AHC: Mediterranean-Centered HRE

Hold together Visconti's empire, marry a Neapolitan heiress and you're halfway there.....in the fifteenth century.
Which is the basis (regardless of the possibility of inheriting Naples which is...meager) of an Italian dominating center...in the fifteenth century : unless arguing that Visconti could make a go at the imperial title and keep it mostly trough Italian ressources and facing pontifical opposition (which was still the easier way to claim kingship in the region).
 
Which is the basis (regardless of the possibility of inheriting Naples which is...meager) of an Italian dominating center...in the fifteenth century : unless arguing that Visconti could make a go at the imperial title and keep it mostly trough Italian ressources and facing pontifical opposition (which was still the easier way to claim kingship in the region).
His heir marries Elizabeth of Luxembourg, and with prime German real estate, a duke of Milan is simultaneously a natural heir to a previous emperor.
 
The problem there is that Provence was fairly peripheral for the Carolingian world, and more of a military march of sorts against Arabo-Berber piracy in the late IXth/Xth centuries. Note that such position helped Boson to claim a non-descript kingship, but it really became strategical in the conflicts about Italy: there was not much incitative for Carolingians to treat it as a special entity beforehand. The only exception would be the kingdom of Charles, but the quick dismenteling of his inheritance tends to point that the idea of a "provencal" kingdom was contingent.

I wasn't so much thinking of Provence as a "special entity" as wondering about the prospects of an alternate division of land in which the Provencal "march," as you put it, might remain attached to Burgundy/Lotharingia rather than assigned to Italy, thus preventing a Burgundy-Provencal divide. But you raise a good point, which is that even if such a "united Burgundy" were to emerge in the 9th century, the attentions of the Burgundian kings might be drawn to West/East Francia as much as to Italy. That was certainly in evidence with Rudolph I of Burgundy, who made an unsuccessful play for the Lotharingian inheritance, and his son who fought with the Swabians over Thurgau, but I'm not sure such conflicts would necessarily exclude concerted Burgundian ambitions on Italy, particularly given the attraction of the imperial mantle.

Again, I don't really know how likely it is for a cohesive (well, by late Carolingian standards, anyway) Burgundian kingdom (with Provence) to arise in the 9th century, but from the perspective of Italy it seems as if such a state would offer the strongest (non-German) platform from which to create a "southern HRE," barring some alternate 9th century development in Italy itself which arrested the kingdom's disintegration or maintained a "native" prince of sufficient power to make that attempt.
 
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