; the emperors’ path to power was littered with the bodies of their murdered relations. Nero’s victims included his first wife and his mother and perhaps his second wife also. Even the great Constantine – the first Christian emperor and the man responsible for the Roman Empire becoming a Christian state – ordered the killings of his second wife and his eldest son, the Deputy Emperor Crispus.
Yet the empire engendered prosperity, encouraged by free trade and a common currency, provided justice as well as law, and had a broadmindedness about race and class that modern Europe has only recently striven to emulate. Senior officials did not have to be aristocrats or Romans or even Italians. Two of the best emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, came from Iberia, and some of their successors were from Gaul, Thrace, Illyria, Syria, Arabia and north Africa. What Roman history we learn at school seems to consist of conquests and murders and barbarian invasions, but the Mediterranean world enjoyed a far greater degree of peace during the first, second and fourth centuries of the Roman Empire than at any time since. Unlike cities of the Middle Ages, Roman towns did not need to build vast defensive walls; those of the capital were unnecessary until the fifth century. For most of the first century AD the long north African coast required only a solitary legion to keep it quiet; in the same period Spain needed none at all. The age of Augustus, like the age of the Antonines in the second century, was largely peaceful and broadly thriving – certainly in comparison with the subsequent millennium. Edward Gibbon, writing in the 1770s, may have been right to identify the years AD 98–180 as ‘the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’.8
Unlike later imperialisms, the Roman Empire did not provoke quasi-nationalist feelings of resentment among subject peoples except in Judaea. There may have been ethnically coloured grievances in other places, such as Egypt and Britain, but the only sanguinary revolts – three of them – that might be regarded as nationalistic were Jewish. In the last one, in the 130s AD, Jewish rebels minted coins carrying such slogans as ‘freedom’, ‘redemption’ and ‘Jerusalem’.9 The man who suppressed this final revolt and turned Jerusalem into a Roman colony was Hadrian, in other respects among the most civilized of emperors. An Iberian hellenophile of Roman descent, this sagacious politician spent his reign travelling the provinces, reforming government and erecting many lovely buildings as well as his wall across Britain; a proponent of peace, he halted the expansion of the frontiers and even withdrew the legions from Mesopotamia (now Iraq). For him the empire was a commonwealth, beneficial to all free people inside it, and he could not understand who would want to resist the prevailing Graeco-Roman culture; perhaps that explains his ferocity towards the Jews. He was not, of course, the only Roman who failed to understand the rebellions in Judaea. Elsewhere proto-nationalism had never been an issue during the rise of Rome, the domination of Italy and the extension of empire. And it did not become one later on. The empire collapsed in the fifth century for many reasons, both internal and external, but nationalistic opposition to Roman hegemony was not one of them. The subject peoples were not fighting for liberation or self-determination. Most of them, like the British, who had valued the beata tranquillitas of Roman peace, wanted the empire to survive.
The great Italian historiographer Arnaldo Momigliano recounted that, when he wanted to understand Italian history, he caught a train and went to Ravenna. ‘There, between the tomb of Theodoric and that of Dante, in the reassuring neighbourhood of the best manuscript of Aristophanes and in the less reassuring one of the best portrait of the Empress Theodora’, he could begin to feel what Italian history had ‘really been’.
The presence of a foreign rule, the memory of an imperial pagan past, and the overwhelming force of the Catholic tradition have been three determining features of Italian history for many centuries. These three features first joined together when Ravenna became the capital of the Ostrogothic kingdom.10
It is an idiosyncratic passage but also an illuminating one so long as we remember that he was not really writing about ‘Italian history’ but about the history of what happened in the Italian peninsula. The Goths, Lombards and Franks of the old ‘Dark Ages’ were fighting not about Italy but for territory they wanted to conquer and settle. As for the Byzantines, foes of the first two barbarian invaders, they fought because they, the Roman imperialists of the east, were ambitious to recover for themselves the western imperial heritage.
Historians have an everlasting desire to overturn the verdicts of their predecessors, and it has become customary to claim that the ‘barbarian invasions’ of the late Roman Empire were neither barbarian nor invasions but migrations of not very aggressive Germanic peoples. Similarly, the Dark Ages are no longer seen as especially dark: if they were a sort of twilight in some areas, in others, such as the Ravenna of the mosaics, they were positively bright. In the endless debates between change and continuity – as if all history, even for the briefest period, is not a combination of the two – continuity in this instance is triumphant, except in Italy, where historians have a long memory of intruders and can recognize an invasion when they see one. Yet although the cities may have survived in a diminished state, along with certain aspects of Roman administration, civilization was altered throughout the western empire, and people became poorer. Archaeological evidence indicates that in Britain after the withdrawal of the legions economic life reverted not to the preceding Iron Age but to the Bronze Age before that: at the beginning of the fifth century the craft of pottery became extinct, and the technique of making it on a wheel was not retrieved for three centuries.11
As rulers, the barbarians – if such they were – started well. Little is known of the origins of Odoacer, who in 476 overthrew the last emperor of the west (a child called Romulus Augustulus), except that his father was a notable at the court of Attila, King of the Huns. Odoacer made himself king, governed largely in accordance with Roman practice, and resided in the emperor’s palace in Ravenna, which had been the imperial capital since the beginning of the century. Unfortunately he provoked the anger of the Byzantine emperor, Zeno, who persuaded Theodoric, chief of the Ostrogoths, to abandon his raids on the Balkans and instead invade Italy, where he would be permitted to make himself king as a vassal of Constantinople. Theodoric obliged with an invasion in 489, a long siege of Ravenna and the murder of Odoacer, his wife, his son and many of his followers.
The reign of the new king began with a bloodbath and ended soon after the execution of the philosopher Boethius, who wrote his celebrated De consolatione philosophiae while waiting in prison for his death. Yet for three decades in between Theodoric ruled wisely and peacefully. He insisted on religious tolerance, refusing to favour either side in the controversy over Arianism, the heresy which denied the full divinity of Christ, and he managed to dissuade his victorious Goths from bullying the Roman population. His was the last kingdom to extend over the whole of Italy for over 1,300 years, yet it was even more transient than other regimes of the age, disappearing shortly after his death and leaving little visible trace apart from his imposingly primitive mausoleum at Ravenna.
Theodoric had theoretically ruled Italy in the name of the Byzantine emperor on the Bosphorus, and it was one of Zeno’s successors, Justinian, who intervened again in Italy when Theodoric’s daughter was deposed and strangled by a cousin. The pretext was usurpation and murder, but the motive was the ambition of an emperor of the east to recover the empire of the west. Justinian ordered his general Belisarius to follow up his victories over the Sassanids in Persia and the Vandals in north Africa with an invasion of Sicily and the peninsula. The imperial army reached Ravenna in 540, thus making possible the creation of the great mosaic portrait which unsettled Momigliano: that of Justinian’s tough and capable wife, the Empress Theodora, robed in imperial purple in the octagonal church of San Vitale, a long distance from her past as an actress, a dancer and a single mother.
Sporadically suspicious of his general, Justinian recalled Belisarius a few years later and left the rest of the ‘reconquest’ to be completed by Narses and his other commanders. After a war that lasted nearly twenty years, an emperor once again controlled Italy, this time through the exarchate (or viceroyalty) of Ravenna. Although the Byzantines were in fact Greeks and were phasing out Latin, they called themselves rhomaioi (Greek for Roman) and continued to do so for centuries to come; no one called anyone or anything Byzantine (derived from Buzas, Constantinople’s first name) until the sixteenth century, after their empire had collapsed.12 They regarded themselves as the heirs of classical and Christian Rome and believed that they had reversed the process of decline. Yet the war had been costly for the empire and ruinous for Italy, destroying the prosperity preserved by Odoacer and Theodoric. The genius of Belisarius may have given the illusion of a genuine imperial revival, but the Byzantines were not rich enough, strong enough or popular enough to keep the whole of Italy.
In 568 Alboino, King of the Lombards, brought his Germanic people from the Danube Valley over the Julian Alps and into north-east Italy. Their advance was almost unopposed, and by the end of the following year they had captured all the cities north of the Po apart from Pavia, which they took in 572 and later made their capital. From there bands of Lombards ventured further south, eventually establishing independent duchies at Spoleto and at Benevento. Between the Lombard kingdom in the north and a reduced Roman-Byzantine exarchate in Ravenna, an uneasy coexistence survived for nearly 200 years, long enough for the heartlands of both to become permanently known as Lombardy and Romagna. Yet the Lombard king seldom exercised the far-flung authority of Theodoric. He was king of his own people (rex gentis langobardorum) not King of Italy, and wide areas of the south remained outside his control. Even in the Lombard areas he was frequently opposed by the dukes, not only of Spoleto and Benevento but also several others who governed the duchies or city-territories of the kingdom. So influential were these magnates that towards the end of the sixth century the Lombards experimented for a disastrous, anarchic decade with rule by dukes only.
Byzantine power began to crumble in the north and centre of the peninsula early in the eighth century. In 727 Ravenna rebelled against the Byzantine prohibition of icons and killed the exarch; a generation later, it fell to the Lombards, thus ending its three and a half centuries of glory as the capital of the Roman Empire, of the Ostrogothic kingdom and of Byzantine Italy. Yet in the south the Byzantine Empire held on for longer than the Lombards in the north and even managed to expand its territory: at the beginning of the eleventh century its dominions in Italy included Apulia, Lucania and Calabria, all of them under the ecclesiastical control of Constantinople rather than Rome. Byzantium had possessed Sicily too, and Syracuse, one of the greatest cities of the Mediterranean, had briefly been its capital in the seventh century; but Arab invaders from north Africa had subsequently conquered the island, and Taormina, the last toehold, had capitulated in 902. Muslim armies also succeeded in seizing several cities in Apulia and in establishing an emirate based in Bari in 841. They were eventually driven out by Christian forces, and Bari became the imperial headquarters in Italy for a further two centuries. But in 1071 the Byzantines suffered two defeats at the extremities of their empire, in the east by the Seljuk Turks and in the west by Norman knights, who captured Bari and went on to build themselves a sturdy kingdom in southern Italy.
Thus a great empire left the western stage, though the duchy of Venice remained within its orbit. Centuries later, Byzantium was condemned by Gibbon, Montesquieu and other writers of the Enlightenment as corrupt, deceitful, ineffective and tortuously bureaucratic; even the adjective Byzantine was used pejoratively, though the noun itself was later rehabilitated in the poetry of W. B. Yeats along with the sages and spirits of Constantinople. Yet it seems unfair to apply such insulting attributes to an empire that lasted a thousand years longer than its western partner and which was forced to expend much of its stamina resisting invasions of, among others, Persians, Huns, Bulgars, Goths, Lombards, Arabs, Normans, Venetians, crusaders, and both the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks. By resisting the Arab armies in the seventh and eighth centuries, Byzantium had preserved not only itself but also Christendom and the future of Christian Europe.13
Lombard kings were still expanding their territories in the middle of the eighth century, yet within a generation they had lost everything, including their crown. Pushing southwards down the peninsula, they alarmed the papacy which, since the exclusion of the Byzantines from central Italy, now controlled Rome and its hinterland. Pope Stephen II thus travelled to France, where he crowned the Frankish ruler, Pepin the Short, and in return received military help against the Lombards. He thereby inaugurated one tradition – of papal appeals for foreign help – which lasted till the nineteenth century, and another – of French invasions of Italy – which enjoyed an equally long history. Pepin twice brought an army into Italy to defeat the pope’s foes, but it was left to his son Charles, later known as Charlemagne, to descend upon Italy in 773, capture Pavia and sweep away the Lombard kingdom.
The following year Charles journeyed to Rome, where he received the title King of the Lombards to add to that of King of the Franks, and on a subsequent visit to the city he had his son, another Pepin, crowned King of Italy. He changed the name of the kingdom from regnum langobardorum to regnum italiae and he kept its administration separate from the rest of his empire. Yet he was less interested in Italy itself than in its role in his plan of renovatio imperii or ‘the empire renewed’. The goal of his long, obsessive career as a warrior, which included eighteen battles just against the Saxons, was the recovery of the western Roman Empire, of which he considered himself the heir; and he did indeed conquer much of it, with the exceptions of Britain, most of Iberia and the Byzantine parts of south Italy. On Christmas Day 800 he returned to Rome to be crowned Emperor of the Romans, a title which greatly annoyed the other emperor in Constantinople.
The alliance between the Franks and the papacy stimulated two potent ideas that crystallized into two extremely powerful institutions: the idea of a universal power, whose embodiment, the Holy Roman Empire, was only extinguished by Napoleon 1,000 years later, and the idea of territorial dominion of the popes, a reality that survived for even longer. Although the relationship may have been conceived in need and amity, it developed into a contest with fluctuating fortunes for both sides that ended only when the Emperor Charles V emerged victorious more than seven centuries later. This lengthy struggle was one of the determining factors in the saga of Italian disunity.
The papacy owed its rise to a number of audacious claims: that St Peter was Bishop of Rome (for which there is little evidence), that Jesus had given him primacy over his other apostles (which is debatable – the apostles seem to have been unaware of it), and that Peter’s successors – if they were his successors – had received divine authority for their claims to universal jurisdiction over the Church and to superiority over the monarchs of western Christendom. Fortune favoured pretensions to papal supremacy, especially after three rival patriarchates (Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria) came under Muslim rule in the seventh century, and a fourth (Constantinople) went into schism with the Roman Church in 1054. Yet while the pope’s claims to be the ‘Vicar of Christ’ might conceivably be supported by a zealous interpretation of the New Testament, no one pretended that Jesus had said anything about Peter and his successors becoming rulers of earthly states. A fresh act of audacity was thus required to justify the papacy’s temporal power.
In 754 the Frankish King Pepin had agreed to conquer and to give Pope Stephen territories in central Italy that had belonged to the exarchate of Ravenna. Known as the Donation of Pepin, the promise was confirmed and magnified (though largely unfulfilled) twenty years later by his son Charlemagne. Yet, as the Frankish kings had no rights in Italy at this time, it could be argued that their donations of former Byzantine land were invalid. An older and higher authority was needed, and thus the Donation of Constantine came into being, a document in which the formidable fourth-century Roman emperor, grateful for his recovery from leprosy, was supposed to have granted his papal contemporary temporal dominion as well as spiritual primacy over the Roman Empire of the west. Not until the Renaissance was this proved to be one of history’s most spectacular forgeries. By that time the document (the work of a papal cleric in the eighth century) had served its purpose of justifying the formation of the Papal States, a thick band of territory stretching from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian that kept the Italian peninsula divided until the second half of the nineteenth century. The popes expanded their territories from Rome and its environs – the so-called ‘Patrimony of St Peter’ – to include the duchies of Perugia, Spoleto and Benevento, the March of Ancona and finally the Romagna and parts of Emilia. In the process Christ’s differentiation between the realms of God and Caesar was forgotten; so was the sixth-century pope, Gregory the Great, who liked to be called ‘the servant of the servants of God’. No one would have considered a Renaissance pope the servant of anyone, even God.
The strident struggles between the popes and the Holy Roman Empire date from the eleventh century. Before then both papacy and government descended into ages so dark that not even revisionists have been able to illuminate them. The empire of Charlemagne was divided between his grandsons and then his great-grandsons, and the dynasty’s generally absentee rule in Italy petered out in the reigns of Charles the Bald (875–7) and Charles the Fat (880–7). The century closed with invasions by the Magyars from Hungary, who ravaged the north, and stability did not improve over the following sixty years. In the long history of Italian disunity these decades are in a league of their own, a period dominated by magnates claiming to be king – and sometimes emperor – fighting other equally implausible claimants. One index of anarchy and upheaval is the list of claimants who succeeded in becoming kings of Italy between 888 and 962: one Marquess of Friuli, two Dukes of Spoleto, one Duke of Carinthia, one King of Provence, one Duke of Burgundy, two Kings of Arles, two Marquesses of Ivrea and one King of Germany.
A certain stability, or at least consistency, returned to Italy in the middle of the tenth century when Otto, the Saxon King of Germany, claimed the throne of Italy through his wife Adelaide (the daughter, widow and jilter of three previous kings of Italy) and made himself King of the Lombards. Following Charlemagne’s example, he travelled to Rome in 962 and had the pope crown him emperor, thus inaugurating three centuries of rule over Italy by three dynasties of German emperors – Saxon, Salian and Swabian (usually known as Hohenstaufen) – with brief interludes supplied by members of the Welf and Supplinburger families. The gallery consisted of one Lothair, two Fredericks, three Conrads, four Ottos and seven Henrys.
The rulers styled themselves rex romanorum et semper augustus (‘king of the Romans and ever emperor’), and the coronations that their realms required indicate both the complexity of their roles and the difficulty in fulfilling separate duties as kings of Germany, kings of Italy and Holy Roman emperors. After being elected by the German princes, they were crowned kings of Germany at Charlemagne’s beloved Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) and became then also known as kings of the Romans. Later they crossed the Alps to receive the iron crown of the Lombards at Pavia, Monza or Milan. The last stage of the process was the journey to Rome, where they were crowned emperors by the pope.
The German Empire stretched from the Baltic and the North Sea to the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian. Such a distance, with a lot of mountains in between, forced emperors to spend long periods on the road. An emperor might be in Italy, quarrelling with the pope over ecclesiastical appointments, when an outbreak of civil war in Germany made him hurry northwards; after settling that crisis, he might have to scuttle back across the Alps to confront the rebellious cities of Lombardy or go even further south to deal with a military threat from Byzantium or the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Even so, emperors managed to find time for outside interests such as campaigning in Poland and participating in four of the Crusades. A predictable consequence of such frenetic activity was the neglect of Italy.
The emperors had their judicial and fiscal institutions in Italy; they also had their supporters among the magnates and bishops, whom they relied on for the administration of the cities. Yet the absence of their overlord enfeebled the institutions and the bishops and encouraged magnates to do what they liked to do anyway: plot and switch allegiances. Such a structure was ill-equipped to administer the new Italy of the eleventh century, in which agricultural wealth, the expansion of trade and a rise in population were transforming societies and economies. The growth and prosperity of the cities gave their citizens the desire and self-confidence to run the affairs of their own communes.* Unwilling to accept that they should remain loyal to an absentee foreigner with doubtful rights of sovereignty, they were soon electing their own leaders, running their own courts and raising their own militias. The emperors, distracted by incessant wars in Germany, made concessions that left the communes virtually autonomous. By the late eleventh century their rule over the Lombard and Tuscan cities had become almost nominal.
Frederick Barbarossa (Redbeard), the Duke of Swabia who became emperor in 1155, was determined to reverse the drift. A relentless warrior, with grandiose notions of his rights and his dignity, he later became renowned as a symbol of Teutonic unity, a hero to German romantics and an inspiration for Adolf Hitler, who code-named his invasion of Russia ‘Operation Barbarossa’. He regarded the Ottos as successors to the Caesars and himself as successor to the Ottos. As he claimed his position to be equivalent to that of Augustus, he considered the kings of France and England to be inferior rulers. As for Italy, he was intent on reclaiming the so-called ‘regalian rights’ which lawyers in Bologna conveniently assured him he possessed. These included the rights to appoint officials in the cities, to receive taxes on fish and salt and to collect money from tolls and customs. He wanted the cash and was determined to get it; he also enjoyed the prestige acquired from the submission of others.
The defiance of Milan, the largest Italian city, inspired Barbarossa to invade Italy, which he did half a dozen times. His pretext – and perhaps it was a little more than a pretext – was that he was coming to the rescue of those pro-imperial towns, such as Como and Lodi, which earlier in the century had been devastated by the Milanese. He captured Milan in 1162 and destroyed it. He also obliterated the town of Crema, one of its allies, after besieging it with exceptional brutality: hostages from Crema were tied to the front of his siege towers so that the defendants could not avoid hitting their relatives and fellow citizens with arrows.
Barbarossa’s actions led to the foundation of the Lombard League, formed by sixteen cities in 1167 to defend themselves against his imperial armies. An early confrontation was avoided, however, when more urgent matters forced the emperor to return to Germany, and he did not come back at the head of a new army for several years. Despite the defection of a couple of cities, the League won a great victory against him in 1176 at Legnano near Milan, its infantry forcing Barbarossa’s German cavalry from the field. It was a historic moment for the peninsula, perhaps the most united moment between the death of Theodoric and the creation of modern Italy. When patriots of the nineteenth century scoured their history for heroic events to depict, Legnano was a popular choice for literature and painting; it also inspired one of Verdi’s least memorable operas, La battaglia di Legnano, in which the chorus opens the evening with the words
Long live Italy! A holy pact
binds all her sons together.
At last it has made of so many
a single people of heroes!
Unfurl the banners in the field,
unconquered Lombard League!
And may a shiver freeze the bones
of fierce Barbarossa.14
His humiliating defeat forced Barbarossa to negotiate, and at the Treaty of Constance in 1183 he conceded the rights of the communes to elect their own leaders, make their own laws and administer their own territories. Concessions made by his opponents were nominal or unimportant: among them were an oath of allegiance and a promise to give a sum of money to future emperors as they proceeded to Rome for their coronations. As the historian Giuliano Procacci noted, ‘the communes recognized the overall sovereignty of the emperor, but kept the sovereign rights they held’.15 Barbarossa died seven years later, drowned in an Anatolian river on his way to join the Third Crusade, but his Italian ambitions lived on in the person of his grandson, the Emperor Frederick II, who made equally futile attempts to cow the cities of northern Italy.
The wars between Barbarossa and the communes were part of a longer and wider struggle between the Holy Roman emperor and the papacy, which had supported the Lombard League. As with so many conflicts on Italian soil, this one thus became internationalized, several popes calling in German and French princes to assist their cause. Competing factions in the Italian communes soon acquired labels of bewildering foreign origin. Papal supporters were known as Guelphs, called after the Bavarian Welf family that produced Otto IV, briefly an emperor in the early thirteenth century, as well as, later and less relevantly, the Hanoverian kings of Great Britain. Their opponents, the pro-imperial Ghibellines, took their appellation from an even more obscure source, the Salian and later Hohenstaufen town of Waiblingen, a name sometimes used to denote members of the house of Swabia. In their endless medieval struggles, however, Italian Guelphs and Ghibellines were motivated far more by local factors than by remote loyalties to popes and German emperors.
When Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, it was clear that the Franks, who had rescued the papacy from the Lombards, were the senior partners in the alliance. Yet Leo’s successors tried to reverse the roles by claiming the right to choose who would be emperor. By the eleventh century they were insisting that the emperors acknowledge they received their thrones from the pope, who, as Christ’s vicar on earth, was the highest authority in Christendom. Power was involved along with pride and prestige. Gregory VII, pope (1073–85) and later saint, insisted that only he had the right to invest the clergy with abbeys, bishoprics and other ecclesiastical offices: secular rulers who disobeyed him were excommunicated. The Emperor Henry IV, who planned to continue the policy of his father (Henry III) of appointing and dismissing popes as well as bishops, reacted by deposing Gregory and calling him ‘a false monk’. In retaliation the pope excommunicated the emperor and encouraged his subjects to rebel. Alarmed by threats to his rule in Germany, a contrite Henry then apologized to the pope, waiting for three days in the snow outside the castle of Canossa until Gregory finally absolved him from excommunication. Within three years, however, they were again at odds, and Henry was deposed and excommunicated once more. This time he responded by seizing Rome and setting up an anti-pope who crowned him emperor, but he was soon expelled by the real pope’s Norman allies, who burned much of the city. The feud between Henry and Gregory was not a unique one: these medieval centuries abound with examples of emperors dethroning popes and of popes deposing and excommunicating emperors as well as other monarchs.
Another ingredient in the dispute between pope and emperor was the status of the Norman kingdom of Sicily. The south of Italy was already very different from the north, more rural and feudal, more ethnically varied, its life determined by the Mediterranean and its peoples in a way unknown to the cities of the Po Valley with their ties to Europe beyond the Alps. Under authoritarian rulers, who liked to direct the economy themselves, and living uncomfortably beside a feudal baronage, the towns had little chance to prosper as their counterparts could do further north; the few that had recently flourished, such as the port of Amalfi with its merchants in Egypt and on the Bosphorus, soon withered. Like the north, the south had its Romans, Lombards and Franks, but it also contained large numbers of Byzantine Greeks and Muslim Arabs as well as a significant Jewish minority. This multicultural, multi-confessional amalgam was unexpectedly welded into a kingdom by a small band of knights from Normandy whose descendants ruled it, flamboyantly and on the whole successfully, for nearly 200 years.
Norman adventurers, seeking work as mercenary soldiers, had begun arriving in the south early in the eleventh century. Pope Benedict VIII hired some of them to fight the Byzantines in Apulia, and before long a few of the knights, notably the remarkable Hauteville brothers, were receiving lands from grateful employers. Fearing that these Normans were becoming too strong, a later pope led an army against them but was defeated and taken prisoner by one of the five Hautevilles, Robert Guiscard, in 1053. Making the best of it, the papacy agreed soon afterwards that, in return for recognizing papal sovereignty over the south, Robert Guiscard could call himself ‘Duke of Apulia and Calabria and future Duke of Sicily’. The adjective ‘future’ soon became redundant when the new duke, assisted by his equally talented younger brother Roger, advanced down Calabria and invaded Sicily in 1061. Thereafter, Robert Guiscard concentrated on conquering the mainland north, capturing Bari and ending Byzantine rule there in 1071, while Roger (later known as ‘the Great Count’) overcame the Arabs of Sicily, taking Palermo in 1072 and completing his conquest of the island in 1090. After the deaths of the two brothers, the Great Count’s son, another Roger, united the Hauteville territories and, following the capture of another pope, was recognized as Roger II, King of Sicily.
The new king was one of the finest rulers of the Middle Ages, a broadminded and farsighted man of wide culture and much administrative ability. He refused to join the Second Crusade because religious toleration was fundamental to his rule, and he insisted that the laws and customs of the peoples of his kingdom should be respected. Fluent in Greek and Arabic, he presided over the most intellectual and cosmopolitan court in Europe, and the architecture he loved – a blend of Saracen, Norman and Byzantine – is still visible in Palermo, in the Palatine chapel with its mosaics and in the red domes of the church of San Giovanni degli Eremiti. He returned Sicily to the prosperity and influence it had not enjoyed since the days of the ancient Greeks – and to which it would not return again. He made of the Mediterranean’s largest island a microcosm of what the sea might be but very rarely is, a space where cultures, creeds and peoples meet in a climate of mutual tolerance and respect.
The popes treated the Normans much as they treated the emperors: cajoling and pleading when they needed them, fighting and trying to depose them when they did not. Robert Guiscard and Roger II both suffered excommunication. When the Hautevilles and the Hohenstaufen (Barbarossa’s family) became dynastically united in 1186, the hostility became almost permanent. Roger was succeeded by his son William I, another talented and successful Hauteville, unjustly known by his foes among the barons as William the Bad, and by his grandson, William II, called ‘the Good’ because he was more lenient to those perennially annoying subjects. Since Barbarossa after Legnano was no longer a threat to Italy, the second William decided to marry his aunt Constance to the emperor’s heir, the future Henry VI; as his own marriage was childless, a son of this union might thus add the crown of Sicily to the titles of King of Germany, King of Italy and Holy Roman emperor. The prospect of an emperor ruling lands both north and south of the expanding papal states naturally alarmed Pope Celestine III, who first promoted a rival claimant (an Hauteville bastard) to the Sicilian throne and then tried to thwart Henry’s plan to have his son Frederick elected King of Germany. He failed when Frederick was chosen by the electors at the age of two in 1196, but the deaths of the boy’s parents before he was four, together with Constance’s choice of the next pope (Innocent III) as her son’s guardian, postponed an inevitable struggle.
The infant became the charismatic Frederick II, a monarch whose cultural range makes his fellow rulers of the period seem brutal, boorish and philistine in comparison. Hailed as stupor mundi (‘the amazement of the world’), he was lauded in his time as a linguist, law-giver, builder, soldier, administrator and scientist; as an ornithologist he wrote a masterly book on falconry and dismissed the notion that barnacle geese were hatched from barnacles in the sea – an example of deductive reasoning rather than observation because he had no opportunity of studying the breeding habits of the geese inside the Arctic Circle. Yet the adulation, like the appellation, was excessive. The comparison with contemporary kings may stand, but he was not as wise a ruler or as cultured a man as his maternal grandfather, Roger II. He was justly famous as a champion of religious tolerance, yet his skills as a builder, architect and linguist have been exaggerated. In any case, whatever his talents, he failed to solve the three great inherited problems of his position: relations with the papacy, relations with the Lombard cities, and the relationship between Sicily and the empire.
Frederick antagonized the papacy early in his reign by crowning his baby son King of Sicily and, a few years later, making sure he was elected King of Germany. When he himself was crowned emperor in 1220, at the age of twenty-five, he assured the papacy that the crowns would remain legally separated. Yet the assurance did not convince a subsequent pope, Gregory IX, once a friend of St Francis and St Dominic but now a dogmatic and irascible leader of the Church. In 1227 he excommunicated Frederick after an outbreak of plague had forced the emperor to abandon a crusade; when the expedition was resumed a year later, the pope was so enraged that an excommunicant was leading it that he launched an invasion of Sicily while its king and his army were away campaigning triumphantly for Christendom. Frederick soon returned from the Holy Land, where he had crowned himself King of Jerusalem, defeated the papal armies and forced Gregory to come to terms and absolve him from excommunication.
The truce between the two men lasted for almost a decade after 1230, but the pope did not relinquish his ambitions to remove the Hohenstaufen from Sicily and to promote a new dynasty for the empire. Frederick’s invasion of Sardinia in 1239 gave him a pretext to excommunicate the emperor once again and build alliances with the pro-Guelph cities of the north. Gregory died in 1241, yet his vendetta was continued, with matching vindictiveness, by a successor, Innocent IV, who deposed Frederick, called him a precursor of the anti-Christ and urged the German electors to supply a new emperor.
Stupor mundi may have been unlucky in his relations with the papacy but he was unwise in his dealings with the Lombard cities. Claiming that northern Italy legally belonged to him, he was determined to succeed where Barbarossa, his paternal grandfather, had failed. In 1226 he summoned an imperial assembly to Cremona, most loyal of Ghibelline towns, and announced his intention ‘to restore regalian rights’. His ambitions predictably led to a revival of the Lombard League, and most of the Po Valley cities banded together to resist him for the last quarter-century of his life. Frederick defeated the League at the Battle of Cortenuova in 1237 but then overplayed his hand by demanding an unconditional surrender, which the cities refused to give him; the following year he was humiliated by his failure to capture Brescia after a lengthy siege. Despite military successes in 1240–41, when he captured parts of the Papal States, and in 1246, when he suppressed a rebellion in the south, the campaigns achieved nothing durable. Even more humiliating than Brescia was the siege of Parma in 1248, when the apparently beleaguered garrison unexpectedly stole out of the town and ransacked Frederick’s camp while he was out hunting.
The emperor died in 1250 and, after the brief reign of his son Conrad, his southern territories were claimed by his bastard child Manfred. Another talented descendant of the Hautevilles, Manfred was a poet, a scientist and a diplomat wiser than his father in his dealings with northern Italy. Yet Frederick’s death had not halted the papacy’s efforts to eliminate the house of Hohenstaufen and to find a new monarch for the kingdom of Sicily. In 1266, after the entreaties of several popes, Charles of Anjou, a brother of the French king, victoriously invaded: Manfred was killed in battle, and the last male Hohenstaufen, Conrad’s teenage son Conradin, was executed.
Charles made himself unpopular in Sicily, chiefly by transferring his capital from Palermo to Naples, and he was ejected by the islanders following the uprising in 1282 known as the Sicilian Vespers. In his place the throne was offered to King Peter of Aragon, whose wife was a daughter of Manfred. Peter’s acceptance and reign may have given some solace to supporters of the Hohenstaufen, but Aragonese rule presaged the long decline of the island. Already cut off from north Africa and the Arab world, it was now detached from France and Italy, although over the centuries the southern mainland – known as ‘continental Sicily’ – was from time to time reunited with island Sicily to be called eventually the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Yet from the end of the thirteenth century the island was effectively an outpost of Spain, tied torpidly to Iberia for over 400 years. Like Sardinia, it received viceroys but little attention from its Hispanic rulers.
Frederick’s rule had resulted in the extinction of his dynasty and the impoverishment of Sicily, which had to pay for his wars. Another casualty was the idea of uniting Italy under a single ruler, which is what he wanted and which no one tried to make a reality again for another six centuries. The beneficiaries of his failure were the cities of Tuscany and the north, which could now pursue their cultural and communal development – as well as their local rivalries – without much external interference. The defeat of a cultured monarch of the south thus led to a cultural efflorescence of the north.