Kingdom of Italy (774–961)

The medieval Kingdom of Italy took shape in June 774, when Charlemagne captured Pavia and ended the Lombard kingdom. Rather than abolishing the realm, he and his successors ruled it as a separate kingdom, crowned with the Iron Crown and supported by counts and royal officials; Pavia remained its capital. Carolingian control covered much of northern and central Italy, while the papacy, Venice, the Byzantine south and the independent principality of Benevento lay outside it. After the Treaty of Verdun in 843 the kingdom passed to Lothair I and his line, which died out in 875. The following decades brought a rapid succession of Carolingian, Spoletan and Friulian kings, among them Berengar I, Guy of Spoleto and Hugh of Arles, while magnates, bishops and cities acquired greater autonomy and the south fragmented into rival Lombard principalities. In 951 Otto I of Germany invaded, married Adelaide and was proclaimed king; he conquered Pavia in 961 and was crowned emperor in Rome in 962. From then on the Regnum Italiae was one of the constituent kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire, but it retained its own coronation at Pavia, its assembly and its law, and its rulers continued to be elected or contested locally. The kingdom's central authority gradually lost ground to the communes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, yet the imperial claim to Italy survived until the Napoleonic era.