POLITICAL HISTORY OF ITALY

Although it would be an unusually complex task to summarize the history of Italy, one of the chief features of that history is readily identified – the persistent lack of political unity. This is explained partly by the geography of the peninsula, divided into discrete regions by the chain of the Apennine Mountains, and partly by the political situation that obtained as the Roman Empire broke apart. Like other tribes before them, such as the Ostrogoths under Theoderic, the Lombards invaded Italy in the mid-sixth century, and they succeeded in conquering most of it; the only lands remaining in the hands of the Eastern (or Byzantine) Empire were Venice, the territory between Rome and Ravenna, Naples, and the far south. Even those lands under Lombard rule were far from constituting a political unit; rather, they were a series of independent duchies. Then, in the second half of the eighth century, the Pope, by now a temporal no less than a spiritual lord, summoned the Franks to aid against the Lombards, and so the Franks for a short while controlled most of the peninsula.

For more than a millennium afterwards, Italy continued to be a shifting patchwork of small political units. A crude but perhaps helpful picture of the fragmented situation can be formed by surveying the different groups.

In the central-northern area were the papal lands, extending from Rome north towards Bologna and southeast across the plain of Latium.