The Italians

by John Hooper

  Leo’s coronation of Charlemagne, an already crowned monarch, was more than just an expression of gratitude for the Franks’ military intervention. The pope was declaring him to be the emperor of a reborn Western Roman Empire. Although the title conferred on Charlemagne was renounced for a while by his successors, it was revived in the middle of the tenth century and never subsequently relinquished. The territory that the emperors ruled eventually came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire—a reflection of their claim to a legitimacy that derived from the papacy, and through the papacy from God. Like the Papal States, the Holy Roman Empire would survive into the nineteenth century. At its greatest extent, it covered much of northern Italy, Sardinia, parts of eastern France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Germany, some of western Poland, the modern-day Czech Republic and most of today’s Slovenia.

  The interaction between the papacy and the Frankish kings may have been momentous, but it was also richly ironic. Pepin had little enough right to hand Byzantine territory to the popes. But Leo had no right whatever to confer on Pepin’s son the title of Roman emperor. The claim of later popes to be the true heirs of Augustus and his successors was based on a document known as the Donation of Constantine. This purported to show that before making Byzantium his capital in 330, Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, had entrusted the western part of his domains to the then reigning pope. But the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, a lie. It had been concocted in the papal chancellery at some point in the eighth century.

  By crowning Charlemagne, Pope Leo may have felt he was asserting the right of the papacy to decide who should be emperor in the West. But he was also creating a rival heir to the legacy of ancient Rome. The competing pretensions of the papacy on the one hand and of Charlemagne’s successors on the other would again and again bring death and destruction to medieval Italy. After 962, the emperors were Germans and every time the emperor of the day felt the need to reassert his power or replenish his coffers, an army would come marching through the Alps. Cities would be sacked, the surrounding countryside ravaged. There would be slaughter, rape and looting.

  But the creation of this new empire did not just bring about conflict. It also led, in Italy as in Germany, to an abnormal degree of political fragmentation. Though a few of the Holy Roman emperors opted to rule from Rome, most spent their lives on the other side of the Alps. The popes, for their part, were often more concerned with ecclesiastical and theological matters than with the mundane details of civil administration. And in any case their military resources were limited: they relied for the protection of the Papal States to a large extent on moral authority and mercenary troops.

  The result was a power vacuum in the northern half of Italy in which many towns and cities, particularly those that had once enjoyed a degree of autonomy under the original Roman Empire, started to govern themselves. Successive popes, keen to curb the power of the Holy Roman emperors, encouraged the spread of these miniature semidemocratic republics known as communes. When the communes began to be replaced by more personal and autocratic forms of government in the fourteenth century, Italy north of the Papal States became a patchwork of semi-independent principalities, duchies, marquisates, counties and tiny lordships dotted with the odd surviving republic. Wars between them were common.

  The inhabitants of northern and north central Italy in the late Middle Ages may have been divided and vulnerable. But for as long as the communes survived, their citizens enjoyed a degree of control over their own affairs that was unthinkable in most of the rest of Europe. They were also increasingly prosperous: a surge in economic growth began toward the end of the eleventh century and lasted on and off until the start of the fourteenth, laying the material foundations for the Renaissance.

  The most powerful of the republics in the north was Venice. But it was also the least typical. Venice’s lagoon-dwelling inhabitants—originally refugees from the German tribal invasions—had never been subject to the Holy Roman Empire. They had elected their first duke, or doge, back in the eighth century after cutting themselves loose from the Byzantine Empire. Enriched by trade with the East, especially after the start of the Crusades, the Venetian Republic, or Serenissima,* grew to be an important naval power. By the end of the fifteenth century, the doges had an empire of their own that stretched as far as Cyprus.

  By casting a protective mantle over the rest of northern and central Italy, the emperors not only encouraged the region to fracture internally, but cut it off from the south. In the thousand years that followed Charlemagne’s coronation, alliances were sometimes forged that involved this or that southern state. From time to time, an emperor would lead his army into the Mezzogiorno. And for a while, the two halves of Italy were nominally reunited as part of the empire. But for the rest, the affairs of the north and the south were separate, and they developed as quite different societies.

  Sicily was gradually conquered by Muslim forces in the ninth century and remained an Islamic emirate until the end of the eleventh. The foot and heel of the Italian boot still came under direct Byzantine rule. But Muslim raiders established another, relatively short-lived emirate around Bari in the ninth century. A Lombard principality centered on Benevento survived for almost three hundred years after the Frankish invasion (it was divided after the middle of the ninth century). And when the Muslim occupation of Sicily isolated the emperors in Constantinople from their remaining possessions farther west, several territories nominally belonging to the Byzantine Empire became effectively independent.

  Sardinia was one. Provincial governors who were also judges took over the administration of the so-called giudicati into which the island was split. The giudicati soon became hereditary kingdoms, one of which survived as an independent state into the fifteenth century. On the western seaboard of the Italian mainland, a number of the ports together with their hinterlands—first Naples, then Gaeta, Amalfi and, briefly, Sorrento—became self-governing. Amalfi in particular enjoyed a golden age of wealth and influence in the tenth and eleventh centuries based on trade with the Byzantine Empire and a good deal of diplomatic opportunism. (Like the rulers of the other southern maritime states, the dukes of Amalfi had no qualms about forging alliances with Muslim potentates, or even pirates.)

  Sicily prospered too, and for longer. Under the emirate, Palermo was probably the biggest city in Europe after Constantinople. Muslim rule there was snuffed out in the same way as Byzantine control of the mainland: by Norman mercenaries who had come to take part in the incessant conflicts that raged among the petty states of southern Italy and between them and the Byzantine forces stationed there. By 1071, Byzantine rule in Italy had ended, and twenty years later a Norman was master of Sicily.

  Fanatically Christian descendants of the Vikings, the Normans proved to be unexpectedly tolerant and intelligent rulers. On Sicily, they allowed a fusion of Arab, Jewish, Byzantine and Norman elements to take place, creating a dazzlingly eclectic culture. And it was a Norman who in the twelfth century brought Sicily and the mainland together as part of a unified kingdom. The south was to remain territorially united for most of the next seven hundred years, even though for much of that period Sicily and the mainland were governed as separate entities under the same crown.

  In 1194, the emperor Henry VI conquered the Kingdom of Sicily, as the united state was misleadingly called, and for the next seventy years the whole of present-day Italy, with the exception of Sardinia, was brought within the Holy Roman Empire. For thirty of those years, under Frederick II, it was the rest of the empire stretching to the Baltic that was ruled from the Kingdom of Sicily and specifically from Palermo, where the emperor had grown up. Frederick’s reign saw perhaps the most determined effort before the nineteenth century to bring all of Italy under the direct control of a single authority. But his efforts were resisted by the communes and resulted in almost thirty years of warfare. Vigorously opposed by the papacy, Frederick failed, and within a few
years of his death a French dynasty had wrested the Kingdom of Sicily from the grip of the empire.

  The island of Sicily was subsequently lost to the Crown of Aragon, the state in northeastern Spain that included modern-day Catalonia. But in the fifteenth century a king of Aragon, Alfonso V, reunited the island (and Sardinia) with the mainland. After the Crown of Aragon merged with the Crown of Castile, southern Italy became a dominion of the new Kingdom of Spain, the realm that would soon be ascendant in the Mediterranean and far beyond.

  The unity of the south under a succession of foreign rulers contrasted sharply with the fragmentation of the north. But after a series of catastrophes in the fourteenth century, notably the Black Death, economic activity there recovered and gradually reacquired momentum. It was during this period too that the first great Renaissance works of art and literature made their appearance in Siena and Florence.

  As Harry Lime rightly observed, Italians produced some of their greatest cultural achievements in precisely those periods in which they were in greatest peril.* The prosperity and emerging cultural brilliance of the states that replaced or absorbed the communes masked the acute danger they were in. By the middle of the fifteenth century, at the height of the Renaissance, northern Italy was split into more than a dozen states. Farther south, the pope’s temporal authority was severely circumscribed by the power of local nobles.

  For as long as the Holy Roman Empire held a cloak of protection over the whole of northern and central Italy, its inhabitants were safe from all but one another and the odd irate emperor. For all intents and purposes, however, the cloak had been cast off in the days of Frederick II, and just as the Italy of the fifth and sixth centuries had been a tempting prize for the Ostrogoths and Lombards, so the Italy of the fifteenth century—the land of the Renaissance and the richest territory in Europe—became an irresistible lure for the new nation-states that were starting to challenge the Holy Roman Empire for dominance of the continent.

  It is often said that the Germans have never recovered from the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, that the brutality of that momentous clash between Protestant and Catholic armies hard-wired into their national character a sense of insecurity that they have never been able to shake off. Something not so very different could be said of the so-called Italian Wars that began in 1494, when a French army marched onto the peninsula. For almost sixty years, French, Spanish, German and Swiss armies crisscrossed Italy against a background of dizzyingly complex diplomacy that involved popes, foreign monarchs, the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and the rulers of Italy’s tragically divided and competing states.

  In 1527, the violence peaked in an attack on Rome that shocked the whole of Europe. Some twenty thousand mainly German (and Lutheran) troops poured through the walls of the city at the start of an eight-day orgy of destruction that has come to be known as the Sack of Rome. Churches were pillaged. Nuns were raped. Priests were murdered. Noble houses were torched. Priceless classical treasures were smashed or looted. Romans thought to be wealthy were tortured so they would hand over their riches, and if they proved to have none they too were butchered. Nearly a quarter of the population was killed.

  The Italian Wars were scarcely the first to be waged on the peninsula in order to settle foreign scores. Nor were they necessarily more destructive than those that preceded them. But they were uniquely humiliating. They revealed in the most savage way the Italians’ inability to sink their differences and work together for their common good. They put a ruinous and bloody end to the most culturally illustrious era of Italy’s history. And they ushered in another in which much of the north would join the south under foreign yokes. In the end, it was not the French but the Spanish—already masters of the south—who emerged as the dominant power. Under the treaty that put an end to the fighting, the extensive territories of the Duchy of Milan were given to Spain. Venice retained its independence, as did the other Italian duchies and republics. But in the new era of big, centralized nation-states hungry for empire, their freedom of maneuver was severely limited.

  Though it was far from obvious at the time, the sixteenth century also marked the start of Italy’s economic decline relative to other parts of Western Europe. There was more than one cause, but probably the most important were the changes that were taking place in the pattern of world trade. The routes across the Atlantic had already begun to carry far more traffic and generate far greater wealth than those in the Mediterranean, while the Far East would soon replace the Near East as a source of imports for the increasingly wealthy nations of Western Europe.

  The new political order imposed at the end of the Italian Wars was to remain in place for another 150 years. But that did not mean the intervening period was peaceful. In the first half of the seventeenth century Italy was the scene of several more wars, most involving the increasingly self-assertive Kingdom of Savoy. The conflicts that would determine its fate in the next century, on the other hand, were fought outside the peninsula. But that only drove home the point that the Italian states had become pieces in a chess game in which the important moves were made on other parts of the European board. Austria now supplanted Spain as the main arbiter of the peninsula’s destiny, though it subsequently lost the south to the Spanish branch of the Bourbon dynasty.

  Thereafter, Italy’s political geography remained substantially unchanged until 1796, when Napoléon Bonaparte, whose ancestry was more Italian than French, became the latest of many generals to lead his troops over the Alps. If only for a few years, the French were the masters of Italy. Napoléon redrew the boundaries of the various little states and gave them names borrowed from the classical past (so Tuscany, for example, became the Kingdom of Etruria).

  Once the revolutionary wave had passed, the old order—as in most of the rest of Europe—was restored. The Spanish Bourbons, by now thoroughly Italianized, were given back the southern mainland and Sicily. Fiercely conservative, authoritarian and promonarchy, the leaders of early nineteenth-century Europe wanted no truck with republics. Two were snuffed out in the settlement that followed the Napoleonic wars. Genoa went to the House of Savoy, whose realm included Sardinia, Piedmont on the eastern side of the Alps, and Savoy on the western side. Venice, proudly free for more than a thousand years, was handed to Austria, together with its extensive hinterland and what remained of its empire. The Austrians also got back the lands of the old Duchy of Milan. They thus gained control of most of northern Italy, and held on to it until the Risorgimento.

  Almost fourteen centuries elapsed between the deposing of the last Roman emperor in the West and the unification that followed the breaching of the Aurelian Wall near Porta Pia in 1870: sixty generations, more or less, of disunity and vulnerability to the whim of foreign rulers and the might of foreign armies.* Such things leave their mark on a people.

  CHAPTER 3

  Echoes and Reverberations

  Noi siamo prodotto del passato e viviamo immersi nel passato.

  We are produced by the past and we live immersed in the past.

  Benedetto Croce

  I had been based in Italy as a foreign correspondent for only a short time when I received a letter from a reader, forwarded to me from the newspaper in London. It was quite unusual in those days to get any sort of feedback. Email was still a novelty in the mid-1990s. If you wanted to register your objections (or, more rarely, pay a compliment) to a journalist, you had to go to the trouble of writing a letter with typewriter or pen, putting it in an envelope and taking it to a mailbox. Few readers bothered. Those who did so were usually either mentally disturbed, utterly delighted or furiously angry. This one was furiously angry.

  Some weeks earlier, in what had been more of a literary flourish than a serious assessment, I had referred to Italy as being “charming but corrupt and chaotic.” It was that last word that had infuriated my British reader. How on earth could I claim it was chaotic? he asked. He had come to live in Italy a few
months earlier and found that, on the contrary, life in Italy was infinitely better organized than in Britain. Having just returned to Rome from a trip to Naples, I found this more than a little baffling. But then I looked at the address at the top of the letter. The writer was living in Bologna. His Italy and my Italy were worlds apart.

  He had based himself in a city that, in the Cold War years, the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) had turned into a showcase for Socialist government. As I was soon to discover when I visited Bologna myself, it was a place where not only did the buses run on time, but the passengers knew when they were going to arrive because of electronic displays at the bus stops. These had been installed in Bologna years before they made their appearance in other European cities (twenty years later they are only just now getting to Rome). I, by contrast, had been living and working for most of the time in the southern half of Italy—it has usually produced more news than the rest—and in a very different and more disorderly society. There, the buses were dilapidated and the drivers thought nothing of roaring over pedestrian crossings at which people were waiting on either side to cross the road.

  Nor were the Communists’ ambitions for Bologna the only reason it was—and is—different from cities farther south. As you move north from Rome, civismo, which translates as “public spirit” or “social responsibility” or just “consideration for others,”* increasingly becomes a reality. The public spaces in towns and the common parts of buildings become cleaner and tidier. There is more evidence of a sense of community.