Did
Berengar
demand the imperial crown?
Cambridge Medieval History - v3 - Germany and the Western Empire
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.
11
## p. 162 (#208) ############################################
162
Otto's imperial coronation
able to disregard his enemies while he proceeded through Ravenna, thus
avoiding the Tuscan route, to receive the promised imperial crown. On
31 January 962 he encamped on Monte Mario outside Rome, and according
to custom certain of his vassals took on his behalf an oath to respect the
Pope's rights. The custom was old, but the terms of the oath were new! ,
for John XII wished for an ally, not a suzerain, and the German king
promised not to hold placita or intervene in Rome without the Pope's
assent, to restore such alienated papal lands as he should become master
of, and to bind whomever he should appoint to rule the Regnum Italicum
to be the Pope's protector. The Romans disliked a foreigner, and Otto
bought his way by elusive promises and fallacious expectations. On
2 February he entered the Leonine city and was crowned with Adelaide
in St Peter's by the Pope. A Roman Emperor of the West, successor
of Charlemagne, once more existed. It was of evil omen that Otto's
sword-bearer stood on guard against his assassination while the sacring .
was enacted.
On their side Pope John and the Romans swore fealty to the Emperor
with an express promise not to aid or receive Berengar and Adalbert.
They found that Otto considered the situation changed by his new dignity.
It is true that the privilege he granted to the Papacy on 13 February was
even more generous than the old Carolingian donations in the matter of
territory—for it added a large strip of Spoletan land to Rome and its
duchy, the Exarchate, the Pentapolis, the Tuscan territory, the Sabina
and the southern patrimonies, not to mention the vaguer supposed do-
nation of 1774 which was now confirmed without any clear idea of its
meaning. But the pact of 824 was also expressly revived, by which the
election of the Pope was submitted to imperial confirmation, and the
Emperor's suzerainty in the papal lands was reserved and exercised in
Rome itself by his missus. The scheme of setting up a vassal king of
Italy, if ever really entertained, was abandoned. Although the terms
of Otto's oath were not precisely infringed, the change in the spirit of
the new treaty was manifest-Pope John had become a subject? .
There was still Berengar II to conquer, and the Emperor returned to
Pavia, driving Hubert of Tuscany into exile on the way. Berengar was
holding out in the impregnable castle of S. Leo in the Apennines, queen
Willa and her sons in strongholds near the lakes in the north. Willa
was now compelled to surrender on terms which allowed her to rejoin
her husband : their sons were pressed hard, and Adalbert made his escape
to the Saracens of Fraxinetum and Corsica. There he entered into re-
1 Unless the lost charter of Charles the Bald to John VIII really formed a
precedent. Cf. Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma (M. G. H. Script. 111. ,
p. 722).
? This account is based on the view that the Privilegium Ottonianum is substantially
the text of the privilege granted by Otto to John XII, the existing document being
a copy made for the next Pope, Leo VIII.
## p. 163 (#209) ############################################
Subjugation of Rome and the Papacy
163
lations with Pope John who was heartily weary of his new subordination.
Meantime Otto was secure in the north, his partisans were placed in power,
Liudprand was Bishop of Cremona, Adalbert-Atto Count of Modena and
Reggio, Otto's nephew Henry of Bavaria in firm possession of the march
of Verona. So the news of the Pope's dubious loyalty only urged the
Emperor to finish with Berengar by blockading him in S. Leo in May
963, while he still negotiated with John. The Pope on his side had
grounds of complaint, for the Exarchate had not been restored to the
Apostolic See on the ground that Berengar must first be conquered. On
the other hand Otto had documentary proof that John was trying to
rouse the Hungarians against him, and when he heard that Adalbert
had been welcomed by John at Civitavecchia he seems to have decided
to take the extreme measure of deposing his quondam ally. It was a
hazardous course, for in the general belief the Pope could be brought
to no man's judgment, and the Romans, even those not of Alberic's
faction, resented any diminution of their autonomy. But Otto knew that
John XII's scandalous life and government had made men inclined to
admit even a Pope's deposition, and were driving his Roman opponents
even to alliance with the foreign Emperor. Accordingly in October
Otto left a blockading force at S. Leo and marched on Rome, where his
partisans rose. John XII and Adalbert fled to Tivoli laden with much
church-treasure, and the Romans surrendered. They gave hostages and
swore never to elect a Pope save by the choice of Otto and his son. The
engagement was novel, going far beyond the Carolingian right to confirm
an election and receive the Pope's fealty, but Alberic had already exercised
the same power and Otto's imperial crown was unsafe without it. Canonical
form was as nearly as possible observed in John's deposition. A synod,
in which the Pope's central Italian suffragans predominated, was presided
over by the Emperor and attended by the Roman clergy and nobles ;
John was accused of gross misconduct and was summoned by Emperor
and synod to clear himself in person. A brief letter in reply merely
threatened with excommunication and suspension any bishops who should
elect a new Pope. The synod sent a second summons retorting the threat
and criticizing the illiteracy of John whose Latin smacked of the ver-
nacular, but John was not to be found by the messengers. It was clear
that the three canonical summonses could not be delivered to the culprit,
and Otto now came forward in his own person and denounced John for
his breach of fealty to himself. Thereupon on 4 December Emperor and
synod declared John deposed and elected the protoscriniarius, a layman,
Pope as Leo VIII.
Otto was in the full tide of success. Just after Christmas S. Leo at
last surrendered and Berengar II and his wife were sent captive to
Bamberg where they both died in 966. So Otto confidently dismissed
much of his army. But John XII was stronger than he seemed, for his
uncanonical deposition and a layman's uncanonical election had roused
а
CH. VII.
11-2
## p. 164 (#210) ############################################
164
The Romano-Germanic Empire
qualms among a section of the churchmen, and the Romans were fretting
under their subjugation. A sudden rising failed before the swords of
Otto's tried warriors; yet, when Otto went eastwards to take possession
of the Spoletan duchy, John XII had only to appear before Rome with
troops for the gates to be opened. Pope Leo just escaped with his life,
and John was reinstated. After mutilating his former envoys to Otto,
John and Azo, presumably on a charge of forgery, a synod of the nearest
bishops in February 964 annulled Otto's synod in which most of them
had participated and declared Leo an intruder. Otto, whose missus had
been ill-treated, naturally refused to change his policy. While his army
was collecting, however, John XII died on 14 May of paralysis, and the
Romans made a bid for independence by electing a learned and virtuous
Pope, Benedict V. It was a vain manoeuvre. Otto starved out the city,
mutilating all who tried to pass his blockading lines. On 23 June the
surrender was made, and Leo VIII reinstated. Benedict was deposed
and sent to a saintly exile at Hamburg. By now at any rate it was
agreed that Otto's grants to the Popes were only for show, for of all the
lands bestowed by his charter the duchy of Rome and the Sabina alone
were left to the Papacy.
In this way Otto the Great brought into existence the Romano-
Germanic Empire of the West, or, to give it its later and convenient
name, the Holy Roman Empire, compounded by a union of the German
kingdom with the Regnum Italicum and with the dignity of Roman
Emperor. It was intended and supposed to be a revival of the Empire
of Charlemagne which had broken up on the deposition of Charles the
Fat, although its title had remained until the fall of Berengar I to express
a protectorate of the Papacy. It was also a reassertion of that claim to
pre-eminence in Western Europe which had been made by Otto's pre-
decessor Arnulf as chief of the Carolingian house. Arnulf's Empire,
indeed, furnishes the transitional form between that of Otto and that of
Charlemagne, for Otto's title implied less than Charlemagne's had.
Otto was considered the lay chief of Western Christendom, its defender
from heathen and barbarians, the supreme maintainer of justice and
peace; but, whereas Charlemagne was ruler of church and state, Otto's
power over the church was protective in its character. The Pope was
unquestioned spiritual chief of Christendom; Otto was at the same time
his suzerain with regard to the papal lands, and his subject as a
member of the Church. The arrangement was only workable because
the Papacy was weak. In secular matters Otto's Empire lacked the
universality of Charlemagne’s. Not only were France and Christian
.
Spain outside its frontiers, but within it the nascent force of nationality
was beginning to make itself felt. The German monarch was a foreigner
in subject Italy, disguised as the fact might be by the absence of national
feeling among the Italian magnates. “He had with him peoples and
tribes whose tongues the people did not know. ” This meant constant
a
## p. 165 (#211) ############################################
The government of Italy
165
disaffection, constant suppression. The popular hatred burnt most
fiercely at Rome and found utterance in a Roman monk': “Woe to thee,
Rome, that thou art crushed and trodden down by so many peoples ;
who hast been seized by a Saxon king, and thy folk slaughtered and thy
strength reduced to naught ! ”
In the details of government, also, Otto had not the control which
Charlemagne exercised. Although the decline of the royal power must
not be overrated, especially in Germany, even there feudalism, seignorial
independence and state disorganisation, had made great strides. In
Italy, where he was too often an absentee, the royal demesne was
depleted and the lay vassals were out of hand. Otto met this difficulty
by a clever balancing of the two groups by whom he had been called in,
the great secular magnates and the bishops. Of these, the first were
the Marquesses, a title given in Italy to the ruler of several counties.
Towards them Otto was conciliatory; even Hubert in the end was
restored to Tuscany, and the Lombards, some four or five in number,
were the Emperor's faithful vassals. They were survivors in the struggle
for existence among the counts which had raged in the dissolution of
the Carolingian order. Under the pressure of civil war, of Hungarian
and Saracen ravage, old dynasts had vanished, new had come and had
either vanished too, or had remained weakened. In their place or by
their side ruled the bishops in the Lombard plain. Since 876 they had
been permanent royal missi in their dioceses, and thus had at least in
name supervision over the counts. Like other magnates the bishops
during the years of anarchy had increased their “immunity” inside their
domains, by increase of exemptions and jurisdictions and by grants of
the profitable royal rights of market and toll and the like, while those
domains also grew through the piety or competitive bribery of the kings
and nobles. Not least among the sources of the bishops' power was
their influence over their cities, inherited from Roman times. In anarchy
and disaster they stepped into the breach at the head of their fellow-
citizens, whatever civic feeling existed gathered round them, and fragment
by fragment they were acquiring in their cathedral cities the public
functions” whether of count or king. In its completed form this
piecemeal process resulted in the city and a radius of land round it
being excised from its county and removed from the count's jurisdiction.
Thus Bergamo, Parma, Cremona, Modena, Reggio and Trieste were at
Otto's accession under the rule of their bishops. Otto came as the ally
of the bishops and deliverer of the Church. He exercised whether by
pressure on the electors or by mere nomination the appointment to
vacant sees and great abbeys, and thus gained non-hereditary vassals
of his own choice who were the safest supporters of his monarchy. He
favoured of set policy these instruments of his power as counter-
weights to the feudal magnates. Fresh cities, Asti, Novara, and Penne
1 Benedict. S. Andreae Chron. c. 39.
CH. VII.
## p. 166 (#212) ############################################
166
Otto's attempt to annex South Italy
in the Abruzzi, were wholly given over to their bishops, and the im-
munities on episcopal lands steadily grew, so that they too were in
process of being excised from the counties in which they lay. The work
was slowly done by Otto and his successors both in Italy and Germany,
but there was no countering tendency. The functions granted were
either those of the hereditary counts or those which the kings had been
unable to perform. By transference of these to the churchmen Otto and
his heirs recovered control of much local government by seeming to give
it away, and secured faithful, powerful adherents selected for capacity.
Their monarchy came to rest, especially in Italy, on their control of the
Church ; all the more essential to them therefore became the subjection
or the firm alliance of the Papacy.
Scarcely had Otto left Italy when the death of his nominee, Pope
Leo VIII, early in 965 endangered his new Empire. The Romans with
a show of duty sent an embassy to beg for the exile Benedict as Pope,
and Adalbert appeared in Lombardy to raise a revolt. Duke Burchard
of Swabia, indeed, defeated Adalbert, and the Romans elected the
Bishop of Narni as Pope John XIII at the Emperor's command, but,
though John was of Alberic's kindred, the mere fact that he represented
German domination enabled rival nobles to raise the populace and drive
him into exile. He was not restored till in 966 the news of Otto's
descent into Italy with an army provoked a reaction. Punishment was
dealt out to the rebels, severer for the Roman enemies of the Pope than
for the Lombard rebels against Otto. John XIII's exile seems to have
occasioned fresh schemes of the Emperor. Paldolf I Ironhead of Capua-
Benevento, with whom the Pope had found an asylum, appeared in
Rome in January 967 and was there invested by Otto with the march of
Spoleto, at the same time becoming Otto's vassal for his native princi-
pality. Otto thus created a central Italian vassal of the first rank, and
enlarged his Empire. One motive, no doubt, was the wish to give peace
and security to the Spoletan march ; but the main purpose was clearly
to begin the annexation of South Italy to the Regnum Italicum. This
design, which was in pursuance of old Carolingian claims, was bound to
find resistance in the Eastern Empire. The Byzantines looked on Otto's
imperial title as a barbaric impertinence; they considered Capua-
Benevento as part of the Longobardic theme; and they were determined
to maintain their dominion in Italy.
The Eastern Roman Emperors were always handicapped in their
dealings in Italy; their province there was too important to be let go,
too
remote to be the object of their chief energies. The fall of King Hugh
had been followed by outbreaks in Apulia, and at the same time the Saracen
raids became a grave danger when the Fatimite Caliph Manşūr once again
recovered the revolted colony of Sicily in 947. Calabria was overrun
by his troops; even Naples was besieged; and, although in 956 the
patrician Marianus Argyrus restored Byzantine authority over subjects
## p. 167 (#213) ############################################
Compromise with Byzantium
167
and vassals, the peace which suspended, rather than closed, the Saracen
war was no more conclusive than the fighting. When a celebrated
general Nicephorus Phocas became Emperor in 963 his vigorous effort
to succour the last semi-autonomous Greeks of Sicily ended in disaster,
and an ignominious peace. Now he found himself on the defensive
against the aggression of the new Romano-Germanic Empire and the
Latin West. John XIII was trying to revive the decadent Latin Church
in south Italy by carving out new archbishoprics for Capua and Benevento
from his own Roman province; Otto the Great was acquiring Capua-
Benevento as a vassal state. At first it seemed as if an arrangement
were possible, for Otto asked for a Byzantine bride, Theophano, daughter
of Romanus II, for his son Otto II, whom at Christmas 967 he had
caused the Pope to crown co-regent Emperor; and his Venetian envoy
promised that Otto would respect the Byzantine dominions in Italy.
But in 968 the German monarch made a surprise attack on Apulia and,
only after failing to take Bari, did he send Liudprand of Cremona to
Constantinople to conclude the marriage-treaty. Otto must have thought
it easier to fix the frontier with the territory he claimed already in his
possession. The natural effect on the rude and soldierly Nicephorus was
to make him badger Liudprand and prepare an expedition. The war
was indecisive. The exiled King Adalbert, Nicephorus's Italian ally, could
do nothing and eventually fled to French Burgundy where in 975 he died,
while his brother Conrad submitted to Otto and received the march of
Ivrea. Otto on his side when he warred in person could take no Apulian
town and Paldolf Ironhead was captured by the Greeks, who yet were
soon defeated again. It was the murder of Nicephorus in December 969
which brought a solution. The new Byzantine Emperor, John Tzimisces,
had his hands full in the East; Otto saw the design of conquering Greek
Italy was hopeless. By the intervention of Paldolf, released for the
purpose, they came to terms, and in April 972 Theophano was married
at Rome to Otto II. Events make it clear that Otto kept the suzerainty
of Capua-Benevento and abandoned further schemes. Paldolf Ironhead's
wide central Italian dominion after all formed a convenient buffer-state
for both Empires, no matter to which he was a vassal.
Otto the Great did not long survive the settlement with Eastern
Rome, as he died in Thuringia on 7 May 973. His character belongs to
German history, but his work affected all Europe. He had created the
Holy Roman Empire and in so doing had revived the conception of
Charlemagne which moulded the thought and the development of Western
Europe. The union of Germany and north Italy was his doing and the
fate of both for centuries derives from the bias he gave their history.
So, too, in immediate results he closes one era and begins another,
for the times of anarchy and moral collapse following the wreck of
Charlemagne's Empire come to an end, and a period of revival in
government, in commerce and in civilisation is ushered in by the com-
CH. VII.
## p. 168 (#214) ############################################
168
Reduction of Fraxinetum
1
parative peace he gave. The problem of defence against the barbarian
invader, which had baffled the fleeting Italian kings and had contributed
to their ruin, was solved. Otto himself crushed the Hungarian hordes
for good and all: it was fitting that in his reign the Saracens of
Fraxinetum also, who so long preyed on the routes between Italy and
France, should be abolished. The impulse to this deliverance was
given by a crowning outrage. St Maiolus, Abbot of Cluny, revered
throughout the West, was captured in July 972 while crossing the Great
St Bernard Pass with a numerous caravan of fellow travellers. The Cluniac
monks at once raised the enormous ransom demanded by the Saracens,
but the indignation roused by the event and perhaps a hope of so great
a booty at length moved the great barons on either side of the Alps to
act in concert. The Saracens who had seized St Maiolus were cut off
and destroyed, and a federation of nobles led by the counts of Provence
and Ardoin of Turin closed in on Fraxinetum itself. The Saracen colony
was extirpated. Once more the Alpine passes were free to travellers,
save for exactions by the nobles and occasional brigandage? .
The Regnum Italicum could now rest under the shadow of the strong
monarchy, untroubled save by the violence of the nobles and the un-
appeased strife of Roman factions. Otto the Great had nominated in
973 Benedict VI to succeed to the Papacy, but a relative of John XIII
and of Alberic, Crescentius, son of a Theodora, thrust in a usurper, the
deacon Franco, as Boniface VII in 974. Yet a reaction, perhaps pro-
voked by the true Pope's murder, soon came, and the imperial missus,
Count Sico, was able to instal the Bishop of Sutri as Benedict VII,
although Franco contrived to escape to Constantinople with a quantity
of church-treasure. The revolution had not even required a German
army, much less an imperial campaign.
Not till December 980 did Otto II (the Red) find leisure or occasion
to proceed to Italy. He came to be reconciled with his mother Adelaide,
and perhaps to give her some voice in affairs. The young Emperor,
then aged twenty-five, was not eminently gifted with a ruler's wisdom;
but he was ambitious and energetic, and his ambitions now were directed
to that conquest of the south which his father had abandoned. There
was much that was tempting in the situation of Byzantine Italy, much
that seemed to call for intervention. In answer to the proceedings of
Otto the Great an attempt had been made by the Byzantines to unify
the administration by transmuting the strategos of Longobardia into the
catapan or viceroy of Italy with a superior authority over the strategos
of Calabria. This new system was soon put to hard proof. In 969 the
Fatimite caliphs conquered Egypt, and thus became hostile neighbours
to the East Romans in Syria. War broke out, and spread to the western
provinces of both powers. Once more Calabria was ravaged by the
· The county of Aosta appears to have become again a part of Jurane Burgundy,
as a result of this war.
## p. 169 (#215) ############################################
Otto II's failure in South Italy
169
Muslims under the Sicilian emir Abu'l-ķāsim in 976 and Apulia suffered
in the next year. The only relief given was due to the local payment of
blackmail, for the Byzantines, who had begun the war in spirited fashion
by the momentary capture of Messina, were paralysed by the campaigns
in Syria, by the civil wars which followed Tzimisces' death, and by the
disaffection of the Apulians.
Otto the Red succumbed to the temptation. The Saracen danger
under Abu'l-ķāsim grew ever more menacing and might affect his own
dominions. Civil war in the East and disaffection in Italy made the
Byzantines weak. He might at one and the same time repel the Muslims
and bring the Regnum Italicum to its natural limits. In September 981 he
had reached Lucera on the Apulian frontier when he was recalled to
secure his rear. Paldolf Ironhead had soon extended his central State.
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.
11
## p. 162 (#208) ############################################
162
Otto's imperial coronation
able to disregard his enemies while he proceeded through Ravenna, thus
avoiding the Tuscan route, to receive the promised imperial crown. On
31 January 962 he encamped on Monte Mario outside Rome, and according
to custom certain of his vassals took on his behalf an oath to respect the
Pope's rights. The custom was old, but the terms of the oath were new! ,
for John XII wished for an ally, not a suzerain, and the German king
promised not to hold placita or intervene in Rome without the Pope's
assent, to restore such alienated papal lands as he should become master
of, and to bind whomever he should appoint to rule the Regnum Italicum
to be the Pope's protector. The Romans disliked a foreigner, and Otto
bought his way by elusive promises and fallacious expectations. On
2 February he entered the Leonine city and was crowned with Adelaide
in St Peter's by the Pope. A Roman Emperor of the West, successor
of Charlemagne, once more existed. It was of evil omen that Otto's
sword-bearer stood on guard against his assassination while the sacring .
was enacted.
On their side Pope John and the Romans swore fealty to the Emperor
with an express promise not to aid or receive Berengar and Adalbert.
They found that Otto considered the situation changed by his new dignity.
It is true that the privilege he granted to the Papacy on 13 February was
even more generous than the old Carolingian donations in the matter of
territory—for it added a large strip of Spoletan land to Rome and its
duchy, the Exarchate, the Pentapolis, the Tuscan territory, the Sabina
and the southern patrimonies, not to mention the vaguer supposed do-
nation of 1774 which was now confirmed without any clear idea of its
meaning. But the pact of 824 was also expressly revived, by which the
election of the Pope was submitted to imperial confirmation, and the
Emperor's suzerainty in the papal lands was reserved and exercised in
Rome itself by his missus. The scheme of setting up a vassal king of
Italy, if ever really entertained, was abandoned. Although the terms
of Otto's oath were not precisely infringed, the change in the spirit of
the new treaty was manifest-Pope John had become a subject? .
There was still Berengar II to conquer, and the Emperor returned to
Pavia, driving Hubert of Tuscany into exile on the way. Berengar was
holding out in the impregnable castle of S. Leo in the Apennines, queen
Willa and her sons in strongholds near the lakes in the north. Willa
was now compelled to surrender on terms which allowed her to rejoin
her husband : their sons were pressed hard, and Adalbert made his escape
to the Saracens of Fraxinetum and Corsica. There he entered into re-
1 Unless the lost charter of Charles the Bald to John VIII really formed a
precedent. Cf. Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma (M. G. H. Script. 111. ,
p. 722).
? This account is based on the view that the Privilegium Ottonianum is substantially
the text of the privilege granted by Otto to John XII, the existing document being
a copy made for the next Pope, Leo VIII.
## p. 163 (#209) ############################################
Subjugation of Rome and the Papacy
163
lations with Pope John who was heartily weary of his new subordination.
Meantime Otto was secure in the north, his partisans were placed in power,
Liudprand was Bishop of Cremona, Adalbert-Atto Count of Modena and
Reggio, Otto's nephew Henry of Bavaria in firm possession of the march
of Verona. So the news of the Pope's dubious loyalty only urged the
Emperor to finish with Berengar by blockading him in S. Leo in May
963, while he still negotiated with John. The Pope on his side had
grounds of complaint, for the Exarchate had not been restored to the
Apostolic See on the ground that Berengar must first be conquered. On
the other hand Otto had documentary proof that John was trying to
rouse the Hungarians against him, and when he heard that Adalbert
had been welcomed by John at Civitavecchia he seems to have decided
to take the extreme measure of deposing his quondam ally. It was a
hazardous course, for in the general belief the Pope could be brought
to no man's judgment, and the Romans, even those not of Alberic's
faction, resented any diminution of their autonomy. But Otto knew that
John XII's scandalous life and government had made men inclined to
admit even a Pope's deposition, and were driving his Roman opponents
even to alliance with the foreign Emperor. Accordingly in October
Otto left a blockading force at S. Leo and marched on Rome, where his
partisans rose. John XII and Adalbert fled to Tivoli laden with much
church-treasure, and the Romans surrendered. They gave hostages and
swore never to elect a Pope save by the choice of Otto and his son. The
engagement was novel, going far beyond the Carolingian right to confirm
an election and receive the Pope's fealty, but Alberic had already exercised
the same power and Otto's imperial crown was unsafe without it. Canonical
form was as nearly as possible observed in John's deposition. A synod,
in which the Pope's central Italian suffragans predominated, was presided
over by the Emperor and attended by the Roman clergy and nobles ;
John was accused of gross misconduct and was summoned by Emperor
and synod to clear himself in person. A brief letter in reply merely
threatened with excommunication and suspension any bishops who should
elect a new Pope. The synod sent a second summons retorting the threat
and criticizing the illiteracy of John whose Latin smacked of the ver-
nacular, but John was not to be found by the messengers. It was clear
that the three canonical summonses could not be delivered to the culprit,
and Otto now came forward in his own person and denounced John for
his breach of fealty to himself. Thereupon on 4 December Emperor and
synod declared John deposed and elected the protoscriniarius, a layman,
Pope as Leo VIII.
Otto was in the full tide of success. Just after Christmas S. Leo at
last surrendered and Berengar II and his wife were sent captive to
Bamberg where they both died in 966. So Otto confidently dismissed
much of his army. But John XII was stronger than he seemed, for his
uncanonical deposition and a layman's uncanonical election had roused
а
CH. VII.
11-2
## p. 164 (#210) ############################################
164
The Romano-Germanic Empire
qualms among a section of the churchmen, and the Romans were fretting
under their subjugation. A sudden rising failed before the swords of
Otto's tried warriors; yet, when Otto went eastwards to take possession
of the Spoletan duchy, John XII had only to appear before Rome with
troops for the gates to be opened. Pope Leo just escaped with his life,
and John was reinstated. After mutilating his former envoys to Otto,
John and Azo, presumably on a charge of forgery, a synod of the nearest
bishops in February 964 annulled Otto's synod in which most of them
had participated and declared Leo an intruder. Otto, whose missus had
been ill-treated, naturally refused to change his policy. While his army
was collecting, however, John XII died on 14 May of paralysis, and the
Romans made a bid for independence by electing a learned and virtuous
Pope, Benedict V. It was a vain manoeuvre. Otto starved out the city,
mutilating all who tried to pass his blockading lines. On 23 June the
surrender was made, and Leo VIII reinstated. Benedict was deposed
and sent to a saintly exile at Hamburg. By now at any rate it was
agreed that Otto's grants to the Popes were only for show, for of all the
lands bestowed by his charter the duchy of Rome and the Sabina alone
were left to the Papacy.
In this way Otto the Great brought into existence the Romano-
Germanic Empire of the West, or, to give it its later and convenient
name, the Holy Roman Empire, compounded by a union of the German
kingdom with the Regnum Italicum and with the dignity of Roman
Emperor. It was intended and supposed to be a revival of the Empire
of Charlemagne which had broken up on the deposition of Charles the
Fat, although its title had remained until the fall of Berengar I to express
a protectorate of the Papacy. It was also a reassertion of that claim to
pre-eminence in Western Europe which had been made by Otto's pre-
decessor Arnulf as chief of the Carolingian house. Arnulf's Empire,
indeed, furnishes the transitional form between that of Otto and that of
Charlemagne, for Otto's title implied less than Charlemagne's had.
Otto was considered the lay chief of Western Christendom, its defender
from heathen and barbarians, the supreme maintainer of justice and
peace; but, whereas Charlemagne was ruler of church and state, Otto's
power over the church was protective in its character. The Pope was
unquestioned spiritual chief of Christendom; Otto was at the same time
his suzerain with regard to the papal lands, and his subject as a
member of the Church. The arrangement was only workable because
the Papacy was weak. In secular matters Otto's Empire lacked the
universality of Charlemagne’s. Not only were France and Christian
.
Spain outside its frontiers, but within it the nascent force of nationality
was beginning to make itself felt. The German monarch was a foreigner
in subject Italy, disguised as the fact might be by the absence of national
feeling among the Italian magnates. “He had with him peoples and
tribes whose tongues the people did not know. ” This meant constant
a
## p. 165 (#211) ############################################
The government of Italy
165
disaffection, constant suppression. The popular hatred burnt most
fiercely at Rome and found utterance in a Roman monk': “Woe to thee,
Rome, that thou art crushed and trodden down by so many peoples ;
who hast been seized by a Saxon king, and thy folk slaughtered and thy
strength reduced to naught ! ”
In the details of government, also, Otto had not the control which
Charlemagne exercised. Although the decline of the royal power must
not be overrated, especially in Germany, even there feudalism, seignorial
independence and state disorganisation, had made great strides. In
Italy, where he was too often an absentee, the royal demesne was
depleted and the lay vassals were out of hand. Otto met this difficulty
by a clever balancing of the two groups by whom he had been called in,
the great secular magnates and the bishops. Of these, the first were
the Marquesses, a title given in Italy to the ruler of several counties.
Towards them Otto was conciliatory; even Hubert in the end was
restored to Tuscany, and the Lombards, some four or five in number,
were the Emperor's faithful vassals. They were survivors in the struggle
for existence among the counts which had raged in the dissolution of
the Carolingian order. Under the pressure of civil war, of Hungarian
and Saracen ravage, old dynasts had vanished, new had come and had
either vanished too, or had remained weakened. In their place or by
their side ruled the bishops in the Lombard plain. Since 876 they had
been permanent royal missi in their dioceses, and thus had at least in
name supervision over the counts. Like other magnates the bishops
during the years of anarchy had increased their “immunity” inside their
domains, by increase of exemptions and jurisdictions and by grants of
the profitable royal rights of market and toll and the like, while those
domains also grew through the piety or competitive bribery of the kings
and nobles. Not least among the sources of the bishops' power was
their influence over their cities, inherited from Roman times. In anarchy
and disaster they stepped into the breach at the head of their fellow-
citizens, whatever civic feeling existed gathered round them, and fragment
by fragment they were acquiring in their cathedral cities the public
functions” whether of count or king. In its completed form this
piecemeal process resulted in the city and a radius of land round it
being excised from its county and removed from the count's jurisdiction.
Thus Bergamo, Parma, Cremona, Modena, Reggio and Trieste were at
Otto's accession under the rule of their bishops. Otto came as the ally
of the bishops and deliverer of the Church. He exercised whether by
pressure on the electors or by mere nomination the appointment to
vacant sees and great abbeys, and thus gained non-hereditary vassals
of his own choice who were the safest supporters of his monarchy. He
favoured of set policy these instruments of his power as counter-
weights to the feudal magnates. Fresh cities, Asti, Novara, and Penne
1 Benedict. S. Andreae Chron. c. 39.
CH. VII.
## p. 166 (#212) ############################################
166
Otto's attempt to annex South Italy
in the Abruzzi, were wholly given over to their bishops, and the im-
munities on episcopal lands steadily grew, so that they too were in
process of being excised from the counties in which they lay. The work
was slowly done by Otto and his successors both in Italy and Germany,
but there was no countering tendency. The functions granted were
either those of the hereditary counts or those which the kings had been
unable to perform. By transference of these to the churchmen Otto and
his heirs recovered control of much local government by seeming to give
it away, and secured faithful, powerful adherents selected for capacity.
Their monarchy came to rest, especially in Italy, on their control of the
Church ; all the more essential to them therefore became the subjection
or the firm alliance of the Papacy.
Scarcely had Otto left Italy when the death of his nominee, Pope
Leo VIII, early in 965 endangered his new Empire. The Romans with
a show of duty sent an embassy to beg for the exile Benedict as Pope,
and Adalbert appeared in Lombardy to raise a revolt. Duke Burchard
of Swabia, indeed, defeated Adalbert, and the Romans elected the
Bishop of Narni as Pope John XIII at the Emperor's command, but,
though John was of Alberic's kindred, the mere fact that he represented
German domination enabled rival nobles to raise the populace and drive
him into exile. He was not restored till in 966 the news of Otto's
descent into Italy with an army provoked a reaction. Punishment was
dealt out to the rebels, severer for the Roman enemies of the Pope than
for the Lombard rebels against Otto. John XIII's exile seems to have
occasioned fresh schemes of the Emperor. Paldolf I Ironhead of Capua-
Benevento, with whom the Pope had found an asylum, appeared in
Rome in January 967 and was there invested by Otto with the march of
Spoleto, at the same time becoming Otto's vassal for his native princi-
pality. Otto thus created a central Italian vassal of the first rank, and
enlarged his Empire. One motive, no doubt, was the wish to give peace
and security to the Spoletan march ; but the main purpose was clearly
to begin the annexation of South Italy to the Regnum Italicum. This
design, which was in pursuance of old Carolingian claims, was bound to
find resistance in the Eastern Empire. The Byzantines looked on Otto's
imperial title as a barbaric impertinence; they considered Capua-
Benevento as part of the Longobardic theme; and they were determined
to maintain their dominion in Italy.
The Eastern Roman Emperors were always handicapped in their
dealings in Italy; their province there was too important to be let go,
too
remote to be the object of their chief energies. The fall of King Hugh
had been followed by outbreaks in Apulia, and at the same time the Saracen
raids became a grave danger when the Fatimite Caliph Manşūr once again
recovered the revolted colony of Sicily in 947. Calabria was overrun
by his troops; even Naples was besieged; and, although in 956 the
patrician Marianus Argyrus restored Byzantine authority over subjects
## p. 167 (#213) ############################################
Compromise with Byzantium
167
and vassals, the peace which suspended, rather than closed, the Saracen
war was no more conclusive than the fighting. When a celebrated
general Nicephorus Phocas became Emperor in 963 his vigorous effort
to succour the last semi-autonomous Greeks of Sicily ended in disaster,
and an ignominious peace. Now he found himself on the defensive
against the aggression of the new Romano-Germanic Empire and the
Latin West. John XIII was trying to revive the decadent Latin Church
in south Italy by carving out new archbishoprics for Capua and Benevento
from his own Roman province; Otto the Great was acquiring Capua-
Benevento as a vassal state. At first it seemed as if an arrangement
were possible, for Otto asked for a Byzantine bride, Theophano, daughter
of Romanus II, for his son Otto II, whom at Christmas 967 he had
caused the Pope to crown co-regent Emperor; and his Venetian envoy
promised that Otto would respect the Byzantine dominions in Italy.
But in 968 the German monarch made a surprise attack on Apulia and,
only after failing to take Bari, did he send Liudprand of Cremona to
Constantinople to conclude the marriage-treaty. Otto must have thought
it easier to fix the frontier with the territory he claimed already in his
possession. The natural effect on the rude and soldierly Nicephorus was
to make him badger Liudprand and prepare an expedition. The war
was indecisive. The exiled King Adalbert, Nicephorus's Italian ally, could
do nothing and eventually fled to French Burgundy where in 975 he died,
while his brother Conrad submitted to Otto and received the march of
Ivrea. Otto on his side when he warred in person could take no Apulian
town and Paldolf Ironhead was captured by the Greeks, who yet were
soon defeated again. It was the murder of Nicephorus in December 969
which brought a solution. The new Byzantine Emperor, John Tzimisces,
had his hands full in the East; Otto saw the design of conquering Greek
Italy was hopeless. By the intervention of Paldolf, released for the
purpose, they came to terms, and in April 972 Theophano was married
at Rome to Otto II. Events make it clear that Otto kept the suzerainty
of Capua-Benevento and abandoned further schemes. Paldolf Ironhead's
wide central Italian dominion after all formed a convenient buffer-state
for both Empires, no matter to which he was a vassal.
Otto the Great did not long survive the settlement with Eastern
Rome, as he died in Thuringia on 7 May 973. His character belongs to
German history, but his work affected all Europe. He had created the
Holy Roman Empire and in so doing had revived the conception of
Charlemagne which moulded the thought and the development of Western
Europe. The union of Germany and north Italy was his doing and the
fate of both for centuries derives from the bias he gave their history.
So, too, in immediate results he closes one era and begins another,
for the times of anarchy and moral collapse following the wreck of
Charlemagne's Empire come to an end, and a period of revival in
government, in commerce and in civilisation is ushered in by the com-
CH. VII.
## p. 168 (#214) ############################################
168
Reduction of Fraxinetum
1
parative peace he gave. The problem of defence against the barbarian
invader, which had baffled the fleeting Italian kings and had contributed
to their ruin, was solved. Otto himself crushed the Hungarian hordes
for good and all: it was fitting that in his reign the Saracens of
Fraxinetum also, who so long preyed on the routes between Italy and
France, should be abolished. The impulse to this deliverance was
given by a crowning outrage. St Maiolus, Abbot of Cluny, revered
throughout the West, was captured in July 972 while crossing the Great
St Bernard Pass with a numerous caravan of fellow travellers. The Cluniac
monks at once raised the enormous ransom demanded by the Saracens,
but the indignation roused by the event and perhaps a hope of so great
a booty at length moved the great barons on either side of the Alps to
act in concert. The Saracens who had seized St Maiolus were cut off
and destroyed, and a federation of nobles led by the counts of Provence
and Ardoin of Turin closed in on Fraxinetum itself. The Saracen colony
was extirpated. Once more the Alpine passes were free to travellers,
save for exactions by the nobles and occasional brigandage? .
The Regnum Italicum could now rest under the shadow of the strong
monarchy, untroubled save by the violence of the nobles and the un-
appeased strife of Roman factions. Otto the Great had nominated in
973 Benedict VI to succeed to the Papacy, but a relative of John XIII
and of Alberic, Crescentius, son of a Theodora, thrust in a usurper, the
deacon Franco, as Boniface VII in 974. Yet a reaction, perhaps pro-
voked by the true Pope's murder, soon came, and the imperial missus,
Count Sico, was able to instal the Bishop of Sutri as Benedict VII,
although Franco contrived to escape to Constantinople with a quantity
of church-treasure. The revolution had not even required a German
army, much less an imperial campaign.
Not till December 980 did Otto II (the Red) find leisure or occasion
to proceed to Italy. He came to be reconciled with his mother Adelaide,
and perhaps to give her some voice in affairs. The young Emperor,
then aged twenty-five, was not eminently gifted with a ruler's wisdom;
but he was ambitious and energetic, and his ambitions now were directed
to that conquest of the south which his father had abandoned. There
was much that was tempting in the situation of Byzantine Italy, much
that seemed to call for intervention. In answer to the proceedings of
Otto the Great an attempt had been made by the Byzantines to unify
the administration by transmuting the strategos of Longobardia into the
catapan or viceroy of Italy with a superior authority over the strategos
of Calabria. This new system was soon put to hard proof. In 969 the
Fatimite caliphs conquered Egypt, and thus became hostile neighbours
to the East Romans in Syria. War broke out, and spread to the western
provinces of both powers. Once more Calabria was ravaged by the
· The county of Aosta appears to have become again a part of Jurane Burgundy,
as a result of this war.
## p. 169 (#215) ############################################
Otto II's failure in South Italy
169
Muslims under the Sicilian emir Abu'l-ķāsim in 976 and Apulia suffered
in the next year. The only relief given was due to the local payment of
blackmail, for the Byzantines, who had begun the war in spirited fashion
by the momentary capture of Messina, were paralysed by the campaigns
in Syria, by the civil wars which followed Tzimisces' death, and by the
disaffection of the Apulians.
Otto the Red succumbed to the temptation. The Saracen danger
under Abu'l-ķāsim grew ever more menacing and might affect his own
dominions. Civil war in the East and disaffection in Italy made the
Byzantines weak. He might at one and the same time repel the Muslims
and bring the Regnum Italicum to its natural limits. In September 981 he
had reached Lucera on the Apulian frontier when he was recalled to
secure his rear. Paldolf Ironhead had soon extended his central State.
