c. 1000–1400

Popes, communes and city-states

While the papacy rules central Italy and claims authority over all Christendom, northern and central towns become self-governing communes, rich, quarrelsome and fiercely proud.

The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria — Philip Jones, Clarendon Press (1997)
The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples — David Gilmour, Allen Lane (2011)
Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes — Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press (2014)

Well established statehoodreligionidentityeconomy

After Rome fell, Italy was fought over by Goths, Byzantines, Lombards, Franks, Arabs in Sicily and later Normans in the south. From the eighth century the popes ruled a band of territory across central Italy, the Papal States, which they would keep until 1870.

Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes — Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press (2014)
The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples — David Gilmour, Allen Lane (2011)

From around 1100, towns in the north and centre, such as Milan, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Bologna and Siena, threw off their bishops and lords and governed themselves as communes. The Lombard League defeated the emperor Frederick Barbarossa at Legnano in 1176. Venice and Genoa built trading empires across the Mediterranean, and Florentine bankers lent to the kings of Europe.

The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria — Philip Jones, Clarendon Press (1997)

The communes were also violent places, torn between Guelphs, who backed the pope, and Ghibellines, who backed the emperor. The poet Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence in 1302 in one such feud and wrote his Divine Comedy in Tuscan, laying a foundation for the Italian language.

Dante — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria — Philip Jones, Clarendon Press (1997)

The south, meanwhile, developed differently, as a single kingdom ruled from Palermo and later Naples by Normans, Germans, French and Aragonese, with powerful barons.

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples — David Gilmour, Allen Lane (2011)

Why it matters today

Italy

This is the root of campanilismo, loyalty to your own bell tower: the sense that you are first from Siena or Bergamo or Bari, then Italian. City rivalries live on in football, in Siena's Palio and in local pride in dialect and food. The papacy's presence in Rome also meant that the Church was a political as well as a spiritual power in Italy, with consequences that reached into the twentieth century.