Dear friends of Whispers from Italian History, welcome. Make yourselves comfortable, close your eyes, forget the noise of the present. Today I will not tell you the story of a single man or a single battle.
Today we will do something bigger. We will attempt to grasp the wind. We will try to understand how the greatest empire history has ever seen, Rome, did not die with a scream, but with a long, slow sigh.
We are used to thinking of history as a series of dates carved in stone. In 476 the empire falls, in 1492 the Middle Ages end. But real life does not work that way.
No one went to sleep one evening in antiquity and woke up the next morning in the Middle Ages. It was a journey. A journey lasting centuries through the mist, the fear, the collapse of every certainty, but also through the stubborn hope of those who did not want to die.
I will tell you how the Roman eagles, tired and old, gave way to ravens and wolves. I will tell you of emperors who hid in the marshes for fear of their own shadow, of barbarian generals who wept before the beauty of what they had to destroy, of queens who used faith as a shield and of popes who used corpses as defendants in court. Get ready, because we are about to enter the tunnel of time.
We are about to cross those centuries they call dark, only because they did not have the patience to light a light to look inside. Our journey begins when Rome still seemed eternal, but its heart had already stopped in its chest. The silence that followed the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 was not a silence of peace.
It was the silence of one holding their breath before the scream. The Romans of Italy, those who still inhabited the decaying villas of Campania or the damp palaces of Rome, deluded themselves for a few decades. They deluded themselves that Odoacer was a good king and then they deluded themselves even more with Theodoric the Great, the king of the Ostrogoths.
Theodoric, an extraordinary man, a barbarian who had lived in Constantinople, who loved Roman civilisation more than the Romans themselves. Under him, for thirty years, it seemed that Italy could be reborn. He restored the Trajan aqueduct, funded games in the circus, protected philosophers like Boethius and Cassiodorus.
Italy breathed, the marshes were reclaimed, the grain returned to fill the granaries. It seemed that the storm had passed, that Goths and Romans could coexist. The former with the sword to defend, the latter with the toga to administer, but it was an illusion as fragile as blown glass.
In the East, in Constantinople, sat a man who never slept. Justinian, the emperor who wanted to be living law, the man who had beside him Theodora, a former actress with a scandalous past, who became the most powerful and ruthless empress in history. Justinian had an obsession, a worm that devoured his brain night and day, the renovatio imperii.
The renewal of the empire. He could not accept that Rome, the cradle of civilisation, was ruled by heretical and barbarian kings. For him, Italy was not a lost province, it was an amputated limb that had to be reattached to the body even at the cost of bleeding the patient dry.
And so in 535 AD hell was unleashed. It was not a barbarian invasion that destroyed ancient Italy, it was the Roman liberation. The Gothic War is perhaps the most tragic and least told chapter of our history.
It lasted almost twenty years. Twenty years of sieges, of hunger, of betrayals, of plague. Imagine Belisarius, Justinian's general, a military genius, landing in Sicily and moving up the peninsula.
The Goths, led by King Witiges, were not willing to give up the land they now considered home. They entrenched themselves. The turning point, the one that truly marked the end of ancient life, occurred in Rome, in 537.
Witiges besieged the city occupied by Belisarius. But failing to break through the Aurelian Walls, he did something irreparable. He cut the aqueducts.
You must understand the magnitude of this gesture. For a thousand years Rome had been the city of water. Eleven cyclopean aqueducts brought millions of litres of water a day for the baths, fountains, sewers, and gardens.
Water was the lifeblood of Rome. In a single day the blood stopped flowing. The great Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, marble wonders where thousands of people washed and socialised, instantly became cathedrals of silence and dust.
Without running water, the sewers stopped working. The city became a fetid trap. Roman hygienic civilisation died that day and would not return for centuries.
The Romans had to return to drinking the murky water of the Tiber, falling ill and dying like flies. The war continued ferociously. Totila, the new king of the Goths, a charismatic and desperate man, tried to rouse the peasants and slaves against the Roman and Byzantine masters, promising freedom.
It was a social war, a total war. Rome was taken and retaken five times. There is a moment described by the historian Procopius that sends shivers down the spine.
When Totila recaptured Rome in 546, he found it empty. Not almost empty. Empty.
The population had fled or died of hunger. In the Roman Forum there was not a living soul. Only statues staring into nothingness and stray dogs gnawing on human bones.
For forty days, Rome was a ghost town, abandoned by God and men. The greatest metropolis of antiquity was reduced to an uninhabited marble shell. When finally the Byzantine general Narses defeated the last Gothic king, Teia, on the slopes of Vesuvius in 553, the victory tasted like ash.
Italy was a cemetery. Milan had been razed to the ground. Its thirty thousand male inhabitants massacred.
The countryside had become marshes because no one tended the canals anymore. Wolves, literally, entered villages to eat children. The Plague of Justinian, arriving from the East on the rats of military ships, had finished the work the sword had started, killing a third of the remaining population.
The survivors wandered like ghosts in a post-atomic landscape. The senatorial aristocracy, that cultured and very wealthy social class, which had kept literature and law alive for centuries, had been exterminated. Their assets confiscated, their libraries burned.
The Byzantine liberation had killed ancient Italy. The Byzantines imposed ferocious taxes to repay the war expenses. A Greek tax collector, a certain Alexander called "The Scissors" for his ability to clip the edges of gold coins, became the most hated man on the peninsula.
The Romans began to miss the Goths. And it was in this void, in this absolute desolation, that the door opened for the true Middle Ages. It was the spring of the year 568.
From the Julian Alps, to the east, appeared a people who did not resemble any of the previous ones. The Goths had tried to be Roman. The Vandals wanted the riches of the Romans.
But these newcomers, these were aliens. They were the Lombards. Their name derived from their long beards, the Langobarden, or perhaps from their long halberds.
They were a Germanic people who had remained pure, wild, untouched by Latin culture. They were pagans or Arian Christians, but of a superficial, magical, warrior Arianism. They still worshipped Odin in the secret of the forests, they hung goat skins on sacred trees.
They did not ask for treaties. They did not seek alliances. They did not ask permission from the Emperor of Constantinople.
They just took. Their king was Alboin. Imagine him.
A giant covered in skins and plates of raw iron. A man who had exterminated the Gepids before descending into Italy. The story of Alboin is worthy of a horror film and tells us everything about the ferocity of these new masters.
Alboin had killed with his own hands the king of the Gepids, Cunimund, and had taken his daughter, Rosamund, as his wife. A marriage of prey, not love. But Alboin had done more.
He had taken his father-in-law's skull, had it cleaned and transformed it into a drinking cup. A cup made of human bone, rimmed with silver. It is said that during a banquet in Verona, drunk and cruel, Alboin filled that cup with red wine and offered it to Queen Rosamund.
Before all the warriors who laughed and pounded their fists on the tables, he ordered her: Drnk, drink with your father. Rosamund, pale as a sheet, drinks. But in that sip of wine and hatred, she swore her revenge.
A revenge that would lead to the murder of the king in his own bed a few years later. This was the level of tribal violence that the Lombards brought to Italy. The advance of the Lombards was a slow and unstoppable tide.
They met no resistance, because there was no one left to resist. The Byzantine army, tired and poorly paid, retreated into fortified coastal cities. The Lombards overran the Po Valley.
They took Milan, they took Pavia, which became their capital. The Bishop of Milan fled to Genoa. The rich Romans escaped to the Venetian lagoons, going to populate those islands of mud that would one day become Venice.
It was in those years of terror that the seed of the Italian nation was born. But the Lombards did something that marked the fate of Italy forever. A wound that still bleeds today.
They did not conquer the entire peninsula. They took the north, which from them took the name Langobardia, our Lombardy. They took Tuscany.
And then a group of rebellious and adventurous dukes pushed south, bypassing the Pope's lands, and founded the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. But they left a corridor in Byzantine hands. A corridor that connected Rome to Ravenna, passing through Umbria and the Marche.
And Naples, Calabria, Sicily, and coastal Puglia also remained Byzantine. For the first time in history Italy was split in two. The unity that Rome had created centuries before was shattered.
On one side, Lombard Italy: continental, feudal, rude, warrior. On the other, Byzantine Italy, or Romania (hence Romagna): maritime, bureaucratic, linked to the East, Graecising. Two Italies.
Two languages beginning to diverge, two ways of life. This fracture would not be healed for 1,393 years, until 1861. Life under the Lombards in the first decades was a nightmare for the Latins.
The Romans were no longer citizens, they were the subjugated people. Roman law disappeared from the courtrooms. In its place came the law of the forest; the feud, private revenge, prevailed.
If a Lombard killed your brother, you did not go to a judge. You took your sword and killed him or his son or his cousin. And the chain of blood continued for generations, decimating entire families.
The Lombards organised themselves into farae. The Fara was not just a family, it was a military clan on the move. They settled in a territory, drove out the Roman owners and took everything.
Even today, if you look at the map of Italy, you find hundreds of towns called Fara: Fara Sabina, Fara Filiorum Petri, Fara Novarese. They are the fossil footprints of that invasion. And yet, yet Italy has a magical power.
Italy seduces those who conquer her. Slowly, generation after generation, the Lombards began to change. The mild climate, the wine, the majestic ruins surrounding them, all this acted upon them.
They began to trim their beards, they began to dress in Roman fabrics instead of bear skins. They began to give their children Latin names. And above all, they began to look with respect at that old priest dressed in white who lived among the ruins of Rome: the Pope.
There was a woman, once again a woman, who changed the course of history. Queen Theodelinda. She was a Bavarian princess, Catholic, who married the Lombard king Authari and, upon his death, his successor Agilulf.
Theodelinda was beautiful, cultured and intelligent. She understood a fundamental thing. The Lombards were a minority.
They could not rule forever with terror over a Catholic Latin majority. They had to merge. They had to convert.
Theodelinda established a correspondence with a giant of a man, Pope Gregory the Great. Gregory is a figure who deserves a story of his own. He was a Roman nobleman, a former prefect of the city who had become a monk.
He became Pope at the worst moment in history, as the plague raged and the Lombards besieged Rome. While the Emperor in Constantinople sent no help, Gregory took charge. He organised the defences, paid the soldiers, fed the people with the church's grain, and negotiated with the barbarians.
Theodelinda and Gregory, together, began to weave the web of peace. Thanks to her, the Lombard kings stopped being predators and became builders. In Monza, Theodelinda built a splendid basilica and there, even today, is kept the most sacred object of that time, the Iron Crown.
It is a circle of gold and gems, but inside it runs a thin band of iron. Legend says that iron is one of the nails from the cross of Christ hammered flat. That crown became the symbol of the Kingdom of Italy.
For centuries, until Napoleon, whoever wanted to be King of Italy had to feel the cold of that iron on their forehead. The transformation of the Lombards culminated in the year 643 with King Rothari. Rothari did something a barbarian would never have done a century before.
He wrote a code of laws, the Edict of Rothari. But the fascinating thing is how he wrote it. He wrote it in Latin.
The language of the conquered had become the language of the law of the victors. The Edict of Rothari is an extraordinary document. It is the attempt to stop the chaos of the feud.
Rothari said "enough blood". From today every wound has a price. He introduced the weregild.
The price of a man. If you cut off someone's hand, you had to pay a precise sum. If you gouged out an eye, another sum.
If you broke a tooth, yet another. But not all men were equal. The tooth of a nobleman was worth more than the tooth of a free man, which was worth more than the tooth of a serf.
It seems unjust to our modern eyes, but for the time it was a revolution. Replacing revenge with a fine meant bringing peace back to the streets. It meant there was a king who guaranteed justice, no longer just the strength of the clan.
Years passed. We arrived at the eighth century. Italy was healing.
In the countryside the peasants returned to farming. In the cities, tentatively, shops reopened. Lombards and Romans were mixing.
It was no longer possible to distinguish who was a descendant of the conquerors and who of the conquered. A new people was forming, the medieval Italian people. They spoke a new language, strange, rough but alive, the vernacular.
A broken Latin full of Germanic words. Words we use today and that come from the Lombards. Cheek, back, shin, fang, spleen.
Words of war. "War" itself is a Germanic word. Verra, guard, helmet, arrow, truce.
Words of work. Bench, shelf, balcony, inn. Words for the colour white.
The Romans said albus, blonde, brown. Without the Lombards today we wouldn't say "what a beautiful back", but we would use some extinct Latin term. They have entered our linguistic DNA.
But ambition is a beast that never sleeps. The Lombard kings, Liutprand, Aistulf and finally Desiderius made the fatal mistake. They felt strong.
They wanted everything. They wanted to drive the Byzantines out of Ravenna and they succeeded. But above all they wanted Rome.
They wanted the Pope to become one of their bishops, their subject. But the Pope had tasted power. The Pope felt he was the heir to the Caesars.
He would never kneel before a long-bearded king who smelled of beer and Arianism. When King Desiderius marched on Rome, threatening to take it by hunger, Pope Stephen II and then Adrian I understood they could no longer defend themselves alone. The Byzantines were far away and weak.
They needed a new protector. Someone with a heavy sword, blind Catholic faith and who was far enough away not to become an overbearing master. The Pope looked west, across the Alps, towards a new power rising in the forests of Gaul: the Franks.
Who were these Franks that the Pope looked upon with such hope? To understand, we must forget the image of disorderly barbarians. The Franks were the most efficient war machine in Europe, but they had something more, something that made them unique in the eyes of Rome.
They were Catholic from birth. Unlike the Goths or the Lombards who had embraced the Arian heresy, creating an invisible wall with the Latin population, the Franks had converted directly to Catholicism with their first king, Clovis, centuries before. For the Pope they were not invaders, they were the beloved sons, they were the armed wing of God.
The dynasty leading them at that time was not that of the illegitimate kings, the Merovingians, by now "rois fainéants", faded shadows who had themselves transported on ox-drawn carts. In command were the Mayors of the Palace, a family of brilliant and unscrupulous usurpers, the Pippinids. Their leader, Pepin the Short, a man small in stature but immense in cunning, asked the Pope a question that changed the history of public law.
Is it right that the king be he who wears the crown but does nothing? Or he who holds real power and bears the weight of government? The Pope, who desperately needed help against the Lombards, answered as Pepin hoped.
It was an iron pact. The Pope legitimised Pepin's coup d'état, anointing him with holy oil, making his person sacred and untouchable. In return, Pepin descended into Italy, defeated the Lombards and, instead of keeping the conquered lands, made a gesture that left everyone speechless.
He took the keys to 22 cities in central Italy, including Ravenna, and placed them on the tomb of St Peter. It was the Donation of Pepin. At that moment, in 756, the State of the Church was officially born.
The Pope was no longer just a spiritual leader, he was a king. He had a territory, an army, taxes. That strip of land would cut Italy in two, preventing its unification for over a thousand years.
But Pepin was just the starter. The true banquet of history began with his son, a man who would become a living legend. Charles, whom history remembers as Magnus, the Great.
Imagine him, he was not a pale intellectual, he was a force of nature. Almost a metre ninety tall, in an era when the average was much lower. He had large, lively eyes, a bull neck and a prominent belly that he did not hide, indeed he flaunted it as a sign of well-being and strength.
He loved roasted meat, women, hunting and war. But he had an intellectual curiosity that devoured everything. He did not know how to write, his hands were too accustomed to the sword to handle a quill and he kept wax tablets under his pillow to practise tracing letters at night with poor results.
But he could read Latin, understood Greek and loved having the stories of St Augustine read to him while he ate. The showdown with the Lombards arrived in 773. The Lombard king Desiderius, perhaps underestimating the young Charles, had again attacked papal territories.
Charles did not hesitate, he gathered the Frankish army, a tide of armoured knights, and marched towards the Alps. Desiderius awaited him at the Chiusi di Susa, in the Susa Valley, the point where the mountains tighten like a pincer. It was an impregnable position.
The Lombards laughed and drank on their fortifications, sure the Franks would shatter against that wall. But Charles was not a bull charging head-on, he was a wolf. Thanks, it is said, to the betrayal of a jester or perhaps guided by local shepherds, he found a forgotten path through the mountains, bypassed the Lombard positions.
When Desiderius's soldiers saw the Frankish banners appearing behind them, panic spread like wildfire. The Lombard army, which had dominated Italy for two centuries, dissolved without almost fighting. Desiderius shut himself inside Pavia, his capital.
His son Adelchi, the tragic hero of this story, fled to Verona and then to Constantinople, weeping for the end of his people. The siege of Pavia lasted months. It was a hard winter.
But in June 774 the city opened its doors. Desiderius surrendered and here Charles made his master move. Another conqueror would have razed the city, killed the nobles and annexed everything to the Kingdom of the Franks.
Charles did not. Charles took the Iron Crown, that same crown that Theodelinda had forged, and placed it on his head. He proclaimed himself Rex Francorum et Langobardorum, re dei franchi e dei longobardi.
He did not erase the enemy kingdom, he incorporated it. He kept the Lombard laws, he kept many dukes in their place if they swore loyalty to him. Northern Italy became a separate kingdom but united in the person of the king.
It was an act of supreme political intelligence. The Lombards did not feel like slaves, but subjects of a stronger king. But Italy was only one piece of Charles's chessboard.
For thirty years this tireless man spent every summer in the saddle of his horse, fighting at the four corners of Europe. In the north against the Saxons, fierce pagans who worshipped sacred trees. It was a war of religious extermination.
Charles cut down the Irminsul, the pillar of the Saxon world, and gave them a brutal choice: baptism or death. Thousands were beheaded in a single day at Verden. Charles was no saint, he was a builder of empires and used terror as mortar.
In the east he destroyed the kingdom of the Avars, Asian raiders who had accumulated immense treasures. Ox-drawn carts brought home to Charles gold and jewels in such quantity as to cause the price of gold to crash throughout Europe. In the south-west he fought against the Arabs of Spain, creating the Spanish March.
It was during a retreat from this campaign that his rearguard was massacred at Roncesvalles by Christian Basques, not by Arabs as the legend says. There died the prefect of the March of Brittany, Ruodlandus, whom poetry would transform into Roland, the hero who blows the oliphant horn until his temples burst. At the end of the 8th century, Charles was the undisputed master of Christian Europe.
His dominion stretched from the Elbe to the Ebro, from the North Sea to Benevento. Only one thing was missing: the title, the name that would give meaning to that mass of diverse lands. Thus came the most famous night of the Middle Ages, Christmas night of the year 800.
The setting was Rome, but not a triumphant Rome. A few months earlier, the Pope, Leo III, had been attacked in the street by an opposing faction. They had pulled him from his horse, tried to blind him and cut out his tongue.
He had fled, bloody and terrified, to Charles in Germany, imploring help. Charles descended to Rome not as a pilgrim, but as a judge. He restored the Pope to the throne, punished the conspirators and restored order.
That Christmas night, the Basilica of Saint Peter glowed with thousands of candles. The air was thick with incense and tension. Charles knelt at the Apostle's tomb to pray.
He wore—a very rare thing for him who loved Frankish clothes—a Roman tunic and sandals to please the Romans. As he rose, the Pope approached. He held a precious crown in his hand, placed it on his head.
And at that moment all the Roman people present in the Basilica, well instructed, shouted in unison three times: To Charles Augustus, crowned by God, great and peaceful emperor of the Romans, life and victory. In that instant the ancient world truly ended and Europe was born. After three hundred and twenty-four years there was again an emperor in the West, but it was a strange empire: holy because wanted by the Pope, Roman because it used its name, but its heart was not in Rome.
Rome was only the holy city, the museum of faith. The political heart was in Aachen, in the forests of Germany, where Charles loved to bathe in the warm thermal waters with his friends and his hundred illegitimate and legitimate children. The centre of gravity of history had shifted; the Mediterranean, which for millennia had been the centre of the world, was now a dangerous frontier infested by Saracen pirates.
Europe looked north; under the protective shadow of Charles, however, something wonderful happened: we call it the Carolingian Renaissance. Charles understood a truth that many rulers forget: you cannot manage an empire with ignorance. He needed officials who could read orders, he needed priests who could read the Bible without mangling Latin, so as not to offend God with wrong prayers.
He ordered that every cathedral and every monastery open a school, not only for monks but also for the children of the nobles. He called to his court the most brilliant minds of the time. Alcuin of York, an English monk who was the living library of the era.
Paul the Deacon, a cultured Lombard who told the story of his people. Together they carried out a massive cultural rescue operation. The monks in their scriptoria began to copy furiously.
They copied everything: Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, treatises on medicine, on astronomy. 90% of the classical Latin works we possess today reached us because a Carolingian monk decided to copy them in those decades. If it hadn't been for them, we would have lost the memory of antiquity and they did more.
They invented a new way of writing. Merovingian and Lombard scripts were convoluted, difficult to read. Charles's scholars invented the Carolingian minuscule: detached, round, clear, elegant letters.
It is the script you are reading now on your screens because Renaissance printers revived it believing it to be ancient Roman and it became our printing standard. Charlemagne literally shaped the way we write A, B, C. But how was such a vast empire governed without the internet, without phones, without paved roads?
Charles invented feudalism, although he did not call it that. It was a system based on personal trust. Everything relied on an oath.
The emperor entrusted a territory, a county or a march if it was on the border, to a trusted man, the count or the marquess. This man placed his joined hands in the emperor's hands and swore to be his vassal, his man. In exchange, he received the "beneficium", the land, to exploit to arm himself and his knights.
To check that these counts did not become local tyrants, Charles sent out pairs of missi dominici, the envoys of the Lord. A layman and a cleric who travelled, listened to the people's complaints, checked the counts and reported back to the emperor. As long as there was Charles, a man who spent his life on horseback moving from one palace to another, the system held.
His mere presence made the corrupt tremble, but a system based on one man alone is destined to collapse when that man dies. On 28 January in the year 814, Charlemagne died in Aachen of pleurisy. He was buried sitting on his throne, with his sword by his side and the Gospel on his knees.
With him died the unity of Europe. His son, Louis the Pious, was a good but weak man, crushed by the shadow of his father and the ambitions of his own children. The Frankish Empire had a disastrous succession rule.
The kingdom was considered a private property of the king, to be divided among all male sons. There was no concept of an indivisible state. Charlemagne's grandsons tore each other apart for years.
In 843, with the Treaty of Verdun, Europe was cut into three pieces, like a cake. To Charles the Bald went the western part, which would become France. To Louis the German went the eastern part, which would become Germany.
To Lothair went the central part, a long and indefensible strip of land stretching from the North Sea down to central Italy, including Rome and Aachen. Lotharingia. Northern Italy found itself tied to this central kingdom, but it was a weak link.
Central power crumbled. The counts and marquesses, who under Charles were revocable officials, began to consider their lands as private property, to be bequeathed to their children. The "beneficium" became an hereditary fief.
The emperor no longer mattered. Real power was local. It belonged to the castellan who owned the fortress on the hill.
And the need for fortresses became desperate because while Charles's grandsons argued, Europe was assaulted from every side. It was a second siege, worse than that of the barbarian invasions. From the north came the Vikings or Normans, men of the north.
With their shallow-draft ships, the drakkars, they sailed up rivers, struck abbeys, burned Paris, looted Pisa and Luni. They were fast, ruthless, elusive. From the south came the Saracens, Muslims who set out from Africa and Spain.
They conquered Sicily in the year 827, making it a splendid garden but detaching it from Christian Europe. They created pirate bases in Puglia and Provence. In 846 the unthinkable happened.
The Saracens sailed up the Tiber and looted the Basilica of Saint Peter, which was outside the walls. The tombs of the apostles profaned. Rome trembled again.
From the east came the Magyars, nomadic horsemen, formidable archers who seemed like the old Huns. They roamed the Po Valley and Germany burning everything they could not carry away. People were terrified.
The emperor was far away and powerless. Who will defend us? The local lord defends us.
He who built a stone wall defends us. Thus incastellamento was born. Italy and Europe covered themselves with castles, not the fairy-tale residences we imagine today, but squat towers, palisade enclosures, shelters atop mountains where peasants ran to hide as soon as the alarm bell rang.
Society crystallised into three orders, three rigid castes that would define the centuries to come. There were the oratores, those who prayed, the clergy, who protected the soul and held culture. There were the bellatores, those who fought, the nobles, who protected the body and held the land and weapons.
And there were the laboratores, those who worked, the peasants, the vast majority who fed everyone else and had no rights, except to be protected and taxed. It was a hard, violent, fragmented world. A world where travelling from one city to another meant risking one's life or paying infinite tolls.
A world where the forest had reclaimed the cultivated fields. And yet, in this manure mixed with blood, new seeds were germinating. In Italian cities, abandoned by the nobles who preferred castles, bishops and small artisans and merchants remained.
These cities, forced to organise themselves to defend against Magyars or Saracens, began to develop a sense of identity. They built new walls. They huddled around their patron saint.
In Milan, in Genoa, in Pisa, in Venice, people began to understand that perhaps they didn't need a distant emperor or a greedy count. Perhaps they could govern themselves. The golden age of the Italian Middle Ages was about to be born.
The age of the communes. The age in which Italy, divided, quarrelsome, would become the economic and cultural centre of the Western world. But this is the story of the next rebirth.
If we thought that with Charlemagne's death and the division of the empire the worst had passed, we were wrong. Europe was about to enter its darkest moment, but also the most absurd and fascinating. Historians call it the Iron Century, the tenth century.
An era in which the title of emperor became an empty shell and the papacy in Rome sank into an abyss of corruption and blood that seems straight out of the pen of a horror writer. While in the countryside castles multiplied to defend against Magyars and Saracens, in Rome a grotesque spectacle was unfolding. The holy city had become hostage to the great Roman noble families who used the throne of Peter as a family armchair.
The most macabre episode, the one that will make you understand how low we had fallen, is the Cadaver Synod. It was the year 897. Pope Stephen VI, driven by hatred for his predecessor, Pope Formosus, ordered something unheard of.
He had Formosus's body exhumed, he who had been dead and buried for nine months. Imagine the scene in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the cardinals sitting in silence, terrified. And before them, sitting on a throne, the mummified corpse of the old pope, dressed in sacred vestments, the tiara on his head and the weak sceptre in his hand.
The smell must have been unbearable, barely covered by incense. A real trial was conducted. A deacon was placed near the dead man to answer in his stead.
The living pope screamed at the dead pope, accusing him of having usurped the throne. In the end, the corpse was condemned. They stripped off his robes, cut off the three fingers of his right hand with which he blessed, and the body was dragged through the streets and thrown into the Tiber.
It seemed like the end of the church. A few days later the people of Rome, in a riot, revolted. Stephen VI was seized and strangled in prison.
But Formosus's body? Legend says it got caught in a fisherman's net and was brought back to shore. When they brought it back into St Peter's, it is said that the statues of the Saints bowed as it passed.
This was the atmosphere in Rome. An era dominated not by men of faith, but by women of power. They call it the pornocracy.
One woman in particular held Rome in her grip for decades, Marozia, daughter of a senator and an unscrupulous noblewoman, Theodora. Marozia was beautiful and lethal. It is said that at 15 she was already the mistress of Pope Sergius III, with whom she had a son.
Marozia married three powerful men, one after another, using them as steps for her ascent. She controlled Castel Sant'Angelo, the city's fortress. She had popes elected, deposed them, had them killed, often smothered with a pillow—a Roman classic.
She even managed to have her son elected Pope with the name of John XI. Imagine, a woman who is the mother of the Pope and mistress of Rome. Her end came at the hands of another of her sons, Alberic, who, tired of his mother's ambition, had her arrested and shut in a convent, taking power over Rome himself and ruling it like a prince for twenty years.
While Rome drowned in the mud of its intrigues, to the north something new was rising. From Germany came a new dynasty of kings, the Saxons, hard men, raised fighting. Their leader was Otto I.
Otto had a dream: to redo what Charlemagne had done, to restore the empire. He descended to Italy in 951, he had been called by a woman, Adelaide, the Queen of Italy, who had been imprisoned in a tower on Lake Garda by a usurper who wanted to force her to marry him. Adelaide's story is an adventure novel.
She managed to escape from the tower by digging an underground passage, she hid in the marshes among the reeds for days, fed by a fisherman, until Otto arrived to save her. Otto married her, took the Iron Crown in Pavia and then descended to Rome. In 962 he was crowned emperor.
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was born. From that moment and for centuries, Italy's fate was tied double-tight to that of Germany. German emperors descended cyclically to the peninsula to be crowned and to try to bring order to the Italian chaos, often failing, often dying of malaria in Roman summers.
But the real miracle of these centuries happened neither in Rome nor in Pavia. It happened in places the empire had forgotten. It happened on the coast.
While the interior retreated into castles, some coastal cities looked to the sea. They had remained formally Byzantine, but Byzantium was far away and sent no help. So these cities learned to defend themselves.
They learned to build ships. They learned to trade instead of fight. The Maritime Republics were being born.
Amalfi, nestled between the rocks and the sea in the south, was the first. It invented the Amalfi Laws, the first maritime law code in the world. Its merchants bought silk in Constantinople and resold it for gold prices in Europe.
But the true rising star was further north. In that lagoon of mud where Roman refugees had escaped centuries before to flee from Attila and the Lombards. Venice.
Venice was an anomaly. A city without land, without walls, built on water. For centuries it had been a loyal province of Byzantium.
But in the year 828 an event occurred that changed its fate. A sacred theft. Two Venetian merchants, Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello, were in Alexandria, Egypt, now Muslim land.
There was the body of Saint Mark the Evangelist. The two merchants decided to steal it. They entered the church, took the Saint's bones and put them in a basket.
To hide them from the Muslim customs officers, they covered the sacred body with pork. When the customs officers opened the basket and saw the pork, they spat and drew back in disgust. Kanzir.
Kanzir. Pig. The body arrived in Venice.
The Doge ordered the construction of a basilica to house it. The Basilica of Saint Mark. With the relics of an apostle in its home, Venice was no longer a swamp of refugees.
It was a spiritual power. It detached itself from Byzantium. The Doge became a prince.
Venetian ships began to dominate the Adriatic, defeating the Slavic pirates. Venice invented an early capitalism. It invented the commenda, a contract in which he who had money funded the expedition and he who had courage set out with the ship, later splitting the profits.
While feudalism tied man to the land, the Maritime Republics tied man to risk and profit. They were islands of freedom in a sea of serfs. And so, between cadaver popes, German emperors, women of power and pirate merchants, we approached a fateful date.
The year one thousand. The romantic legend invented centuries later tells us that humanity was terrified, that everyone expected the end of the world. A thousand and no more a thousand, it was said was written in the Apocalypse.
Crowds are imagined praying in churches, peasants stopping sowing because anyway the world is about to end. In reality things went differently. The man of the 10th century did not have a calendar hanging on the wall.
Many did not even know what year they were living in. Time was cyclical, marked by the seasons and liturgies. Fear was there, but it was the daily fear of hunger, of the plague, of the Magyars who arrived on horseback shooting arrows.
But right around the year one thousand something really changed. It was not the Apocalypse, it was the climate. The sun begani to warm more, the rains became more regular, the medieval climatic optimum.
The harvests improved. Peasants invented the heavy plough that turned the soil in depth. They invented the three-field rotation of crops.
There was more food. Children stopped dying all in the first year of life. The population began to grow.
The old city walls became narrow. Suburbs began to be built outside the gates. The burghers.
The end of the world did not arrive. The beginning of a new world arrived. The silence of Rome was over.
The screams of the barbarians had transformed into Romance languages. Europe was waking up from its long sleep, stretching its numbed limbs, ready to build cathedrals of white stone that would challenge the sky, universities where Aristotle was studied again and banks where gold florins were counted. The Dark Middle Ages were over.
The Late Middle Ages began, the splendid and terrible era that would lead straight to Dante, Giotto and the blinding light of the Renaissance. And here we stop. On the threshold of this new millennium we began our journey with the Roman senators walking in a city of marble, convinced that their empire would last forever.
And we end it in a completely different landscape. If we looked at Italy from above in the year 1000, we would no longer recognise the geometric and orderly peninsula of the Caesars. We would see a maddened mosaic.
We would see the great consular roads, the Cassia, the Appia, the Aurelia, partly swallowed by forests, transformed into muddy paths travelled by pilgrims and armed merchants. We would see the broken aqueducts, like skeletons of prehistoric giants, with collapsed arches serving as shelter for shepherds. We would see Rome, the Caput Mundi, reduced to a town of twenty thousand souls huddled in a bend of the Tiber, while the great ancient basilicas and the Colosseum are used as stone quarries to build defensive towers.
But if we looked closely, we would not see only ruins. We would see life pushing to get out, like grass cracking the concrete. We would see the hills dotted with castles and fortified villages, those villages that are still the backbone of our landscape today, where people live huddled together for protection.
We would see the Benedictine monasteries, islands of order and prayer, where marshes are reclaimed, vines are planted and books are saved. We would see coastal cities like Amalfi, Gaeta and Venice, which have stopped fearing the sea and have started sailing again, trading with the East, bringing spices and silk, inventing the compass and the laws of the sea. Historians of the past called these centuries dark.
They spoke of the Middle Ages, the middle age, as if it had been only a long useless parenthesis of barbarism between the light of antiquity and the splendour of the renaissance, but it is a lie. A lie invented by men who wanted to feel like direct heirs of Cicero and Augustus. There was no darkness, there was only a different light.
Not the cold and steady light of marble, but the flickering and warm light of the fire in the hearth. In these difficult, violent, dirty centuries, the greatest miracle happened. We were born, we Italians were born, we Europeans were born.
The ancient man, the Roman citizen, no longer exists. He vanished in the mists of time. In his place is a new man, a man who no longer prays to Jupiter, but to Christ.
A man who no longer speaks the formal Latin of Virgil, but begins to babble the first sounds of the vernacular, the language of the people, that sweet and musical language that one day Dante Alighieri will transform into supreme art. A man who no longer obeys a divine and distant emperor, but who has learned to defend his city, his guild, his family. A man who knows the value of personal loyalty, of honour, of the oath.
The Middle Ages was not the death of civilisation. It was the crucible, the furnace. In that furnace three different metals were fused together.
The law and culture of Rome, which never truly died, but remained in the foundations. The strength, courage and sense of freedom of the Germanic peoples—the Goths, the Lombards, the Franks—who gave us our blood and names. And the Christian faith, which gave a common soul to people who before slaughtered each other.
From this painful, slow fusion, which cost tears and blood, emerged our civilisation. We started from the fall of a world that seemed invincible. We saw emperors hiding in marshes and barbarian generals weeping over ruins.
We saw a Lombard queen convert a people of warriors with gentleness. We saw a Frankish king kneel at Christmas to be crowned emperor and dream of a united Europe. We have seen that history never ends.
There is never a full stop. Every end is a disguised beginning. Rome had fallen, yes, but Italy survived and Europe was born.
Now we have arrived at the gates of the year one thousand. It was said that humanity awaited the end of the world. A thousand and no more a thousand, said the apocalyptic prophecy.
But the world did not end. Indeed, after the year one thousand, Europe woke up. The climate became warmer.
Harvests improved. The population began to grow. The cities, those small frightened ones, broke their old walls because they no longer contained the inhabitants.
The era of cathedrals, universities, and communes challenging emperors was about to begin. The era of Saint Francis and Frederick II was about to begin. But this, this is another story.
And here I address you, friends of Whispers from Italian History. This narrative experiment ends here, for now. We have crossed five centuries of iron and fire in a single breath.
But Italian history is a bottomless pit. There are still a thousand years to tell before we get to us. Do you want to continue this journey?
Vi piacerebbe that we explored together, step by step, the subsequent phases in chronological order? Do you want to discover how the small Italian communes became the economic powers of the Mediterranean? Do you want to enter the Renaissance courts, between poisons and masterpieces?
Do you want to ride with Garibaldi or sit in the salons that made the unification of Italy? Let me know. Your voice is the compass of this channel.
Write in the comments if you like this format of great chronological storytelling and if you want the series to continue with the Late Middle Ages. History is not just dates and names in a dusty book. History is us.
It is the memory of who we were to understand who we can become. Thank you for walking with me through the ruins and rebirths. The journey continues if you wish it.
See you soon, travellers of time.
