DBAHC/WI: Unify Italy

The challenge here is to unify Italy with a pre-1900 POD. Yes, I know that there is currently a large movement across the peninsula to unify, but that’s due to the “Mediterranean Spring” which began with the Republic of Iberia’s unification back in 2010. What I want is a unified Italy for a timeline I’m working on that includes multiple “World Wars” in the early to mid 20th century and “communism” and “fascism” becoming two of the major ideologies in the world.
 
Maybe if Napoleon had continued his conquests instead of stopping as he did IOTL maybe Italy could had been unified.
 
Maybe if Napoleon had continued his conquests instead of stopping as he did IOTL maybe Italy could had been unified.

What’s the correlation? If Napoleon conquers Sicily he’s gonna want to keep Italy divided, as he divided Northern Italy alone into 3 kingdoms IOTL.
 
What’s the correlation? If Napoleon conquers Sicily he’s gonna want to keep Italy divided, as he divided Northern Italy alone into 3 kingdoms IOTL.

Maybe I've should had worded myself differently. Had Napoleon continued his empire would had overextended, leading to collapse somewhere throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
 
Maybe I've should had worded myself differently. Had Napoleon continued his empire would had overextended, leading to collapse somewhere throughout the Napoleonic Wars.

What’s the correlation between that and the unified Italy? I don’t even think a victorious coalition (certainly not Austria or the Ottomans) would’ve wanted a unified Italy. They’d probably return Italy to the disunified mess it was pre-Napoleon.
 
A unified Italy is very unlikely without an early POD, the various nations of the Italian Peninsula are simply too different from each other culturally and linguistically to be united. The Italian unification movement is a mostly central Italian dominated middle class and intellectual movement that mainly emerged as a result of resentment towards the Papal State remaining a theocracy in comparison to the secularism of the rest of Europe, there's little support for it in the south or the north outside of intellectuals.
 
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What’s the correlation between that and the unified Italy? I don’t even think a victorious coalition (certainly not Austria or the Ottomans) would’ve wanted a unified Italy. They’d probably return Italy to the disunified mess it was pre-Napoleon.

You can achieve this if Napoleon wins but his empire collapses later (or at least wanes in influence), leaving nothing to oppose the Italian states unifying, which they probably would either with the rise of nationalism or fascism.
 
There was only one moment, prior to the events in OTL, when Italy could have had a chance to unify: the second half of the 14th century.

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As you can see from this map, the Duchy of Milan was one of the few places in Europe that survived the Black Death shaken but not wrecked, meaning that if it had mobilized as soon as the pandemic burnt itself out, there was a chance it could have conquered much of the country between the end of the plague (1353) and the start of the papal captivity in Avignon (1377), which would have been the perfect occasion to take Rome.

It would require minimal ASB intervention, specifically in the form of a SI with the right historical knowledge.
 
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TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
As you can see from this map, the Duchy of Milan was one of the few places in Europe that survived the Black Death shaken but not wrecked,
Very interesting.
I do wonder, however, how reliable that map is.
I would not rule out Milan being spared due to ... lack of records.
Brugge - that is interesting and inspires the same sort of curiosity as Milan - why not affected?
Poland, Upper Saxony, Sudeten - these were "spared" as they were sparsely populated backwaters ... and with sparse records too ...
Navarra same - a bunch of shepards is not very prone to civilisation diseases ...
 
Maybe have the French First Republic turn the entirety of the Italian Peninsula into a single unitary "Italian Republic" under French protection, as some Italian revolutionaries seem to have wanted? And then, post-war, have the Habsburgs turn it into a "Kingdom of Italy" under a cadet Habsburg branch with this precedent?
 
What if a Liberal Italian Pope got elected? Might have enough clout to form an Italian federation with the Pope as head.
 
What if a Liberal Italian Pope got elected? Might have enough clout to form an Italian federation with the Pope as head.

A Liberal Papacy... that's funny. Liberal Catholics are already as rare as hen's teeth; nobody openly espousing those kinds of ideals has a prayer (no pun intended) of climbing the religious hierarchy to the point of even being a candidate, much less getting a Conclave to vote them in.

But as for unification possibilities, what about if through some marriage schenanagins you got a Bourbon on one of the Italian thrones who had a spot on the line of succession in France in the 16th or early 17th century? If the two nations ended up tied in a personal union, they could use French Royal manpower and the claims of various vassal nobility on the other Italian states to conduct a series of campaigns to get enough of the peninsula under common vassalage to declare a new crown.
 
Of course, that ended very poorly. Remember the Siege of Venice?

I know that campaign didn't go anywhere in the end, just pointing out that the fact Milan was the first among the Italian states to get grabby again lends credence to most maps showing the duchy weathering the Black Death's spread relatively unharmed, compared to its neighbors.
 
Maybe a ancient barbarian tribe, like the one that founded the city of Rome, could unify the peninsula and prevent the Carthaginian Empire from conquering most of it.
 
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What’s the correlation between that and the unified Italy? I don’t even think a victorious coalition (certainly not Austria or the Ottomans) would’ve wanted a unified Italy. They’d probably return Italy to the disunified mess it was pre-Napoleon.

Could be a useful ally against the French.
 
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