King of Italy (Italian: Re d'Italia; Latin: Rex Italiae) was the title given to the ruler of the Kingdom of Italy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The first to take the title was Odoacer, a barbarian warlord, in the late 5th century, followed by the Ostrogothic kings up to the mid-6th century. With the Frankish conquest of Italy in the 8th century, the Carolingians assumed the title, which was maintained by subsequent Holy Roman Emperors throughout the Middle Ages. The last Emperor to claim the title was Charles V in the 16th century. During this period, the holders of the title were crowned with the Iron Crown of Lombardy.
A Kingdom of Italy was restored from 1805 to 1814 with Napoleon as its only king, centred in Northern Italy. It was not until the Italian unification in the 1860s that an independent Kingdom of Italy covering the entire Italian Peninsula was restored. From 1861 the House of Savoy held the title of King of Italy until the last king, Umberto II, was exiled in 1946 when Italy became a republic.
In 568, the Lombards entered the peninsula and ventured to recreate a barbarian kingdom in opposition to the Empire, establishing their authority over much of Italy, except the Exarchate of Ravenna and the duchies of Rome, Venetia, Naples and the southernmost portions. In the 8th century, estrangement between the Italians and the Byzantines allowed the Lombards to capture the remaining Roman enclaves in northern Italy. However, in 774, they were defeated by the Franks under Charlemagne, who deposed their king and took up the title "king of the Lombards". After the death of Charles the Fat in 887, Italy fell into instability and a number of kings attempted to establish themselves as independent Italian monarchs. During this period, known as the Feudal Anarchy (888–962), the title Rex Italicorum ("King of the Italians" or "King of the Italics") was introduced. After the breakup of the Frankish Empire, Otto I added Italy to the Holy Roman Empire and continued the use of the title Rex Italicorum. The last to use this title was Henry II (1004–1024). Subsequent emperors used the title "King of Italy" until Charles V. They were crowned in Pavia, Milan and Bologna.
Initially named Dux Italiae (Duke of Italy) by Zeno, the Roman Emperor in Constantinople, he later was recognized as King of Italy by the foederati in control of the Italian peninsula. He was deposed by the Ostrogoths, who established their own kingdom.
Theodoric the Great was invited by the emperor Zeno to take Italy from Odoacer and rule it in Zeno's name. He defeated Odoacer in 493, establishing a new kingdom in place of Odoacer's. Officially, the Ostrogothic kings ruled the Roman citizens in Italy as a viceroy of the Roman emperors, and their own Gothic people as their king, though functionally they ran their kingdom entirely independently from the Roman authority in Constantinople. Their greatest extent was during Theodoric's reign; as Roman Emperors from the east began to exert more power and retake control of Roman territory, the last Ostrogothic king fell to the Emperor Justinian in 553.
Roman authority in Italy was briefly re-established under Justinian, though his gains were lost under his successor Justin II, after a new Germanic tribe, the Lombards, invaded from the north and established their kingdom in 568.
The Lombards under Alboin established their kingdom in the extreme north of Italy in 568, gradually pushing the Byzantine Romans back from the peninsula until only the Exarchate of Ravenna remained under Roman control. This finally fell in the 750s, with the Lombards gaining control of most of the peninsula. The last Lombard King of Italy, Desiderius, was deposed by his son-in-law Charlemagne, who folded it into the larger Carolingian Empire, which evolved over time into the Holy Roman Empire.
Charlemagne ruled over northern Italy as King of the Lombards. In 781, he named his son Pepin as King of Italy, though he still maintained suzerainty over the land. Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor in 800, while the Kingdom of Italy became one of the constituent kingdoms of the Empire. Beginning with Louis the Pious in 818, the Kingdom was ruled directly by the Carolingian Emperor himself.
In 951 Otto I invaded Italy and was crowned with the Iron Crown of Lombardy. In 952, Berengar and Adalbert became his vassals but remained kings until being deposed by Otto.
Otto is considered to be the founding emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of Italy was considered one of the constituent realms of the Empire. Beginning in the 12th century, states such as the Republic of Venice and the Papal States captured more and more territory from the Kingdom of Italy, and the Empire's territory on the Peninsula shrunk over time. After Charles V, the emperors stopped being crowned with the Iron Crown of Lombardy and the Italian title fell into disuse. Imperial control in Italy receded to Trent and South Tyrol until the dissolution of the Empire in 1806. Southern Italy had never been part of the Holy Roman Empire; it remained initially under the control of various Byzantine fiefs until the NormanKingdom of Sicily (later the Kingdom of Naples) took control of the area in the 11th century. Central Italy, along the Rome-Ravenna axis, was part of the Papal States, under the direct personal rule of the pope. The Duke of Savoy was de jure a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor, with the Duke being Prince and Perpetual Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire.
Charles V was the last emperor to be crowned king of Italy or to officially use the title.[4] The Habsburg emperors claimed the Italian crown until 1801. The empire continued to include Italian territories until its dissolution in 1806.
In 1805, Napoleon established a client state in northern Italy, named the Kingdom of Italy. He established himself as King of Italy, in personal union with his role as Emperor of the French. This client state did not survive the end of the Napoleonic era; in its place, the Congress of Vienna established a number of independent duchies and kingdoms in the region.
During and after the Revolutions of 1848, sentiment on the peninsula grew for the establishment of a unified Italian kingdom. Southern Italy had not been united with northern Italy since the early medieval period, being mostly under the rule of the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Northern Italy, in the early 19th century, came under the domination of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which besides its namesake island, also ruled the expansive Piedmont and Savoy regions along the French-Italian borderlands. The formerly republican leader in southern Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi, made common cause with the House of Savoy to overthrow the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the people voted in a plebiscite to join Sardinia to form the Kingdom of Italy in 1861; the Papal States and the city of Rome were annexed to the Kingdom in 1870, completing the Unification of Italy. This kingdom lasted until the aftermath of World War II, when the 1946 Italian institutional referendum ended the monarchy.
↑ According to Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages (pg. 29), although Otto II was crowned King of the Romans in 961 and Holy Roman Emperor in 967, he only obtained the Iron Crown at Pavia in late 980, during his descent into Italy, and prior to his celebrating Christmas at Ravenna.
↑ Although Otto III was crowned Holy Roman Emperor at Rome on 21 May 996, he was crowned King of Italy at Milan prior to the death of Pope John XV in early March 996 – see Comyn, History of the Western Empire, Vol. 1, pg. 123
↑ enumerated as successor of Henry I who was German King 919–936 but not Emperor.
↑ enumerated as successor of Conrad I who was German King 911–918 but not Emperor
Arnulf of Carinthia was the duke of Carinthia who overthrew his uncle Emperor Charles the Fat to become the Carolingian king of East Francia from 887, the disputed king of Italy from 894, and the disputed emperor from February 22, 896, until his death at Ratisbon, Bavaria.
The Holy Roman Emperor, originally and officially the Emperor of the Romans during the Middle Ages, and also known as the Romano-German Emperor since the early modern period, was the ruler and head of state of the Holy Roman Empire. The title was held in conjunction with the title of King of Italy from the 8th to the 16th century, and, almost without interruption, with the title of King of Germany throughout the 12th to 18th centuries.
Charles the Fat was the emperor of the Carolingian Empire from 881 to 887. A member of the Carolingian dynasty, Charles was the youngest son of Louis the German and Hemma, and a great-grandson of Charlemagne. He was the last Carolingian emperor of legitimate birth and the last to rule a united kingdom of the Franks.
The Exarchate of Ravenna, also known as the Exarchate of Italy, was an administrative district of the Byzantine Empire comprising, between the 6th and 8th centuries, the territories under the jurisdiction of the exarch of Italy resident in Ravenna. The term is used in historiography in a double sense: "exarchate" in the strict sense denotes the territory under the direct jurisdiction of the exarch, i.e. the area of the capital Ravenna, but the term is mainly used to designate all the Byzantine territories in continental and peninsular Italy. According to the legal sources of the time, these territories constituted the so-called Provincia Italiae, on the basis of the fact that they too, until at least the end of the 7th century, fell under the jurisdiction of the exarch and were governed by duces or magistri militum under him.
The history of Italy in the Middle Ages can be roughly defined as the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance. Late antiquity in Italy lingered on into the 7th century under the Ostrogothic Kingdom and the Byzantine Empire under the Justinian dynasty, the Byzantine Papacy until the mid 8th century. The "Middle Ages" proper begin as the Byzantine Empire was weakening under the pressure of the Muslim conquests, and most of the Exarchate of Ravenna finally fell under Lombard rule in 751. From this period, former states that were part of the Exarchate and were not conquered by the Lombard Kingdom, such as the Duchy of Naples, became de facto independent states, having less and less interference from the Eastern Roman Empire.
The Duchy of Spoleto was a Lombard territory founded about 570 in central Italy by the Lombard dux Faroald. Its capital was the city of Spoleto.
Berengar I was the king of Italy from 887. He was Holy Roman Emperor between 915 and his death in 924. He is usually known as Berengar of Friuli, since he ruled the March of Friuli from 874 until at least 890, but he had lost control of the region by 896.
Lambert was the King of Italy from 891, Holy Roman Emperor, co-ruling with his father from 892, and Duke of Spoleto and Camerino from his father's death in 894. He was the son of Guy III of Spoleto and Ageltrude, born in San Rufino. He was the last ruler to issue a capitulary in the Carolingian tradition.
Guy III of Spoleto was the Margrave of Camerino from 880 and then Duke of Spoleto and Camerino from 883. He was crowned King of Italy in 889 and emperor in 891. He died in 894 while fighting for control of the Italian Peninsula.
The Ostrogothic Kingdom, officially the Kingdom of Italy, was a barbarian kingdom established by the Germanic Ostrogoths that controlled Italy and neighbouring areas between 493 and 553. Led by Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoths killed Odoacer, a Germanic soldier and erstwhile leader of the foederati. Odoacer had previously become the de facto ruler of Italy following his deposition of Romulus Augustulus, the final emperor of the Western Roman Empire, in 476. Under Theodoric, the Ostrogothic kingdom reached its zenith, stretching from modern Southern France in the west to the modern western Serbia in the southeast. Most of the social institutions of the late Western Roman Empire were preserved during his rule. Theodoric called himself Gothorum Romanorumque rex 'King of the Goths and Romans', demonstrating his desire to be a leader for both peoples.
The Kingdom of Italy, also called Imperial Italy, was one of the constituent kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire, along with the kingdoms of Germany, Bohemia, and Burgundy. It originally comprised large parts of northern and central Italy. Its original capital was Pavia until the 11th century.
The March of Ivrea was a large frontier county (march) in the northwest of the medieval Italian kingdom from the late 9th to the early 11th century. Its capital was Ivrea in present-day Piedmont, and it was held by a Burgundian family of margraves called the Anscarids. The march was the primary frontier between Italy and Upper Burgundy and served as a defense against any interference from that state.
The Kingdom of the Lombards, also known as the Lombard Kingdom and later as the Kingdom of all Italy, was an early medieval state established by the Lombards, a Germanic people, on the Italian Peninsula in the latter part of the 6th century. The king was traditionally elected by the very highest-ranking aristocrats, the dukes, as several attempts to establish a hereditary dynasty failed. The kingdom was subdivided into a varying number of duchies, ruled by semi-autonomous dukes, which were in turn subdivided into gastaldates at the municipal level. The capital of the kingdom and the center of its political life was Pavia in the modern northern Italian region of Lombardy.
The March of Friuli was a Carolingian frontier march, established in 776 as the continuation of the Lombard Duchy of Friuli, established against the Slavs and Avars. It was ceded to the Duchy of Bavaria as the March of Verona in 952. Its territory comprised parts of modern-day Italy, Slovenia and Croatia.
The March of Istria was originally a Carolingian frontier march covering the Istrian peninsula and surrounding territory conquered by Charlemagne's son Pepin of Italy in 789. After 1364, it was the Istrian province of the Habsburg monarchy, the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary.
Otto I, known as Otto the Great or Otto of Saxony, was East Frankish (German) king from 936 and Holy Roman Emperor from 962 until his death in 973. He was the eldest son of Henry the Fowler and Matilda of Ringelheim.
The monarchy of Italy was the system of government in which a hereditary constitutional monarch was the sovereign of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1946.
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