In any case he was slaughtered by the Romans in 928 and his brother
the Pope was thrust into prison to die or be murdered without much
delay.
the Pope was thrust into prison to die or be murdered without much
delay.
Cambridge Medieval History - v3 - Germany and the Western Empire
MED.
H.
VOL.
III.
CH, VI.
10
## p. 146 (#192) ############################################
146
Independence of great vassals
a
6
8
control was quite illusory. Rodolph III, in his latter years, hardly ever
so much as shewed himself outside the districts bounded by the valleys
of the Saône and the Doubs and between the Jura and the upper course
of the Rhône. The greater part of the lords, shutting themselves up
within their own domains, made a show of ignoring the king's authority,
or else merely deferred their revolt because, knowing the king near
at hand, they might fear being constrained by him. “O king! ” ex-
claimed the Chancellor Wipo to Henry III a few years later, “ Bur-
gundy demands thee; arise and come quickly. When the master tarries
long absent, the fidelity of new subjects is apt to waver. The old
proverb is profoundly true 'Out of sight, out of mind. ' Although
Burgundy is now, thanks to thee, at peace, she desires to view in thy
person the author of this peace and to feast her eyes upon the counten-
ance of her king. Appear, and let thy presence bring back serenity to
this kingdom. Formerly, thou didst with difficulty subdue it; profit
now by its readiness to serve thee. ”
As a matter of fact, Burgundy could spare her king very well,
and the efforts made by Henry III to render his government in these
parts a little more effective were to be unavailing. Despite his frequent
visits, and the attempts that he made to reduce to obedience his rebel-
lious vassals, notably the Counts of Burgundy and Genevois, Henry III
accomplished nothing lasting. On his death (1056), his widow, the
Empress Agnes, tried as fruitlessly to restore the royal power by sending
Rudolf of Rheinfelden, Duke of Swabia, to represent her in the kingdom.
Later on, Henry IV, when he had attained his majority, and after him
Henry V in his struggle with the Papacy, met with hardly anything but
indifference or hostility in Burgundy as a whole. Henry V's successor,
Lothar of Supplinburg, himself supplies the proof of the purely
nominal character of his authority in these distant provinces, when, on
summoning the lords of Burgundy and Provence to join an expedition
which he was preparing for Italy, he exclaims: “At sundry times we
have written to you to demand the tribute of your homage and sub-
mission. But you paid no heed, thus emphasizing in an indecorous
manner your contempt for our supreme power. We intend to labour
henceforward to restore in your country our authority, which has been
so much diminished among you as to be almost completely forgotten. . . .
Thus we command you to appear at Piacenza, on the Feast of
St Michael, with your contingent of armed men. '
This summons was to produce no result. The Emperors tried by every
means to make their power a reality. Following the example of the
Empress Agnes, who had sent Rudolf of Rheinfelden to represent her,
Lothar of Supplinburg, and afterwards Frederick Barbarossa were to
try the experiment of delegating their authority to various princes
of the Swiss house of Zähringen whom they appointed “rectors” or
viceroys. This rectorate, soon to be called the Duchy of Burgundia
## p. 147 (#193) ############################################
Later history
147
Minor (lesser Burgundy), was, however, only effective to the east of the
Jura, that is, practically over modern Switzerland, and it disappeared in
1217 on the extinction of the elder line of Zähringen. In 1215
Frederick II was to try a return to the same policy, making choice of
William of Baux, Prince of Orange, then in 1220 of William, Marquess
of Montferrat; from 1237 onwards, he was to be represented by im-
perial vicars. We shall see the Emperors make an appearance, in an
intermittent fashion, in the kingdom and sometimes seeming to re-possess
themselves of a more or less real authority in this or that district.
Frederick Barbarossa, in particular, after his marriage with Beatrice,
the heiress of the county of Burgundy, will appear as unquestioned
master in the diocese of Besançon, and be crowned king of Arles in
1178; Frederick II will for a time recover a real power of action in
Provence and the Lyonnais; and again in the fourteenth century,
Henry VII, strong in the support of the princes of Savoy, will rally to
his standard large numbers of the nobles of the kingdom. Charles IV
will characteristically go through the empty form of coronation in 1365,
But these will be isolated exceptions, leading to nothing.
Incapable of enforcing their authority, the Emperors, from the latter
part of the twelfth century onwards, more than once will even meditate
restoring the kingdom of Arles, as it is now most frequently called, to
its former independence,' reserving the right to exact from its new king
the recognition of their suzerainty. Henry VI will offer it to his prisoner,
Richard Cæur de Lion in 1193 ; Philip of Swabia to his competitor,
Otto of Brunswick in 1207; Rudolf of Habsburg will consider en-
trusting it in 1274 to a prince of his family, and later on to an Angevin
prince, an idea to be revived by Henry VII in 1310.
But all these efforts prove vain. For long centuries the kingdom of
Arles remains in theory attached to the Empire, but little by little, this
kingdom, over which the German sovereigns could never secure effective
control, will crumble to pieces in their hands. Out of its eastern
portion the Swiss confederation and the duchy of Savoy will be formed ;
the kings of France, in the course of the fourteenth century, will succeed
in regaining their authority over the Vivarais, the Lyonnais, the Valen-
tinois and Diois, and Dauphiné, successively. To these, a century later,
will be added Provence, which had already been long in French hands.
CH. VI.
10_2
## p. 148 (#194) ############################################
148
CHAPTER VII.
ITALY IN THE TENTH CENTURY.
The death of the Emperor Lambert in October 898 dealt a blow to
the royal power in North Italy, the Regnum Italicum of the tenth century.
In place of the born ruler, who had mastered his own vassals and made
himself protector of the Papacy, there succeeded Berengar, mild and
cheatable. Berengar, too, was weak in resources. His own domains lay
awkwardly in the extreme north-east, in Friuli and the modern Veneto, not
like Lambert's in the centre; and he had not like Lambert the support
of a large group of the great nobles and bishops who formed the real
source of power in Italy. Two magnates in especial were equally faith-
less and formidable, Adalbert the Rich, Marquess of Tuscany, in the
centre, and Adalbert, Marquess of Ivrea, on the western frontier. In vain
did Berengar marry his daughter Gisela to Adalbert of Ivrea and give
the Tuscan his freedom from the prison to which Lambert had consigned
him for revolt. A plot was hatching, when disaster befel king and
kingdom.
Already in 898 the Hungarians, or Magyars', had raided the present
Veneto from their newly-won settlements on the river Theiss. In 899 a
larger swarm made its way from Aquileia to Pavia. Berengar, always a
gallant warrior, strove to rise to the occasion. From the whole Regnum
Italicum his vassals came to the number of 15,000 men-at-arms. Before
them the outnumbered Magyars fled back, but were overtaken at the
river Brenta. Their horses were worn out, they could not escape,
and the
tradition, perhaps influenced by a sense of tragedy, tells of their proffers
refused by the haughty Christians. Yet on 24 September they surprised
their heedless foes and scattered them with fearful slaughter. For nearly
a year the Lombard plain lay at their mercy, though few fortified cities
were taken and they did not cross the Apennines. Amid his faithless
vassals, with his land desolated, Berengar submitted to pay blackmail,
which at least kept the Magyars his friends if it did not save Lombardy
from occasional incursions. The only mitigation of the calamity was
the defeat of the Hungarians on the water when in 900 they assaulted
Venice under her doge Pietro Tribuno.
i See Vol. 1. Chapter xu. (A).
## p. 149 (#195) ############################################
Berengar I and Louis III
149
a
Berengar had lost men, wealth and prestige, he was too clearly
profitless for his subjects, and the death at Hungarian hands of many
bishops and counts left the greatest magnates greater than ever. The
plot against him, already begun, gathered strength. It was headed by
Adalbert II the Rich of Tuscany, whose wife Bertha, the widow of a Pro-
vençal count, was daughter of Lothar II of Lorraine and thus grand-
daughter of the Emperor Lothar I; and its object was to restore
Lothar I's line to Italy in the person of Louis of Provence, grandson of
the Emperor Louis II. The Spoletan party, the Empress Ageltrude, and
Pope John IX, the old partisan of Lambert, were, it seems, won to the
plan, and the hand of the Byzantine princess Anna, daughter of Leo VI,
was obtained for the pretender. When Louis came to Italy in Sep-
tember 900, Berengar, faced by a general defection, could only retreat
beyond the Mincio, while his rival, surrounded by the magnates, pro-
ceeded to Rome to receive the imperial crown in February 901 from the
new Pope Benedict IV. But Louis had no great capacity, and the
magnates were fickle of set purpose, for, says the chronicler Liudprand
in a classic passage, they preferred two kings to play off one against the
other. In 902 a counter-change was brought about. Berengar advanced
to Pavia, and Loạis, who had been unable to get away quickly enough,
was allowed to withdraw on taking an oath never to return. Within
three years (905), however, Bertha once more tempted her kinsman to
invade Italy. He was to be furnished, perhaps, with a Byzantine subsidy'.
Once more Berengar fled east, this time to Bavaria, for Adalard, Bishop
of Verona, his chief stronghold, called in his rival. Louis heedlessly
thought himself secure and was surprised and captured (21 July) by
Berengar to whom the Veronese citizens, though not their bishop, were
always loyal. No risks were taken by the victor, and Louis was sent
back to Provence blind and helpless. By an atrocity unlike his usual
dealings Berengar at last secured an undisputed throne. Real control .
over great nobles and bishops he was never to obtain.
While the Regnum Italicum lay invertebrate in the hands of the
magnates, South Italy was even more disordered and tormented. For
sixty years the land had suffered from the intolerable scourge of Saracen
ravages. While a robber colony, established almost impregnably on the
river Garigliano, spread desolation in the heart of Italy over the Terra
di Lavoro and the Roman Campagna, the true base of the Muslims lay
in Sicily. There the mixed Berber and Arab population, who had
swarmed in under the Aghlabid dynasty of ķairawān, were on the point
of completing the conquest of the Christian and Greek eastern portion of
>
At least the Pseudo-Symeon Magister states (Ann. Leon. Basil. fil. cap. 14) that
the eunuch Rhodophylus in 904 was taking 100 lbs. of gold “to the Franks. ”
But
the other narrators, e. g. John Cameniates, De excidio Thessalonicae, cap. 59, state that
this sum was for the Byzantine army then fighting “the Africans," and in any case
it was diverted to ransom the walls of Thessalonica from destruction by the Moslems.
CH. VII.
## p. 150 (#196) ############################################
150
South Italy and the Saracens
the island, and the brief cessation of their direct raids on the mainland
which began c. 889 did not last long.
Subdivision and intestine wars for independence and predominance
paralysed South Italy in its struggle against the Saracens. The greatest
power there was the Byzantine Empire, after Basil I and his general
Nicephorus Phocas had revived its power in the West. Two themes
were set up in Italy, each under its strutegos or general', that of
Longobardia with its capital at Bari which included Apulia and Lucania
from the river Trigno on the Adriatic to the Gulf of Taranto, and that
of Calabria with its capital at Reggio which represented the vanished
theme of Sicily. These detached and frontier provinces, usually scantily
supplied with troops and money owing to the greater needs of the core
of the Empire, were beset with difficulties occasioned by the hostility of
the Italians to the corrupt and foreign Greek officials. The Lombard
subjects in Apulia were actively or potentially disloyal; and a long strip
of debateable land formed the western part of the Longobardic theme,
which was always claimed by the Lombard principality of Benevento, its
ancient possessor. Then there were the native Italian states, all con-
sidered as its vassals by Byzantium in spite of the competing pretensions
of the Western Empire. Three of these, Gaeta, Naples and Amalfi,
were coast towns, never conquered by the Lombards, and, like Venice,
had long enjoyed a complete autonomy without formally denying their
allegiance to East Rome. They were all now monarchies, all trading,
and all inclined to ally with the Saracens, who were at once their
customers and their principal dread. The three remaining states were
Lombard, the principalities of Benevento and Salerno and the county
of Capua. The prince of Salerno acknowledged Byzantine suzerainty.
Benevento had been conquered by the Greeks in 891, only to be
recovered by the native dynasty under the auspices of the Spoletan
Emperors of the West, and then conquered by Atenolf I of Capua in
899. This union of Capua and Benevento was the beginning of some
kind of order in a troubled land, hitherto torn by the struggle of furious
competitors.
It was the Saracen plague, however, which at length brought the
petty states to act together. If the invasion of Calabria by the half-mad
Aghlabid Ibrāhīm who had conquered Taormina, the last Byzantine
stronghold of Sicily, and threatened to destroy in his holy war Rome
itself, “ the city of the dotard Peter,” ended in his death before Cosenza
in 902, and civil wars distracted Sicily till she submitted to the new
Fatimite Caliphate at ķairawān; the Moslems of the Garigliano still
ate like an ulcer into the land. The countryside was depopulated, the
great abbeys, Monte Cassino, Farfa, Subiaco and Volturno, were destroyed
and deserted. At last the warring Christians were so dismayed as to be
reconciled, and Atenolf of Capua turned to the one strong power which
1 See for the system of themes Vol. iv. and its maps.
а
ท
## p. 151 (#197) ############################################
Victory of the Garigliano
151
could intervene and professed himself a Byzantine vassal. Help was long
in coming when a warrior Pope stepped in to consolidate and enlarge
the Christian league.
Rome had undergone strange vicissitudes since the death of Emperor
Lambert, but they had had a clear outcome, the victory of the land-
owning barbarised aristocracy over the bureaucratic priestly elements of
the Curia. After the death of Benedict IV (903) the revolutions of
a year brought to the papal throne its old claimant, the fierce anti-
Formosan Sergius III (904–11), over two imprisoned and perhaps
murdered predecessors. Sergius owed his victory to “Frankish” help,
possibly that of Adalbert the Rich of Tuscany, but he was also the ally
of the strongest Roman faction. Theophylact, vesterarius of the Sacred
Palace and Senator of the Romans, was the founder of a dynasty. He
was chief of the Roman nobles; to his wife, the Senatrix Theodora,
tradition attributed both the influence of an Empress Ageltrude and,
without real ground, the vices of a Messalina; his daughter Marozia was
only too probably the mistress of Pope Sergius and by him the mother
of a future Pontiff, John XI, and finally married the new Marquess of
Spoleto, the adventurer Alberic. The power of these and of other great
ladies, which is a characteristic of the tenth century, and sometimes their
vices, too, won for them the hatred of opposing factions whose virulent
report of them has fixed the name of the “ Pornocracy” on the debased
papal government of that unhallowed day. Two inconspicuous successors
of Sergius III were followed, doubtless through Theophylact's and Theo-
dora's choice, by the elevation of the Archbishop of Ravenna to the
papal see as John X (914-28). This much-hated pontiff, who like
Formosus had been translated to the indignation of the strict canonists,
was no mere instrument in his maker's hands. He at once took the lead
in the war with the Saracens. The Byzantine regent Zoë was sending
a new strategos, the patrician Nicholas Picingli, with reinforcements to
Bari. From the south Picingli marched in 915 up to Campania, adding the
troops of Atenolf's successor at Capua, Landolf I, and of Guaimar of
Salerno to his army. Even the rulers of the sea-ports, Gaeta and
Naples, appeared in his camp decorated with Byzantine titles. From
the north came Pope John and his Romans accompanied by the Spoletan
levies under Marquess Alberic. A Byzantine fleet occupied the mouth
of the Garigliano, and after a three months' blockade the starving Saracens
burst out to be hunted down by the victors among the mountains.
This decisive victory began an era of revival in Southern Italy.
Though Calabria and even Apulia remained open to Saracen raids, which
recommenced when the Fatimite Caliph Mahdi conquered Sicily in 917;
though from c. 922 onwards Hungarian bands now and again worked
their way south; a comparative security was restored. The deserted
champaign could be slowly repopulated, the monasteries could claim
once more their ravaged possessions and, as the century wore on, be
a
CH. VII.
## p. 152 (#198) ############################################
152
Anarchy of North Italy
rebuilt. Not a little of this wanly dawning prosperity was due to the
stability which was at last acquired by the princely houses. The rulers
of Capua-Benevento, Salerno and the rest reigned long and transmitted
an assured, if not unharassed, dominion to their heirs. Their thriving
was soon shewn in hostility to their Byzantine suzerain. Picingli's
victory had not ameliorated the government of the Italian themes.
Calabria, the Greek character of which was being accentuated by the
inrush of refugees from Sicily, might only be restive at exactions due to
blackmail paid to the Fatimite Caliph for respite from his subjects'
raids; but the Lombards, who were predominant in Apulia, hankered for
autonomy, and in spite of bribes in cash and titles, were inclined to side
with the aggressive prince of Capua. Landolf I took advantage of the
Apulians' discontent and the weakness of the strategoi, with their in-
sufficient means and their coast harried by Saracen and Slav pirates. In
concert with Guaimar II of Salerno and the Marquess Theobald I of
Spoleto he overran c. 927 the greater part of Longobardia and held it
some seven years. Not till the Eastern Empire could ally with a strong
a
king of the Regnum Italicum was it possible to oust Landolf and his
allies.
The strong king was long in coming. Berengar indeed received in
December 915 the imperial crown from John X, in disregard of Louis the
Blind's rights, perhaps in reward for his concurrence in Alberic's assistance
at the Garigliano, perhaps to counterbalance the then dangerous might
of the Eastern Emperor in the south. But Berengar was no whit more
powerful thereby. Hungarian raids still occurred and a more persistent
enemy began to trouble western Lombardy. At the close of the ninth
century bands of Saracen pirates coming from Spain had established
themselves in a fortified settlement on the coast of Provence, on the Golfe
du St Tropez, called Fraxinetum, the name of which is preserved in Garde-
Freinet. Thence, as their numbers grew, they conducted terrible raids
on the surrounding territory. Provence was the worst sufferer, but, since
the Saracens made the Alps their favourite plundering centre, Italy too
was a victim. The Alpine valleys were desolated, the great roadside
abbeys, such as Novalesa, were destroyed. Bands of pilgrims to the
graves of the Apostles at Rome were robbed and massacred, till the
intercourse of Italy with the north-west was in danger of ceasing. Here
again the magnates fought in isolation when only a combined effort could
root out the evil. Berengar seems to have done nothing, perhaps he
could do nothing, but his discredit naturally increased.
The fickle magnates meanwhile were looking out for another rival
king. Bertha of Tuscany, whose husband Adalbert II was dead, again
worked for the restoration of the line of Lothar I and brought in her
son by her first marriage, Hugh, Duke of Provence, who ruled his native
country during Louis the Blind's incapacity. This first attempt failed
(c. 920) and then a group of northern magnates headed by Adalbert of
## p. 153 (#199) ############################################
Rodolph II and Hugh of Provence
153
Ivrea, now husband of Bertha's Tuscan daughter Ermingarde, invited
Rodolph II, King of Jurane Burgundy. The accustomed tragicomedy
followed. Rodolph came in 922 and was recognised north of the
Apennines, while Berengar held out in Verona and won infamy by
letting in his Hungarian allies who this time penetrated to Campania.
Next year the rivals fought one of the rare pitched battles of the time
at Fiorenzuola near Piacenza where Berengar had the worse and the death
of 1500 men depleted the scanty ranks of the kingdom's military caste.
Thenceforth Berengar vegetated, seemingly under truce, at Verona till his
murder by one of his vassals on 7 April 924. He had watched, rather than
caused, the anarchy of the realm, just as his lavish grants to the prelates
registered rather than caused the cessation of a central government.
Rodolph was not more fortunate. He had two kingdoms, and while
he was in Burgundy the Magyars laid Lombardy waste. They burnt
Pavia itself in 924 and only left Italy to pass over the Alps and be
exterminated by pestilence in Languedoc. The hopes of the house of
Lothar revived. Adalbert of Ivrea was dead, and his widow Ermingarde
joined with her brother Guido of Tuscany and Lampert, Archbishop of
Milan, in calling in once more her half-brother Hugh of Provence. In
925 they revolted, twice repelled Rodolph's efforts at reconquest, and on
6 July 926 elevated Hugh to the throne. In him a strong king had coine.
Hugh, wily and voluptuous, had his domains and vassals in Provence
behind him and a group of magnates in his favour in Italy. He set
himself to increase the latter by endowing his Provençal kindred. One
nephew, Theobald I, was given the march of Spoleto, another, Manasse,
Archbishop of Arles, was later put in charge of three sees in commendam.
A Provençal immigration set in to the disgust of the Italian nobles.
Hugh, who no more than his contemporaries ventured to reconstitute
the ancient royal government or to recall the alienations of revenue and
administrative functions, did succeed in making the great vassals, as
well as the bishops, his nominees.
To be crowned Emperor was the natural goal of Hugh's ambition.
Without the protectorate over the Papacy an Italian king had but a
maimed dominion in central Italy, and to a mere protection of the
Papacy the functions of the Emperor had been reduced since the time
of Lambert. Indeed it seems that Hugh came into Italy with the
Pope's approval and struck a bargain with him at Mantua in 926.
John X was in a dangerous plight. Theophylact was dead, Marquess
Alberic was dead, their daughter and widow, the sinister Marozia, led
their Roman faction, and had become hostile to the self-willed Pope.
If John X probably strengthened himself by obtaining the Spoletan
march, which Alberic had held, for his own brother Peter, perhaps in
return for Berengar l's coronation, Marozia gained far more power by
her marriage to Marquess Guido of Tuscany. In the faction-fighting
Marquess Peter was driven from Rome c. 927, but a terrible Hungarian
>
CH. VII.
## p. 154 (#200) ############################################
154
Alberic of Rome
way thus
raid which lacerated Italy from Friuli to Campania enabled him to re-
enter the city. Tradition charged on him an alliance with the raiders.
In any case he was slaughtered by the Romans in 928 and his brother
the Pope was thrust into prison to die or be murdered without much
delay. Marozia now was supreme: “Rome was subdued by might under
a woman's hand,” says the wrathful local chronicler! . Two Popes, so
shadowy that they were forgotten in a few years, wore the tiara in turn
till in 931 she raised her own son, probably by Sergius III, to the
pontificate as John XI. But Marozia was weakened by the death of
Guido and looked around her for a potent consort. She found one in
Guido's half-brother, Hugh of Italy, then a widower. King Hugh may
a
have been baffled in his original scheme of becoming Emperor by the
fall of John X; he had also been drawn off by the Hungarians and a
revolt at Pavia. Now, however, he was so firm on his throne as to
secure the election of his boy son Lothar II as co-regent. His contract
with Marozia is the ugliest episode of the time. He feared his half-
brother Marquess Lambert of Tuscany, himself a descendant of Lothar I
and a possible rival; and he could not marry his half-brother Guido's
widow. Therefore he seized and blinded Lambert, and announced that
his two half-brothers were not true sons of Bertha. With the
cleared he entered Rome in 932 and married Marozia. But the senatrix
and her husband miscalculated and did no more than garrison the castle
of Sant' Angelo. Before Hugh was crowned the Romans rose against
the hated Burgundian foreigner. Their leader was Marozia's own son
Alberic, whom she had borne to Alberic of Spoleto, a youth who knew
Hugh's treatment of inconvenient relatives. Sant'Angelo was besieged
and taken, and although Hugh made his escape Marozia and John XI
were imprisoned. Of Marozia no more is said.
The rule of Alberic marks the open and complete triumph of the
Roman landed aristocracy over the bureaucratic clerical government of
the Papacy. His state resembled the city monarchies of Naples or
Gaeta. On him as “prince and senator of all the Romans”
ferred, it seems by popular election, the exercise of the Pope's secular
power in Rome and its duchy. Though the act was revolutionary and
ultra vires, no denial of the Pope's sovereignty was made. It was enough
that John XI and his four successors were docile instruments of the
prince. Perhaps Alberic dreamed of further change, of reviving a
miniature Western Empire, for he tried to win a Byzantine bride, and,
even when baffled, surnamed his son Octavian. “His face was bright
like his father's and he had old-time worth. For he was exceedingly
terrible, and his yoke was heavy on the Romans and on the holy
Apostolic See? . ” His stern domination seems to have been a blessing to
a
Rome and its duchy, which he secured, while King Hugh about 938 seized
on Ravenna and the Pentapolis which had indeed been ruled by the
1 Benedict. S. Andreae, c. 30.
; Ibid. c. 32.
was con-
## p. 155 (#201) ############################################
Hugh's alliance with Byzantium
155
a
Italian emperors since the days of Guy (Guido). The turbulent Roman
)
nobles and his own treacherous kindred were kept in order, the submissive
churchmen protected by a pious usurper who favoured monastic reform
and was the friend of St Odo of Cluny. It was all Alberic could do,
however, to maintain himself against the persistent efforts of King Hugh
to conquer Rome. A first siege of the city in 933 was a failure, a second
in 936 ended in a treaty by which Alberic married Hugh's legitimate
daughter Alda. This pacification did not last, although negotiated by
St Odo, and in 941 Hugh by bribes and warfare was so successful as just
to enter Rome. Somehow he was expelled, "by the hidden judgement
of God” according to our only narrator? . Yet he would not give up the
war until 946 when he had become a king under tutelage. Alberic
thenceforth ruled unchallenged till his death in August 954.
Hugh and Alberic had been rival suitors for the alliance of the
Eastern Emperor Romanus I Lecapenus, and in 935 Hugh had won the
prize, partly through the pressure he could exercise in the south, partly
no doubt through an eligibility to which the isolated prince of the
Romans could lay no claim. Hugh, by calling off Theobald I of
Spoleto, enabled the Byzantines to recover the lost districts of Apulia,
and eventually the alliance was sealed by the marriage of Hugh's illegiti-
mate daughter to a Byzantine prince, the future Emperor Romanus II.
The two powers suffered in common from the Hungarians and Saracens.
Against the Magyars little was done save to pay blackmail, although
in 938 some raiding bands as they retreated from Campania, were ex-
terminated by the Abruzzans. Common action was, however, attempted
against the Saracens of Fraxinetum, who, besides their formidable
brigandage on the West Alpine passes, raided even as far as Swabia
and by sea must have troubled the Byzantines. In 931 the Greeks
attacked them and, landing at Fraxinetum, made a slaughter, while it
may be that at the same time Hugh's vassals revenged the destruction
of Acqui by cutting to pieces the Saracen raiders and occupying for a
moment the passes? But no permanent result was obtained. Rather
the ravage of the Fraxinetan Saracens grew worse, and in 935 the
Fatimites sent a fleet from Africa which stormed Genoa. At last
Hugh and Romanus I were roused to a joint campaign. In 942 a
Byzantine fleet burnt the Saracens' ships with Greek fire, and blockaded
Fraxinetum by sea, while Hugh with his army invested it by land. The
Saracens could have been rooted out, when Hugh made a treaty with
them : they were to hold the Swabian passes against any attempted
invasion by Hugh's exiled nephew Berengar of Ivrea. Perhaps Italy
was somewhat spared in consequence, but the Alps continued the scene
of their brigandage.
1 Liudprand, Antapodosis, v. 3.
? So we can reconstruct from Flodoard an. 931 and Liudprand, Antapodosis, iv. 4,
which may well refer to the same year.
а.
CH. VII.
## p. 156 (#202) ############################################
156
Relations with Burgundy and Germany
The fear of invasion had been with Hugh since the beginning of his
reign, and in his western policy it was obscurely entangled with his
desire to retain Provence. He evidently wished to consider the kingdom
of Provence as annexed to his Italian crown after the death of the
Emperor Louis the Blind in 928, but in spite of his wide lands and
numerous relatives there he could not obtain recognition as sovereign.
King Raoul of France also nourished ambitions to rule on the Rhone,
and it may be that Hugh hoped to block his way, as well as to buy
off an invasion threatened by Rodolph II of Jurane Burgundy, when
c. 931 he made, on the evidence of Liudprand, a treaty with Rodolph II
by which there was ceded to Rodolph II “all the territory Hugh had
held in Gaul before he became king of Italy. " We may doubt whether
this ineffective treaty referred to more than one or two districts; in any
case Rodolph II lost them again, and his death in 937 opened out a new
prospect? . Hugh contrived to marry Rodolph II's widow Bertha hiinself
and to betroth Rodolph's daughter Adelaide to his own son Lothar II.
Though the rights of Rodolph's young son Conrad were not disputed,
Hugh probably hoped to be the real ruler of Jurane Burgundy, when a
greater competitor appeared on the scene.
The German princes had by no means abandoned hopes of Italian
conquest since the Emperor Arnulf's death, although the internal troubles
of Germany, seconded by Hugh's gifts and embassies, precluded a royal
campaign. Duke Burchard of Swabia had aided his son-in-law Rodolph II;
in 934 Duke Arnulf of Bavaria suffered defeat in an invasion of the
Veneto. But now the German king, Otto the Great, was strong; he
was determined to secure his south-western frontier, and perhaps already
dreamed of reasserting Arnulf's position and taking the imperial crown.
In some way he gained possession of young Conrad and controlled the
government of Jurane Burgundy. All that Hugh seems to have kept
was the Valley of Aosta, and his lands in Provence.
The perpetual danger of an invasion was increased by the readiness
of the magnates to call in a foreign king at any discontent. Although
national consciousness was present in Italy, and in a strongly localized
form was marked in Rome, the great vassals were still as their ancestors
of the ninth century had been, members of the mainly Frankish noble
houses which were scattered and endowed throughout Charlemagne's
Empire. In Italy they were mostly new-comers, only Italian in their
objection to fresh magnates from beyond the Alps. Hugh's safety, on the
other hand, lay in the introduction of new men from Provence, his kins-
men and allies, which he could the more readily effect as the magnates he
found in possession had struck but short roots since the days of the Emperor
Guy. Even so he could not much depend on his nominees; the instinct
and the opportunity for feudal turbulence were too strong. Among the
bishops the saintly Frank, Ratheri of Verona, had to be deposed for
1 See Previté-Orton, Italy and Provence, EHR, 1917, p. 335.
## p. 157 (#203) ############################################
Fall of King Hugh
157
adherence to Duke Arnulf's invasion. In central Italy he could root out
the ancient dynasts, but could not implant loyalty to himself. On
Lambert's deposition he had given the march of Tuscany to his full
brother Boso, once a count in Provence, who in turn vanished in his
prisons in 936. Soon after Theobald I of Spoleto died and was replaced
by Anscar, son of Adalbert of Ivrea and Hugh's half-sister Ermingarde
of Tuscany. This was such a risky appointment in view of the wrongs
which Hugh had done to Ermingarde's family that the chronicler Liud-
prand explains it as intended to remove Anscar from his powerful friends
in the north. In any case rumour said that the king stirred up against
the new Marquess of Spoleto a Provençal, Sarlio, Count of the Palace,
who had married Theobald I's widow. In 940 Anscar was slain in battle,
and Hugh then turned on Sarlio whom he forced to take the cowl. The
king by now seemed to be finding surer instruments in his own bastard
children, of whom the eldest Hubert, Marquess of Tuscany in 936, Marquess
of Spoleto and Count of the Palace c. 942, kept a firm hand on central
Italy, while others were designed for ecclesiastical preferments.
Hugh's astute perfidy alarmed the Italian nobles more and more and
especially their greatest remaining chief, Anscari's half-brother, Berengar,
Marquess of Ivrea. Everything conspired to make Berengar dangerous
and alarmed. He was heir through his mother of the Emperor Berengar I,
his wife Willa was daughter of the fallen Boso of Tuscany, his march of
Ivrea gave him command of the western gates of the kingdom, and its
extent and Anscari's fate pointed him out as Hugh’s next destined victim.
The story goes that Hugh intended to seize and blind him, but that the
Marquess was forewarned by the young co-regent Lothar II, and with
his wife fled to Duke Herman of Swabia by whom they were con-
ducted to the German king, Otto the Great. Otto, while he did not
actively assist the exile, would not give him up in spite of the redoubled
presents of King Hugh, and Berengar was able to plot with the mal-
contents of Italy for a rebellion. In the meantime Hugh, feeling his
throne shake under him, made feverish efforts to recover his vassals'
loyalty. Berengar's great domains were distributed among leading
nobles: the counts Ardoin Glabrio of Turin, Otbert and Aleram are
henceforward in the first rank of magnates ; and an unusual number of
royal diplomas were issued in 943. But Saracen and Hungarian maraud-
ing did not increase Hugh's hold on his subjects. It is clear that besides
lay plotters the great prelates and his own kin were ready to revolt.
When Berengar saw the time was come, in the mid-winter of 944–5, he
made his venture over the Brenner towards Verona, the Count of which,
Milo, an old adherent of Berengar I, was in his favour. The decisive
moment came when Manasse of Arles, who was in charge of the frontier
bishopric of Trent, deserted his uncle. A general defection was headed
by Archbishop Arderic of Milan, and Hugh at Pavia could do nothing
better than send in April the unhated Lothar II to Milan to appeal to
CH. VII.
## p. 158 (#204) ############################################
158
Berengar II
the rebels. The assembly was moved and declared the youth sole king,
but, when Hugh tried to escape to Provence with his treasure, Berengar
in fear of a new invasion had him intercepted and reinstated in August
as nominal joint king. In this humiliating position Hugh remained till
April 947 when somehow he gained leave to abdicate and retire to
Provence with the treasure with which he still hoped to engineer a fresh
invasion. But he died on 10 April 948.
Meanwhile Berengar was ruling, in the name of Lothar II, as “chief
councillor of the realm. " He seems to have done his best to promote
his clerical partisans, but his main reliance was on his fellow magnates.
Although no doubt he recovered much of his own domains, he was
evidently obliged to buy support by consenting to alienations like that
of Turin to Ardoin Glabrio. Even Hubert was left unmolested in
Tuscany, if a new Marquess was appointed to Spoleto. How little
Berengar was master of the kingdom was shewn when he nominated
Manasse of Arles to the see of Milan. The Milanese townsmen elected
a rival Adalman, Manasse obtained adherents in the countryside, and
the two competitors fought for five years without decisive result. It
was, however, in foreign affairs that Berengar's weakness was most
obvious. Hugh had been in relations with all his neighbours, Berengar
shrank into isolation ; Byzantium neglected him, Provence submitted to
Conrad of Jurane Burgundy, the protégé of Otto the Great, Germany
loomed ever more formidably in the north, the Hungarians under their
chief Taxis proved in 947 by ravages which reached Apulia that Italy
was no better defended than before. Weakness and the greed of wealth
which belonged to Berengar's own character brought unpopularity which
was exemplified in the accusations that he made a large profit out of the
tax levied for blackmail to the Magyars, and that he was the deviser of
the sudden death of Lothar II in November 950. Berengar still had
sufficient following to secure the election of himself and his son Adalbert
as joint kings on 15 December 950, but the disaffected were numerous.
Lothar left no son, and his widow Adelaide of Jurane Burgundy with
her rich dower was the centre of an opposition in which the bishops,
who had suffered under Berengar's exactions, took the leading part.
Berengar II's expedient was to ride rough-shod over the ex-queen's rights.
Her dower was seized on, she was ill-used and imprisoned, if we may trust
later tradition she was required to marry the young King Adalbert. She
only gained safety by an adventurous escape to the protection of Bishop
Adalard of Reggio, who according to a credible later story consigned her
to the impregnable castle of his vassal Adalbert-Atto at Canossa.
This was in August 951, but a champion was already near at hand,
whose advent shows that Adelaide's persecution at the hands of Berengar II
was not unprovoked. Germany, the most powerful of the kingdoms
which arose from the shattered Carolingian Empire, had prospered under
the Saxon dynasty and neither her King Otto the Great nor the dukes
## p. 159 (#205) ############################################
First invasion of Otto the Great
159
a
of her southern duchies, Bavaria and Swabia, were inclined to let slip the
opportunity of conquering their wealthy and weak neighbour of Italy.
These princes were all near kinsmen, for Henry of Bavaria was Otto's
brother and Liudolf of Swabia was Otto's eldest son; but, while Henry
and Liudolf who were bitter rivals were imitating the local ambitions of
the dukes their predecessors, Otto probably had a greater model in his
mind-he would revive the Empire as Arnulf had held it and be suzerain
of western Christendom; that he would so win the hand of the beautiful
queen he rescued would give an additional attraction to the enterprise.
The two dukes, being near at hand, made hasty invasions for their own
ends first of all, Henry with some success, Liudolf with failure. Then
came Otto at the head of an imposing force, to which both dukes brought
contingents. He crossed the Brenner Pass and reached Pavia at the end
of September 951, without any resistance being offered him. The church-
men in fact were on his side, led by the versatile Archbishop Manasse,
and Berengar II could only flee to one of his castles. But the adhesion
of the bishops of the Lombard plain was not enough, and in his triumph
Otto's difficulties began. Pope Agapetus, at Alberic's instigation, refused
his request to be crowned Emperor, for the Roman prince had no mind
to nullify his life's work by introducing a foreign Roman Emperor; and
the king's marriage to the rescued Adelaide roused against him a domestic
enemy. His son Liudolf, in thorough discontent at the influence of his
stepmother and her ally Henry of Bavaria, departed for Germany to
scheme revolt. Otto himself followed in February 952, having after all
acquired only some half of the kingdom of which he assumed the title.
He left his son-in-law Duke Conrad of Lorraine with troops to hold
Pavia and continue the war. The king had scarcely gone, however,
before Conrad and Berengar II came to terms, both perhaps being well
aware how little trust could be placed in the Lombard magnates.
Together they came to Otto at Magdeburg in April, but Otto's terms
were not so lenient as Conrad imagined. Berengar was received with
haughty discourtesy, and dismissed to attend a diet at Augsburg in
August, whither he was accompanied by the chief Lombard prelates.
There he and Adalbert became Otto's vassals for the Regnum Italicum
from which they were compelled to cede the marches of Verona, Friuli
and Istria to Duke Henry of Bavaria. Thus Otto, although withdrawing
from Italy, kept its eastern gateway in German hands.
Berengar II returned to Italy burning with wrath against the bishops
and nobles who had caused his disasters and the mutilation of his kingdom.
He and his queen Willa earned an evil name for greed and cruelty, since
they needed wealth to enrich the enfeebled kingship and were hungry for
revenge. Among their lay foes Adalbert-Atto underwent a long vain
siege in his castle of Canossa, but the chief sufferers were the churchmen.
The series of grants to them, which had continued so persistently under
former kings, almost ceases under Berengar. At Milan, Manasse's rival
CH. VII.
## p. 160 (#206) ############################################
160
The chronicler Liudprand
a
Adalman was induced to resign, and he himself was dispossessed in favour
of a new Archbishop, Walpert. Exiles began to make their way to Otto's
court, among them our chief informant about these Italian kings, the
chronicler Liudprand, who thereby became the bitter enemy of Berengar II
with his house and wreaked his revenge in his historical writings. If
there had survived another business-like Italian chronicle, like that of
Flodoard for France, Liudprand would have earned more gratitude from
posterity than he does for his vivid narrative, his pointed character-
sketches, and the brush-like abundance of " local colour" with which he
overlays his scanty facts. As it is, in his Antapodosis (Retribution) we
have a difficulty in obtaining a firm foothold for history amid the crumb-
ling and quaking mass of rancorous, if often contemporary, gossip which
Liudprand loves to heap up. Of noble birth, bred at King Hugh's court,
and once Berengar II's secretary, he was in the best position to give
accurate and full information, but he had a soul above documents. It
is hardly his fault that he depended on oral tradition for all events before
his own time, for there seems to have been no Italian chronicle for him
to use, but he evidently made no record at the time and when he wrote
rested wholly on a memory which rejected dates and political circum-
stances and was singularly retentive of amorous scandal however devoid
of probability. He does not even tell in his unfinished work the cause
and events of his persecution by Berengar to which he frequently alludes,
while sketching with fine precision the diary of his reception at Constan-
tinople whither he first went as Berengar's envoy. For what interested
him he could remember and tell to the life. To his credit be it said
he was no liar, though he may be found suppressing an unpleasant fact;
what he heard he told, and perhaps we may grant him that he gave a
ready, and sometimes a determined, belief to the gossip of anterooms and
the tradition of wrathful factions. It is unfortunate, for he was a practical
statesman, and knew and sometimes reveals the motives of his times.
Berengar had had a free hand in Italy, and had even recovered
Verona, because Otto was occupied in German revolts and frontier wars,
but in 955 occurred the decisive victory of the Lechfeld in which Otto
put an end once for all to Hungarian raids. He had succeeded
where all the Italian kings had failed, he had rescued central Europe,
and was therefrom with little doubt its destined ruler. His intervention
in Italy, Henry of Bavaria being now dead, was renewed by the agency
of his reconciled rebel son Liudolf. In 957 the duke made his invasion
with the usual rapid success. Berengar II fled, Adalbert was defeated
in battle, and all Lombardy had submitted when Liudolf died of fever at
Pombia near Lake Maggiore, the first German victor to lose his gains
owing to the alien climate of Italy.
The death of Liudolf was followed by the immediate recovery of his
lost ground by Berengar. He came back with a new series of bitter
feuds to pursue. Walpert of Milan and other prelates fled to Otto, and
## p. 161 (#207) ############################################
Otto's second invasion
161
Manasse became once more a pluralist by returning to Milan as Berengar's
partisan. Among the lay magnates Marquess Otbert went into exile; a
general disaffection existed among those who retained their possessions.
The king was still eager as Hugh had been before him to amass an im-
posing royal demesne and to create trusty great vassals. Hitherto central
Italy had been faithful to him ; now, however, Spoleto seems an enemy,
perhaps owing to the new turn of affairs at Rome. On his deathbed in
954 prince Alberic had bound the Romans by oath to elect his son and
heir by Alda, John-Octavian, Pope when Agapetus should die. In
December 955 the promise was kept and the boy became Pope as John XII.
Thus the Pope recovered control of Rome by uniting with the Papacy
the chiefship of the strong faction of Alberic. Any design of a perma-
.
nent principate must have been given up; it was perhaps too anomalous,
and it is significant that John renewed the long forgotten habit of dating
by the years of the Byzantine Emperors. But the Roman nobles remained
in power to the continued subjection of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
John XII himself was a dissolute boy whose pontificate was a glaring
scandal. No gleam of competence redeemed his debauchery, though he
was not without secular ambitions. About 959 he made war on the co-
regent princes of Capua-Benevento, Paldolf I (Pandulf) Ironhead and
Landolf III, with the aid of Marquess Theobald II of Spoleto. He
failed, and gave way, for prince Gisulf of Salerno assisted his neighbours;
and then Berengar attacked Spoleto on an unknown pretext. Theobald
was driven out, and Spoleto taken over by the king possibly to be con-
ferred on his own son Guido. Did Berengar demand the imperial crown?
In any case King Adalbert ravaged Roman territory, and John XII
was in such straits as to appeal for German intervention, thus strangely
shewing how the ancient policy of the Popes could recur in the unclerical
son of Alberic.
It was in the summer of 960 that the Pope's envoys, the Cardinal-
deacon John and the scriniarius Azo, reached Otto the Great in Saxony.
The Pope's prayer for help was seconded by the Lombard exiles and by
the messages of numerous magnates. Otto was now unembarrassed in
other directions, and could resume his old schemes with the knowledge
that he would have at last allies and support south of the Apennines.
He was not ready to move, however, till August 961, when he crossed the
Brenner Pass in force. Adalbert may have attempted to gather troops
to bar the defiles north of Verona, but the universal defection of counts
and bishops made resistance impossible, and the German king entered
Pavia, whence Berengar had fled after spitefully burning the royal palace.
Otto and the infant son Otto II whom he had left in Germany were at
once acknowledged as co-regent kings of Italy without further cere-
mony. All their deserted rivals could do was to hold out in strong castles
on the spurs of the Alps and in the Apennines where one magnate at
least, Marquess Hubert of Tuscany, remained true to them. Otto was
C. MED. H. VOL. III. CH. VII.
10
## p. 146 (#192) ############################################
146
Independence of great vassals
a
6
8
control was quite illusory. Rodolph III, in his latter years, hardly ever
so much as shewed himself outside the districts bounded by the valleys
of the Saône and the Doubs and between the Jura and the upper course
of the Rhône. The greater part of the lords, shutting themselves up
within their own domains, made a show of ignoring the king's authority,
or else merely deferred their revolt because, knowing the king near
at hand, they might fear being constrained by him. “O king! ” ex-
claimed the Chancellor Wipo to Henry III a few years later, “ Bur-
gundy demands thee; arise and come quickly. When the master tarries
long absent, the fidelity of new subjects is apt to waver. The old
proverb is profoundly true 'Out of sight, out of mind. ' Although
Burgundy is now, thanks to thee, at peace, she desires to view in thy
person the author of this peace and to feast her eyes upon the counten-
ance of her king. Appear, and let thy presence bring back serenity to
this kingdom. Formerly, thou didst with difficulty subdue it; profit
now by its readiness to serve thee. ”
As a matter of fact, Burgundy could spare her king very well,
and the efforts made by Henry III to render his government in these
parts a little more effective were to be unavailing. Despite his frequent
visits, and the attempts that he made to reduce to obedience his rebel-
lious vassals, notably the Counts of Burgundy and Genevois, Henry III
accomplished nothing lasting. On his death (1056), his widow, the
Empress Agnes, tried as fruitlessly to restore the royal power by sending
Rudolf of Rheinfelden, Duke of Swabia, to represent her in the kingdom.
Later on, Henry IV, when he had attained his majority, and after him
Henry V in his struggle with the Papacy, met with hardly anything but
indifference or hostility in Burgundy as a whole. Henry V's successor,
Lothar of Supplinburg, himself supplies the proof of the purely
nominal character of his authority in these distant provinces, when, on
summoning the lords of Burgundy and Provence to join an expedition
which he was preparing for Italy, he exclaims: “At sundry times we
have written to you to demand the tribute of your homage and sub-
mission. But you paid no heed, thus emphasizing in an indecorous
manner your contempt for our supreme power. We intend to labour
henceforward to restore in your country our authority, which has been
so much diminished among you as to be almost completely forgotten. . . .
Thus we command you to appear at Piacenza, on the Feast of
St Michael, with your contingent of armed men. '
This summons was to produce no result. The Emperors tried by every
means to make their power a reality. Following the example of the
Empress Agnes, who had sent Rudolf of Rheinfelden to represent her,
Lothar of Supplinburg, and afterwards Frederick Barbarossa were to
try the experiment of delegating their authority to various princes
of the Swiss house of Zähringen whom they appointed “rectors” or
viceroys. This rectorate, soon to be called the Duchy of Burgundia
## p. 147 (#193) ############################################
Later history
147
Minor (lesser Burgundy), was, however, only effective to the east of the
Jura, that is, practically over modern Switzerland, and it disappeared in
1217 on the extinction of the elder line of Zähringen. In 1215
Frederick II was to try a return to the same policy, making choice of
William of Baux, Prince of Orange, then in 1220 of William, Marquess
of Montferrat; from 1237 onwards, he was to be represented by im-
perial vicars. We shall see the Emperors make an appearance, in an
intermittent fashion, in the kingdom and sometimes seeming to re-possess
themselves of a more or less real authority in this or that district.
Frederick Barbarossa, in particular, after his marriage with Beatrice,
the heiress of the county of Burgundy, will appear as unquestioned
master in the diocese of Besançon, and be crowned king of Arles in
1178; Frederick II will for a time recover a real power of action in
Provence and the Lyonnais; and again in the fourteenth century,
Henry VII, strong in the support of the princes of Savoy, will rally to
his standard large numbers of the nobles of the kingdom. Charles IV
will characteristically go through the empty form of coronation in 1365,
But these will be isolated exceptions, leading to nothing.
Incapable of enforcing their authority, the Emperors, from the latter
part of the twelfth century onwards, more than once will even meditate
restoring the kingdom of Arles, as it is now most frequently called, to
its former independence,' reserving the right to exact from its new king
the recognition of their suzerainty. Henry VI will offer it to his prisoner,
Richard Cæur de Lion in 1193 ; Philip of Swabia to his competitor,
Otto of Brunswick in 1207; Rudolf of Habsburg will consider en-
trusting it in 1274 to a prince of his family, and later on to an Angevin
prince, an idea to be revived by Henry VII in 1310.
But all these efforts prove vain. For long centuries the kingdom of
Arles remains in theory attached to the Empire, but little by little, this
kingdom, over which the German sovereigns could never secure effective
control, will crumble to pieces in their hands. Out of its eastern
portion the Swiss confederation and the duchy of Savoy will be formed ;
the kings of France, in the course of the fourteenth century, will succeed
in regaining their authority over the Vivarais, the Lyonnais, the Valen-
tinois and Diois, and Dauphiné, successively. To these, a century later,
will be added Provence, which had already been long in French hands.
CH. VI.
10_2
## p. 148 (#194) ############################################
148
CHAPTER VII.
ITALY IN THE TENTH CENTURY.
The death of the Emperor Lambert in October 898 dealt a blow to
the royal power in North Italy, the Regnum Italicum of the tenth century.
In place of the born ruler, who had mastered his own vassals and made
himself protector of the Papacy, there succeeded Berengar, mild and
cheatable. Berengar, too, was weak in resources. His own domains lay
awkwardly in the extreme north-east, in Friuli and the modern Veneto, not
like Lambert's in the centre; and he had not like Lambert the support
of a large group of the great nobles and bishops who formed the real
source of power in Italy. Two magnates in especial were equally faith-
less and formidable, Adalbert the Rich, Marquess of Tuscany, in the
centre, and Adalbert, Marquess of Ivrea, on the western frontier. In vain
did Berengar marry his daughter Gisela to Adalbert of Ivrea and give
the Tuscan his freedom from the prison to which Lambert had consigned
him for revolt. A plot was hatching, when disaster befel king and
kingdom.
Already in 898 the Hungarians, or Magyars', had raided the present
Veneto from their newly-won settlements on the river Theiss. In 899 a
larger swarm made its way from Aquileia to Pavia. Berengar, always a
gallant warrior, strove to rise to the occasion. From the whole Regnum
Italicum his vassals came to the number of 15,000 men-at-arms. Before
them the outnumbered Magyars fled back, but were overtaken at the
river Brenta. Their horses were worn out, they could not escape,
and the
tradition, perhaps influenced by a sense of tragedy, tells of their proffers
refused by the haughty Christians. Yet on 24 September they surprised
their heedless foes and scattered them with fearful slaughter. For nearly
a year the Lombard plain lay at their mercy, though few fortified cities
were taken and they did not cross the Apennines. Amid his faithless
vassals, with his land desolated, Berengar submitted to pay blackmail,
which at least kept the Magyars his friends if it did not save Lombardy
from occasional incursions. The only mitigation of the calamity was
the defeat of the Hungarians on the water when in 900 they assaulted
Venice under her doge Pietro Tribuno.
i See Vol. 1. Chapter xu. (A).
## p. 149 (#195) ############################################
Berengar I and Louis III
149
a
Berengar had lost men, wealth and prestige, he was too clearly
profitless for his subjects, and the death at Hungarian hands of many
bishops and counts left the greatest magnates greater than ever. The
plot against him, already begun, gathered strength. It was headed by
Adalbert II the Rich of Tuscany, whose wife Bertha, the widow of a Pro-
vençal count, was daughter of Lothar II of Lorraine and thus grand-
daughter of the Emperor Lothar I; and its object was to restore
Lothar I's line to Italy in the person of Louis of Provence, grandson of
the Emperor Louis II. The Spoletan party, the Empress Ageltrude, and
Pope John IX, the old partisan of Lambert, were, it seems, won to the
plan, and the hand of the Byzantine princess Anna, daughter of Leo VI,
was obtained for the pretender. When Louis came to Italy in Sep-
tember 900, Berengar, faced by a general defection, could only retreat
beyond the Mincio, while his rival, surrounded by the magnates, pro-
ceeded to Rome to receive the imperial crown in February 901 from the
new Pope Benedict IV. But Louis had no great capacity, and the
magnates were fickle of set purpose, for, says the chronicler Liudprand
in a classic passage, they preferred two kings to play off one against the
other. In 902 a counter-change was brought about. Berengar advanced
to Pavia, and Loạis, who had been unable to get away quickly enough,
was allowed to withdraw on taking an oath never to return. Within
three years (905), however, Bertha once more tempted her kinsman to
invade Italy. He was to be furnished, perhaps, with a Byzantine subsidy'.
Once more Berengar fled east, this time to Bavaria, for Adalard, Bishop
of Verona, his chief stronghold, called in his rival. Louis heedlessly
thought himself secure and was surprised and captured (21 July) by
Berengar to whom the Veronese citizens, though not their bishop, were
always loyal. No risks were taken by the victor, and Louis was sent
back to Provence blind and helpless. By an atrocity unlike his usual
dealings Berengar at last secured an undisputed throne. Real control .
over great nobles and bishops he was never to obtain.
While the Regnum Italicum lay invertebrate in the hands of the
magnates, South Italy was even more disordered and tormented. For
sixty years the land had suffered from the intolerable scourge of Saracen
ravages. While a robber colony, established almost impregnably on the
river Garigliano, spread desolation in the heart of Italy over the Terra
di Lavoro and the Roman Campagna, the true base of the Muslims lay
in Sicily. There the mixed Berber and Arab population, who had
swarmed in under the Aghlabid dynasty of ķairawān, were on the point
of completing the conquest of the Christian and Greek eastern portion of
>
At least the Pseudo-Symeon Magister states (Ann. Leon. Basil. fil. cap. 14) that
the eunuch Rhodophylus in 904 was taking 100 lbs. of gold “to the Franks. ”
But
the other narrators, e. g. John Cameniates, De excidio Thessalonicae, cap. 59, state that
this sum was for the Byzantine army then fighting “the Africans," and in any case
it was diverted to ransom the walls of Thessalonica from destruction by the Moslems.
CH. VII.
## p. 150 (#196) ############################################
150
South Italy and the Saracens
the island, and the brief cessation of their direct raids on the mainland
which began c. 889 did not last long.
Subdivision and intestine wars for independence and predominance
paralysed South Italy in its struggle against the Saracens. The greatest
power there was the Byzantine Empire, after Basil I and his general
Nicephorus Phocas had revived its power in the West. Two themes
were set up in Italy, each under its strutegos or general', that of
Longobardia with its capital at Bari which included Apulia and Lucania
from the river Trigno on the Adriatic to the Gulf of Taranto, and that
of Calabria with its capital at Reggio which represented the vanished
theme of Sicily. These detached and frontier provinces, usually scantily
supplied with troops and money owing to the greater needs of the core
of the Empire, were beset with difficulties occasioned by the hostility of
the Italians to the corrupt and foreign Greek officials. The Lombard
subjects in Apulia were actively or potentially disloyal; and a long strip
of debateable land formed the western part of the Longobardic theme,
which was always claimed by the Lombard principality of Benevento, its
ancient possessor. Then there were the native Italian states, all con-
sidered as its vassals by Byzantium in spite of the competing pretensions
of the Western Empire. Three of these, Gaeta, Naples and Amalfi,
were coast towns, never conquered by the Lombards, and, like Venice,
had long enjoyed a complete autonomy without formally denying their
allegiance to East Rome. They were all now monarchies, all trading,
and all inclined to ally with the Saracens, who were at once their
customers and their principal dread. The three remaining states were
Lombard, the principalities of Benevento and Salerno and the county
of Capua. The prince of Salerno acknowledged Byzantine suzerainty.
Benevento had been conquered by the Greeks in 891, only to be
recovered by the native dynasty under the auspices of the Spoletan
Emperors of the West, and then conquered by Atenolf I of Capua in
899. This union of Capua and Benevento was the beginning of some
kind of order in a troubled land, hitherto torn by the struggle of furious
competitors.
It was the Saracen plague, however, which at length brought the
petty states to act together. If the invasion of Calabria by the half-mad
Aghlabid Ibrāhīm who had conquered Taormina, the last Byzantine
stronghold of Sicily, and threatened to destroy in his holy war Rome
itself, “ the city of the dotard Peter,” ended in his death before Cosenza
in 902, and civil wars distracted Sicily till she submitted to the new
Fatimite Caliphate at ķairawān; the Moslems of the Garigliano still
ate like an ulcer into the land. The countryside was depopulated, the
great abbeys, Monte Cassino, Farfa, Subiaco and Volturno, were destroyed
and deserted. At last the warring Christians were so dismayed as to be
reconciled, and Atenolf of Capua turned to the one strong power which
1 See for the system of themes Vol. iv. and its maps.
а
ท
## p. 151 (#197) ############################################
Victory of the Garigliano
151
could intervene and professed himself a Byzantine vassal. Help was long
in coming when a warrior Pope stepped in to consolidate and enlarge
the Christian league.
Rome had undergone strange vicissitudes since the death of Emperor
Lambert, but they had had a clear outcome, the victory of the land-
owning barbarised aristocracy over the bureaucratic priestly elements of
the Curia. After the death of Benedict IV (903) the revolutions of
a year brought to the papal throne its old claimant, the fierce anti-
Formosan Sergius III (904–11), over two imprisoned and perhaps
murdered predecessors. Sergius owed his victory to “Frankish” help,
possibly that of Adalbert the Rich of Tuscany, but he was also the ally
of the strongest Roman faction. Theophylact, vesterarius of the Sacred
Palace and Senator of the Romans, was the founder of a dynasty. He
was chief of the Roman nobles; to his wife, the Senatrix Theodora,
tradition attributed both the influence of an Empress Ageltrude and,
without real ground, the vices of a Messalina; his daughter Marozia was
only too probably the mistress of Pope Sergius and by him the mother
of a future Pontiff, John XI, and finally married the new Marquess of
Spoleto, the adventurer Alberic. The power of these and of other great
ladies, which is a characteristic of the tenth century, and sometimes their
vices, too, won for them the hatred of opposing factions whose virulent
report of them has fixed the name of the “ Pornocracy” on the debased
papal government of that unhallowed day. Two inconspicuous successors
of Sergius III were followed, doubtless through Theophylact's and Theo-
dora's choice, by the elevation of the Archbishop of Ravenna to the
papal see as John X (914-28). This much-hated pontiff, who like
Formosus had been translated to the indignation of the strict canonists,
was no mere instrument in his maker's hands. He at once took the lead
in the war with the Saracens. The Byzantine regent Zoë was sending
a new strategos, the patrician Nicholas Picingli, with reinforcements to
Bari. From the south Picingli marched in 915 up to Campania, adding the
troops of Atenolf's successor at Capua, Landolf I, and of Guaimar of
Salerno to his army. Even the rulers of the sea-ports, Gaeta and
Naples, appeared in his camp decorated with Byzantine titles. From
the north came Pope John and his Romans accompanied by the Spoletan
levies under Marquess Alberic. A Byzantine fleet occupied the mouth
of the Garigliano, and after a three months' blockade the starving Saracens
burst out to be hunted down by the victors among the mountains.
This decisive victory began an era of revival in Southern Italy.
Though Calabria and even Apulia remained open to Saracen raids, which
recommenced when the Fatimite Caliph Mahdi conquered Sicily in 917;
though from c. 922 onwards Hungarian bands now and again worked
their way south; a comparative security was restored. The deserted
champaign could be slowly repopulated, the monasteries could claim
once more their ravaged possessions and, as the century wore on, be
a
CH. VII.
## p. 152 (#198) ############################################
152
Anarchy of North Italy
rebuilt. Not a little of this wanly dawning prosperity was due to the
stability which was at last acquired by the princely houses. The rulers
of Capua-Benevento, Salerno and the rest reigned long and transmitted
an assured, if not unharassed, dominion to their heirs. Their thriving
was soon shewn in hostility to their Byzantine suzerain. Picingli's
victory had not ameliorated the government of the Italian themes.
Calabria, the Greek character of which was being accentuated by the
inrush of refugees from Sicily, might only be restive at exactions due to
blackmail paid to the Fatimite Caliph for respite from his subjects'
raids; but the Lombards, who were predominant in Apulia, hankered for
autonomy, and in spite of bribes in cash and titles, were inclined to side
with the aggressive prince of Capua. Landolf I took advantage of the
Apulians' discontent and the weakness of the strategoi, with their in-
sufficient means and their coast harried by Saracen and Slav pirates. In
concert with Guaimar II of Salerno and the Marquess Theobald I of
Spoleto he overran c. 927 the greater part of Longobardia and held it
some seven years. Not till the Eastern Empire could ally with a strong
a
king of the Regnum Italicum was it possible to oust Landolf and his
allies.
The strong king was long in coming. Berengar indeed received in
December 915 the imperial crown from John X, in disregard of Louis the
Blind's rights, perhaps in reward for his concurrence in Alberic's assistance
at the Garigliano, perhaps to counterbalance the then dangerous might
of the Eastern Emperor in the south. But Berengar was no whit more
powerful thereby. Hungarian raids still occurred and a more persistent
enemy began to trouble western Lombardy. At the close of the ninth
century bands of Saracen pirates coming from Spain had established
themselves in a fortified settlement on the coast of Provence, on the Golfe
du St Tropez, called Fraxinetum, the name of which is preserved in Garde-
Freinet. Thence, as their numbers grew, they conducted terrible raids
on the surrounding territory. Provence was the worst sufferer, but, since
the Saracens made the Alps their favourite plundering centre, Italy too
was a victim. The Alpine valleys were desolated, the great roadside
abbeys, such as Novalesa, were destroyed. Bands of pilgrims to the
graves of the Apostles at Rome were robbed and massacred, till the
intercourse of Italy with the north-west was in danger of ceasing. Here
again the magnates fought in isolation when only a combined effort could
root out the evil. Berengar seems to have done nothing, perhaps he
could do nothing, but his discredit naturally increased.
The fickle magnates meanwhile were looking out for another rival
king. Bertha of Tuscany, whose husband Adalbert II was dead, again
worked for the restoration of the line of Lothar I and brought in her
son by her first marriage, Hugh, Duke of Provence, who ruled his native
country during Louis the Blind's incapacity. This first attempt failed
(c. 920) and then a group of northern magnates headed by Adalbert of
## p. 153 (#199) ############################################
Rodolph II and Hugh of Provence
153
Ivrea, now husband of Bertha's Tuscan daughter Ermingarde, invited
Rodolph II, King of Jurane Burgundy. The accustomed tragicomedy
followed. Rodolph came in 922 and was recognised north of the
Apennines, while Berengar held out in Verona and won infamy by
letting in his Hungarian allies who this time penetrated to Campania.
Next year the rivals fought one of the rare pitched battles of the time
at Fiorenzuola near Piacenza where Berengar had the worse and the death
of 1500 men depleted the scanty ranks of the kingdom's military caste.
Thenceforth Berengar vegetated, seemingly under truce, at Verona till his
murder by one of his vassals on 7 April 924. He had watched, rather than
caused, the anarchy of the realm, just as his lavish grants to the prelates
registered rather than caused the cessation of a central government.
Rodolph was not more fortunate. He had two kingdoms, and while
he was in Burgundy the Magyars laid Lombardy waste. They burnt
Pavia itself in 924 and only left Italy to pass over the Alps and be
exterminated by pestilence in Languedoc. The hopes of the house of
Lothar revived. Adalbert of Ivrea was dead, and his widow Ermingarde
joined with her brother Guido of Tuscany and Lampert, Archbishop of
Milan, in calling in once more her half-brother Hugh of Provence. In
925 they revolted, twice repelled Rodolph's efforts at reconquest, and on
6 July 926 elevated Hugh to the throne. In him a strong king had coine.
Hugh, wily and voluptuous, had his domains and vassals in Provence
behind him and a group of magnates in his favour in Italy. He set
himself to increase the latter by endowing his Provençal kindred. One
nephew, Theobald I, was given the march of Spoleto, another, Manasse,
Archbishop of Arles, was later put in charge of three sees in commendam.
A Provençal immigration set in to the disgust of the Italian nobles.
Hugh, who no more than his contemporaries ventured to reconstitute
the ancient royal government or to recall the alienations of revenue and
administrative functions, did succeed in making the great vassals, as
well as the bishops, his nominees.
To be crowned Emperor was the natural goal of Hugh's ambition.
Without the protectorate over the Papacy an Italian king had but a
maimed dominion in central Italy, and to a mere protection of the
Papacy the functions of the Emperor had been reduced since the time
of Lambert. Indeed it seems that Hugh came into Italy with the
Pope's approval and struck a bargain with him at Mantua in 926.
John X was in a dangerous plight. Theophylact was dead, Marquess
Alberic was dead, their daughter and widow, the sinister Marozia, led
their Roman faction, and had become hostile to the self-willed Pope.
If John X probably strengthened himself by obtaining the Spoletan
march, which Alberic had held, for his own brother Peter, perhaps in
return for Berengar l's coronation, Marozia gained far more power by
her marriage to Marquess Guido of Tuscany. In the faction-fighting
Marquess Peter was driven from Rome c. 927, but a terrible Hungarian
>
CH. VII.
## p. 154 (#200) ############################################
154
Alberic of Rome
way thus
raid which lacerated Italy from Friuli to Campania enabled him to re-
enter the city. Tradition charged on him an alliance with the raiders.
In any case he was slaughtered by the Romans in 928 and his brother
the Pope was thrust into prison to die or be murdered without much
delay. Marozia now was supreme: “Rome was subdued by might under
a woman's hand,” says the wrathful local chronicler! . Two Popes, so
shadowy that they were forgotten in a few years, wore the tiara in turn
till in 931 she raised her own son, probably by Sergius III, to the
pontificate as John XI. But Marozia was weakened by the death of
Guido and looked around her for a potent consort. She found one in
Guido's half-brother, Hugh of Italy, then a widower. King Hugh may
a
have been baffled in his original scheme of becoming Emperor by the
fall of John X; he had also been drawn off by the Hungarians and a
revolt at Pavia. Now, however, he was so firm on his throne as to
secure the election of his boy son Lothar II as co-regent. His contract
with Marozia is the ugliest episode of the time. He feared his half-
brother Marquess Lambert of Tuscany, himself a descendant of Lothar I
and a possible rival; and he could not marry his half-brother Guido's
widow. Therefore he seized and blinded Lambert, and announced that
his two half-brothers were not true sons of Bertha. With the
cleared he entered Rome in 932 and married Marozia. But the senatrix
and her husband miscalculated and did no more than garrison the castle
of Sant' Angelo. Before Hugh was crowned the Romans rose against
the hated Burgundian foreigner. Their leader was Marozia's own son
Alberic, whom she had borne to Alberic of Spoleto, a youth who knew
Hugh's treatment of inconvenient relatives. Sant'Angelo was besieged
and taken, and although Hugh made his escape Marozia and John XI
were imprisoned. Of Marozia no more is said.
The rule of Alberic marks the open and complete triumph of the
Roman landed aristocracy over the bureaucratic clerical government of
the Papacy. His state resembled the city monarchies of Naples or
Gaeta. On him as “prince and senator of all the Romans”
ferred, it seems by popular election, the exercise of the Pope's secular
power in Rome and its duchy. Though the act was revolutionary and
ultra vires, no denial of the Pope's sovereignty was made. It was enough
that John XI and his four successors were docile instruments of the
prince. Perhaps Alberic dreamed of further change, of reviving a
miniature Western Empire, for he tried to win a Byzantine bride, and,
even when baffled, surnamed his son Octavian. “His face was bright
like his father's and he had old-time worth. For he was exceedingly
terrible, and his yoke was heavy on the Romans and on the holy
Apostolic See? . ” His stern domination seems to have been a blessing to
a
Rome and its duchy, which he secured, while King Hugh about 938 seized
on Ravenna and the Pentapolis which had indeed been ruled by the
1 Benedict. S. Andreae, c. 30.
; Ibid. c. 32.
was con-
## p. 155 (#201) ############################################
Hugh's alliance with Byzantium
155
a
Italian emperors since the days of Guy (Guido). The turbulent Roman
)
nobles and his own treacherous kindred were kept in order, the submissive
churchmen protected by a pious usurper who favoured monastic reform
and was the friend of St Odo of Cluny. It was all Alberic could do,
however, to maintain himself against the persistent efforts of King Hugh
to conquer Rome. A first siege of the city in 933 was a failure, a second
in 936 ended in a treaty by which Alberic married Hugh's legitimate
daughter Alda. This pacification did not last, although negotiated by
St Odo, and in 941 Hugh by bribes and warfare was so successful as just
to enter Rome. Somehow he was expelled, "by the hidden judgement
of God” according to our only narrator? . Yet he would not give up the
war until 946 when he had become a king under tutelage. Alberic
thenceforth ruled unchallenged till his death in August 954.
Hugh and Alberic had been rival suitors for the alliance of the
Eastern Emperor Romanus I Lecapenus, and in 935 Hugh had won the
prize, partly through the pressure he could exercise in the south, partly
no doubt through an eligibility to which the isolated prince of the
Romans could lay no claim. Hugh, by calling off Theobald I of
Spoleto, enabled the Byzantines to recover the lost districts of Apulia,
and eventually the alliance was sealed by the marriage of Hugh's illegiti-
mate daughter to a Byzantine prince, the future Emperor Romanus II.
The two powers suffered in common from the Hungarians and Saracens.
Against the Magyars little was done save to pay blackmail, although
in 938 some raiding bands as they retreated from Campania, were ex-
terminated by the Abruzzans. Common action was, however, attempted
against the Saracens of Fraxinetum, who, besides their formidable
brigandage on the West Alpine passes, raided even as far as Swabia
and by sea must have troubled the Byzantines. In 931 the Greeks
attacked them and, landing at Fraxinetum, made a slaughter, while it
may be that at the same time Hugh's vassals revenged the destruction
of Acqui by cutting to pieces the Saracen raiders and occupying for a
moment the passes? But no permanent result was obtained. Rather
the ravage of the Fraxinetan Saracens grew worse, and in 935 the
Fatimites sent a fleet from Africa which stormed Genoa. At last
Hugh and Romanus I were roused to a joint campaign. In 942 a
Byzantine fleet burnt the Saracens' ships with Greek fire, and blockaded
Fraxinetum by sea, while Hugh with his army invested it by land. The
Saracens could have been rooted out, when Hugh made a treaty with
them : they were to hold the Swabian passes against any attempted
invasion by Hugh's exiled nephew Berengar of Ivrea. Perhaps Italy
was somewhat spared in consequence, but the Alps continued the scene
of their brigandage.
1 Liudprand, Antapodosis, v. 3.
? So we can reconstruct from Flodoard an. 931 and Liudprand, Antapodosis, iv. 4,
which may well refer to the same year.
а.
CH. VII.
## p. 156 (#202) ############################################
156
Relations with Burgundy and Germany
The fear of invasion had been with Hugh since the beginning of his
reign, and in his western policy it was obscurely entangled with his
desire to retain Provence. He evidently wished to consider the kingdom
of Provence as annexed to his Italian crown after the death of the
Emperor Louis the Blind in 928, but in spite of his wide lands and
numerous relatives there he could not obtain recognition as sovereign.
King Raoul of France also nourished ambitions to rule on the Rhone,
and it may be that Hugh hoped to block his way, as well as to buy
off an invasion threatened by Rodolph II of Jurane Burgundy, when
c. 931 he made, on the evidence of Liudprand, a treaty with Rodolph II
by which there was ceded to Rodolph II “all the territory Hugh had
held in Gaul before he became king of Italy. " We may doubt whether
this ineffective treaty referred to more than one or two districts; in any
case Rodolph II lost them again, and his death in 937 opened out a new
prospect? . Hugh contrived to marry Rodolph II's widow Bertha hiinself
and to betroth Rodolph's daughter Adelaide to his own son Lothar II.
Though the rights of Rodolph's young son Conrad were not disputed,
Hugh probably hoped to be the real ruler of Jurane Burgundy, when a
greater competitor appeared on the scene.
The German princes had by no means abandoned hopes of Italian
conquest since the Emperor Arnulf's death, although the internal troubles
of Germany, seconded by Hugh's gifts and embassies, precluded a royal
campaign. Duke Burchard of Swabia had aided his son-in-law Rodolph II;
in 934 Duke Arnulf of Bavaria suffered defeat in an invasion of the
Veneto. But now the German king, Otto the Great, was strong; he
was determined to secure his south-western frontier, and perhaps already
dreamed of reasserting Arnulf's position and taking the imperial crown.
In some way he gained possession of young Conrad and controlled the
government of Jurane Burgundy. All that Hugh seems to have kept
was the Valley of Aosta, and his lands in Provence.
The perpetual danger of an invasion was increased by the readiness
of the magnates to call in a foreign king at any discontent. Although
national consciousness was present in Italy, and in a strongly localized
form was marked in Rome, the great vassals were still as their ancestors
of the ninth century had been, members of the mainly Frankish noble
houses which were scattered and endowed throughout Charlemagne's
Empire. In Italy they were mostly new-comers, only Italian in their
objection to fresh magnates from beyond the Alps. Hugh's safety, on the
other hand, lay in the introduction of new men from Provence, his kins-
men and allies, which he could the more readily effect as the magnates he
found in possession had struck but short roots since the days of the Emperor
Guy. Even so he could not much depend on his nominees; the instinct
and the opportunity for feudal turbulence were too strong. Among the
bishops the saintly Frank, Ratheri of Verona, had to be deposed for
1 See Previté-Orton, Italy and Provence, EHR, 1917, p. 335.
## p. 157 (#203) ############################################
Fall of King Hugh
157
adherence to Duke Arnulf's invasion. In central Italy he could root out
the ancient dynasts, but could not implant loyalty to himself. On
Lambert's deposition he had given the march of Tuscany to his full
brother Boso, once a count in Provence, who in turn vanished in his
prisons in 936. Soon after Theobald I of Spoleto died and was replaced
by Anscar, son of Adalbert of Ivrea and Hugh's half-sister Ermingarde
of Tuscany. This was such a risky appointment in view of the wrongs
which Hugh had done to Ermingarde's family that the chronicler Liud-
prand explains it as intended to remove Anscar from his powerful friends
in the north. In any case rumour said that the king stirred up against
the new Marquess of Spoleto a Provençal, Sarlio, Count of the Palace,
who had married Theobald I's widow. In 940 Anscar was slain in battle,
and Hugh then turned on Sarlio whom he forced to take the cowl. The
king by now seemed to be finding surer instruments in his own bastard
children, of whom the eldest Hubert, Marquess of Tuscany in 936, Marquess
of Spoleto and Count of the Palace c. 942, kept a firm hand on central
Italy, while others were designed for ecclesiastical preferments.
Hugh's astute perfidy alarmed the Italian nobles more and more and
especially their greatest remaining chief, Anscari's half-brother, Berengar,
Marquess of Ivrea. Everything conspired to make Berengar dangerous
and alarmed. He was heir through his mother of the Emperor Berengar I,
his wife Willa was daughter of the fallen Boso of Tuscany, his march of
Ivrea gave him command of the western gates of the kingdom, and its
extent and Anscari's fate pointed him out as Hugh’s next destined victim.
The story goes that Hugh intended to seize and blind him, but that the
Marquess was forewarned by the young co-regent Lothar II, and with
his wife fled to Duke Herman of Swabia by whom they were con-
ducted to the German king, Otto the Great. Otto, while he did not
actively assist the exile, would not give him up in spite of the redoubled
presents of King Hugh, and Berengar was able to plot with the mal-
contents of Italy for a rebellion. In the meantime Hugh, feeling his
throne shake under him, made feverish efforts to recover his vassals'
loyalty. Berengar's great domains were distributed among leading
nobles: the counts Ardoin Glabrio of Turin, Otbert and Aleram are
henceforward in the first rank of magnates ; and an unusual number of
royal diplomas were issued in 943. But Saracen and Hungarian maraud-
ing did not increase Hugh's hold on his subjects. It is clear that besides
lay plotters the great prelates and his own kin were ready to revolt.
When Berengar saw the time was come, in the mid-winter of 944–5, he
made his venture over the Brenner towards Verona, the Count of which,
Milo, an old adherent of Berengar I, was in his favour. The decisive
moment came when Manasse of Arles, who was in charge of the frontier
bishopric of Trent, deserted his uncle. A general defection was headed
by Archbishop Arderic of Milan, and Hugh at Pavia could do nothing
better than send in April the unhated Lothar II to Milan to appeal to
CH. VII.
## p. 158 (#204) ############################################
158
Berengar II
the rebels. The assembly was moved and declared the youth sole king,
but, when Hugh tried to escape to Provence with his treasure, Berengar
in fear of a new invasion had him intercepted and reinstated in August
as nominal joint king. In this humiliating position Hugh remained till
April 947 when somehow he gained leave to abdicate and retire to
Provence with the treasure with which he still hoped to engineer a fresh
invasion. But he died on 10 April 948.
Meanwhile Berengar was ruling, in the name of Lothar II, as “chief
councillor of the realm. " He seems to have done his best to promote
his clerical partisans, but his main reliance was on his fellow magnates.
Although no doubt he recovered much of his own domains, he was
evidently obliged to buy support by consenting to alienations like that
of Turin to Ardoin Glabrio. Even Hubert was left unmolested in
Tuscany, if a new Marquess was appointed to Spoleto. How little
Berengar was master of the kingdom was shewn when he nominated
Manasse of Arles to the see of Milan. The Milanese townsmen elected
a rival Adalman, Manasse obtained adherents in the countryside, and
the two competitors fought for five years without decisive result. It
was, however, in foreign affairs that Berengar's weakness was most
obvious. Hugh had been in relations with all his neighbours, Berengar
shrank into isolation ; Byzantium neglected him, Provence submitted to
Conrad of Jurane Burgundy, the protégé of Otto the Great, Germany
loomed ever more formidably in the north, the Hungarians under their
chief Taxis proved in 947 by ravages which reached Apulia that Italy
was no better defended than before. Weakness and the greed of wealth
which belonged to Berengar's own character brought unpopularity which
was exemplified in the accusations that he made a large profit out of the
tax levied for blackmail to the Magyars, and that he was the deviser of
the sudden death of Lothar II in November 950. Berengar still had
sufficient following to secure the election of himself and his son Adalbert
as joint kings on 15 December 950, but the disaffected were numerous.
Lothar left no son, and his widow Adelaide of Jurane Burgundy with
her rich dower was the centre of an opposition in which the bishops,
who had suffered under Berengar's exactions, took the leading part.
Berengar II's expedient was to ride rough-shod over the ex-queen's rights.
Her dower was seized on, she was ill-used and imprisoned, if we may trust
later tradition she was required to marry the young King Adalbert. She
only gained safety by an adventurous escape to the protection of Bishop
Adalard of Reggio, who according to a credible later story consigned her
to the impregnable castle of his vassal Adalbert-Atto at Canossa.
This was in August 951, but a champion was already near at hand,
whose advent shows that Adelaide's persecution at the hands of Berengar II
was not unprovoked. Germany, the most powerful of the kingdoms
which arose from the shattered Carolingian Empire, had prospered under
the Saxon dynasty and neither her King Otto the Great nor the dukes
## p. 159 (#205) ############################################
First invasion of Otto the Great
159
a
of her southern duchies, Bavaria and Swabia, were inclined to let slip the
opportunity of conquering their wealthy and weak neighbour of Italy.
These princes were all near kinsmen, for Henry of Bavaria was Otto's
brother and Liudolf of Swabia was Otto's eldest son; but, while Henry
and Liudolf who were bitter rivals were imitating the local ambitions of
the dukes their predecessors, Otto probably had a greater model in his
mind-he would revive the Empire as Arnulf had held it and be suzerain
of western Christendom; that he would so win the hand of the beautiful
queen he rescued would give an additional attraction to the enterprise.
The two dukes, being near at hand, made hasty invasions for their own
ends first of all, Henry with some success, Liudolf with failure. Then
came Otto at the head of an imposing force, to which both dukes brought
contingents. He crossed the Brenner Pass and reached Pavia at the end
of September 951, without any resistance being offered him. The church-
men in fact were on his side, led by the versatile Archbishop Manasse,
and Berengar II could only flee to one of his castles. But the adhesion
of the bishops of the Lombard plain was not enough, and in his triumph
Otto's difficulties began. Pope Agapetus, at Alberic's instigation, refused
his request to be crowned Emperor, for the Roman prince had no mind
to nullify his life's work by introducing a foreign Roman Emperor; and
the king's marriage to the rescued Adelaide roused against him a domestic
enemy. His son Liudolf, in thorough discontent at the influence of his
stepmother and her ally Henry of Bavaria, departed for Germany to
scheme revolt. Otto himself followed in February 952, having after all
acquired only some half of the kingdom of which he assumed the title.
He left his son-in-law Duke Conrad of Lorraine with troops to hold
Pavia and continue the war. The king had scarcely gone, however,
before Conrad and Berengar II came to terms, both perhaps being well
aware how little trust could be placed in the Lombard magnates.
Together they came to Otto at Magdeburg in April, but Otto's terms
were not so lenient as Conrad imagined. Berengar was received with
haughty discourtesy, and dismissed to attend a diet at Augsburg in
August, whither he was accompanied by the chief Lombard prelates.
There he and Adalbert became Otto's vassals for the Regnum Italicum
from which they were compelled to cede the marches of Verona, Friuli
and Istria to Duke Henry of Bavaria. Thus Otto, although withdrawing
from Italy, kept its eastern gateway in German hands.
Berengar II returned to Italy burning with wrath against the bishops
and nobles who had caused his disasters and the mutilation of his kingdom.
He and his queen Willa earned an evil name for greed and cruelty, since
they needed wealth to enrich the enfeebled kingship and were hungry for
revenge. Among their lay foes Adalbert-Atto underwent a long vain
siege in his castle of Canossa, but the chief sufferers were the churchmen.
The series of grants to them, which had continued so persistently under
former kings, almost ceases under Berengar. At Milan, Manasse's rival
CH. VII.
## p. 160 (#206) ############################################
160
The chronicler Liudprand
a
Adalman was induced to resign, and he himself was dispossessed in favour
of a new Archbishop, Walpert. Exiles began to make their way to Otto's
court, among them our chief informant about these Italian kings, the
chronicler Liudprand, who thereby became the bitter enemy of Berengar II
with his house and wreaked his revenge in his historical writings. If
there had survived another business-like Italian chronicle, like that of
Flodoard for France, Liudprand would have earned more gratitude from
posterity than he does for his vivid narrative, his pointed character-
sketches, and the brush-like abundance of " local colour" with which he
overlays his scanty facts. As it is, in his Antapodosis (Retribution) we
have a difficulty in obtaining a firm foothold for history amid the crumb-
ling and quaking mass of rancorous, if often contemporary, gossip which
Liudprand loves to heap up. Of noble birth, bred at King Hugh's court,
and once Berengar II's secretary, he was in the best position to give
accurate and full information, but he had a soul above documents. It
is hardly his fault that he depended on oral tradition for all events before
his own time, for there seems to have been no Italian chronicle for him
to use, but he evidently made no record at the time and when he wrote
rested wholly on a memory which rejected dates and political circum-
stances and was singularly retentive of amorous scandal however devoid
of probability. He does not even tell in his unfinished work the cause
and events of his persecution by Berengar to which he frequently alludes,
while sketching with fine precision the diary of his reception at Constan-
tinople whither he first went as Berengar's envoy. For what interested
him he could remember and tell to the life. To his credit be it said
he was no liar, though he may be found suppressing an unpleasant fact;
what he heard he told, and perhaps we may grant him that he gave a
ready, and sometimes a determined, belief to the gossip of anterooms and
the tradition of wrathful factions. It is unfortunate, for he was a practical
statesman, and knew and sometimes reveals the motives of his times.
Berengar had had a free hand in Italy, and had even recovered
Verona, because Otto was occupied in German revolts and frontier wars,
but in 955 occurred the decisive victory of the Lechfeld in which Otto
put an end once for all to Hungarian raids. He had succeeded
where all the Italian kings had failed, he had rescued central Europe,
and was therefrom with little doubt its destined ruler. His intervention
in Italy, Henry of Bavaria being now dead, was renewed by the agency
of his reconciled rebel son Liudolf. In 957 the duke made his invasion
with the usual rapid success. Berengar II fled, Adalbert was defeated
in battle, and all Lombardy had submitted when Liudolf died of fever at
Pombia near Lake Maggiore, the first German victor to lose his gains
owing to the alien climate of Italy.
The death of Liudolf was followed by the immediate recovery of his
lost ground by Berengar. He came back with a new series of bitter
feuds to pursue. Walpert of Milan and other prelates fled to Otto, and
## p. 161 (#207) ############################################
Otto's second invasion
161
Manasse became once more a pluralist by returning to Milan as Berengar's
partisan. Among the lay magnates Marquess Otbert went into exile; a
general disaffection existed among those who retained their possessions.
The king was still eager as Hugh had been before him to amass an im-
posing royal demesne and to create trusty great vassals. Hitherto central
Italy had been faithful to him ; now, however, Spoleto seems an enemy,
perhaps owing to the new turn of affairs at Rome. On his deathbed in
954 prince Alberic had bound the Romans by oath to elect his son and
heir by Alda, John-Octavian, Pope when Agapetus should die. In
December 955 the promise was kept and the boy became Pope as John XII.
Thus the Pope recovered control of Rome by uniting with the Papacy
the chiefship of the strong faction of Alberic. Any design of a perma-
.
nent principate must have been given up; it was perhaps too anomalous,
and it is significant that John renewed the long forgotten habit of dating
by the years of the Byzantine Emperors. But the Roman nobles remained
in power to the continued subjection of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
John XII himself was a dissolute boy whose pontificate was a glaring
scandal. No gleam of competence redeemed his debauchery, though he
was not without secular ambitions. About 959 he made war on the co-
regent princes of Capua-Benevento, Paldolf I (Pandulf) Ironhead and
Landolf III, with the aid of Marquess Theobald II of Spoleto. He
failed, and gave way, for prince Gisulf of Salerno assisted his neighbours;
and then Berengar attacked Spoleto on an unknown pretext. Theobald
was driven out, and Spoleto taken over by the king possibly to be con-
ferred on his own son Guido. Did Berengar demand the imperial crown?
In any case King Adalbert ravaged Roman territory, and John XII
was in such straits as to appeal for German intervention, thus strangely
shewing how the ancient policy of the Popes could recur in the unclerical
son of Alberic.
It was in the summer of 960 that the Pope's envoys, the Cardinal-
deacon John and the scriniarius Azo, reached Otto the Great in Saxony.
The Pope's prayer for help was seconded by the Lombard exiles and by
the messages of numerous magnates. Otto was now unembarrassed in
other directions, and could resume his old schemes with the knowledge
that he would have at last allies and support south of the Apennines.
He was not ready to move, however, till August 961, when he crossed the
Brenner Pass in force. Adalbert may have attempted to gather troops
to bar the defiles north of Verona, but the universal defection of counts
and bishops made resistance impossible, and the German king entered
Pavia, whence Berengar had fled after spitefully burning the royal palace.
Otto and the infant son Otto II whom he had left in Germany were at
once acknowledged as co-regent kings of Italy without further cere-
mony. All their deserted rivals could do was to hold out in strong castles
on the spurs of the Alps and in the Apennines where one magnate at
least, Marquess Hubert of Tuscany, remained true to them. Otto was
C. MED. H. VOL. III. CH. VII.
