Sons of the Harlot Empress

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Sons of the Harlot Empress
(Or, "A Bowl of Water Unspilled")

A Biographical History of Early Medieval Italy and the Royal House of Tusculum

The modern ruins of Roman Tusculum


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“Italy was dismembered and powerless. In civilization and culture, however,
far surpassing the half barbarian Germans, had she in the middle of the tenth
century been able to put forward as her king a great native prince, such as
Alberic, the expedition of Otto would never have succeeded.”

- Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

Between the breakup of Charlemagne's empire and the reform of the system of papal election in 1059, the nobility of Rome had great power in the selection of Christ's Vicar on Earth. No family exploited this more successfully than the Tusculani, the house of the Counts of Tusculum, who (with a few periods of interruption) were the dominant force in Rome from the early 10th century to the middle 11th century. For much of this time, the men upon Saint Peter's chair were either hand picked by the Tusculani counts or Tusculani counts themselves.

History has been harsh to the Tusculani. Their period of papal domination is often considered the nadir of the papacy, when the throne was sat upon by debauched, petty, and occasionally murderous noblemen who had little interest in spiritual affairs. The early Tusculan period, when several popes were the progeny of (or had affairs with) prominent Tusculan noblewomen, was infamously labeled the “Pornocracy” or "Rule of Harlots/Whores" by Protestant historians.

One Tusculan lord stands head and shoulders above the others: Alberic, sometimes called “Alberic II” to distinguish him from his father. He had a rather dubious pedigree for a prince: His father was an up-jumped page who murdered a duke and usurped his duchy, and his mother was the most notorious of Tusculan noblewomen who was the teenage mistress of a pope and had a bastard son with him who would also become pope. Alberic would go on to become the prince and absolute master of Rome, able to thwart the plans of Hugh, King of Italy and even Otto the Great. Neither could manage to lay a hand on the imperial crown as long as he lived.

***
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The Tusculani have always been a great favorite of mine, but recently I read the above quote by Gregorovius and decided to see if I could expand the reach of the Tusculani beyond just Rome to Italy itself, and make Alberic and his descendents not merely princes and counts (and popes), but kings and emperors.

That might be burying the lede a bit, because a timeline with a Tusculani Italy is also necessarily a timeline in which the Holy Roman Empire as we know it never forms. Obviously, that itself will have broad implications that will have to be dealt with. In the main, however, this is a story about medieval Italy, and the style of writing will be more biographical, written in the manner of a narrative or somewhat “pop” history book. Butterflies will not be ignored, but the focus of our alternate universe author is principally on Italy and its royal house.

This timeline diverges from our own in 932, when King Hugh of Italy arrives in Rome to receive both a bride and the imperial crown. According to legend, at the wedding feast of Hugh and Marozia, Alberic’s twice-widowed and much-maligned mother, the young Alberic spilled a bowl of washing-water on Hugh, causing the king to slap his new stepson for his clumsiness. Alberic immediately fled the feast, rallied the Romans against the foreigner, drove Hugh from the city (he escaped through a window), and imprisoned his own mother. Marozia would die in her son’s dungeon, Hugh would never possess either Rome or the imperial crown, and Alberic would be Rome’s sovereign for the rest of his life.

In this timeline, however, there is no falling out – perhaps Marozia convinces her son to cooperate, or perhaps it’s as simple as Alberic being a little more careful with a bowl of water. Marozia shall be empress, Hugh shall be emperor, and Alberic shall be the founder of a dynasty.

***
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Though I've lurked a lot and commented a bit, this is my first time posting a timeline of my own. While I do have some events and characters sketched out in advance, I'm largely making it up as I go along. I'm flexible, and I welcome any comments, criticisms, or insights into plausible and interesting ways in which the story could unfold.

Please note that the dates and family relationships of the early Tusculani (and 10th century Europeans in general) are highly uncertain and reliant on vague, contradictory, and often very partisan primary sources (looking at you Liutprand). For the most part I've settled on dates and lineages that seem most likely to me, but I sometimes interpret things in ways that are more useful to my story.

Some historical background, and the first act of Alberic's rise, will be posted in the next few days.

A note on footnotes:

1: Footnotes in regular type are “in-character” footnotes, written by the same alternate timeline author as the main text.
2: Footnotes in italics are “out-of-character” footnotes, commenting on key differences from our own timeline.

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Background - Hugh, Marozia, and the two Alberics
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Charles the Fat was the last man to rule over a united Carolingian empire. With his deposition in 887 and subsequent death, petty kings – the so-called reguli – appeared everywhere, hungry for the scraps of a fragmenting empire.

At the start of the 10th century, Italy’s king was Berengar of Friuli. Having gained the kingdom in the wake of the Carolingian disintegration, his reign was spent desperately trying to keep it, and even the acquisition of the imperial crown in 915 did not seem to make his throne any more secure. He finally lost his kingdom to Rudolph II, the King of Upper Burgundy, in 923, and died the year after. Rudolph himself was even less successful, and three years after the Italian nobles had invited him in to replace Berengar, they invited Hugh of Arles (also known as Hugh of Provence) to replace Rudolph.

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A 12th century depiction of Emperor Berengar
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King Hugh

Hugh was “merely” the Count of Arles, but he had become effectively the ruler of Provence (or Lower Burgundy) as the regent of Louis the Blind, who in an earlier conflict with Berengar had lost not only Italy and the imperial crown but his eyes as well. While Hugh’s family, the Bosonids, was a local Burgundinian house, he possessed Carolingian blood through his mother Bertha, an illegitimate daughter of Lothair II of Lotharingia. In short order, Hugh gained the Italian throne and Rudolph was forced back to Upper Burgundy. Hugh’s principal object thereafter was the imperial crown, which had been unclaimed since the death of Berengar.

That crown, however, rested with the Pope in Rome. In those days the power in that city was wielded by the senatrix and patricia Marozia, daughter of Theophylact of Tusculum, who by 932 was not only the pope’s master but also his mother.

Senatrix Marozia

In the time of the ancient Romans, Tusculum was a bucolic hilltop retreat, a place where the wealthy could withdraw from the sweltering heat of Rome and spend their summers in comfort only fifteen miles from the capital. Between the fall of Rome and the 10th century, Tusculum is hardly mentioned at all, but it re-emerges into history in 901 as the domain of a certain Theophylact, who was in that year a palatine iudex (Palatine Judge) of the Emperor Louis III. Though we have no knowledge of Theophylact's parents, the family was quite evidently a native house of Rome, and claimed since the early days of their rule to be descended from the Roman gens Julii, which boasted Roman consuls as far back as the 5th century BC.[1]

By the time Theophylact appears in 901, he is already the preeminent man in Rome. He is credited with the overthrow (and possibly the murder) of Antipope Christopher in 904. His ability to found a lasting dynasty, however, was stymied by his lack of sons; his wife, Theodora, bore him only one, a boy named Boniface who died in infancy. His legacy would instead reside with his two daughters, Marozia and Theodora.

The older of the two, Marozia, was renowned from a young age for her unsurpassed beauty; aspects of her intelligence and character would only be appreciated later. At the age of 15 or 16 she caught the eye (or, as some say, seduced) the new pope Sergius III, a man thoroughly without virtue but completely devoted to Tusculan supremacy. She became his mistress, and before his death in 911 she bore him a son named John.

Though no longer a virgin, her beauty and the power of her father were evidently sufficient to attract a suitor – Alberic, Duke of Spoleto. Formerly a page of Duke Guy III with no known pedigree, Alberic murdered his lord and usurped his duchy, a violent episode which was to set the tone for the remainder of his life. His marriage to Marozia cemented an alliance with Theophylact and pulled him into the power struggles of Rome. A man of some martial skill, he was acknowledged as “consul of the Romans” following his role in saving the city from the Saracen menace at the Battle of Garigliano in 915. After the death of Theophylact in 920, his wife was hailed as senatrix et patricia, and the couple ruled as tyrants in Rome. Alberic and Marozia possessed a mutually reinforcing ruthlessness seldom excelled in the annals of matrimony, and Alberic is said to have enforced his rule with the aid of the marauding Magyars who at that time were terrorizing all of Italy. In 925, having made more enemies than he could deal with, he was murdered by a mob.

Pope John X, who held Saint Peter’s throne at that time, had been a client of Theophylact and Alberic. He soon fell out with Marozia, however, and without a powerful father or husband to aid her, the senatrix was forced to flee the city in 924. She returned around three years later with a new husband – Guy, Margrave of Tuscany, who was eager to assist his beautiful new wife’s schemes. They were temporarily stymied by the opposition of Peter, Pope John’s brother, whom the pope had given Alberic’s lands in Spoleto, but in 928 the conflict in Rome was resolved in favor of Marozia and Guy. Their forces stormed the Lateran palace, hacked Peter to pieces in front of his brother, and threw John into a dungeon, where he was later strangled.

Both Rome and the Papacy were theirs. Guy, however, died unexpectedly only a year later, and again it was left to Marozia to maintain her rule alone. A series of her feeble and short-lived appointees kept the pontifical throne warm until her own bastard son with Pope Sergius turned 18 and was “elected” Pope John XI in 931. Still, however, her position was tenuous; her association with powerful men had been the chief instrument of her rise, and she was now quite unassociated.

Pope John XI, the illegitimate son of Marozia and Pope Sergius III
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The Roman Wedding

Thus, with a King of Italy who needed control over Rome on the one hand, and a mistress of Rome who needed a powerful husband on the other, the solution practically recommended itself.

A minor obstacle existed to their union – it was technically illegal. Marozia and Hugh were not related in any way by blood, but Marozia’s previous husband, Guy of Tuscany, had been Hugh’s half-brother, as Bertha of Lotharingia had been mother to them both. By canon law, this made their marriage impossible on grounds of affinity.

This obstacle, however, turned out to be really more of an opportunity. Since Guy’s death, Tuscany had been held by his brother Lambert. Hugh already mistrusted Lambert, who ran his province with far too much independence. Hugh now alleged that by the time of the birth of Guy and Lambert, Bertha had been barren, and had faked her pregnancy and passed off newborn boys taken from another woman as her own. By way of slandering his own mother as a fraud, Hugh thus denounced Lambert as no true relative of his. Lambert was accused him of treason, removed from office, and blinded. This brutal act not only delivered Tuscany to Hugh, who passed it on to his brother Boso, but cleared the way for his marriage to Marozia.

Generally overlooked was Marozia’s own son – not the bastard who now ruled as Pope, but her eldest legitimate son by Alberic of Spoleto, also named Alberic. As the date of the wedding approached, the young man could have been forgiven for feeling a bit insecure. Lambert’s recent fate – stripped of office, disinherited, and blinded – must have weighed heavily on Alberic. If Hugh could treat his own half-brother in such a way, after all, what would become of his stepson? Alberic certainly knew of the ambitions of his mother, and had reason to wonder if they included him.

Hugh arrived in Rome in 932. He was married first in the Castel S. Angelo; during the feast after the wedding, Marozia is said to have sent Alberic to carry water to Hugh so that he might wash his hands. Alberic, despite any unease he may have had, nevertheless obeyed his formidable mother. Presumably at Marozia’s insistence, Hugh subsequently embraced Alberic and acknowledged him as his stepson. The next day came the moment Hugh had been waiting for - his long-awaited dowry, the imperial crown. Pope John XI performed the ceremony in Saint Peter’s Basilica, crowning his new stepfather as Imperator Romanorum.[2]


Footnotes
[1] The claim cannot possibly be substantiated, but neither can it be dismissed out of hand; Rome, even in its darkest days, was continually occupied, and noble families had tenaciously clung to power there under Germanic, Byzantine, and Frankish regimes.
[2] Only now have we reached our point of departure - everything before is actual history, or at least my interpretation of it based on conflicting sources. Some elements are disputed - for instance, whether John XI was in fact the son of Sergius or whether he was Alberic's son. It is highly unusual that the eldest daughter of a nobleman would openly conduct a pre-marital affair, let alone with a pope; on the other hand, it was exceptionally rare that a nobleman would push his firstborn son into a church career, which would have to have been the case if John, not the younger Alberic, was Alberic of Spoleto's eldest son. I have chosen the interpretation that holds John to be Marozia's bastard child with Sergius.

 

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I. The Empress in Pavia, the Judge in Rome

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The Pre-Romanesque Basilica of San Michele Maggiore in Pavia,
the site of the royal coronations of Louis III "the Blind,"
Berengar of Friuli, and (possibly) Hugh of Arles

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Empress Marozia

Having begun her life as the daughter of a local Roman lord, Marozia had risen far. The woman who had once merely been an object of salacious gossip had terrorized her city into obedience with unrelenting energy and stunning violence, and in 932 stood before them as a Roman Empress. It was the crowning moment of a remarkable career.

Rome, however, was not to remain hers. Her previous husbands had come to her, arriving from Spoleto and Tuscany to serve as her martial enforcers over her native city. Hugh would not fit into that pattern. Lombardy, not Rome, was the beating heart of his domain, and what the old imperial capital offered in religious and symbolic significance it utterly lacked in geographic, military, and economic importance.

Paradoxically, though crowned with the highest title a woman could aspire to and at the height of her personal glory, Marozia soon found that her actual power was greatly diminished. Three of her greatest assets in Rome had been her family name, her political savvy, and her legendary beauty. In Pavia, however, the provincial name of Tusculum meant nothing: “daughter of Theophylact” impressed precisely no-one, certainly not Frankish lords who traced their ancestry back to kings and emperors. As for her political instinct, it seems to have been of only limited use in the alien environment of the Pavian court. Even her beauty, though still remarked upon by contemporary chroniclers in 932, was in danger of waning; at the time of her wedding to Hugh she was already in her forties.

But the greatest of problems was that upon her arrival in Pavia much of her value to Hugh had already been lost. The imperial crown that she had offered was now his; she could not offer it again. Nor could she enjoy a privileged position as the mother of his children, for she never bore him any. (This cannot have been any fault of Hugh’s, for the emperor was a serial adulterer who sired bastards with young ladies both low and noble in every corner of his kingdom.) Liutprand[1] claims that, at least at first, the "Roman Venus" influenced her new husband with certain feminine wiles; but Liutprand could never resist a bawdy tale, even when it concerned the mother of his benefactor.[2]

Marozia brought four children with her to Lombardy. Her sons Alberic, Constantine, and Sergius were approximately 20, 15, and 12 in the year of her third marriage. Her fourth child and only daughter was the five year old Bertha.[3] Of all her children only Pope John XI, at that time 24 years of age, remained behind in Rome.

Alberic spent three years with his mother and stepfather at the imperial court, which was primarily based in Pavia but frequently traveled to other royal centers in Lombardy like Cremona, Turin, and Verona. Little is known of how his time was spent. He is certainly known to have been in Verona with Hugh in 934, the year Arnulf, Duke of Bavaria attempted (and failed) to invade the country, but we have no direct evidence that he was involved in that or any other military campaign.

One acquaintance of import that Alberic was to make at Hugh’s court was a young boy named Liutprand, who was twelve years old at the time of Alberic’s arrival. Liutprand, a native of Pavia, had entered Hugh’s service as a page in 931. Whether he was ever a page to Alberic is unknown, but Liutprand describes Marozia’s sons as treating him like an “adopted brother.” Liutprand, who was in his youth known chiefly for his fine singing voice, completed his education at court and became a deacon at the Cathedral of Pavia. He would be separated from Alberic for some years, but would in time become his biographer and chief propagandist, as well as our most detailed (if not our most impartial) contemporary source for the lives of Alberic and his close relations.

The Roman Rebellion

The departure of Marozia from Rome had suddenly robbed the city of the woman who, with one interruption after the death of her first husband, had kept a firm hand on the contumelious Romans since the death of Theophylact in 920. If Hugh or Marozia expected Pope John to take over the reigns of power, they badly overestimated his capabilities. He seems to have effectively been under the sway of his maternal uncle, also named John, who was the husband of Marozia’s younger sister Theodora.[4] This state of affairs continued until the unexpected death of John XI in 935; he had not even reached the age of thirty. Poison was rumored and some have assumed it was the work of his uncle, but it is difficult to see what the senior John would have gained from removing his easily controlled nephew from the throne.

Hugh, whose policy was always to fill vacant positions of power with his relatives, decided to compel the installation of his bastard son Boso as John’s successor. Hugh had been grooming Boso for the see of Piacenza, but the venerable bishop he had installed there to hold the post for a few years until Boso reached majority had stubbornly refused to drop dead. The now-vacant see of Rome seemed like an infinitely preferable alternative.

Boso’s age is unknown, but he was certainly in his early twenties or late teens. That was not necessarily an obstacle, as had been just demonstrated with John XI. John, however, had been a native Roman installed by the senatrix whom all Rome feared. Boso was deemed totally unsuitable by the Romans, whose contempt for outsiders was already legendary in their own time. On the arrival of Boso or shortly thereafter, a group of Roman nobles stirred up a rebellion, imprisoned Hugh’s son, and effected the election of a reluctant Benedictine monk named Leo.

Hugh furiously prepared to teach the city a lesson, but in the end did not go himself. Liutprand credits this decision to the influence of the empress, who, according to him, convinced him that her son Alberic, as a Roman, would be heeded by the people and successfully bring them to heel. It may also be that Hugh, who had only driven off a Bavarian invasion in the previous year, felt that his personal absence from Lombardy would be too much of a risk. From Marozia's perspective, it was an opportunity to demonstrate that she was still worth something to Hugh; it was critical that any emperor in Italy not merely wear the crown, but control Rome, and the empress would only benefit if her husband believed that only her family could provide that control.

So it was that Alberic, at the age of 23, was made a iudex palatinus[5] of the Emperor Hugh and tasked with restoring obedience to Rome. It was his first test, and one that pitted him in a struggle against his own uncle, who was one of the instigators of the rebellion. Alberic, however, was made of sterner stuff than Pope John. Spreading the rumor that he was intending to seize the Tusculani patrimony in the Alban Hills, he induced his uncle John to leave the city, and then made his entry uncontested. He benefited from the disorganization of the rebellion, which had no clear leader; his uncle John had not been able to coalesce the anti-Boso faction around himself, and other rebellious nobles could be bribed or otherwise induced to switch sides to Marozia's son.

Alberic rapidly succeeded in freeing Boso, and in days of street fighting wrested control of the city center. A church council was summoned in the name of the emperor (and safely outside the city) which pronounced Leo deposed and acknowledged Boso as pope.[6] When this provoked a riot, it was violently quashed by Alberic's men. As for Leo, who seems to have never wanted to put himself in the position of revolutionary leader, he soon submitted himself and was thrown in prison. Nevertheless, local resistance and unrest seems to have continued for some time; John continued to contest Alberic's dominance of Rome from his base at Tusculum for months, and it may have taken as long as a year for Alberic to put out the last embers of rebellion.

The Tusculani family tree, to 935 (click for enormous)
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Next time: Alberic and the Saint

Footnotes
[1] This is the same person as OTL Liutprand of Cremona, a bishop, chronicler, and diplomat in the service of Otto the Great. Liutprand is a major primary source for this period of Italian history, though he's got a tremendous axe to grind against all sorts of people he doesn't like. ITTL, he ends up being Alberic’s partisan instead of Otto’s, and will be extensively referenced here.
[2] And how. OTL Liutprand is excessively cruel and/or vulgar when it comes to women he doesn’t like, calling Marozia a “shameless whore,” claiming that the wife of Berengar II cheated on him with a chaplain because of the size of “his weapon,” and devoting two chapters in the Antapodosis to a story about how the wife of the Margrave of Tuscany attempted to hide a jeweled belt in a “very intimate retreat.” She is stripped naked by the king’s soldiers, who discover the location of the belt by observing “a piece of string hanging close by the round and rosy hemispheres of her buttocks.” They burst into laughter and make obscene jokes at her expense. Keep in mind Liutprand is a bishop.
[3] Bertha was also her lone child from her short-lived second husband, Guy of Tuscany. Her three sons were all sired by her first husband, the elder Alberic.
[4] This John is sometimes mistakenly named “John Crescentius” because of his place as an ancestor of the Crescentii family, the “junior line” of the Tusculani noble house. The family, however, is named after John’s son Crescentius, and was not known as such until well after John’s death. John was evidently a member of a Roman noble family, but the identity of his parents or his family affiliation has never been confirmed. Later histories associate him with the gens Anicii of ancient Rome and occasionally refer to him as “Ioannes Anicius,” but the association was only claimed long after his death and is probably spurious.
[5] Palatine Judge. The same title was held by his grandfather Theophylact as the viceroy of Emperor Louis III ("Louis the Blind") in Rome.
[6] Yes, that does mean there is a "Pope Boso" in this timeline. The tradition of popes taking new names upon their accession did not start IOTL until the papacy of John XII, previously known as Octavian, the son of Alberic II.

 

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II. The Banner Year
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The Church of St. Mary on the Aventine, the probable birthplace of Alberic
of Rome (Alberic II), converted from a Tusculani palace into a monastery by
Alberic c. 939.
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Alberic and the Saint

As Alberic was struggling to quash the last holdouts of the Roman opposition in 936, a distinguished visitor arrived from France: Odo of Cluny, the famous monastic reformer and soon-to-be saint. Odo was already well-known for his personal holiness and his sweeping reforms of monastic communities in France which had formerly slipped into laxity and sin. He had now come to Rome, partly as a pilgrim, but more importantly to continue his work in a place where monastic life was even further degraded. The monasteries of Italy had been devastated by years of internal war, the raiding of Saracens and Magyars, and plundering by local noblemen. Most that remained were thoroughly debased and not at all devoted to the spiritual life. Clerics of all kind openly kept mistresses, prayer and fasting were replaced by drinking and feasting, and simony was rampant.

The Vita Odonis, the only contemporary biography of Odo, claims that Odo’s first accomplishment in Italy was the miraculous conversion of Alberic, the “Prince of the Romans,” from his wicked ways. According to its author, John of Salerno, Alberic had formerly been a persecutor of monasteries, looting them relentlessly and usurping their property - until Odo’s pious exhortations transformed him into a devoted patron of the Church. This “Road to Damascus” moment, of course, was written and surely exaggerated to glorify Odo, but it has a kernel of truth – some of the participants in the rebellion against Boso were themselves Roman prelates hostile to a foreign pope, and the close links between clerical and secular power in Rome meant that noble families opposed to Alberic very frequently had both knights and monks among their ranks.

Odo rapidly gained Alberic’s favor. In the year of his arrival, he interceded between Alberic and his uncle John, apparently still at odds over control of Rome and Tusculum, and by his mediation the Roman rebellion was brought to a final close. So too did he persuade Alberic to be merciful to the hapless former-antipope Leo, still languishing in a Tusculan dungeon, and allow him to retire to a monastery.

Alberic soon appointed Odo director of the monasteries in the Campagna and provided him with the requisite authority and funding to undertake his task. With Alberic’s support, Odo restored the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome as well as the Abbey of Subiaco. Around 939, Alberic donated to the Church the very same Tusculani palace where he had been born, which under Odo's supervision became the Church of Saint Mary on the Aventine and a Benedictine monastery. That one of Marozia’s favored residences was now dedicated to the most holy of virgins was an irony not lost on the Roman people, who for generations afterwards colloquially referred to the church as “Little Mary on the Aventine.”[1][2]

Not all of the monasteries came over easily. The so-called monks of Farfa lived their lives in libertine debauchery, and in 936 they poisoned their abbot Ratfredus who had made some tentative steps towards trying to restore the religious community there. When Odo attempted to travel there he was prevented from entering the monastery by armed monks. The situation would not be addressed until the mid-940s, after Odo’s departure and death, when Alberic dispatched a new group of monks to promote reforms there. When the Farfan monks drove them away, Alberic responded by sending his soldiers to storm the abbey and forcibly install a new abbot; but he, too, was poisoned. Meaningful reform at Farfa would have to wait for Alberic’s successors.

Odo also spread his reforms in the south. A particular target was the once-renowned abbey of Monte Cassino, which was in a sorry state. It had never really recovered since it had been sacked and burned by the Saracens in 884. The current abbot and most of his monks lived in Capua, and the remainder still at Monte Cassino did not live like monks at all. Odo was successful in at least returning some of the monks to their duties and restoring parts of the abbey’s patrimony which had been stolen by lay magnates, in large part thanks to the growing ties between his patron and the Lombard princes.

Odo departed Italy in 941 and died shortly thereafter, but his five years in Italy were to have long-lasting repercussions both for the Italian church and for Alberic’s own legacy. Alberic himself, though a strong supporter of Odo’s mission, was not entirely a Cluniac in intention. He supported the reform of spiritual life and the moral restoration of the monasteries and was a generous supporter of monastic life throughout his career, but did not free them altogether from secular control as Odo would have wanted. The Tusculani had always manipulated church offices to enhance their power, and Alberic was no exception. Interference in the elections of abbots, and later their outright investiture at his hands, was never a power he willingly ceded.

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Odo of Cluny, 11th century depiction
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Duke of Spoleto

As we have mentioned, when Duke Alberic of Spoleto died in 924, Pope John X had given the duchy to his own brother Peter. Rudolph, then king of Italy, had ignored that appointment and installed his own cousin Boniface to the office. Peter was executed by Marozia’s men in 927; Boniface died, apparently of natural causes, the next year. By that time Hugh had gained the kingship, and bequeathed the ducal title to his own relation, Theobald.[3] In 936, not long after Odo’s arrival and the end of the Roman insurgency, Theobald too died after holding the duchy for no more than eight years.

Liutprand explains that Hugh preferred another of his Burgundinian relations for the duchy, but that Alberic acted faster and was aided by some machination of the empress. Claiming the duchy as his rightful patrimony, Alberic asserted control over the local counts with little resistance. Liutprand claims he rode into Spoleto with “his companions,” suggesting that this was not a large-scale military operation, though doubtless it involved an armed retinue. His claim was not without merit, but more importantly he was the stepson of the emperor, and the emperor’s last appointed duke had been similarly accepted without contest. If Hugh objected to this brash act, he did not immediately contest it, but a reckoning would come soon enough.

At this point a word about titles would not be amiss. Alberic’s original title, granted by Hugh, was iudex palatinus, but after the dual conquests of Rome and Spoleto in 936 other titles start to take precedence. In Rome, Alberic acquired the traditional urban titles also carried by his mother, senator et patricius[4], and is also noted as the vestararius[5] of Pope Boso. With the assumption of power in Spoleto he added his father’s title of duke as well, and – perhaps as to not minimize his Roman roots – by 938 styled himself Dux Spoletanus et Romanorum, Duke of Spoleto and the Romans.

Within a year, Alberic had snuffed out his opposition in Rome, acquired his father’s duchy, and become the patron of one of Europe’s holiest living men. Abruptly he had made himself a magnate of some significance, and this in turn propelled him into a new diplomatic sphere. His family already had links to the Neapolitans on account of the marriage of his cousin Theodora to Duke John III of Naples. Constantine, Alberic’s younger brother, wed Gemma, the daughter of Duke Docibilis II of Gaeta, sometime between 936 and 938.

As for Duke Alberic himself, he entered into a betrothal with Gisela, the half-sister of Margrave Berengar of Ivrea, the head of the Anscarid family and the most powerful magnate in Lombardy. Liutprand alleges the influence of the empress in this match – and it is not incredible that Marozia, after arranging three political marriages for herself, would decide to arrange one for her son as well – but this may be another one of Liutprand’s characterizations of the empress as a puppet-master supreme. As we will soon see, the betrothal was very clearly interpreted by Hugh as a hostile act, and it is doubtful that the empress would openly engineer a match so obviously likely to inflame Hugh’s paranoia. The betrothal seems to have been made in 937 or 938, though they would not be married until 939.[6]

The Emperor’s Displeasure

Hugh was a rather successful Italian ruler by the standards of the time, but this was an exceptionally low bar to clear. His immediate predecessor, Rudolph, had lasted only a few years before being booted out, and the long but intensely chaotic reign of Berengar before him had been a long-running disaster for the kingdom.[7] The essential weakness of the kingdom was its fragmentation; the invasions of the Magyars had shattered the centralized power of the king, forcing the people to rely on local counts, dukes, and margraves – the great magnates of Italy – to protect them. These rising lords had no great respect for the authority of the king, who was compelled to buy the loyalty of both lay and ecclesiastical lords with land, as well as privileges and immunities. This, in turn, steadily impoverished the monarch and reduced the kingdom into a patchwork of feudal lords and bishops who hoarded their privileges and contributed nothing to the kingdom’s welfare. If the magnates were faced with a king that attempted to centralize and take back all that had been alienated from the crown, they simply invited another candidate to take his place.

Hugh’s strategy to overcome these formidable challenges was to rule through the ties of family, filling both lay and ecclesiastical posts of importance with his own Burgundinian kinsmen. This was an enterprise that was easier for Hugh than most men given his generous supply of illegitimate children. But even close kinsmen did not always have Hugh’s trust - in 936, at the same time that Alberic was mastering central Italy, Hugh deposed his own brother Boso in Tuscany and replaced him with a bastard son, Hubert. Boso, at least, was allowed to retire to Provence and was thereafter a count of some importance in the Bosonid homeland.

This policy worked well enough concerning open offices which could be filled with any available Bosonid. It had the rather predictable effect, however, of alienating powerful lords of other families who feared that they would become the next targets of Hugh’s proclivity for sudden regime change.

Just as Hugh was swapping margraves in Tuscany, he had the displeasure of seeing his stepson, who had been charged simply with keeping the emperor’s peace in Rome, become effectively the ruler of a broad stretch of central Italy from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic. If this was not bad enough, he subsequently received news of Alberic’s betrothal to Gisela of Ivrea. It is worth mentioning that the “last straw” which seems to have precipitated Hugh’s deposition of his brother Boso was the marriage of Boso’s daughter Willa to Berengar of Ivrea.

In effect, just as Hugh had ousted one powerful lord who had forged a marriage alliance with the Anscarids, another popped up with yet another proposed marriage to the Anscarids. What Alberic may have seen as merely claiming his father’s lands and entering into a smart marriage looked an awful lot to Hugh like a knife aimed squarely at his back.

A political map of Italy, its major internal subdivisions, and its neighbors
c. 938 (click for huge). A dotted line indicates the overall extent of the
"empire" of Hugh. Please note that inaccuracy when it comes to borders,
cities, names, etc. increases as one gets further from Italy; I have not,
for instance, delved far into the history of the Serbs in this time. They
get to be on the map, but I'm not going to do research on every little
border curve. (That said, feel free to offer corrections.)
​

Next Time: Sarlio’s Invasion and the Siege of Rome

Footnotes
[1] The humor derives the fact that “Marozia” is a diminutive of Mary, i.e. “Little Mary.” Marozia’s baptismal name was, in fact, Maria. How she came to be commonly known as Marozia is unknown – her physical descriptions tend to focus on her beauty rather than her height – but it was evidently more than just a casual nickname, as nearly all inscriptions and records naming her in Rome use “Marozia” or some variant thereof, including Marotta, Marotia, Marozze, and Maroza.
[2] The conversion of Alberic’s (alleged) birthplace into a church dedicated to Saint Mary under the guidance of Saint Odo of Cluny, by the way, happened IOTL too, and that’s a real picture of it. You can visit it today, though these days it’s called “Santa Maria del Priorato.”
[3] Theobald is referred to as a nepos of Hugh, which is often translated as “nephew” but more broadly can refer to a cousin or any other close male kinsman. The exact relationship between Theobald and Hugh has never been ascertained.
[4] The title of “consul” was never borne by either Alberic or his mother, though it was possessed by Theophylact and the senior Alberic. In Theophylact’s case, he seems to have held it for a single year and afterwards was titled only “senator,” implying even so long after the fall of the old Roman Senate that the temporary, annual nature of the title of consul still survived. Whether it was an actual office or an awarded honor is not clear, and it fell into abeyance in Rome after the death of Alberic of Spoleto.
[5] Best translated as “treasurer.” This title had also been held by Theophylact in the form of sacri palatii vestararius, “treasurer of the sacred palace.” In effect, the title signified the total control of Alberic over the temporal affairs of the Papacy, including its finances. A hostile chronicler alleged that under Alberic, the pope survived only on a meager stipend and was treated like a “domestic servant.”
[6] Gisela of Ivrea is a semi-fictional person. As mentioned earlier, the Italian Anscarids have almost no women in their known family tree, probably because nobody bothered to record any. There are, however, occasional references to later 10th and 11th century counts being related to the Anscarids in a way that’s clearly not through the male line; someone along the way must have had a daughter, and at least one source I’ve read has posited a full sister of Anscar, Berengar’s half-brother, as a way to explain such a relationship. I’ve chosen to believe that such a person existed, I’ve given her a workable birthdate, and I’ve named her Gisela. IOTL, Alberic married Alda, the daughter of Hugh, but ITTL Alberic is Hugh’s stepson, which because of the rules of affinity would make such a marriage tantamount to brother-sister incest in the eyes of the Church. As it stands, Alberic’s marriage to the hypothetical Gisela would also be banned on account of affinity – her mother, Ermengarde, was the sister of Guy of Tuscany, Marozia’s second husband – were it not for the fact that Hugh had already disowned Guy to clear the way for his own marriage to Marozia, thus inadvertently creating the chance for his stepson’s marriage alliance which he opposed. Whoops!
[7] Not that it was solely the fault of Berengar, who had the misfortune to have to deal not only with the incursions of the Magyars but at least five rival claimants for his throne over the course of his reign.

 

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III. Falling Out​

11th century depiction of Lombard cavalrymen


​

The Empress Alone

Alberic’s quick transformation from a landless hanger-on of the imperial court to a great lord styling himself “Duke of the Romans” – which itself sounded uncomfortably close to Hugh’s own title of Imperator Romanorum – was a source of great worry to Hugh. Alberic, however, was not the only Tusculani to trouble him in those years.

Marozia’s influence over Hugh, such as it was, had entered a steep decline. Her advice to send Alberic to Rome had from Hugh’s point of view clearly backfired. Even if she had no hand in the various plots in Alberic’s favor that Liutprand alleges, Hugh must have had some suspicion that her true loyalty lay with her son, not her husband. Liutprand also adds marital animus to the reasons for the deterioration of their relationship, claiming that the empress was “inflamed with jealousy” over Hugh’s many mistresses and spurned his bed as a result. Certainly she was unused to husbands with as many mistresses as Hugh, but it seems out of character for a woman as pragmatic as Marozia to sabotage her relationship with Hugh out of spite.

Hugh may also have been concerned by Marozia’s hold on Lothair, his only legitimate son and heir (by Hugh’s previous wife, a German noblewoman named Alda or Hilda about whom little is known), who in 938 was not yet twelve years old. Marozia seems to have taken a special interest in her little stepson, and seemed to, in Liutprand’s words, “never put herself apart from him.” In Alberic’s absence, Lothair was her surrogate son, ever showered with attention. Perhaps we are wrong to think cynically about Marozia, and the affection of the empress towards her stepson was genuine, an expression of her own loneliness as a foreign queen in a foreign court bereft of her own sons. Yet considering that she had in Rome had been the epitome of craft and ruthlessness, who had routinely used the affections of others to amass power, one may be forgiven for suspecting ulterior motives behind a mask of maternal tenderness.

For whatever reason, it is clear that by 938 Marozia, notwithstanding her “certain feminine wiles,” had lost whatever control she once had over Hugh, and was no longer able to shield her son from the emperor’s intrigues.

Sarlio’s Invasion

The instrument of Hugh’s wrath against Alberic in 938 was Sarlio, a Burgundinian nobleman who was a comes palatinus (Count Palatine) at Hugh’s court. Probably at the instigation of Hugh, Sarlio had wed the widow of Theobald, the Bosonid Duke of Spoleto whose untimely death had paved the way for Alberic to take control of the duchy. Liutprand alleges that Hugh covertly provided Sarlio with men and money with the intention of raising a rebellion against Alberic and forcing him from the Spoletan duchy, and there is little reason to doubt him – Sarlio does seem to have been well provided for, and it is implausible that he would have attacked the emperor’s son-in-law without Hugh’s support. Around May of 938, claiming to be the rightful duke in jure uxoris,[1] Sarlio invaded Spoleto.[2]

The initial attack seems to have caught Alberic entirely by surprise. Several local lords, including one Count Atto, turned to Sarlio’s side – Liutprand alleges bribery – and the city of Spoleto was besieged. The commander of the city at that time was Alberic’s brother Constantine, who was twenty one years old and had no knowledge of war.[3] Foolishly, he decided to leave the safety of the city walls and attack Sarlio, who outnumbered him handily. Constantine was sharply defeated, but escaped capture and returned to the city. Liutprand explains that Constantine escaped because Sarlio had opted to commit only half his forces and did not press his victory. Liutprand describes Sarlio as an inveterate coward who dreaded personal combat, yet it seems unlikely that Hugh would trust such a man for the job.

Alberic was in Rome, and once appraised of his brother’s situation he prepared an expedition to relieve Spoleto. The nearby city-state of Gaeta, whose duke Docibilis II had recently married his daughter to Constantine, evidently dispatched men to aid him; several sources including Liutprand record the presence of Marinus, the second son of Duke Docibilis, at the subsequent battle, and it is unlikely he came alone. Also present was Landulf, a younger son of John III of Naples, but Landulf is recorded as having been fostered with Marozia as a young boy (a memorial in Naples states that he was “adoptivum Maroza senatrix”) and his presence in Rome in 938 is not grounds to assume any larger Neapolitan participation.[4] Records of the battle to follow also include the earliest historical mention of Crescentius, the son of Alberic’s formerly rebellious uncle John, whose presence in Alberic’s army suggests that the Tusculani in Rome were now acting fully in concert.

Having gathered his forces, Alberic launched a counterattack. The only detailed source for the Battle of Spoleto is Liutprand, who states that an acies (literally “spearpoint” but used in the classical Latin sense of a formation of soldiers) of men under Alberic’s command approached the defenders and lured them from their encampments. When Sarlio’s men gave chase, the larger part of Alberic’s army emerged from a nearby wood to catch Sarlio’s men off-guard. Alberic’s force is described as being principally or entirely cavalry, probably drawn from the Roman nobility; the composition of Sarlio’s force is unknown.

The Romans emerged victorious, and the traitorous Count Atto was killed (by, Liutprand adds with evident relish, a lance in his mouth).[5] The Roman victory was attributed by Liutprand to the bravery of Alberic, the “natural valor of their [Roman] race,” and the cowardice of Sarlio, who he accuses of fleeing at the first sign of adversity. If so, Sarlio evidently did not get far, as he was captured either during the battle or immediately thereafter. Alberic had him blinded.

The Aurelian Walls of Rome
​

The Siege of Rome

This was a clear blunder. On its own, Sarlio’s defeat may have merely been an embarrassment to Hugh, but the savage blinding of a high imperial official provoked the emperor’s fury. His response was to march immediately on Rome. With him was a army that Liutprand describes as “great in number,” which included Magyar mercenaries. Alberic nevertheless resolved to hold the city against him and exhorted the Roman people to defend their walls. Liutprand provides a speech, in which Hugh is labeled “captain of the pagans” and “belonging to a race once slaves of Rome.”

The siege does not seem to have lasted long before it was interrupted by the saintly Odo of Cluny, at that point still in Latium. According to the Vita Odonis, he shamed Hugh and Alberic for bearing arms against each other, for they were father and son in both law and the eyes of God. Liutprand admits the mediation of Odo, but emphasizes that the true reason for Hugh’s willingness to reconcile was that despite the great numbers of his army he could make no headway against Rome’s walls and the spirited defense of the Roman people.[6]

In the presence of Odo and Pope Boso, Alberic gave his ritual submission to the emperor and renewed his allegiance “by hand and by oath.” Further concessions by Alberic, if any, are not recorded, but Liutprand emphasizes that Alberic maintained his mastery of Rome and Spoleto, which if true suggests that Alberic’s position may have been the stronger one. Hugh had in any case lost control of the Hungarians, who ignored the truce and plundered the Campagna until defeated in Sabina and driven off by a Roman-Spoletan force.

Despite the fact that he had backed and forcibly installed a foreign pope, the repulse of a foreign emperor's army gave him a surge of popularity in his native Rome; Liutprand claims the populace hailed him as glorissimus dux (most glorious duke). When Marozia had ruled, she had been a woman to be feared; Rome beheld her with awe, but not with love. Alberic too could be fearful - Benedict of Soracte called him "exceedingly terrible" - but after 938 he could boast of having Rome's devotion as well.

Sarlio’s rebellion was to be the last time Alberic experienced any domestic opposition in the Duchy of Spoleto, which thereafter was unwavering in its obedience. As for Sarlio himself, his fate is uncertain; he is not mentioned again after 938. His unnamed wife, the widow of Duke Theobald, was compelled to enter a convent and is similarly unmentioned thereafter.

Alberic seems to not have been much chastened by the encounter. His rule of Spoleto confirmed, he soon after asserted authority in Perugia and the Pentapolis, territories which had for some time been nominally owed to the Papacy but which the pope had never been strong enough to grasp. With the pretense of being the papal vestararius he had stripped away nearly all the temporal powers of the papacy, and claimed that as the administrator of the papal patrimony he was entitled to take possession of all that was owed the pope. Royal authority in Romagna, which Hugh had been attempting to expand, prevented Alberic's intrusion there, but further south the bishops and nobles soon found his commands too difficult to resist.

Prelude to War

The emperor’s cavalier treatment of his vassals caused great unease amongst the magnates of Lombardy. This was a man, after all, who had by now deposed his brother, blinded his half-brother, and underhandedly sponsored a rebellion to overthrow his stepson. The long-term forecast for those high noblemen who were not even Hugh’s relations seemed gloomy.

The family with the most to lose was the Anscarids, led by Berengar, Margrave of Ivrea and his agnate half-brothers Anscar and Adalbert. Berengar in particular had three strikes against him from Hugh’s point of view. Firstly, he was a grandson of Berengar of Friuli, the last emperor to rule Italy before Hugh, and thus he possessed both royal and imperial legitimacy. Secondly, Ivrea was strategically critical; it was by far the largest territory in Lombardy and controlled key passes into Burgundy and Germany, from where foreign intervention was most likely to come. Thirdly, Berengar’s family was linked by marriage (or would be; the betrothal made earlier was fulfilled in 939) to the upstart Alberic of Rome, creating a potentially dangerous axis among two of Hugh’s great magnates.

Hugh had tried and failed to beak this axis by the deposition of his stepson. The only sensible alternative was to deal with the problem at its source – in Ivrea.

Next Time: A New King

Footnotes
[1] “By right of [his] wife.” Perhaps even more so than in either France or Germany, women were conduits of legitimacy in 10th century Italy, and marrying the widow of a lord gave you a plausible claim to her former husband’s lands.
[2] Sarlio’s rebellion actually happened IOTL, though in 940 instead of 938, and against a different Duke of Spoleto – Anscar, the half-brother of Berengar of Ivrea, who had been installed by Hugh after Theobald’s death in 936. Neither Anscar’s accession in 936 nor his overthrow in 940, both engineered by Hugh, have clear explanations. It has been suggested that Hugh was trying to separate Anscar from his family and power base in Ivrea; if so, he was successful, but the downfall of Anscar only spurred the rebellion of Berengar that would IOTL bring down Hugh’s dynasty.
[3] Constantine either traveled to Rome with Alberic in 935 or joined him shortly thereafter. Sergius, the youngest of the brothers, was being schooled in Pavia in preparation for a church career, while Bertha – still a minor in 938 – remained at the imperial court with her mother.
[4] What exactly Duke John imagined his young son would learn from senatrix Marozia is anyone’s guess; the “adoption” certainly happened while Marozia was in Rome, and thus it must have predated Marozia’s third marriage and could not have been some kind of roundabout diplomatic gesture to Emperor Hugh. Neither Landulf’s birth date nor the time of his initial arrival in Rome are known.
[5] This whole narrative is a mirror-universe version of the actual Battle of Spoleto in 940, in which Sarlio was victorious due to Duke Anscar’s foolhardy bravery and his refusal to retreat even when clearly outmatched. In both OTL and TTL, the traitor Atto gets a lance to the mouth. Some guys just have no luck.
[6] IOTL Alberic repelled three different attempts by Hugh to seize Rome, and Odo did in fact mediate between them on at least one of these occasions. That time, peace was achieved by the marriage of Alberic to Hugh’s daughter Alda, making him Hugh’s son-in-law instead of his stepson as he is ITTL. Alberic accepted the wife, but then still refused Hugh entry into Rome and denied his new father-in-law the imperial crown, which gives you a pretty good idea of the kind of guy Alberic is.

 

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IV. Downfall of a Dynasty​

Lombard soldiers, Late 10th century
​

The Trap is Sprung

In 939 Alberic was at last able to make good on his betrothal to the Anscarids, and married Gisela of Ivrea; he was 27, and she 17. Though the Anscarids were in origin a Burgundinian house, most of her ancestry was Frankish, and she could claim Carolingian descent as well.[1] For her half-brother Berengar, the Margrave of Ivrea, the marriage was a means to ward off the aggressions of Hugh and prevent his own isolation. That, at least, has been the traditional view; more recently some scholars have suggested that Berengar’s initial offer of a betrothal was intended to be an act of reconciliation with Hugh. Alberic, after all, was Hugh’s stepson, and the betrothal was made before Sarlio’s invasion and its aftermath laid bare to all the breach between Alberic and his stepfather.

The marriage did not dissuade Hugh from action for very long. In May of 940, Berengar was called to attend a placitum, or royal assembly, held near Milan. Allegedly Hugh planned to arrest him at the assembly and have him blinded, but according to Liutprand he was warned upon his arrival by the young and kindly Prince Lothair, Hugh’s son. The boy made the critical mistake, however, of sharing what he had done with his beloved stepmother. Berengar attempted to slink away from the assembly grounds at night, before his planned arrest the following day, but Marozia’s men were waiting for him. He was ambushed, captured, delivered to Hugh’s dungeons, and then died in agony as the result of a botched blinding attempt.

What Hugh had not accounted for was the character of Berengar’s half-brother Anscar, whose vengeance was to be exceedingly swift.

Anscar’s Rebellion

Anscar was not as politically savvy as Berengar, but in war he was a dangerous foe. Liutprand praises his strength and calls him “the greatest miles [soldier/knight] among the Lombards.” As a warrior he was formidable, thanks in part to what virtually all his contemporaries – Liutprand most of all – describe as his defining personality trait: bravery. It was his greatest strength and weakness; he was fearless in battle and unwavering in his determination, but he was also obstinate and bold to the point of rashness. When news came of Berengar’s arrest and death, Anscar seems not to have even considered flight, not even as a tactical retreat. He would not “live to fight another day;” he would fight this day, and as soon as forces enough to fight could be found, he was on the march.

Hugh already had a force at hand to subdue Ivrea in the wake of Berengar’s planned capture, but Anscar’s rebellion unnerved him; he paused to await more reinforcements. Anscar, who was impatient and wasted no time in war, marched swiftly into Lombardy and unexpectedly attacked the royal army as it was encamped. At the Battle of Maxentia[2] he delivered a coup de main to Hugh’s army, which broke up and fled in disorder almost immediately. Hugh escaped, but the stinging defeat had a cascading effect among the counts and margraves of Lombardy, who now rushed to renounce Hugh and pledge their support to Anscar. Hugh could still have made a fight of it; there were many strong walls to hide behind, and he could have awaited loyal reinforcements from Provence or Tuscany. But Maxentia seemed to have shattered not only his army, but his nerve, and Hugh fled to Tuscany with his family and the royal treasury in tow. Lombardy was abandoned to Anscar.

Alberic’s immediate response is hard to know because of the short and rather uncertain chronology of the above events. At some point after Berengar’s death, possibly as a reaction to Maxentia, Alberic raised his own army and marched into Tuscany. The Romans plundered their way down the Arno, presumably to goad Margrave Hubert into battle or divert his attention from Lombardy. Hubert and Hugh originally seemed to have planned to defend the heights of the Appenines against Anscar, but with Alberic at his back Hugh again lost his nerve. Boarding a ship, probably in Pisa, Hugh fled to Provence.

With the exception of Hubert, who was still hanging on to his castles in the mountains, Italy belonged totally to the rebels. Anscar and Alberic were now masters of the country, but the country still needed a king.

The Iron Crown of Lombardy, the traditional crown of the Kings of Italy
​

A New King

Liutprand says that Alberic “refused” the crown, but it is more likely that the matter simply never came up, as Alberic stood no realistic chance of getting it. It was Anscar who had won at Maxentia, Anscar who controlled Pavia, and Anscar who now had nearly all the nobles of Lombardy rising to his support. Alberic was an outsider whose sole contribution to the war effort had been to enrich himself by looting the upper Arno. He was also still Hugh's stepson, and despite the icy relationship since 938 and recent hostilities between stepfather and stepson, the northern magnates may have viewed him as suspect.

Anscar would receive the crown, but Alberic wanted something in return – Tuscany. Initially, we are told, Anscar angrily refused, on the basis of inherited right; Anscar was the son of Ermengarde, the sister of the Tuscan margraves Guy and Lambert.[3] It is equally plausible that Anscar simply realized the danger in allowing Alberic to control Latium, Spoleto, and Tuscany together. Benedict of Soracte claims that when Alberic made his demands, Anscar had to be restrained by one of his own fideles from striking his own brother-in-law.

According to a later legend, the first known written example of which occurs in the 12th century, the two princes met in a tent in Anscar’s camp. When Alberic demanded that Tuscany be his, Anscar grievously insulted him and stormed out. After four days of seething with anger, Anscar finally realized that he had no other choice but to accept. He asked one of his men to go to the camp of the Romans and summon Alberic back for another meeting – only to be told that for the last four days Alberic had never left the tent. The Prince of the Romans had patiently waited, sleeping in the tent in Anscar’s camp and taking all his meals there, confident in the knowledge that Anscar would be back.

Even if we doubt the historicity of the tale, it does seem to be a fair representation of the respective demeanors of the two men. It also speaks to the likely fact that Anscar could simply not afford to make an enemy of Alberic. Hubert still controlled the Appenine highlands and Hugh was regrouping in Provence, no doubt preparing to recover his kingdom. The emperor had plenty of supporters in his native land, and having fled with the royal treasury he had plenty of coin to wage a war with. To fight the Bosonids and the Tusculani together was not realistic, and even the bull-headed Anscar eventually realized this. The best compromise he could make was to demand that in return for Tuscany, Alberic would abdicate Spoleto in favor of his brother Constantine, probably with the hope that in time they could be played against one another.[4]

On July 14th, Anscar was elected and crowned King of Italy at Pavia. Alberic, who was in attendance, added his voice to the acclamation and gave his oath of fealty to the new king, after which he was formally granted the March of Tuscany. Alberic then swiftly returned to his new acquisition to continue the reduction of Hubert’s fortresses, while King Anscar made preparations for Hugh’s expected counterattack from Provence.[A]

Loose Ends

Hugh’s strategy of ruling through his kin meant that even after his deposition in Italy, there were a number of Bosonid remnants to deal with. Hubert, of course, was the most prominent, and defied Alberic’s attempts to subdue him for some time. It was not until the winter of 941-942 when Hubert, besieged at Bibola for three months, finally surrendered.

While Alberic was dealing with one of Hugh's bastard sons in Tuscany, another was stirring up trouble in Rome. Isolated in the city, Pope Boso could do little except make mischief, which he attempted by sending missives to foreign kings inviting action against the usurper. These were futile acts, for Boso was surrounded by Tusculani cronies in the middle of a city that hated him. His messages were intercepted, and an attempt to flee the city failed. In the summer of 940 the pope was arrested by Crescentius de Theodora, Alberic’s cousin, and by October he was dead, probably strangled in prison like at least two previous popes who had defied the Tusculani. Crescentius secured the election of a Roman priest of the Church of St. Cyriacus as Pope Marinus II, a rather decent and pious man who devoted his fairly unremarkable papacy to supporting monastic reform, repairing churches in Italy, feeding the poor in Rome, and intervening in some minor ecclesiastical disputes. Well-behaved and with no apparent worldly ambitions, he remained in the good graces of the Tusculani until his natural death.[B] Probably as a reward for this and other services to his cousin, Crescentius appears with the title of senator beginning in 942.

A Bosonid ruler still lingered in the north. Hugh’s cousin Manasses, the bishop of Arles, had under Hugh’s reign also received the sees of Verona, Mantua, and Trento (which was flagrantly illegal under canon law). Manasses had been installed to guard the alpine passes to Bavaria after the Bavarian invasion of 934 in which both the count and bishop of Verona had betrayed Hugh. Like those lords, however, the loyalty of Manasses proved to be flexible, and he acknowledged Anscar as king. His swift change of heart betrayed an opportunism that was to cause future problems.

By the spring of 942 at the latest, the last resistance against Anscar had evaporated. The Bosonids, however, were very much alive in Provence, and Hugh had not yet forsaken the Iron Crown.

Next Time: Malamaria

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Specifically, her maternal grandmother Bertha was the illegitimate daughter of King Lothair II of Lothairingia, thus making Gisela a great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Charlemagne.
[2] Roman Castrum Maxentiae, modern Magenta.
[3] Gisela, Alberic’s wife and Anscar’s sister, was obviously also a child of Ermengarde, but contemporaries seem to have accepted that the rights of the son exceeded those of the daughter’s husband. The fact that the late Margrave Guy actually had a living child of his own – Bertha, Marozia’s only daughter – seems not to have been of any consequence.
[4] It should be noted that the March of Tuscany, under the previous margraves, included not only Tuscany proper but the region of Emilia north of the Apennines (see previous map). Based on comital records in Emilia, it appears that the “Tuscany” Alberic received was merely Tuscany proper, and that “Tuscan Emilia” remained outside his control during Anscar’s reign. It has been suggested that this, too, was part of a compromise between Anscar and Alberic, effectively splitting the march with the Apennines as the dividing line, though Alberic’s share was considerably larger.

Timeline Notes (Out of character)
[A] IOTL, Hugh’s move against Berengar did not come until 941. Berengar, possibly warned by Lothair, was able to evade Hugh’s men and flee to Germany, and eventually came back with an army in 945 and reduced Hugh to a puppet king. Anscar was already dead by this time, having been killed in battle with Sarlio at the actual Battle of Spoleto in 940. In this alternate timeline, however, Anscar is still alive because of Alberic’s seizure of Spoleto, and Berengar was unable to escape because of Marozia’s machinations. Anscar IOTL was indeed described as Liutprand as a great warrior but foolishly brave; he fought to the death at Spoleto rather than retreating and waiting for reinforcements. It seems to me like he’s just the kind of guy who would go toe to toe with Hugh instead of running into exile like Berengar did IOTL. At Maxentia, this yields spectacular success, but eventually his recklessness will be his downfall.
[B] This is the same pope as Marinus II IOTL, the only difference being that ITTL he becomes pope in 941 instead of 942.

(Trying out a new separated footnote format as per the comment of an earlier poster. Better? Worse?)

 

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V. Malamaria​

Marozia as Empress in Provence, Late 10th/Early 11th century
​

The Empress in Exile

Hugh did not arrive in Provence alone. Among his party were his son and heir, Lothair, as well as the empress Marozia and her daughter Bertha. It was the first time Marozia had ever left Italy. We do not know whether or not she came willingly, but later writers have tended to see it as a conscious choice. Hugh had been forced out of Italy, but he was still emperor and ruler of Provence; at least at his side, she might have some influence over whatever empire he had left. Hugh, for his part, does not seem to have considered her an advisor, but neither did he cast her aside even after the treachery of her son; she had, after all, demonstrated her loyalty by subverting Berengar’s plot to escape.

Marozia surely knew that any power she had in Italy would be only at the sufferance of her son, and that scenario was unlikely. If anyone knew how dangerous Marozia could be it was surely Alberic, who had seen much of her early career firsthand. Lombardy had been a foreign land, and Provence even more so - but here, at least, she was still an empress and a queen.

The Lay of the Land

A moment should be taken to note the state of Burgundy in the early 940s. The old kingdom of Burgundy had for some time been split into two halves, Upper and Lower Burgundy, the lower part of which is commonly known as the Kingdom of Arles or Provence. Around 923, Rudolph II of Upper Burgundy had overthrown and defeated Emperor Berengar of Friuli and conquered Italy, but in 926 the Italian magnates subsequently invited in Hugh, at that time regent for Emperor Louis III “the Blind” of Provence, to replace him. Rudolph then fled from Italy back to Upper Burgundy, but kept up his claim on the crown and continually threatened a return.

The standoff ended only in 933 with an agreement between Rudolph and Hugh by which Rudolph’s daughter Adelaide would be betrothed to Hugh’s son Lothair, Rudolph would renounce his claims on Italy, and Hugh would cede to Rudolph the Kingdom of Lower Burgundy, thus re-uniting the Burgundinian kingdoms under Rudolph’s rule. Nevertheless, Hugh does not seem to have ever given up functional control of much of Provence despite nominally renouncing his kingship there, and still had a sizable principality to retreat to in 941.

Presently, Upper Burgundy was ruled by Rudolph’s son Conrad. Upon Rudolph’s death in 937, Hugh had claimed the throne in opposition to Conrad, but domestic affairs delayed him from making good on it. During that delay Otto, King of the Germans, had swooped into Burgundy in support of Conrad and engineered the young king’s coronation. Henceforth Conrad would be in most respects an autonomous monarch, but his kingdom would be a nominal dependency of Germany and a part of Otto’s ever-widening sphere of influence. With that, Hugh’s window of opportunity slammed shut.

Between the two Burgundies were a number of formally dependent but practically autonomous counties. The most prominent among them was the County of Vienne, which was ruled by Charles Constantine, the (possibly illegitimate) son of Louis the Blind. Despite being the son of an emperor, he seems to have only inherited Vienne and never made any claim to his father’s kingdoms, leading modern scholars to suggest that he may have been a bastard. Charles had initially struggled with a Bosonid claimant to his own land, but with French aid Charles had succeeded in breaking Hugh’s grip in the region and now ruled under nominal French suzerainty. Hugh’s presence in Italy since 926 had caused the lords in Provence to gain a great deal of autonomy, and the kingdom was on an unsure footing. In particular, Count Boso of Arles (who, despite his name, was not a Bosonid) controlled an unsettling amount of land in Provence, and was also married to the daughter of Charles Constantine.[1]

Saracens of Fraxinet (Farakhshanit), 10th century
​

Anscar and the Infidels

Hugh had suffered a tremendous setback, but he had gained Italy from Provence once before and he was determined to do it again. His first step was to secure an entry, in this case the strategic pass of Mont Cenis. The pass and the Susa Valley below had been conquered by Arduin, the Count of Auriate, from the Saracen raiders of Fraxinet some years previously. Hugh had nearly destroyed the pirates of Fraxinet in 931 with the aid of the Byzantine navy, but now he enlisted them as allies, possibly even making a treaty with Nasr ibn Ahmad, then recorded as the qa'id or commander of Fraxinet.

In the spring of 942, Italy was simultaneously attacked by the Saracens, ostensibly under Hugh’s direction, and the largest raiding force of Magyars to be seen in years. Count Arduin made a valiant effort to defend the Susa Valley, but was forced to cede it to the Saracens, who plundered it thoroughly. Hugh now had a foothold in Italy, and he was eager to use it.

King Anscar, meanwhile, prepared to confront the Magyars. Since their first decisive defeat of Emperor Berengar of Friuli in 899, practically every attempt to ward off the Magyars by force of arms had been a miserable failure. Only paying them off worked, and Hugh in particular had often paid them to redirect their raids against neighbors he was at odds with. Anscar, a man of action, was not inclined to buy peace, and in any case he had little to buy it with – Hugh, after all, had absconded with the royal treasury.

The man of the hour turned out to be Alberic, who convinced Anscar that fighting the Magyars while also fending off a Saracen-Provencal invasion would be suicidal, and apparently also contributed money from his own coffers to aid the king in paying them off. The fact that Alberic was in a position to advise the king – and that the king listened to him – seems to suggest that despite their rather tense interactions in 940, Alberic did not simply retreat into Central Italy and leave Lombardy to fend for itself after Hugh’s flight. Royal authority in Alberic's domain appears to have been virtually nonexistent, but he was evidently not disengaged from the affairs of the kingdom and still rendered meaningful service as Anscar's nominal vassal.

Cleverly, Anscar (or possibly Alberic; we do not know who actually negotiated with the Magyars) offered the nomads both tribute and a recommendation – that the land of the Muslims was rich for plunder, and that the Italians would gladly offer them the use of the Mont Cenis pass and guides to lead them through it. The Magyar leaders accepted, and the Saracens and Burgundinians who had only recently captured the Susa Valley soon found themselves face to face with the full body of a Magyar horde. Anscar’s infidels swept aside Hugh’s infidels, and in the wake of their passage Count Arduin regained control of the valley. Hugh was pushed back on his heels and withdrew to his castles while the Magyars ravaged their way through his lands, the south of France, and all the way to the lands of the Caliphate in Catalonia.[A]

Hugh’s Last Attempt

Everything seemed to be going against Hugh. In 942 he not only lost his foothold in Lombardy but received news of the surrender of Hubert as well. He appealed to Conrad of Burgundy for assistance, and possibly even to Otto of Germany, but the former had no interest and the latter had his hands full enough dealing with French politics that year. Provencal nobles like Boso of Arles were ambivalent, interested primarily in expanding their power at home rather than going on more ruinous Italian adventures, and the memory of Hugh’s tyranny was still much too fresh in the minds of the Lombard magnates for him to count on any support there. Even the Saracens, still licking their wounds from their tangle with the Magyars, had little immediate interest in a new invasion.

Nevertheless, Hugh wouldn’t give up his crowns. He led another attack on the Susa Valley in 943 which Count Arduin handily repulsed without even needing to request royal aid. Liutprand writes that rage and bitterness “gnawed at his heart,” and that he ignored the affairs of Provence and abused his own family.

Then in November of 943, as he was making plans for yet another invasion, he became delirious and collapsed. The next day, at the age of 63, Emperor Hugh was dead. The consensus by the chroniclers of the time was that he had been poisoned, and the most likely culprit was his own wife.

The Empress of Provence

Whether or not she was responsible, Marozia immediately moved to take control of the kingdom. Lothair, her stepson, was at that point around sixteen years old – old enough, perhaps, to reign, but still a mild and malleable boy whose devotion Marozia had been cultivating for years. She had him wed to his long-time fiancée, Princess Adelaide of Burgundy, sister to King Conrad, who herself was only twelve years old. Then, breaking Hugh’s agreement with Rudolph, she had her son crowned King of Provence, and gave herself the title of Consilaria Magna – Great Councilor(ess) – of the kingdom.

Marozia, whatever else she was, was not foolish enough to think that she could contest Italy with Anscar and her son. She made peace with them instead, offering (on Lothair’s behalf) to renounce the Bosonid claims to Italy and the imperial crown in exchange for an indemnity. Though King Anscar was continually on the verge of bankruptcy, he nevertheless seems to have been able to scrape together the gold. At a time when the Magyar threat was growing ever more dire, peace on his western border was worth a great deal.

Provence in 943 was a weak kingdom, and there were plenty of alternative sources of authority to the young and untested Lothair. Marozia’s chief aim once the hatchet was buried with Anscar was to utterly destroy her domestic opposition. The first to go was Boso of Tuscany, Hugh’s brother, who after his removal from Tuscany had become Count of Provence and Hugh’s effective regent in that country while Hugh ruled in Italy. Marozia had him arrested for allegedly planning to seize the throne from his nephew, and seized all his lands and wealth for the crown.

From this position Marozia made it her business to claw back as much land and power as could be managed from the Provencal church and nobility. We have only hostile chroniclers to draw from; for some reason she seemed to attract no admirers among the clerical elite. They alleged that she stole church benefices, taxed the bishops, plundered monasteries, and most egregiously used the profits gained from these persecutions to put gold in the hands of infidels. It was not totally false – as the Burgundinians soon learned to hate her, Marozia used outsiders to enforce her will, chiefly Lombard mercenaries and the Muslims of Fraxinet.

After years of the lax rule of Hugh in distant Italy, Marozia’s frenzy of iron-fisted tyranny backed by the swords of foreigners and infidels provoked serious opposition. Eventually a conspiracy formed against her which favored Count Boso of Arles, but in March of 946 he was ambushed and shot full of arrows on a country road. Flodoard claims that the assailants were Saracens in Marozia’s pay. This provoked an uprising in which Marozia had the clear upper hand early on. By 947, however, the fight against her had been joined by Charles Constantine of Vienne, who was no doubt displeased by the murder of his son-in-law, and Hubert of Tuscany – Hugh’s bastard son – who had finally returned from exile in Italy after having been Alberic’s prisoner since 942. It has been suggested that his release was a conscious act by Alberic to undermine his mother, or the result of some deal between Hubert and Alberic; Hubert had really been more of a “guest” than a prisoner in the latter part of his exile, and the timing of his return is suspicious.

By 948, Marozia was hanging on only by a thread. Most of her mercenaries had abandoned her, even the Muslims, who no doubt concluded that the cause of the empress was no longer a profitable one. In desperation, she sent Lothair – now twenty one – to negotiate with the rebels. Lothair was also joined by his queen, Adelaide, who was now seventeen and had blossomed into a young woman of great intelligence and charm. As Adelaide had grown, she had herself gradually attempted to erode Marozia’s hold on Lothair, and now that they were away from the empress she convinced him that only by removing Marozia from power could peace be restored.

Near Marseille, Lothair and Adelaide met with Hubert, Charles, and the other leaders of the rebellion. Lothair asked for their forgiveness for the acts committed in his name, and Adelaide followed with an impassioned speech calling for them to support Lothair, their rightful king, against the cruel and foreign empress. According to Liutprand, the initial intent of the Provencals had been to depose Lothair and make Charles king, but Adelaide’s words were so stirring and Lothair’s humility so heartfelt that they “unanimously” hailed Lothair as their king. It may be more likely that Lothair remained in power because Hubert and others loyal to Hugh’s branch of the Bosonid line were keen to have one of their own remain on the throne, provided that Marozia was removed. The possible bastardy of Charles, as well as the fact that he had previously pledged loyalty to the King of France, may also have counted against him.

Upon hearing that even her own stepson was now against her, Marozia surrendered. Only Lothair’s call for mercy prevented her abuse or murder at the hands of the rebels. She was sent to the convent of Saint Cesaire in Arles, but was restless there – she tried to escape at least once, and an anonymous monk of a nearby monastery wrote that she had made herself “a terror” to the other nuns, unfortunately without providing further detail. In 950, Lothair – possibly as an act of mercy – freed her from the convent and sent her on a ship to Italy.

Her arrival would not take the form of a tearful reunion with her sons. Instead she was met by Alberic’s soldiers, who immediately packed her off to Latium and stuffed her in another convent at Subiaco, one of those communities which Alberic and Odo had reformed decades ago. Alberic built her a special cloister, which was palatial by the standards of a nun but certainly not by the standards of Marozia. As far as we know, however, he never visited her there.

At sixty years of age, she was not yet physically infirm, but this latest captivity seemed to finally break her spirit. She had returned to her homeland only to be cast in prison by her own son, and the rebelliousness she had exhibited at Saint Cesaire was absent at Subiaco. Virtually nothing is recorded about her after 950, not even the year of her death, which was sometime between 956 and 960.[B] Marozia, widowed three times, the mistress and mother of popes, ex-duchess, ex-marchioness, ex-queen, and ex-empress, would end her life as a simple nun.

The Legacy of Marozia

Marozia was much maligned both in her lifetime and thereafter. She was despised most of all in Provence, where the people dubbed her “Malamaria” (lit. “Bad/Evil Maria”). There, she became the archetypal wicked stepmother, who in one chronicler’s view “subjected the realm to countless calamities.” Yet she arguably improved the position of Hugh’s flagging kingdom in her brief reign. The death of Hugh, if it was indeed her doing, ended a costly and fruitless attempt to turn back the clock and allowed a new king to focus on consolidation at home. The demise of the two Bosos (of Arles and of Tuscany, the latter of whom died or was murdered in her dungeons in 947) removed the two greatest competitors to Lothair’s power and put the monarchy on a much firmer footing. If Lothair was not the most inspired of monarchs, he was at least a more popular figure than Hugh, and Queen Adelaide would prove to be an excellent councilor who swiftly and capably took over Marozia’s position as the woman behind the throne.

In Italy her reputation was more positive, in part because of her position as the mother of a great dynasty. Alberic and his successors, even if they did not exactly embrace her sordid legacy, would not tolerate any writer they patronized to speak evil of the senatrix. Despite his partisanship, Liutprand was to be the most critical of Marozia among nearly all Italian chroniclers for many years to come. He was not about to baselessly slander the mother of his patron, but neither was he compelled to beatify her, perhaps because Alberic and Marozia seem to have never been particularly close.

Marozia’s relationship with her children, like many things about her, is complex. She is described as doting on her stepson Lothair, but no chronicler wrote about any equivalent behavior towards her own children. The only one of her own sons that seems to have been close to her was her second, Constantine, who named his first child after her.

A later artist's interpretation of Marozia as a young woman​

A Portrait of Marozia

Let us now pause and consider, in summary, the life and character of the great senatrix before returning to Italy and the narrative of her sons.

Marozia had grown up in a city in turmoil, the battleground of both local families and the would-be kings and emperors in Italy who wrestled with one another for power in the wake of the Carolingian decline. As the daughter of a prominent nobleman, she certainly did not live in want, but the Rome of her day was nonetheless a traumatic place for a child.

She was seven years old at the time of the infamous Cadaver Synod, when Pope Stephen dug up his predecessor Formosus and had his corpse tried for violation of canon law. Count Theophylact was probably in attendance, and some – in the absence of evidence either way – have claimed that Marozia was there as well. In the wake of this appalling spectacle, Stephen himself was overthrown and strangled. When Marozia was around fourteen or fifteen years of age, she became the mistress of Bishop Sergius, who seven years earlier had been one of the co-judges at the synod. He was thirty years her senior, and also her father’s cousin. Sergius would soon become pope himself, thanks to Marozia’s father imprisoning and probably murdering his predecessor.

It was in this environment of murder and corruption that Marozia became a woman. As a woman, she might normally be expected to merely cement the family’s alliance with another house as a bride; but in the absence of a brother, she became the protégé of her father Theophylact, expected to maintain the family’s grip on the city and the papacy. In that she did not disappoint.

Surely Marozia used her charm and beauty to obtain what she wanted, but the chroniclers that malign her as a “harlot” or “prostitute” write from a position of simple misogyny. In fact her pre-marital affair with Sergius is the only relationship she is known to have had outside of wedlock, and it is not fair to blame a 14 or 15 year old girl for a relationship undoubtedly engineered or at least encouraged by her powerful father to serve his own political interests. No substantial accusation of adultery was ever leveled against her by her contemporaries, and one can hardly call a noblewoman a “prostitute” for engaging in politically motivated marriages. Constrained by the standards and roles of her time, she sought power in the only way in which a woman could, by marrying and manipulating powerful men.

Historians have debated the extent of her foresight as empress in Italy. Certainly some of the things she is alleged to have masterminded – sending Alberic to Rome and arranging his marriage with Gisela – were pivotal moments in Alberic’s rise to power. Yet just as often her actions seem contradictory, based in the exigencies of the moment rather than some master plan. Most glaringly, she allegedly secured a marriage alliance between her son and the Anscarids, only to arrange for the capture (and subsequent death) of Berengar, an act which was intended to destroy the Anscarids as a power. These appear to be acts not of grand strategy, but opportunism.

Marozia had charm and low cunning, but as a politician she was second-rate. In the cramped, gritty environment of Rome, where political struggles resembled gang wars and the best way to overcome one’s enemies was to murder their leaders and terrorize the rest into obedience, she excelled. But once placed on a grander stage, in Italy and then in Provence, she faltered. Italy could not be mastered with sheer ruthlessness and a few dozen thugs. In Provence she fell back on what she knew, boldly slaying and persecuting her adversaries, and it caused the whole kingdom to shudder with revulsion and rise up against her. To her credit, she learned her father’s game very well – but it was the only game she ever knew how to play.

Next Time: The Reign of Anscar

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Though Boso of Arles was not a Bosonid, Charles Constantine was, albeit of a different branch than Hugh. Specifically, Charles was Hugh’s second cousin once removed.

Timeline Notes (Out of character)
[A] The Magyar raid of 942 IOTL went very similarly; Hugh paid the Magyars to go raid Islamic Spain, which they duly did. Apparently they got lost in a desert and killed their Italian guide, and some ended up as bodyguards to the Caliph.
[B] Thus, in both OTL and TTL, Marozia dies in the captivity of her son.

 

[Carp]

VI. Anscar the Bold​

Modern illustration of a 10th century Ottonian horseman
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Looking East

The peace that Empress Marozia had brought about between Bosonid Provence and Anscarid Italy in early 944 gave King Anscar the first moment of peace he had experienced since his coronation in 940. His attention turned immediately to the persistent threat of the Magyars.

With the help of Alberic, Prince of the Romans,[1] he had managed to “encourage” the host of 942 to move on with a sizable payment, but the kingdom’s coffers were practically empty. To address this, in 944 Anscar levied a tax throughout the kingdom. In decentralized Italy this was not an easy task, and its actual effectiveness is hard to measure, but it does seem to have been a boon to Anscar. The resistance that might normally have been expected from the Lombard nobles was mostly absent; a Magyar army passing through Lombardy was as good an excuse for taxation as any. Benedict of Soracte leveled criticism at Anscar for the “heavy yoke” placed upon the church, but the measure was supported by Pope Marinus II – and thus, implicitly, by his master Alberic.[A]

Anscar’s first measure against the Magyar threat was to re-establish the old March of Friuli, which included most of northeastern Italy. The march had once been the base of power of Emperor Berengar of Friuli, but it had collapsed in the wake of the Magyar invasion and no margrave had been installed since Berengar’s reign. It was nominally still part of the Kingdom of Italy, but its cities had been sacked and more than a few of its bishops had abandoned their sees for safer domiciles. Anscar, following in Hugh’s footsteps, gave the march to his younger brother Adalbert, and spent money from the royal tax to build and repair fortresses and city walls in the region.

The appointment had the unintended effect of angering Bishop Manasses of Arles, cousin of Emperor Hugh.[B] In addition to being the bishop of Arles, Manasses was also bishop of Verona, Mantua, and Trento, a situation which was illegal under canon law but which Hugh had permitted to try and establish a loyal presence in the Alps. Loyalty, however, was not a character trait which Manasses possessed. He had been quick to make peace with the new regime after Anscar became king, but the appointment of Adalbert in Friuli threatened to greatly diminish his power, particularly in Verona where Adalbert established himself. In 945, Manasses offered Berthold, Duke of Bavaria and Carinthia, his support and allegiance if he would invade Italy.

Berthold’s Invasion

It was a tempting offer. In 939, Duke Berthold had married Alda, the daughter of Emperor Hugh, after his original plans of gaining an Ottonian wife had fallen through. The marriage had been proposed by Hugh, probably as a means of securing his German border at a time when his position at home vis-à-vis the Tusculani and Anscarids was looking precarious. Now, however, Hugh was gone, and after Lothair’s renunciation of his rights in Italy the late emperor’s claims seemed to rest with Alda, Berthold in jure uxoris, and their five year old son Henry.

Berthold was also a competent commander. In 943 he had inflicted a clear defeat on the Magyars at the Battle of Wels in Upper Austria and had thereby secured his eastern flank at least temporarily. Anscar had his own victorious reputation after Maxentia, but he had been forced to buy off the Magyars two years later, which may have suggested to Berthold that the king was more likely to fold than fight.

In May of 945, Berthold took up Manasses’ offer and led his army through the Brenner Pass. Margrave Adalbert attempted to oppose him, but Manasses had arranged for the turnover of critical alpine castles to the Bavarians and Adalbert could do nothing but fall back to Verona. That too proved untenable, and Adalbert withdrew from his march entirely. As Berthold completed his conquest of Friuli, the rebellion was joined by a number of bishops, particularly in Romagna and central Lombardy, possibly as a result of Anscar’s “yoke” of taxation upon them in the previous year.

Anscar’s call for troops from the Lombard magnates led to disappointing results – by this time the nobles frequently considered war a private affair, and no Italian king had been able to count on enthusiastic support from the counts of Lombardy for some time. He did, however, have loyal Ivreans to draw upon. He was further reinforced by Alberic, who took the field in person for the first time since the Battle of Spoleto seven years previously. Senator Crescentius de Theodora, Alberic’s cousin who had so ably served him in Rome, was also recorded as present.

Berthold’s strategy was a familiar one – march up the Lombard plain, despoil the land of any lord who resists, and thus give a demonstration that the old king is no longer capable of meaningfully defending his kingdom. Sieges were long and costly, particularly in a land like Lombardy which was so heavily encastellated, while open battles were risky. Devastation and the erosion of the morale of the kingdom’s magnates thereby was the fastest and most effective means to bring down the king without a bloody or drawn-out conflict. Anscar knew this very well – Kings of Italy were easily overthrown, and if he hid behind his walls he would swiftly lose the rest of the magnates, who were likely to prefer being ruled by a Bavarian to having their property ravaged. King Anscar was already a man amenable to a contest of arms; no doubt he also realized that despite its risks, an open battle was the best chance he had of preserving his reign.

Depiction of the Battle of Surrecina, Germany 11th c.
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The Battle of Surrecina

According to Liutprand, Anscar first sent Berthold a rather remarkable invitation to personal combat to decide their dispute “manfully.” Berthold declined. Anscar then advanced against the duke, who was at that time in the vicinity of Cremona. The territory to the west of the city was that of the “Lake Gerundo,” really less a proper lake than an area of marshlands and seasonal flood plains created by the convergence of the Po and Adda rivers. The two armies met on the fringes of this wetland near the village of Surrecina.

Anscar led from the center of his army, placing Margrave Adalbert on his left flank and Prince Alberic on his right. Alberic’s force is specifically noted for being infantry-heavy and composed in large part of “homines urbani” (men of the city), which has generally been understood to be one of the first mentions of “urban militia” taking the field in medieval Italy.[2] When the two armies clashed, Alberic’s force received the worst of it, and was driven back and very nearly routed by the Bavarian cavalry under Arnulf, the Count Palatine of Bavaria and Berthold’s nephew. When Alberic’s soldiers fell back, however, they fell back into the sodden ground of the “lake,” and as the Bavarians pursued them they became stuck and disorganized. Some of Alberic’s men rallied, and a desperate melee was fought in which a number of mail-clad Bavarians drowned in the marsh.

With much of the Bavarian cavalry occupied with Alberic’s troops, Anscar and Adalbert launched a frontal attack that drove away the remainder. Berthold’s infantry, consisting of both Bavarians and allied Lombards, was left unsupported and were virtually all either killed or captured. Anscar then attacked and plundered the Bavarian baggage train, only subsequently returning to assist the beleaguered Alberic. Finally, Count Arnulf was dragged off his horse and captured.

The Battle of Surrecina was a total victory for the Italians. Berthold himself escaped, but not for long. He was ambushed and apprehended trying to cross the Adige back into Friuli, possibly by Adalbert’s men. Liutprand adds the detail that when found, he was initially mistaken for a simple soldier because he was on foot and so covered in mud as to be unrecognizable. With the enemy now in his power, Anscar extracted from him an oath to never return to Italy, and reminded him that the last time an invader had broken such an oath his punishment had resulted in him being known forever after as “Louis the Blind.” For Anscar, the battle was a much-needed success which demonstrated his ability to defend his crown and greatly increased his own reputation.

The Bologna Crisis

Now the time was ripe for the punishment of Berthold’s allies. Manasses had in the interim had been excommunicated by Pope Marinus II for pluralism, which he was obviously and excessively guilty of. With Berthold’s defeat, the excommunicate bishop chose to flee rather than fight and went into exile in Germany. Other bishops had also supported Berthold, and for Anscar this was an opportunity to reinforce his power in the east by deposing traitorous prelates and replacing them with more reliable candidates. This, however, was to open a fresh rift between Anscar and Alberic.

John II, the Bishop of Bologna, had been arrested and removed by Anscar for rebellion, and the king was eager to appoint an Anscarid loyalist to the position. Alberic, however, disputed his right to do so, claiming that Bologna was part of the lands belonging to the Papacy as part of the old Exarchate and the Donation of Pepin, and only the pope – and, as papal vestararius, Alberic himself – could make such an appointment. When Anscar went ahead and installed his candidate anyway, Marinus excommunicated the new bishop, and Alberic raised up his own candidate for the see.

The king and the prince had already barely been on speaking terms since Surrecina. Alberic’s troops had suffered the largest share of the casualties, but Anscar – who had from the start been contemptuous of Alberic’s foot army – considered the whole victory to have been won by the Ivreans. Alberic was not one to grow bitter over lost glory, but he was irate that the king’s men had plundered the enemy camp before helping him, and that correspondingly he and his men had received almost none of the loot from the battle despite suffering disproportionately. To gain some profit from the bloody engagement, Alberic decided to ransom Count Arnulf separately, and refused to hand him over to the king. This had angered Anscar, and now the king fumed at the notion that the prince dared to interfere in the royal prerogative to appoint bishops, particularly in an area that had been within the royal sphere of influence since the reign of Hugh. The working relationship between them which had endured since at least 942 was irrevocably broken.

This breach between the two most powerful men in the kingdom could not have come at a worse time. In 947, less than two years after Berthold’s initial invasion, the Magyar prince Taxis[3] rode into the kingdom with the largest pagan army seen in Italy since the days of Berengar of Friuli.

Next Time: The Magyar Invasion

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Contemporary chroniclers seem to have had difficulty keeping track of Alberic’s titles, which changed fairly rapidly throughout the period of 935-947. In 936 he was Dux Spoletanus et Romanorum, but Spoleto was ceded to his brother four years later and replaced with Tuscany. Nevertheless, references to Alberic as Dux Spoletanus continue in some records as late as 950, possibly a result of confusion with his father Alberic of Spoleto. While inscriptions of Dux Tuscia et Romanorum do exist, they are rare, and from around 940 the most common title for Alberic is simply Princeps Romanorum, Prince of the Romans. Princeps seems to also have been a title favored by Alberic domestically; in Rome, Senator et Princeps appears throughout the 940s. As a consequence of this, historians have occasionally referred to Alberic’s combined holdings in this period as the “Principality of Rome,” but the phrase is anachronistic.
[2] Alternatively, some have proposed that this is better read as “men of the city” – that is to say, Rome – and thus is a reference to Alberic’s Roman followers. This is possible, but seems incongruous with the fact that Alberic’s army is described as being mostly infantry, as the only actual “Romans” Alberic was known to campaign with were the nobleman of the city and the Campagna who fought principally as cavalrymen.
[3] A Latinized form of “Taksony.” Taksony’s position in the Magyar rulership is not precisely known, but he was certainly a prince of the House of Arpad and closely related to the nagyfejedelem (Grand Prince of the Magyars), who in 947 was probably either his father Zoltan or his cousin Fajsz. Contemporary Latin sources describe Taxis as a dux.

Timeline Notes (Out of character)
[A] Berengar of Ivrea managed to collect a similar one-time tax during his reign IOTL to pay off the Magyars. Liutprand accuses him of levying the tax squarely on the Church and the poor and spending none of his own money on the tribute. But then, Liutprand hates Berengar, so what do you expect?
[B] An asshole of the highest caliber. IOTL, he betrayed his own cousin Hugh, who had given him four bishoprics, because Berengar of Ivrea offered him a fifth - Milan. The only problem was that the Milanese so detested him that they rebelled against him and raised up their own candidate. He also sold the see of Verona at one point, making him guilty of not only pluralism but simony as well. Liutprand devotes a chapter of the Antapodosis to a satire of Manasses.

 

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VII. The Last Regulus​

Illustration of a 10th century Magyar cavalryman


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The Invasion of 947

No reliable figures on the size of the host led by the Magyar Prince Taxis (Taksony) into Friuli in 947 exist, but all chroniclers of the time agree it was impressively large. The causes of the invasion are unclear. After a series of setbacks at the hands of the Germans, Lombardy may have been seen as the best target, though that does not explain the scale of the raid. It may be that the leader of the army, Prince Taxis, had political concerns in mind; he was a scion of the House of Arpad, though not the overall Magyar leader (the nagyfejedelem, “grand prince”). A large and successful raid following the recent difficulties with the Germans could not only enrich Taxis and his followers but establish him as the clear successor to the Magyar confederation.

Margrave Adalbert of Friuli had by this time had only a few years to organize his defense of Friuli, and his efforts had been substantially interrupted by the fall of the march to the Bavarians in 945. Though the territory had quickly been recovered after the capture of Duke Berthold, Adalbert had been forced to deal with Berthold’s supporters among the local nobility and episcopate, and many sees and counties apparently remained empty at the time of the invasion. At the very least, however, Adalbert was not caught by surprise, and sightings of the Magyars entering the frontier of the march were swiftly reported back to Anscar.

In 942, Anscar had been dissuaded from fighting the Magyars by Alberic, who had also assisted him in paying them off. That advice might have been useful this time as well, but Alberic no longer had the king’s ear after their fallout over Surrecina and the Bologna episcopal dispute.[1] Anscar, buoyed by his successes against the Bavarians, decided to do what his predecessors had failed to do and drive the pagans out of Italy by force of arms.[A]

Alberic’s own actions on the eve of battle are contested. Flodoard contends that Alberic was commanded to join the royal army but refused; Liutprand alleges that Alberic made preparations to join, but that Anscar was dismissive of his usefulness (perhaps based on his perceived performance at Surrecina) and decided it was not worth waiting for him. Either way, as Anscar marched to war, Alberic remained in Tuscany at his northern capital of Lucca.

“Tu murus tuis sis inexpugnabilis,
Sis inimicis hostis tu terribilis.
Te vigilante, nulla nocet fortia,
Qui cuncta fugas procul arma bellica.
Tu cinge haec nostra, Christe, munimina,
Defendens ea tua forti lancea.”

“Be to Thy people a bulwark none may breach,
The fearsome enemy our enemies fear.
Within Thy care no power can do us harm
For Thou wilt drive all hostile force afar.
Keep these our walls, O Christ, under Thy care
With the protection of Thy mighty spear.”​

- From The Song of the Watchmen of Modena, a liturgical
vigil composed at the time of the Magyar invasion c. 900​

The Battle of Gade

Inexpert at siege warfare, the Magyars were both uninterested in and unable to take the fortifications of Friuli. Adalbert, however, was equally unable to obstruct their passage through his territory, aside from some harassing attacks that seem to have accomplished little against the highly mobile cavalry forces of the Magyars. Already thoroughly plundered, Friuli held no great attraction for Taxis, who passed through it quickly. Only around Mantua did the force disperse to begin plundering Lombardy.

Anscar’s precipitous advance against the Magyars initially caught them by surprise; they had, perhaps, expected less forceful resistance from the king who had bought them off five years previously. Liutprand records that the Lombards even managed to surprise and destroy “an army of pagans” (but probably just a scouting or raiding detachment). In response, Taxis swiftly began consolidating his forces. A Magyar detachment of some size, possibly led by Taxis, harassed the king’s army as it approached Brescia; it was driven off, but the point of the action may have been merely to buy more time for the Magyars to gather their whole army.

Emissaries from Taxis arrived at Brescia to treat with Anscar, and offered to withdraw from the country if sufficiently paid. Anscar refused. At dawn the next day, the Magyar force retreated from the environs of Brescia. Anscar, having seemingly won two skirmishes with the Magyars already, felt that his position was the stronger one and set off in pursuit of the Magyar host to deal with the invaders once and for all.

Anscar was a brave man and a commander of some skill, but he was also relatively young and had no experience with nomadic warfare. After a brief chase, the Magyars turned about and engaged near the village of Gade a few miles from Brescia. Anscar’s cavalry ably repulsed the attack and sent the Magyar cavalry running. Sensing victory, Anscar and the Lombard cavalrymen followed in hot pursuit, only to be led away from their infantry and straight into an ambush. The Magyars enveloped his cavalry force and showered it with arrows from all directions, killing many of the Lombards’ horses. According to Liutprand, Adalbert attempted to convince his brother to retreat, but Anscar refused to run.

By all accounts the king fought like a lion, but in the end he was cut down by the fleet horsemen. Adalbert perished attempting a breakout, reportedly killed by an arrow to the eye. Having practically annihilated the enemy cavalry, the Magyars turned their attention to the infantry, which was now unsupported. Liutprand describes a Magyar warrior riding in front of them, waving the bloody severed head of the king and shouting “Satanic cries” at the Lombards. Terrified, they ran, and many were slain or captured before they could reach the safety of Brescia’s walls.

Modern bust of Prince Taxis (Taksony Fejedelem) in Hungary
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The Aftermath

At the Battle of Gade, the Lombard resistance to Taxis was utterly broken. The king and his brother were both dead, and the casualties among the counts and other noblemen were extensive. The cavalry, composed in large part of noblemen, had suffered appalling casualties. The Magyars had free reign over the countryside of Lombardy, and plundered all the way to Ivrea over the next two months, looting numerous churches and monasteries. Tuscany remained mostly safe; one group of Magyars did raid the port city of Luni, but as they were returning over the Apennines laden down with loot, they were ambushed and defeated by Tuscan soldiers. Despite this small injury, Taxis had gotten what he came for, and in mid-May his forces retreated from Lombardy, their horde followed by wagon after wagon of loot.

Italy was leaderless, and so was the Anscarid clan. King Anscar left a son of around 10 named Amadeus; his brother Adalbert died childless The late Berengar of Ivrea had two sons, Adalbert and Guy, but they were around 13 and 7, respectively. None of them were going to find support amongst what remained of the nobility, who desperately needed a king capable of defending Italy. No candidate abroad was available either – Lothair might ordinarily have been able to effect a Bosonid revival, but in 947 he and his stepmother were fighting a civil war with the nobility of Provence. King Otto of Germany was certainly powerful enough, but at the time he was prosecuting a war against the Danes and Slavs. Duke Berthold of Bavaria, defeated two years earlier in his own attempt at the crown, does not seem to have leapt immediately to the occasion; in any case he died later in the year.

Liutprand would have us believe that the Lombard nobles “begged” for the reluctant Alberic to take up the mantle of kingship. This is likely too modest by half, but it must be conceded that Lombardy in 947 was not the most tempting of prizes. It had been ravaged, ruined, and bled white by war, and the Iron Crown had ruined the life of every man to take it up in the last sixty years. Yet even bearing the crown was arguably less dangerous than allowing Lombardy to remain a power vacuum, waiting for some ambitious foreigner to marshal an army and take it. Any King of Italy would soon set his sight upon the imperial crown, and thus upon Rome and Alberic’s domain. The Prince of the Romans had no alternative but to take the throne, and the Lombards had no alternative but to let him.

By the time Alberic arrived at the gates of Pavia with what was probably the only intact army in Lombardy, his election to the kingship was already a foregone conclusion, and on the 20th of June it was accomplished. Alberic received the Iron Crown upon his brow and at the age of 35 became the first Tusculani king of Italy.

Anscar’s Legacy

Later historians dubbed the period between 887 and 947 the Saeculum Regulorum, the “Age of Petty Kings.” For sixty years, the throne of Italy had been contested by a throng of competing princes. Of the eight that actually ruled as king, all had either met with a violent demise or ended their lives in defeat or exile. Alberic would be the first ruler of Italy since the Carolingians to die a natural death in the country he ruled and pass that country on to his son.

“Reguli” of Italy, 887-947
This list includes all men crowned King of Italy during the Saeculum Regulorum who exercised independent power over at least part of the kingdom. Pretenders who were never crowned and children crowned as co-kings who never exercised independent authority are not listed. Kings of Italy who were also crowned Emperor appear in bold.

• Berengar (Unruoching) 887-924, defeated, then murdered by own men
• Guy (Guideschi) 889-894, defeated, then suddenly died of an illness
• Lambert (Guideschi) 891-896, assassinated (or fell from a horse)
• Arnulf (Carolingian) 894-899, stroke forced him to withdraw from Italy
• Louis III (Bosonid) 900-905, deposed and blinded, died in Provence
• Rudolph (Welf) 922-926, deposed, died in Burgundy
• Hugh (Bosonid) 926-940, deposed, assassinated in Provence
• Anscar (Anscarid) 940-947, killed in battle with Magyars

Accordingly, Anscar was for a long time merely a footnote in Italian medieval historiography, the last regulus in a chaotic and shameful interregnum between the Carolingian and Tusculan periods. If he was remembered at all, it was usually for his failure and death at Gade. Yet Anscar’s reign was not without accomplishment, and if it seems grim and lackluster today it is only because Anscar, with a kingdom continually under threat, had virtually no respite from war for the seven years he ruled. He fought Burgundinians, Bavarians, Saracens, fellow Lombards, and Magyars, and achieved success against all of them save the last.

Anscar’s reputation was much better in the generations immediately succeeding his death. He was renowned as “Anscar the Bold,” the fighting king of Italy, who had freed Lombardy from a cruel tyrant and was martyred by the pagans. By the 11th century he was being venerated as a saint-martyr in Lombardy. Initially, at least, the Tusculani helped to burnish his image; Alberic, who could claim no royal lineage, based his claim to the throne on his marriage to Anscar’s sister. The glorification of the Anscarid house would eventually cause its own problems, as it served as a reminder of that family’s royal right in opposition to the Tusculani, but during the regimes of Alberic and Octavian the legacy of Anscar remained an important source of legitimacy.

Anscar never acquired the imperial crown, and remained only the King of Italy until his death. Most historians have assumed the nature of his reign was such that there was simply no time or money to organize and carry out the procession to Rome and the imperial coronation. Resistance from Alberic is also possible, and is particularly likely after 945 when his relationship with Anscar soured.

In a time in which deceitful, venal, and cowardly rulers feature prominently, Anscar was a respectable figure. He was considered in his time to be a just king and was an inspiring figure to his troops, who never saw him show fear or order them into a fight he would not himself take part in. Though the ancestry of the Ivrean house was Burgundinian, he represented the best martial tradition of the Lombards of old and was never regarded as a “foreign king” like Hugh. For all his praiseworthy qualities, however, his deficiencies in wisdom, humility, and patience doomed him and allowed Italy to at last pass into the hands of a new dynasty.[B]

Next Time: King Alberic and the Germans

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] A dispute that was still ongoing at the time of the invasion in 947, with the two competing bishops both claiming Bologna. Anscar had intervened in 946 to drive out Alberic’s candidate, Boniface. Alberic did not contest the action, but within a month Boniface was back again and stirring up civil strife against Anscar’s candidate Peter.

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] The raid of Taxis into Italy in 947 is historical, but IOTL they were paid off by Berengar (who was at that point not actually king, but the summus consilarius who effectively ruled the kingdom over Lothair) from the proceeds on what Liutprand calls his tax on the church and the paupers. The Magyars rode south and spent three months plundering Byzantine Apulia instead, though one detachment was ambushed and destroyed in Spoleto on the way back, similar to the ambush in the Apennines mentioned ITTL.
[B] As Anscar died IOTL in 940, his character ITTL is based largely on the manner of his OTL death, heroically besting his enemies and disdaining retreat until he was inevitably overwhelmed. Death in battle seems like the only appropriate way for him to go out.

 

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VIII. The New Regime
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A map of Italy and its major internal subdivisions c. 950. Major
royal centers are marked as yellow dots.
​

The Sickness of Lombardy

The illness that beset Italy in this period can be best described as the localization of power. Previously, all vassals and holders of benefices from the Carolingian kings had been required to give military service. In the anarchy of this period, however, these obligations had become cut off from the king. The kings of the era could not protect the kingdom from invaders and were frequently occupied fighting civil wars; this caused the local people, both commoners and petty noblemen, to turn to local authorities for protection. The commoners and milites alike pledged themselves to great margraves and dukes, depriving the king of their service. These margraves and dukes, in turn, used their power bases to defend their independence from any royal oversight at all, or to launch their own bids for the throne. Royal weakness and localization thus formed a self-reinforcing cycle, each aggravating the other.

Soon, the only way to rule the kingdom at all was through personal relations. The duty of service to the king had been lost entirely, so only the personal bond between king and vassal could possibly induce the count to do the royal bidding. This, however, put the king in the position of a negotiator, a man with no more power or authority than any of the great margraves. He could only rule by pleasing his vassals, but the things required to please vassals – the cession of land and the granting of privileges and immunities – further weakened the monarchy. Any attempt to claw back these powers and lands or assert too much authority simply induced the magnates to find a new king who would “respect” them by asking nothing of them, or to make a bid for kingship themselves.

Hugh had come to the logical conclusion of this process – if personal relations are the only bonds between king and vassal, then why not further strengthen them by making your vassals your family as well? Unfortunately, even Hugh’s family was not big enough to fill every post, and blood was not always a guarantor of loyalty. So difficult was it to find trustworthy men that Hugh often simply left counties vacant; hardly a single count in the region of Emilia is recorded during his reign.

The clergy of Italy constituted as much of a threat as the lay nobility, if not more so. Their power was to a great extent tied to urbanization, which was always more advanced in Italy than elsewhere in the Latin world. Cities, by their nature, had held out better against the Magyars and Saracens than the ravaged countryside, and it was the bishops who had stepped in as the defenders – and thus rulers – of the cities. In an effort to buy their loyalty, some reguli – Berengar in particular – had also granted tremendous privileges to the bishops of Lombardy, which they jealously guarded. Later reguli tended to favor the counts, but power in Lombardy was a zero-sum game, and this inevitably alienated the bishops. It was no accident that both Bavarian invasions, under Hugh and Anscar, had been precipitated by the invitations of bishops. In fact the prelates of Italy was as frequently involved in the deposing and inviting of kings as the lay nobility.

Anscar had done reasonably well because he himself was a great magnate. His own family had greatly benefited from the localization of power by amassing a strong principality in Ivrea. As king, however, he was scarcely more powerful than he had been as margrave; the army he took with him into battle against the Magyars in 947 was principally an Ivrean army, joined by whatever counts and milites he or his agents could personally convince to join the effort. The last true “Italian army,” in the sense of a force drawn from throughout the kingdom in service of the king, had been raised by Emperor Berengar in 899, only to be smashed to pieces by the Magyars at the Battle of the Brenta. The strength of that army has been estimated at 15,000; almost 50 years later when Anscar rode out against the Magyars, he could muster no more than 5,000.

The Dissolution of the Marches

Alberic, too, was a great magnate; his meteoric career thus far would have been impossible without the profound weakness of the monarchy and the inability of Hugh and Anscar to reduce outlying provinces to obedience. Now, however, he was in command of the same rotten edifice that he had thrived on, and the view from the top was not a pretty sight.

Alberic did have a great advantage over the reguli that preceded him – he had no magnates to rival him. The great March of Ivrea was on its knees, for the slaughter at Gade had both robbed the clan of its leaders and decimated the ranks of Anscarid loyalists. The Anscarids were now “led” by three boys, the oldest of whom was thirteen.

Shortly after his coronation, Alberic proceeded into the march with his army. Meeting no resistance, he then convened an assembly of the Ivrean lay feudatories at Turin. The counts were called upon to recognize Alberic himself as the Margrave of Ivrea, on the basis that his wife, Queen Gisela, was the last remaining sibling of King Anscar. Initially, this may have been spun as a “regency,” a temporary measure while his Anscarid nephews were too young to rule. It is clear, however, that Alberic had no intention of letting anyone succeed to the march. He took his three Anscarid nephews into his custody and brought them to Lucca, where they were to remain wards of the royal court.

In effect, Alberic had done to Ivrea what Otto had done to the Duchy of Franconia in the previous decade. Otto had succeeded his father as king in 936 and shortly thereafter faced a major rebellion by his dukes. Eberhard, the rebellious Duke of Franconia, was killed at the Battle of Andernach in 939, and Otto had declined to appoint anyone in his place. The duchy became a mere geographic entity, consisting of an assemblage of counts and bishops whose actual superior was the king. Alberic had not left Ivrea vacant per se, but the “personal union” of Ivrea and the Iron Crown accomplished virtually the same thing.

Alberic was not prepared to suppress Friuli as he had done with Ivrea. The march, though massive, was needed as a bulwark against the Magyars (though it had done little to stop them in 947). Its protection was entrusted to Alberic’s cousin, the senator Crescentius, who had a record of accomplishment in Alberic’s service. Crescentius had fought alongside his cousin at Spoleto (938) and Surrecina (945) and had been the architect of Pope Boso’s demise in the aftermath of Hugh’s downfall. In 10th century Italy he seems to have been that rarest of men, a subordinate who was both competent and loyal. The only great feudatory to remain apart from Friuli was Spoleto, which had been held by Duke Constantine, the new king’s brother, since 940 as part of Alberic’s terms with Anscar. For now, he would continue to rule there as dux et marchio.

The March of Tuscany was simply dissolved. Alberic seems to have rarely used marchio as a title for the seven years he had ruled in Tuscany, preferring the general title of princeps Romanorum in all his territories, and abandoned it altogether upon becoming king. Tuscany was now a core part of the royal domain and would no longer constitute a “march” or any kind of autonomous province.

Thus by 948, Alberic had achieved what Hugh had dreamed of and Otto, by 950, would actually accomplish in Germany – a situation in which all great magnates were in fact the immediate kin of the ruler. As long as Crescentius and Constantine remained loyal, there was no plausible rival for power within the kingdom. That did not, however, remove the threat of outside intervention. As Liutprand observed, “the Italians wish always to serve two masters, in order to restrain one by means of the terror with which the other inspires him.” Now for the first time in sixty years there was only one master in Italy, and this could only mean that any counts or bishops who became unsatisfied with this new order would look for new masters elsewhere.

Alberic’s Policy in Lombardy

Alberic could make no sweeping changes in Lombardy. While the nobility for the moment was still shocked into quiescence by the aftermath of the Battle of Gade and two months of savage plundering, they were not about to surrender themselves wholly to the new king. Alberic had come to the fore with a certain expectation that he would be a caretaker of the Anscarid legacy; he claimed the throne by his relation to Anscar, and had taken Anscar’s march as his own and Anscar’s son and nephews as his wards. It was expected that he would stay the course of Anscar, which had been to do very little - Anscar was far too busy defending his crown to remake his kingdom. He had at least resisted the pressures of the counts to recognize hereditary succession, which existed de facto in much of the country but was not a legal principle the kings of Italy had ever admitted.

Anscar, like Hugh, tended to favor the counts of Lombardy over the bishops, which goes a long way towards explaining why it was the bishops who constituted most of the key allies to Duke Berthold in 945. Had Anscar's rule lasted longer, they may have succeeded in bringing him down, but the Magyars accomplished this first.

Alberic attempted to maintain an unsatisfying status quo in central Lombardy. There was, in truth, little he could accomplish there – he could not simply root out the nobility, nor could he try to curb the power of the bishops or revoke their costly privileges. Either path would certainly cause them to find a new foreign protector. Alberic was militarily weak and probably fearful of the intervention of Germany, whose king Otto was just now reaching the apex of his considerable power. Appeasement was the only reasonable policy.

The situation was more congenial in Ivrea, where the Battle of Gade had the salutary effect of clearing out much of the pre-existing nobility of the country. Emperor Hugh had taken advantage of the same situation after the Battle of Florentiola, which had eliminated many of the Frankish nobility in the service of Emperor Berengar. Indeed practically every king of Italy, beginning with Charlemagne himself, had flooded the nobility of Italy with his own countrymen upon his arrival. So “foreign” was the character of the Italian nobility that Liutprand complained that by the time of Hugh’s deposition “it was impossible to find an Italian [nobleman] who had not been either driven out or deprived of all his dignities.”

Following in their footsteps, Alberic began immediately to import his own crowd of nobles, mainly into Ivrea. Certainly many of the “new men” were Romans; this is attested not only by chronicles, but by onomastic evidence. Charters begin to appear in Lombardy of the 950s with such comital names as Theodorus, Gregorius, Egidius, Marinus, and others which were previously unheard of among the nobility of 9th and 10th century Lombardy. Also extremely common are Romanized Lombard names like Paldus (Pandulf), Tebaldus (Teobald), and Transamundus (Trasimund), who are likely to have been transplants from Tuscany and Spoleto.

Alberic no doubt hoped that these “indigenous counts” – the phrase, comites indigeni, is used approvingly by Liutprand – would be more loyal. Some certainly were, like Count Boniface of Como, an affinis (distant relation) of Alberic who would very shortly prove his worth. But the new men could not be stopped from integrating themselves into the existing milieu, chiefly by intermarrying and allying with the Frankish and Burgundinian aristocracy. They were, after all, still noblemen, and noblemen were then as ever inclined to look after the interests of their own houses first.

Alberic’s Policy in Tuscany

With his power greatly limited in Lombardy, Alberic relied heavily on Tuscany, which would remain his greatest source of strength during his rule.

Tuscany had been mercifully spared from most of the Magyar ravages, and Saracen piracy had generally prioritized other targets (though the port of Luni had been sacked by them in the 9th century). As a result, it had never been heavily encastellated, with the partial exception of the Diocese of Lucca. The bishops in Tuscany were also less dominant in the cities than they were in Lombardy, and had been granted fewer privileges by the margraves. While the government of recent margraves had often been neglectful, they had not been forced to alienate their lands nearly as much as the kings of Italy, and the public lands in the march were still very extensive.

Tuscany was also rich. The greater Arno valley region was full of rich farmland, sheep-covered uplands, and prosperous and growing cities like Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, Prato, and Florence. Pisa, though it had not yet risen to the level of southern trading ports like Naples or Amalfi, already boasted a tradition of commerce and a civic fleet that had been strong enough in the 9th century to take a major part in imperial operations as far afield as Tunisia.

Margrave Hubert had held out in the Tuscan Apennines for some time after Hugh’s deposition, and Alberic had used this as an opportunity to root out not only his supporters, but many other Frankish and Burgundinian counts whose only crimes may have been that they did not have Alberic’s trust. Some bishops had also been strong supporters of Hubert, and Alberic deposed them with papal backing. The result was that by the end of hostilities in 954, the march was firmly in Alberic’s hands and his public lands there were larger than they had ever been.

Alberic took a particular interest in Tuscany's cities. Alberic asserted various rights concerning tolls, mints, and tax duties in the cities, some of which had to be wrested from the bishops. To manage these revenues, he appointed castaldi – the word is a variant of the old Lombard term gastald, which in its original sense meant a paid official who managed royal properties. Alberic’s castaldi were similar, but exclusively urban. Though initially created as little more than tax collectors, they soon acquired military powers as well, becoming responsible for organizing the city’s militia and the maintenance of its walls. These officials were in Alberic’s reign sometimes also titled iudex, another throwback to Lombard tradition and an acknowledgement of the judicial powers they were required to have in order to actually defend the king’s pecuniary interests.

The Sodales

The partially-emptied lowlands of the Arno plain became the foundation of Alberic’s “royal” army. To create and maintain a new fighting force, this land was parceled out to new milites (knights), in a manner not dissimilar to Carolingian milites elsewhere. The feudalism of the late Carolingian world, however, had been implemented only imperfectly in Italy. In Rome and the southern Lombard states, the fief as a concept was nonexistent. Alberic had been familiarized with the post-Carolingian system as a magnate of Italy, and had even given himself in homage to Hugh in the classically Frankish ceremony of the taking of hands after Hugh’s siege of Rome in 938. He was, however, still an outsider to that system, and Tuscany became the cradle of a Roman variant of the post-Carolingian system.

The Roman nobility was dependent not so much on landed estates but rather on the largesse and power of the church, the star around which everything in Rome orbited. It was no accident that Theophylact counted sacri palatii vestararius, Treasurer of the Sacred (i.e. Papal) Palace, as one of his principal titles, so much so that his wife Theodora assumed the unheard-of title serenissima vestaratrix (“Most Serene Treasuress”). Thus Roman noble families of prominence took on a distinctly bureaucratic character – lay offices of the Church might be passed from father to son when a family was strong enough to ensure it, but they were not by their nature heritable. Roman families also had an urban character, for the only way to gain profitable offices and remain engaged with the politics of Rome and the church was to actually live in the city. The Counts of Tusculum had ruled from Rome, not Tusculum itself.

Alberic had no interest in filling Tuscany with castles, which had made Lombardy nearly ungovernable. Instead, he applied Roman traditions to the new milites – they would reside not in countryside estates, but in the major cities and towns, where royal authority was strong. This, of course, meant that the miles was not always able to personally supervise his land as much as might be desirable, so it soon became common practice for the milites to entrust these day-to-day duties to a steward of common rank. This, in turn, freed them not only to dwell in the cities, but in theory to go wherever they might be required, which Alberic took advantage of to require that the milites – or at least a rotating subset of them – travel with the itinerant royal court as it moved between Lucca, Rome, Pavia, Mantua, and other locations in Lombardy.

Likely because of this habit, by the 960s these men were frequently referred to as milites sodalium, or in time simply sodales (from the Latin sodalis, meaning a follower or companion). The term may also have come from southern Lombard usage, where sodalis referred usually to a paid soldier. The first of these grants seem to have been established around 945 to 946, after the pacification of Tuscany and possibly as a reaction to the poor performance of Alberic’s infantry forces at Surrecina.

Although the sodales were mainly a Tuscan phenomenon, equivalent grants were also made later on in smaller numbers in Emilia, which had before 940 been part of the Tuscan march and had many vacant counties. Grants were also eventually established in Tuscia, the northern part of Latium bordering on Tuscany. Elsewhere, however, the propagation of the system was both difficult and undesirable; in the absence of strong royal authority, the sodales were preserved best in their original role when they were close at hand, residing in cities ruled directly by Alberic’s administrators under close royal supervision.

The milites sodalium did not represent a perfect solution to the military conundrum, and were not uniquely immune to the issues that beset vassal relations and state institutions all over the post-Carolingian world. Problems would become more evident during the reign of Octavian, who complained that city living made the men “soft.” It was indeed true that the sodales integrated with urban society as the cities grew in wealth and power, eventually intermarrying with prominent burghers, becoming involved in urban politics, and even entering business. In the reign of Alberic, however, when the men were newly established, it was an expedient way of producing a moderately effective force of cavalrymen that depended directly on the monarch.

Alberic’s Policy Elsewhere

Reforms in Latium were minimal compared to those in Tuscany. The Roman nobility was well-established there, unlike the nobles of Tuscany who had been in large part dislocated. Some parts of Tuscia (northern Latium) were eventually included within the range of sodales grants, but most of the Roman hinterland was ruled by the traditional Roman noble families, the great monasteries, or the large estates of surburbican bishops.

The main innovation in Rome itself was the theft of the office of praefectus urbi from the Pope. The title of “urban prefect” was ancient in its lineage, and in previous centuries it had been irregularly used to denote a papal official in charge of managing Rome itself. The position had been eroded by the rise of the vestararii beginning with Theophylact. Alberic reinvented it as a title for his viceroy in Rome, who would from that point forward report to the king in his capacity as sacri palatii vestararius. Crescentius may have held this position de facto before being moved to Friuli, but the first true holder was one Demetrius, described as a cognatus (kinsman) of Alberic.[1] It does not seem to have been an easy post; the prefect was required to be the enforcer of the king’s law over the restive Roman populace, the mediator of feuds between the equally hot-blooded Roman noble families, and the pope’s minder, in addition to the usual duties of a castaldus to collect revenues, organize the militia, and maintain the walls (which in Rome was a massive task in itself).

As the milites sodalium continued to develop in Tuscany, Alberic gradually seems to have depended less and less on the Roman nobility that had once provided him with the core of his forces. He preferred the services of the “new men” whom he had personally raised to prominence from obscurity; Roman families, in contrast, claimed ancient consuls and even emperors in their lineages. Alberic continued to export individual Romans to fill comital and official posts elsewhere in the kingdom, but the Roman aristocracy as a whole was increasingly left to remain in Rome. This change in the status and importance of the Roman nobility would eventually cause serious unrest.

Sources for governance in Spoleto and Romagna are rare in this period, but in both provinces the cities had not been so effectively conquered by the bishops as in Lombardy, and the noblemen still retained substantial power. Hugh had made attempts at bringing Romagna proper under his control, while the Pentapolis region in the south had been incorporated into Alberic’s principality starting as early as the late 930s; as far as we know, organizational reform in these provinces under Alberic was not major.

Looking Onwards

Alberic’s reign was quite peaceful at the end of the 940s, giving him some small breathing space to stabilize his position and effect some changes in policy. He was not, however, a magician; the problems of the kingdom which had grown and festered over sixty years could not be undone overnight, or even in a few years. Given the tendency for kings of Italy to lose their kingdom and occasionally their lives, Alberic’s “reforms” were by necessity short-term and pragmatic rather than the expression of long-term plans for the future. In the heart of the kingdom in Lombardy, Alberic was a weak, conciliatory king in the model of his predecessors, who could hope only by appeasement to remain tolerable; where circumstances allowed him to claw back power or create new clients and structures, like in Tuscany and Ivrea, he did so with all deliberate haste.

Speed was important, for the peace of the late 940s would not continue long into the 950s. In that tumultuous decade, Alberic would have to contend with Byzantine interventions to his south, Magyar raids from the east, and the emergence of his neighbor to the north as the dominant figure in Christendom – Otto, King of the Germans.

Next Time: Alberic and the Germans (for real this time) [A]

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] The relationship of Alberic to Demetrius is unclear. It is known that John, Alberic’s uncle, had a brother named Demetrius, and on this sole piece of evidence historians have tended to assume that the urban prefect of that name was either the very same Demetrius or another member of the same family. This would make the prefect related to Alberic only by marriage and not by blood, unless John’s family shared an ancestor with Theophylact (which is not a terribly remote possibility).

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] I promised “Alberic and the Germans” would be next in the last update, but when I got down to writing it I realized that a little more needed to be said about the problems Alberic faced as king and the administrative trajectory of his reign. It turned into a bit of an infodump, unfortunately - I prefer to write narratives - but to me the most critical issue for any timeline involving an independent medieval Italy is to establish just how a plausible path to strength from its abysmal state in the early 10th century could exist. As an aside, it’s really difficult to strike a balance between an effective king and an unrealistically effective king; real men like Charlemagne and Otto the Great often seem like miracle-workers who we would scoff at were they fictional characters in an alternate history. Every dynasty needs a capable founder, but with Alberic I wanted to try and paint a believable picture of a man who, while highly capable, is also severely limited by the profound infirmity of his kingdom.

 

[Carp]

Enjoying this a lot so far, only quibble would be a bit more prologue before the POD might`ve been helpful as I now so little about the period frm the fall of the Carolingians to the POD.

Let me see if I can help with that. I'll keep this as concise as possible.

The 45-year Clusterf***: An Abbreviated History of the Kings of Italy, 887-932

Berengar of Friuli was the hereditary Margrave of Friuli, a large territory in northeastern Italy. His family, the Unruochings, were Franks who had been installed in Friuli in the early 9th century. Berengar was himself a Carolingian in the distaff line, as his mother was a daughter of Louis the Pious. Berengar was a participant in the Carolingian civil wars, siding with Carloman of Bavaria against Charles the Bald in their contest over Italy. One claim is that Berengar was angling to be named as the heir to Charles the Fat, the last sole ruler of all Charlemagne's empire, but if so this came to nothing. When Charles was deposed in 887, Berengar proclaimed himself King of Italy.

His initial rival was Guy of Spoleto, another Frank with Carolingian blood who ruled as Duke of Spoleto. Guy had attempted to get himself the crown of France after the deposition of Charles, but was frustrated in that attempt and resolved to get Italy from Berengar instead. Guy had the support of the Pope, got himself crowned both king of Italy and emperor, and defeated Berengar in 889 at the Battle of the Trebbia, but he couldn't dislodge Berengar from Friuli.

A new pope, however, turned against Guy, and both the pope and Berengar appealed to Arnulf of Carinthia, the Carolingian king who had overthrown Charles the Fat in East Francia, for help. In 894 Arnulf and Berengar defeated Guy and took control of Italy north of the Po. Guy retreated and planned a counterattack, but then he abruptly died of some illness, and was succeeded by his son Lambert of Spoleto.

Arnulf had been prevented from pressing further into Italy in 894 due to an outbreak of disease and a war with Rudolph I of Burgundy, who was Guy's ally. Lambert made an attempt at a recovery, allied with Margrave Adalbert II of Tuscany (the father of Guy of Tuscany, Marozia's second husband), and was able to retake Pavia. In 896, however, Arnulf launched another campaign into Italy, which met with great success. Pavia fell, Margrave Adalbert switched sides, and Arnulf took Rome and freed the pope, who had been imprisoned by the late Guy of Spoleto for favoring Arnulf. The Pope, Formosus (who would later be the posthumous defendant in the infamous Cadaver Synod), crowned Arnulf as emperor.

Arnulf then marched on Spoleto, Lambert's last possession, but on the way he suffered a stroke. He did not die, but was forced to return north; on the way he had his young son Ratold crowned co-king of Italy, but Ratold never ruled in his own right. As soon as Arnulf returned to Germany, his power in Italy was lost, and he eventually died in 899.

At some point in 896 Berengar, once Arnulf's supporter and ally, had fallen out with him, and had been removed from Friuli. In the wake of Arnulf's retreat, however, Berengar regained his territory. This left Berengar and Lambert in Italy together. Initially they agreed to split the country, Berengar ruling north of the Po and Lambert to the south. This truce lasted only a short time, and in 898 Berengar and Lambert went to war again. At the Battle of Marengo, Lambert defeated Berengar, but then Lambert abruptly died a few days later, either because of a fall from his horse or because he was assassinated.

Finally, Berengar was sole ruler. The very next year, however, the Magyars arrived in Italy. Berengar rallied the armies of Italy against them, and at the Battle of Brenta in 899 he was completely and utterly defeated. He allegedly escaped only by swapping clothes with one of his soldiers.

This defeat caused the nobles of Lombardy to look for an alternative king. In 900 they invited in Louis of Provence, a Bosonid with Carolingian blood. Louis invaded Italy, defeated Berengar, and was crowned king and emperor, but in 902 Berengar turned the tables and defeated Louis. He forced Louis to return to Provence and made him promise that he would never return to Italy.

The Italian nobles did not give up, however, and in 905 they managed to convince Louis to invade again. Among the most prominent of anti-Berengar nobles was Adalbert of Ivrea (the father of Berengar of Ivrea and his brother Anscar). Ivrea had been created by Guy of Spoleto as a reward for Anscar, Adalbert's father, and so the Margraves of Ivrea had always been enemies of Berengar. Even with Ivrean support, however, Louis was defeated (again) and captured. For breaking his oath never to return, Berengar had him blinded, and thereafter he was known as Louis the Blind.

For the next dozen years or so, Berengar was the sole and uncontested king of Italy. He attempted to reconcile with the Anscarids by marrying his daughter Gisela to Margrave Adalbert, but Gisela died in 913 and Adalbert was never truly his supporter. In 915 he managed to get the imperial title from the Pope, who hoped to gain his support against the Saracens; Berengar didn't actually help, but the Saracens were still defeated at the Battle of the Garigliano and Berengar got his crown regardless. Berengar was never able to do much about the Magyar raids, and instead paid them tribute to act as his enforcers in Italy, which caused great resentment against him.

Between 917 and 920, Adalbert and other nobles invited Hugh of Arles, the cousin and regent of Louis the Blind in Provence, to take the throne. He made an attempt, but upon reaching Pavia he was trapped by Berengar, and eventually agreed to leave the country. The nobles tried again in 922, this time inviting in Rudolph II, King of Burgundy, the son of the earlier Rudolph who had been the ally of Guy of Spoleto. Rudolph was more successful than Hugh, forcing Berengar to retreat to Friuli and eventually gaining a decisive victory over him at the Battle of Firenzuola (referred to ITTL by its Latin name of Florentiola). Berengar fled to Verona only to be murdered by one of his own men. As these two sides fought, the Magyars freely ravaged the country, and even sacked the capital Pavia in 924.

Rudolph was now king, but he didn't even have time to gain the imperial crown before the Italian nobles decided they didn't much like him either. They invited Hugh in a second time, and this time he was more successful. Rudolph fled back to Upper Burgundy, and Hugh became king. Hugh eventually attempted to gain the imperial crown with his marriage to Marozia, but was thwarted by the rebellion of her son Alberic, who drove Hugh out, imprisoned Marozia, and proclaimed himself "Prince of All the Romans."

And there you have our POD.

 

[Carp]

IX. Alberic and the Germans​

King Otto receiving the submission of rebellious lords, c. 1200
​

King of Kings

In 950, King Otto of Germany was easily the most powerful ruler in Latin Christendom. After an early rebellion against his rule in 938-939, he had re-asserted his power in Germany and gone on to defeat or dominate almost every neighboring state. Lorraine, long contested between France and Germany after the disintegration of “Middle Francia,” had been decisively wrested from the French king. Conrad of Burgundy, though a king himself, had recognized Otto as his superior. A Danish-Slavic alliance was crushingly defeated, and the King of the Danes had allegedly acknowledged German suzerainty. A rebellion of the Wends had been crushed, and German authority extended further into their lands than ever before. Bohemia, which for a time had been rebellious, had been humbled and returned to the status of a tributary. The Magyars had not been decisively defeated, but since the victory of Otto’s father Henry at the Battle of Riade in 933 the Germans had been increasingly successful against them. In 950, the Duke of Bavaria flipped the usual script and led a successful raid into Pannonia. By the same year, Otto had managed to place a close relation in every ducal position in Germany – his son-in-law Conrad in Lorraine since 944, his brother Henry in Bavaria since 948, and his son Liudolf in Swabia in 950. His power was imperial in scale, and it seemed only fitting that it be imperial in fact as well. Since Hugh’s death in 943, there had been no emperor in the west – Anscar had not secured it before his demise, and Alberic had not yet claimed it either.[1]

Otto had not yet turned his personal attention to Italy, but it must have been on his mind. He had acceded to the throne of Germany in 936, the same year that Alberic had gained control of Spoleto, and since then had seen the fall of Hugh and the destruction of Anscar at the hands of the Magyars. Now the throne was held by a man of no pedigree or much distinction, who – if he was known at all in the rest of the Latin world – was likely known only for being the son of that dreadful empress who, it was whispered, had murdered her own husband only to be deposed by her stepson.

At the time of Anscar’s death, Otto had been occupied in his war against the Danes and Slavs. Yet though that perfect opportunity for intervention had been missed, it would surely be no great feat for the greatest king in Christendom to overcome Anscar’s successor, who in 950 did not seem to sit any more securely on the throne than any of the other unfortunates who had called themselves King of Italy since 887.

The surest indication of Otto’s interest in Italy was his marriage to Alda, the daughter of the late Emperor Hugh. Late in Hugh’s reign, Alda had been married to Duke Berthold of Bavaria to help secure his northern border, and she had borne him two surviving children, Henry and Hilda. Berthold, however, had died in 947, and at the time of his death his widow was only 22 years of age. Otto himself was a widower, having lost his first wife Eadgyth (Edith), the daughter of Edward the Elder, King of the Anglo-Saxons, in 946 to some unrecorded illness. Alda was an ideal bride for the German king – as the sister of King Lothair of Provence, she might help him make further inroads into Burgundy, and as the daughter of an emperor and King of Italy she gave him the connections and clout he would need if he was to dominate that kingdom. They were married in 949. Alberic reportedly sent expensive gifts to Otto on the occasion of the wedding; it must have looked rather like tribute, or a plaintive gesture not to use Alda as an excuse to depose Alberic. Under the circumstances, however, appeasement was the only sensible option.

Family Rivals

Other members of Otto’s family also turned covetous eyes to Italy. As mentioned, Otto’s brother Henry had become Duke of Bavaria in 948. Expanding into Lombardy had been a dream of Bavarian dukes for some time. Given his recent successes against the Magyars, Henry might have from the start entertained notions that he was the man to succeed where his predecessors Arnulf and Berthold had both faltered.

His neighbor in Swabia was his nephew Liudolf. Liudolf had only gained his duchy in 950, but the twenty year old prince was already hungry for more power and glory. While Liudolf was Otto’s only son, the German kingship was in principle elective; even if it were Otto’s express wish that his son should be king after him, this could not be assured unless Liudolf had both the power and prestige to gain the acceptance of the other dukes. His chief competitor for the future succession was clearly his uncle Henry, who had already contested the succession with Otto in 938. The rebellious Henry had been defeated, but was reconciled to Otto and eventually restored to a high position. Liudolf was quite justified to assume that the man who had fought for the crown with his brother would just as easily fight his nephew for it.

For now there would be no war between Liudolf and Henry. The son of the king had to look elsewhere to prove his qualities and win fortune and fame, and Italy seemed like a choice target. Liudolf was popular among the Swabians, and though he lacked much personal experience in command he could count upon a strong force to support his ambitions.

The Invasion of Liudolf

The occasion for action came soon enough. In the spring of 951, a new force of Magyars entered Lombardy. They were less interested in Italy than in France, and Alberic was ready to pay them tribute to expedite their journey west.[A] Resentment against Alberic’s policies in Ivrea, particularly his vast export of Roman and Spoletan vassals and his four year long “regency” in Ivrea (which now had little justification, as Berengar’s oldest son was now seventeen), was combined with outrage over his craven payment of the Magyars and the plundering that they had allegedly engaged in despite being bought off. Liudolf had already been searching for an opportunity for intervention, and jumped on the reports of dissent. No actual agreement is known, but it seems likely Liudolf was “invited” as so many foreigners had been before to make things right in Lombardy. He did not take long to prepare, and in August of 952 Duke Liudolf and a Swabian army entered Italy, probably through the St. Gotthard pass.

The expedition was an utter failure. Liudolf’s attempt to make his way through the mountains in secret was discovered by Count Boniface of Como, a Roman whom Alberic had recently placed in that position precisely so he could keep watch on the nearby mountain passes. Boniface passed word quickly to Alberic, who had been keeping his finger on the pulse of events ever since the Magyar passage through Lombardy and had been preparing for just such an eventuality. Liudolf’s own force was well-armed and sizable, but it was seemingly not well prepared for siege warfare, likely the result of the inexperience and youth of its commander. Accordingly, Bonfiace neither sought nor achieved any victories in the field, but moved quickly to strengthen and resupply the garrisons of his fortresses and held them valiantly against the Swabians. From these fastnesses he managed to harass and contain the Swabians, even plundering his own land to prevent them from foraging.

Leaving Bonfiace to his defense, Alberic moved quickly against rebels in Lombardy and Ivrea, seizing upon and destroying rebel forces before they could rendezvous with the Swabians. He was aided substantially by his “new men” in Ivrea, who used the opportunity to ignite a small-scale civil war. In one case a minor battle, possibly just a running skirmish between a few hundred milites, was fought near Bugella between pro-Liudolf and pro-Alberic forces. Alberic’s supporters apparently lost that engagement, but their resistance throughout Ivrea complicated Liudolf’s attempt to reinforce his army and break out of the mountains.[B]

Some progress was made against Boniface, who had himself become trapped and besieged at Lugano, but Liudolf had come too late in the year and too much time had already been lost. By October, Alberic had crushed most of the rebels in Lombardy and Ivrea. He then marched to the rescue of Boniface, and the cold and hungry Swabians found that their retreat to the pass had been cut off. Liudolf agreed to negotiate with Alberic for peace.

Alberic could be merciless, but his treatment of Liudolf was exceptionally gentle. At their meeting, he treated Liudolf like a celebrated guest, and offered him food and wine. He proposed to allow Liudolf to extricate himself from Italy honorably, with all of his men and their arms, and piled rich gifts upon Liudolf including a garment of silk from the lands of the Greeks. Liutprand reports that gifts were also given for conveyance to Otto, though it is unknown if they actually reached him. Alberic required only that Liudolf swear a pact of friendship with him and that neither would bear arms against the other. Liudolf accepted the deal and likely considered himself fortunate.

Alberic could hardly have done otherwise – poor treatment of Otto’s son and heir would surely have brought down the wrath of the great king upon him. As it stood, however, Otto seemed curiously uninterested in the plight of his son. Liudolf executed his plan in secret and chose a time when Otto was fairly distant in Saxony, suggesting that the invasion was not one which Otto condoned or supported. It was the first indication of a rift between father and son that would soon grow into a massive breach.

Turning back to his own kingdom, Alberic now demonstrated the consequences of loyalty and betrayal. Count Boniface was granted the title of patricius[2] and his land was increased substantially, and Alberic’s partisans in Ivrea were also rewarded. Liutprand claims that Alberic “spread rumors of harsh punishment” that would be meted out against traitors during the invasion, with the intention of inducing them to flee the country; some indeed did flee into Swabia or Burgundy, which made it much easier to seize their lands. Alberic’s treatment of those who remained, however, was not harsh. Most of the rebels seem to have been pardoned and restored to their properties.

The Invasion of Henry

Liudolf’s attack upon Lombardy seems to have caught his uncle Duke Henry by surprise, as he was at the time planning his own campaign. It may be that Henry consciously delayed his own attack to ensure that Alberic, who had the upper hand against Liudolf from the start, would not be distracted from defeating him. In the spring of 952, with Liudolf nursing his bruised ego in Swabia, the Duke of Bavaria invaded Friuli.

Compared to his nephew’s attempt, Henry’s force was larger, more experienced, better prepared, and led by a veteran commander. Henry did not enjoy much Italian support, as Alberic had only just crushed the last rebellion in favor of Liudolf. Nevertheless, he did not seem to need it, as he quickly compelled the surrender of Cividale, defeated Margrave Crescentius near Padua, and gained control of the whole march east of the Adige. Verona, however, was strongly held by Crescentius who had retreated there directly, and Henry was forced to pause in order to lay siege.

According to Liutprand, Alberic attempted to buy off Henry, offering him Istria and Aquileia[3] along with “ten bushels of gold” for peace. It suggests that Alberic realized he was likely to lose the war, or that he believed it was likely to be a prelude for a greater Ottonian invasion which might be blunted if Otto’s brother could be bought off. Henry haughtily refused, and demanded Alberic’s abdication instead. An attempt by Alberic to relieve Verona failed, and he drew back with his army to Mantua. Crescentius would not hold out much longer, and it seemed likely that Alberic would soon suffer the fate of many of his predecessors, overthrown and chased from the country.

The German Crisis

After his invasion, Liudolf had returned to Swabia with an intact army and fine gifts, but it was still quite obvious that his quest for Italy had been frustrated. Despite the fact that the prince had launched his attack in secret, we are told by Thietmar[4] that he resented that Otto had never come to his aid as his army struggled and starved in the mountains. Even more alarming was the news soon after his return to Germany that the king’s new wife, Alda, was pregnant; she would soon give birth to a boy, Henry. Now there was also the apparent success of Duke Henry in Italy; Otto had come to value his brother’s wise council, particularly in military matters, and if all continued to go well for him in Italy his position and prestige would be greatly strengthened. Liudolf worried that his privileged position as heir was being eroded from all sides.

He was not alone with his dissatisfaction against Duke Henry. Bavaria had been traditionally ruled by the Luitpolding family, and with substantial independence from the crown. In the reign of King Henry, Otto’s father, Duke Arnulf of Bavaria had been a constant thorn in his side, even waging an unsuccessful war for the crown. Arnulf was succeeded by his son Eberhard, but Eberhard had rebelled against Otto in the 938 civil war and had been removed from his duchy and banished. Initially Bavaria remained with the Luitpoldings – the next duke, Berthold, was the younger brother of Duke Arnulf – but Berthold’s autonomy in Bavaria was greatly reduced, and when he died the duchy was given not to his young son Henry, but to Otto’s brother Henry. The Ottonian Henry had married Judith, a daughter of Duke Arnulf, to secure his claim.

A younger son of Duke Arnulf, however – also named Arnulf – still held power as Count-Palatine of Bavaria, in charge of supervising royal properties in the duchy. He was disgruntled at the theft of power from his family and desired to rule Bavaria as its duke like his father before him. Despite Henry’s marriage to Arnulf’s sister, the traditional aristocracy of Bavaria disliked Henry and were ripe for incitement by Arnulf.

With Henry now engaged in Lombardy, it seemed like the perfect time to conspire against him in Germany. At Mainz, King Otto was approached by Liudolf along with Conrad “the Red,” Duke of Lothairingia and Otto’s son-in-law, who had sided with Liutpold against the growing power of Henry. Some sort of settlement or ultimatum was presented to the king, probably intending to curb Henry’s power. Initially, Otto agreed, but once he left Mainz he repudiated the settlement, claiming that his son and son-in-law had conspired with Frederick, the Archbishop of Mainz, to compel his agreement under duress. Otto was able to withdraw peacefully to Saxony, but the danger of war was plain, and he sent word to Duke Henry to rejoin him at once.

Henry may have heard of the conspiracy against him in Germany before Otto’s messengers even reached him. According to Liutprand, Henry sent his own emissaries to Alberic to belatedly accept the king’s previous offer. Alberic, however, was also aware of the goings-on in Germany; the events of 951 and 952 suggest that Alberic had excellent intelligence north of the Alps, though we do not know exactly who his informants were. He received Henry’s ambassadors but was noncommittal, telling them that such a concession needed to be carefully considered before being made. Frustrated and impatient, Henry abandoned Verona and plundered the environs of Mantua, but even with Henry’s army rampaging outside his walls Alberic was unmoved. He had time on his side, and both he and Henry knew it. Unable to compel a settlement and increasingly concerned with events unfolding in Germany, Henry retreated from Italy without having struck any bargain with Alberic.

Liutprand is the only source to give a detailed account of these negotiations; elsewhere Henry’s invasion is described as simply being called off because of the outbreak of war in Germany or because of a summons from Otto, and no mention of any offer or belated acceptance is made. The story is not itself implausible, but it may well be Liutprand’s attempt to put the best possible face on the fact that Alberic clearly feared to face Henry in battle and made little attempt to defend his territories apart from withdrawing behind strong walls.

Depiction of a Magyar cavalryman, 10th c.
​

Civil War

As Henry agonized, the situation in Germany was rapidly deteriorating. Conrad and Liudolf still hoped to peacefully enforce their agenda upon the king, but in preparation for the worst, they began heavily reinforcing their cities and castles in Lorraine and Swabia. Feeling threatened, Otto opted to move even without the support of his brother, and at an assembly at Fritzlar declared Conrad to be deposed from his duchy. Conrad refused to step down, and the civil war was now on.

The intricacies of Liudolf’s rebellion are covered best in other works on the medieval Saxon kingdom. In brief, Otto achieved initial success in Lothairingia and managed to corner Liudolf and Conrad at Mainz, but negotiations between them broke down and the strong defense of Mainz seemed in no danger of failing soon. The will of Otto’s soldiers to continue the war against the rebellious dukes – who were still widely respected and took pains to emphasize that their enemy was Henry, not Otto – began to break down. During or soon after Henry’s retreat from Italy, Count-Palatine Arnulf raised his own flag of rebellion in the name of the Luitpoldings. The Bavarians apparently attempted to keep Henry from crossing the mountains, but failed; nevertheless he was very distant from the king’s army at Mainz and in a duchy torn apart by civil war.

Otto, faced with either continuing to lead the siege of Mainz or rushing to quash the rebellion in Bavaria, chose the former, perhaps assured by Henry’s return that he was capable of prosecuting the war in his own duchy. In so doing, he was to assure his victory over his rebellious son, but at a cost. In the spring of 953, a very large Magyar army swept into Bavaria, allegedly summoned by Arnulf who was in danger of losing the struggle with Henry. Hearing of the invasion, Henry was forced to withdraw from Regensburg, which he had been besieging, probably with the intent of proceeding to Augsburg, whose bishop was still loyal to the royal cause. On the way there, he was attacked or ambushed by the Magyars and Bavarians at Geisenfeld. His army managed to defeat the Bavarians and drive back the first wave of the Magyars, but as the raiders pulled back from their assault one of them took a parting shot that hit Henry in the face and killed him immediately.

The Bavarian-Magyar alliance had the effect of discrediting the whole rebellion and renewing the will of Otto’s soldiers to fight, and soon both Conrad and Liudolf surrendered to Otto and begged for his forgiveness. Despite their loss, however, their principal objective – the removal of Henry from his position of power – had been achieved, albeit in a roundabout and gruesome fashion. The Magyar army did not remain long in Bavaria, and plundered their way through Germany with little opposition. Otto concentrated his efforts against Arnulf, who was now isolated; many Bavarian lords and bishops who had been on the fence joined the royal cause, and in October of 953 Arnulf was killed in a skirmish near Regensburg, bringing the rebellion to a close.

Otto did indeed forgive his son and son-in-law and received them back into his grace, but they were nevertheless removed from their ducal positions. With the death of his brother as well, he was swiftly running out of family members who still had his trust to occupy the commanding heights of the kingdom and had to depend once more on local dynasts. Swabia was given to Burchard, a member of the old Alemannic family of Hunfridings, who thanks to his marriage to a daughter of the late Duke Henry was at least Otto’s nephew-in-law. Bavaria went to the son of Duke Henry, also named Henry, but as the boy was only two years old the duchy was managed by his mother Judith, a Luitpolding and the sister of the rebellious Arnulf.[C]

The View From Italy

Alberic could look on all this with some satisfaction. He had parried one German attack and outlasted another which faltered thanks to Germany’s own discord. Within weeks of Henry’s departure, he had regained everything in Friuli that was lost. The civil war would remove Germany as a threat for more than a year, and the outcome was that both dukes who had attacked him were now gone – Liudolf deposed from Swabia, and Henry in his grave. Duke Burchard of Swabia might still be a threat, but he was at least not the impulsive and glory-hungry son of Otto. As for Bavaria, that country had been ravaged by war and was now ruled by an infant, and would pose no danger in the near future.

The threat from the north, however, was far from over. Henry was dead, but he had overran Friuli virtually without opposition; the best that Alberic and Crescentius had been able to manage was to wait him out behind their walls. It was a lesson that was unlikely to be lost on Otto. The German King had defeated the rebellion and now could count on little domestic trouble to distract him from foreign ventures. Furthermore he was still married to Alda, who had recently bore him a son, and thus a male descendant of Hugh. That little boy, Henry, would not survive infancy, but Alda had many childbearing years ahead of her, and even without issue the marriage was dangerous. The King of Germany would for the foreseeable future remain the Sword of Damocles hanging over Alberic’s head.

Before the civil war in Germany was even over, however, Alberic found himself faced with another grave threat. The great Magyar army that had crashed through Germany and Lothairingia was now plundering in France. Their next destination would be Burgundy, and from there their path back to Pannonia lay directly through Lombardy. In short order, Alberic would again have to confront the pagans who had destroyed his predecessor.

Next Time: Imperator


Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Why exactly Alberic did not take the imperial crown immediately, or at least soon after his royal coronation, is a subject of some debate. Certainly he had the means; Rome and the Pope were his, and between 948 and 950 the kingdom was peaceful enough to allow the relatively short trip from Lucca to Rome. Alberic’s reasons were thus certainly political. It may be that, as he had cast himself (or been imagined by his new subjects) as a continuator of Anscar’s light-handed rule, the imperial crown would have been seen as too much of a presumption, or have created a worrying implication of autocracy in the manner of Hugh. He may have also been given pause by the fact that the act would make him the first man with no relation to Charlemagne whatsoever to become emperor in the west. Every one of the reguli since 887 who had worn the imperial crown had at the very least been able to claim some matrilineal descent from the first Frankish Emperor. For a new king with few accomplishments and no familial claim who had gained the throne very nearly by default to be crowned as Charlemagne’s successor by his pet pope might seem like nothing more than an outrageous farce both within Italy and outside it.
[2] The title of patricius was, of course, borne by Alberic and his predecessors while in Rome to indicate their power over the city, but Alberic seems to have in this case been imitating the Greek Emperors, who had a long tradition of granting the high court dignity of patrikios to southern Lombard princes who served well, as well as important generals of the empire. Boniface, as a Roman, would certainly have been familiar with this usage.
[3] Probably meaning the eastern portion of Friuli rather than just the city of Aquileia itself, which after thorough devastation by the Magyars was not much of a prize. Even the Patriarch of Aquileia had ruled from Cividale since the episcopate of Calixtus in the early 8th century.
[4] Thietmar (b. 975, d. 1018) was a German bishop and chronicler who wrote a history of the Saxon kings, the Chronicon Thietmari which covers events in Germany from the beginning of the 10th century to his death in 1018. While not a contemporary of Alberic, Otto, or our main Italian source Liutprand, his account is detailed and useful.

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] This invasion is historical. As ITTL, the OTL invaders seem to have passed through Lombardy without too much incident to get at France.
[B] Liudolf attempted a fairly similar campaign IOTL, which met a fairly similar fate. The difference is that Liudolf IOTL was attempting (possibly) to pre-empt his father, who was already preparing an invasion of Italy that year to gain the hand of Adelaide and the crown of Italy, and ended up getting rescued by his father when his attempt went awry. My feeling is that it’s reasonable to surmise that even without Otto’s invasion of 951, Liudolf might have invaded anyway given the right prompt, which the Magyar passage and its incitement of rebellion provides. He is, after all, an insecure 20 year old who’s just been given a duchy and an army and is eager to prove that he’s Otto’s worthy heir.
[C] This whole narrative is quite similar to the actual rebellion against Otto that happened around this time. The main differences are that a) Otto’s new wife is Alda, rather than Adelaide; b) the trigger is Henry’s absence in Lombardy rather than Otto’s repudiation of Conrad’s truce with Berengar, and c) the war proceeds somewhat differently because Henry is stuck in Italy and then Bavaria, where he dies, instead of being at Otto’s side from the start. It is Henry who IOTL convinces Otto to leave the siege of Mainz and prosecute the war against Arnulf in the south. Henry survives the civil war IOTL only to die of an illness in 955, not long after the Battle of Lechfeld.

 

[Carp]

X. Imperator​

Looking down into Italy from the Great St. Bernard Pass​

The Great Raid

The Magyar force that had been summoned into Bavaria by the Count-Palatine Arnulf had faithfully killed his rival, Duke Henry of Bavaria, but once this deed was accomplished they unbound themselves from any duty of alliance and began a grand tour of desolation through the west. After departing from Bavaria, Franconia was ravaged. The horde crossed the Rhine near its mouth and plundered Lower Lorraine. Then, proceeding into France, they looted nearly every village, church, and monastery in the vicinity of Reims, Laon, and Cambrai.

From here the Magyars turned south towards Burgundy. Its king, Conrad, is associated with an astonishing legend of military guile. Threatened by both the Magyars and the Saracens of Fraxinet at the same time, he is alleged to have pretended to be friend to both, cajoled them into fighting one another, waited until both were weakened, and then swept down and destroyed them both.[A] The legend is obviously exposed as gross exaggeration (at best) by the mere fact that subsequent to this “destruction” there was still a large Magyar host, quite undestroyed, that made its way over the mountains towards Italy. It does seem, however, that the Magyars met with rather stiffer resistance in Conrad’s realm than in either France or Germany, probably owing to the mountainous terrain of Upper Burgundy and the familiarity of Conrad’s soldiers with it. Nevertheless, by August they had converged on the Great St. Bernard pass. Below was the Valley of Aosta (Latin Augusta) and beyond that the valley of the Po leading on to the east.

The commander of the Magyars was Bulcsu, undoubtedly a prince of royal blood but not one whose precise place in the Arpad family tree is known. He is presumed to be the same “Boultzous” who in 948 was a visitor to the imperial court in Constantinople. There he was invested with the high courtly rank of patrikios and received baptism with no less grand a figure than Emperor Constantine VII as his sponsor. The baptism does not seem to have corresponded to an earnest conversion, as John Skylitzes (writing in the late 11th century) claims that Boultzous “violated his contract with God” and continued to raid the empire. In some sources Bulcsu, rather than Taksony (Taxis), is claimed to be the leader of the 947 invasion that resulted in the death of Anscar, but Liutprand – who one expects would make a great deal out of it if they were the same man – does not corroborate this theory. It may also be that Bulcsu was a participant in the 947 raid, but as a lieutenant of Taksony rather than the overall leader.

Liutprand tells us that Alberic was warned of the passage of the Magyars by King Conrad. It may also be that Alberic had already surmised the likely path of the Magyars, as it was inevitable that they would return either through Bavaria or through Lombardy, and the Great St. Bernard pass had been used by other Magyar groups before. Either way, by the autumn of 943 as the Magyars approached the pass, Alberic was already in Ivrea with an army.

A Plan of Action

Alberic does not seem to have set out from the start on a policy of confrontation; the gathering of his forces at Ivrea seems more likely to have been a contingency. Nevertheless, the gathering was not done half-heartedly. Alberic’s force seems to have been predominantly Ivrean, but his Tuscan milites were with him in full force (or at least as full a force as existed in 958), and he was also joined by a small but well-armed contingent of “Germans” who seem to have been either mercenaries or renegades from the Ottonian civil war who had come to be in Alberic’s employ. The Tuscan and German troops were cavalry exclusively, or very nearly so, but the Ivreans were a mixed force that included both Franco-Lombard milites and a large number of lightly-armed local auxiliaries and militiamen on foot.

Also notable was the assembly of leading men of the kingdom that Alberic had with him at Ivrea. Margrave Crescentius, Alberic’s usual right-hand man, had been left in Friuli; but he was joined by his brother Constantine, Duke of Spoleto; the patricius Boniface, Count of Como; and Arduin “the Bald,” Count of Auriate. Also with Alberic was his son Octavian, now fifteen years of age, as well as two of the king’s Anscarid nephews-in-law, Adalbert, the nineteen year old son of Margrave Berengar, and Amadeus, the sixteen year old son of King Anscar.

According to Liutprand, Alberic’s initial instinct was to negotiate with the Magyars. The payment of tribute had been sufficient to speed the raiders of 951 through Lombardy with little incident. Liutprand, however, states that Bulcsu’s demands were so “extravagant” and made so arrogantly that it convinced Alberic to fight. Yet here again Liutprand may be giving more benefit to Alberic than he is due. In the retelling of Benedict of Soracte, the hero of the story is Arduin, Count of Auriate, who had faithfully answered the king’s summons of his Ivrean feudatories.

Arduin was the son of a Frankish knight from Normandy[2], Roger, who had come to Italy with his brother around 888, at the very start of the turbulent Saeculum Regulorum. They entered the service of Rudolph, the Count of Auriate; when he died without issue in 905, Roger married Rudolph’s widow and succeeded as count in jure uxoris. Arduin succeeded his father in 935; his birth date is unknown but at the time of his succession he was likely in his twenties. He soon proved himself to be a vigorous campaigner, particularly against the Saracens of Fraxinet, whom he expelled from the Susa Valley. He added the valley to his domains and had served since 940 as the gatekeeper of Lombardy against Saracen invasion, occasionally even launching his own raids against them in the Alpine passes.

In Benedict’s account, Alberic was convinced that only tribute would stop the Magyars ravaging the country again, and sent his emissaries with gifts to try and appease them. Count Arduin, however, boldly chastised the king for submitting so easily to the infidels and exhorted him to fight. The king at first dismissed him, but Arduin pleaded that the supposedly invincible Magyars could be defeated by ambushing them in the mountains when they were laden down with their ill-gotten loot. Now thinking of the wealth he might gain, the king grew more interested, and Arduin was eventually able to convince him to betray the Magyars and destroy them.

Both accounts have troubling issues. Liutprand would have us believe Alberic was a man of military genius, but little in his record supports this.[3] Certainly the king had certain attributes useful to a general – against his enemies he was always patient, never flustered or driven to action by anger, nor driven to rash acts by a desire for glory. As a grand strategist he was able, but his abilities as a tactician were on the whole mediocre. Arduin is much better cast in that role – for nearly two decades he had been a warrior and captain in the high Alps, ambushing and skirmishing with the Saracens in territory very much like that of the mountains above Ivrea. Benedict’s insinuation that Alberic’s chief interest was plunder, however, rings hollow. Greed does not seem like a controlling personality trait of the king, and it is unlikely that the promise of wealth alone would inspire him to take the field against an enemy that had defeated and executed his predecessor just eight years before.

Both sources do agree that Alberic – whether deceitfully from the outset, or originally in good faith – sent emissaries and tribute to the Magyars in Burgundy. Liutprand also adds that Alberic provided them with local guides, who were under instructions to mislead them. If true, this would not be a unique occurrence. In 938, a Magyar force in Saxony was misled by its Slav guides and led into a marsh where they were ambushed and destroyed by the Germans. The Magyars, whether led by deceitful guides or not, thus descended into the Valley of Aosta believing that the Italians remained their pacified tributaries. They had good reasons to believe it – as king Alberic had never warred against them, and had certainly paid them tribute since 951 and possibly as far back as 947. Alberic had already paid off one Magyar host two years earlier, and the Italians in general had been pushovers for decades. Anscar had been a rare exception to the general rule during the era of the reguli that the kings of Italy vastly preferred to pay the Magyars or even hire them rather than fight them.

The Valpelline north of Aosta, the theorized location of the Battle of Augusta (958)
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The Battle of Augusta

It is generally agreed that the confrontation took place near Aosta, probably in the lower Valpelline just north of the city. The only account of the actual engagement is from Liutprand, who describes the Italian heavy cavalry approaching the Magyars head-on and without warning, and making a frontal attack against them near the valley floor. The usual tactic of the Magyars was to fall back from such an attack, which in an open plain they could easily evade and then turn and shower their enemy with arrows. In this case, however, the Magyars were strewn out in a long column as they wound their way through the valley, hemmed in by the torrent on one side and forested slopes on the others.

The bulk of the Magyars rode up the valley side and attempted to turn the flank of the Italian cavalry. They were initially successful and shot down men and horses among the Italians, but this rough and heavily forested terrain on the Italian left impeded their maneuvers, and it was also where Alberic had positioned his infantry auxiliaries. The Ivrean foot, though lightly armed, attacked the Magyars with “all manner of missiles” and were clearly difficult for the Magyars to effectively fight on the rocky and tree-covered slope.

Recoiling from the Ivrean infantry on the slope, some Magyars rode back the way they had came, but were hampered by their own wagons which filled the path, as well as riders from the rear of the column who were riding forward to assist. The Italian cavalry pressed their attack forward, and in melee their heavier armor gave them an edge against the light Magyar cavalry. Now the Magyars were put to a general flight. Some managed to retreat back up the valley or up adjacent valleys. Others forded the valley torrent, which was shallow but turbulent. Liutprand gleefully describes the Magayars’ horses losing their footing and dashing their riders’ heads open upon the rocks, but this was probably only a sporadic (or even singular) occurrence, as a the largest portion of the retreating Magyars did indeed escape in that direction. If an attempt was made to pursue them, it failed as the Italians fell upon the Magyars’ rich baggage, and most of the remaining Magyars were able to regroup further down the valley.

Before the day was out, a group of Magyars returned to the Italians asking for terms. Bulcsu, their commander, was believed to be dead, and the Magyar emissaries offered to leave Italy in peace if his body were returned to them. For the Magyars this was quite normal behavior; they placed a very high worth on their princes and commanders, even their corpses. In an earlier raid on a French city, a Magyar force had lost their commander to the defenders, who cut off his head and placed it on a spike on their walls. Approaching under a flag of truce, the Magyars offered – apparently in good faith – to return everything they had plundered and leave in peace if the head were returned to them.

But Bulcsu was not dead. He had merely been captured, much to the delight of the Magyars. According to Liutprand, Amadeus, the son of King Anscar, demanded that Bulcsu’s head be cut off to avenge his father’s death. This was apparently too melodramatic for Alberic, who was not interested in indulging his nephew’s vengeance. He magnanimously agreed to release Bulcsu, on the condition that the Magyars leave Italy in peace. The sources are vague as to whether this was merely an agreement for the present force to leave or whether a longer truce was implied. King Henry of Germany, after capturing Prince Zoltan in a skirmish in 924, had been able to gain a nine-year truce for his safe return, but Zoltan was described as the “son of the king” of the Magyars, and Henry’s truce was not without the expectation of tribute. Either way, the Magyars did hold up their end of the bargain in that year. Bulcsu was returned to them, and their subsequent withdrawal from Italy seems to have gone without further comment.[b]

Arch of Augustus, Aosta, 19th c. steel engraving​

Assessment

Liutprand calls the battle a “great slaughter,” but modern scholarship is more conservative, and has generally concluded that the Battle of Augusta did not result in the destruction of Bulcsu’s army as a fighting force. A large contingent clearly escaped the immediate battle, regrouped the same day, and along with their commander they were ultimately able to return home. The failure of the Italians to pursue their fleeing quarry or prevent their escape may well have resulted in Bulcsu snatching victory from the jaws of defeat had he not been captured in the initial engagement.

Contemporaries, however – and not simply Liutprand – were convinced of the importance of the battle. It was the first major victory of an Italian king over a Magyar army, a long-awaited vengeance for Brenta and Gade. For Alberic it was also hugely profitable, for the Magyars had been compelled to leave behind nearly all of the loot they had accumulated in their months-long ravaging of Germany and France. Richerus, a late 10th century French historian, noted (not entirely approvingly) that as a result of the battle “all the chalices and altar-plate of Flanders fell into the hands of the King of Italy.” Alberic’s own vassals were rewarded richly, or at least those who participated. Count Arduin was given the title of patricius, and in time his eldest son Manfred would be betrothed to a Tusculani princess.

The victory was also rich with symbolic significance. It seemed fitting that the name of the nearby city, and thus the battle, was in Latin Augusta. Liutprand relates the rather fanciful story that when he returned to the city he passed under the triumphal arch there, built for Emperor Augustus by his general Aulus Terentius Varro Murena after his victory over the Salassi. When he passed under the arch, his soldiers allegedly rushed to crowd around him, hailing him with shouts of “Imperator!”[4]

Not all was cause for jubilation. Count Boniface was severely wounded, and Duke Constantine had been struck by an arrow, although it did not seem terribly serious at the time. Eventually, however, Boniface would recover, while Constantine would soon succumb to his festering wound.[5]

Crown of Glory

Upon his return to Pavia, word had already spread widely of the victory at Augusta. He immediately summoned an assembly of the Lombard noblemen and secured from them the election of his son, Octavian, as co-king of Italy, a practice which had been frequently (albeit irregularly) observed by the reguli before him. Liutprand states that Alberic was inspired to do this because he had very nearly been killed at Augusta, and his brush with mortality compelled him to think of securing his succession. It is more likely, however, that Alberic simply sensed that now was the time when his political capital was at its peak. In 947, when he was able to secure the throne only thanks to the youth of the Anscarids and the absence of any better alternative, an attempt to associate his son in the kingship would have drawn stiff resistance. Now, however, he had defied two invasions from Germany and delivered the Magyars their first major defeat at Italian hands, and all in less than three years. Surrounded in a veritable cloud of glory, he could not be denied, and Octavian was crowned alongside his father.

Yet the year was not yet done, and the Roman king finally succumbed to the temptation that for the last seven years he had denied. Rome had been his, the Pope had been his, and the imperial crown would have been his had he only the desire to take it. Alberic was usually a practical and reserved man; none of his contemporaries accuse him of being driven by emotion or glory-seeking. This once, however, he may have allowed himself to be swayed by the cries of imperator and the images still in his mind of Hugh, his father-in-law, receiving the imperial crown alongside his mother in the city of his birth.

The pope in that year was Agapetus II, a Roman nobleman of distinguished lineage[6] who Alberic had selected to succeed Marinus II in 946. He has so far received little mention here, but he was easily the most distinguished pontiff of Alberic’s reign. Like his predecessors under the Tusculani he was powerless in temporal matters, but he was a man of energy who interjected the papacy into ecclesiastical matters across Europe. His subservience to Alberic does not seem to have diminished his standing in Christendom at all. He ordered a synod at Ingelheim in 948 to decide on the grave matter of two rival claimants for the diocese of Liege, which had been attended by both the French and German kings; both monarchs bowed to the decision of his eminent legate Marinus of Bomarzo. He was an aid to Otto in restructuring the German chuch, creating new dioceses to encompass newly conquered pagan land and granting privileges to German monastic communities. Foreign monarchs, including the great Otto, beseeched him to grant the pallium to their candidates for the great dioceses of their realms. He wielded the power of excommunication with more credibility than any pontiff in recent history, severing Count Herbert of Vermandois from the grace and salvation of God for continuing to support an illegitimate candidate (his son) for the see of Reims.[C]

A man of such respect and moral authority was the ideal pope for Alberic’s purposes in 953. Otto had gratefully accepted every one of the pope’s decisions in his realm for the better part of a decade; he could not with credibility denounce the very same man as a fraud for bestowing the imperial dignity upon Alberic. It was a dignity that Agapetus probably gave willingly, though truthfully he had little choice in the matter.

All was prepared for a grand entrance into Rome. Even the date was chosen with great care, and on Christmas morning, one hundred and fifty three years to the day after the coronation of Charlemagne, Alberic had the imperial crown placed upon his head in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Following the precedent set by Marozia, Queen Gisela was crowned beside him as his empress.[7] As Pope Agapetus addressed the crowd, he hailed Alberic – according to Liutprand, wholly unprompted – as Restitutor Italiae, Restorer of Italy, a title which had once been borne by Trajan.

Alberic had done all he could do to make the taking of Charlemagne’s crown by a man wholly unrelated to Charlemagne seem legitimate. He had married a woman of Carolingian ancestry, he had sought the crown only after a great victory over the pagans, and had received it from the most widely respected pope of the century thus far. Yet it was still Otto, not Alberic, who was the supreme figure in Europe, and Otto had for some time seen Alberic as his subordinate. On several occasions, such as Otto’s wedding to Alda, Alberic had sent “gifts” easily interpreted as tribute. A king could be suzerain of another king; the relationship between Otto and Conrad of Burgundy had made that clear. A king, however, could not be suzerain of an emperor. Otto, who was only now restoring his kingdom to order after a civil war, must have certainly felt robbed. With Alberic’s implicit renunciation of his subservience, he may have felt betrayed as well. The Sword of Damocles still hung over Alberic’s head, and now the thread was beginning to fray.

Next Time: Alberic and the Greeks

House of Tusculum Family Tree to 953 (Click for Huge)​

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Not counting the driving off of Hugh’s out-of-control Magyar auxiliaries after the Siege of Rome in 938, but there is no mention of Alberic personally taking part in those skirmishes.
[2] “Normandy” in this context is of course an anachronism; it was not known as such until some time after the settlement of Rollo and his Northmen there c. 911. As such, the family of Arduin was Frankish and not “Norman” properly so called.
[3] It should be noted, however, that Alberic had experience with a similar situation, albeit not firsthand. As previously noted, following the Battle of Gade a Magyar detachment returning from raiding Luni had been ambushed and defeated in the Apennines by local Tuscan forces. Those who support Liutprand’s version of events point to this incident as the inspiration for Alberic’s strategy at Augusta.
[4] The story has the distinctive whiff of Liutprand’s propaganda, though the practice of the Germanic peoples hailing their kings as “imperator” after a great victory is well established. King Henry of Germany received the same acclamation after defeating the Magyars at Riade in 933.
[5] Though it is little more than historical trivia, it is a notable coincidence that Alberic and Otto each lost their brother to the Magyars in the same year.
[6] In particular, he was allegedly descended from Anicius Faustus Albinus Basilius, the last “regular” Consul of Rome before the city’s fall to the Ostrogoths in 546. He may have also been related to John, Alberic’s uncle and the father of Crescentius, if the legends of John having Anicii ancestry are believed. The mother of Agapetus was allegedly a Greek woman.
[7] It is has been widely claimed that this precedent of the empress being crowned alongside her husband began with Marozia. It is true that there is little evidence of any of the “empresses” of the reguli being recognized as anything more than the wives of emperors, and Charlemagne was crowned alone. Yet counterexamples exist - the wife of Louis the Pious was said in his time to have been “crowned as empress and acclaimed Augusta by all.”

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] Yes, this is a real thing that Conrad “the Peaceful” is said to have done. No, I don’t believe it either. It’s a pretty neat trick for a guy who never went to war with his neighbors once in his entire life.
[b] The “Great Magyar Raid” is a historical event and took the same route as ITTL, even to the extent of (probably) going through the Great St. Bernard pass, though it actually occurred in 954 rather than 953. (In this timeline, the earlier rebellion of Arnulf pushes forward the Magyars’ schedule, as he was probably the one who invited them.) At that time IOTL, Italy was “ruled” by Berengar of Ivrea, who had only recently returned in humiliation from Germany as Otto’s vassal king. He was far too busy desperately trying to claw back his position and punish the traitors that had supported Otto’s invasion in 951 to bother with Magyars, whose passage through Italy went almost totally without comment. Certainly nobody bothered to oppose them at Aosta.
[C] All true things about Pope Agapetus II, who was a legitimately respectable pope in a rather disreputable age. The funny thing about the supposedly scandalous “Tusculan Papacy” is that under Alberic, the complete lack of any temporal power whatsoever actually forced the popes to focus on ecclesiastical administration, monastic reform, repairing churches, feeding the poor, and all those other things we moderns actually expect a pope to do as opposed to behaving like miniature kings in central Italy. Of course, everything went to hell again once his son Octavian became simultaneous pope and princeps after Alberic’s death.

 

[Carp]

XI. The Two Romes
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Emperor Constantine VII crowned by Christ, woodcut c. 945
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The Embassy of 949

At the time of Alberic’s imperial coronation the emperor in Constantinople was the learned Constantine VII “Porphyrogenitos” of the Macedonian dynasty. Constantine had been emperor since the year after Alberic’s birth, but at that time he had been a boy of seven, and he would not free himself from regents and ambitious co-emperors for decades. Only in 945, with the deposition of his father-in-law Romanos Lekapenos and his two sons, did Constantine become the sole ruler of the empire.

The first known contact between Alberic and Constantine was in 949, less than two years into Alberic’s kingship, when Alberic organized and dispatched an embassy to Constantinople. The specific purpose of the embassy is not recorded, but it may have been a general gesture of goodwill – The Byzantines were a powerful presence in southern Italy, and Gaeta, their northernmost vassal on the peninsula, was only 75 miles from Rome. For Alberic, who had only just established himself after the disastrous fall of Anscar, gaining the recognition of neighboring powers was of critical importance.

Alberic hand-picked the members of his embassy. Among them, serving as a junior diplomat, was Liutprand, from whom we have heard a great deal already. The two had known each other as youths at the court of Hugh, though Alberic was eight years Liutprand’s senior. Now just shy of 30, Liutprand had acquired a reputation for literary skill during his clerical education at the cathedral chapter of Pavia. He had been reunited with Alberic shortly after his royal coronation in 947, and the new king had picked him as one of his chancery clerks. The embassy to Constantinople was a chance for Liutprand to learn Greek and to demonstrate his usefulness to the sovereign who he had once thought of as his “adopted brother.” It was also, in a sense, in his blood – both his father and stepfather had been ambassadors to the Greeks during the reign of Hugh.

Constantine was a man of great learning and intellectual curiosity. His collections of literary and artistic work were extensive. He ordered a compilation of written histories and even wrote some of his own. At the time of Alberic’s first embassy, he was composing a manual intended to advise his young son and presumed successor, Romanos, on domestic and foreign policy. Known in the West as De Administrando Imperio (On the Governance of the Empire), the manual included information on numerous foreign peoples.

The 949 embassy seems to have been a success. Despite his junior position, Liutprand reserves much of the responsibility for that success for himself. In addition to the gifts sent by Alberic, Liutprand – according to him, on his own initiative, albeit on the basis of his father's advice – bought and presented Constantine with a number of carzimasia,[1] which Constantine received with delight. Liutprand wrote that eunuchs were “more precious to the emperor than anything.” Liutprand, or someone else in the embassy, has been theorized to have been a contributor to De Administrando as a first-hand source for Constantine’s chapter on the history and national character of the Lombards.

Liutprand gave a very positive report of his first visit to the great city. He writes about eating with the emperor on “silver and gold dishes” as well as an incredible pulley system of ropes “wrapped in gilt leather” that could lift and lower bowls of food. He describes the great hippodrome and acrobats at the emperor’s court. Perhaps his most famous passage is a description of the astonishing automata at the imperial palace:

"In front of the emperor’s throne was set up a tree of gilded bronze, its branches filled with birds, likewise made of bronze gilded over, and these emitted cries appropriate to their species. Now the emperor’s throne was made in such a cunning manner that at one moment it was down on the ground, while at another it rose higher and was to be seen up in the air. This throne was of immense size and was, as it were, guarded by lions, made either of bronze or wood covered with gold, which struck the ground with their tails and roared with open mouth and quivering tongue. Leaning on the shoulders of two eunuchs, I was brought into the emperor’s presence. As I came up the lions began to roar and the birds to twitter, each according to its kind… After I had done obeisance to the Emperor by prostrating myself three times, I lifted my head, and behold! the man whom I had just seen sitting at a moderate height from the ground had now changed his vestments and was sitting as high as the ceiling of the hall. I could not think how this was done, unless perhaps he was lifted up by some such machine as is used for raising the timbers of a wine press."[2]
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Liutprand’s commitment to accuracy in writing is not great, and he probably exaggerates his own importance in the embassy. His awe and appreciation of the court of Constantine, however, seem genuine.[A] The embassy was able to return to Alberic with gifts from the eastern empire, which may have been all that Alberic was after at that time – a clear recognition on the part of Constantine that, at least in the eyes of the empire of Constantinople, Alberic was the legitimate King of Italy.

The Embassy of 954

Alberic’s purpose in 949 may have only been to win recognition and establish good relations, but after his coronation as emperor in 953 he had more ambitious goals in mind. Though he had taken steps to make his coronation seem as legitimate as possible in the west, the recognition of his imperial title by Constantinople would be a substantial coup. Even better than mere words would be a marital alliance, in particular a marriage between his son and heir Octavian – recently crowned as co-king of Italy – and a Greek princess. In 954 Alberic dispatched another embassy to Constantine, with Liutprand again in attendance (and apparently in a more senior capacity than in 949). This time, however, their reception was somewhat cooler. What Alberic sought in 954 was much taller order than what he had been after in 949.

A marriage between the two empires had at the very least been considered before. Nicholas Mystikos wrote disapprovingly of a proposed marriage between the Frankish Emperor Louis III (later known as Louis the Blind) and Anna, the daughter of Emperor Leo VI and the half-sister of Constantine VII. Whether this marriage ever happened is of considerable debate; on the basis of his name alone, some historians have suggested that Charles Constantine of Vienne, the only son of Louis, was a product of this marriage, but other factors throw some doubt on the idea.[B] Regardless, the fact that a marriage was at the very least proposed between a Frankish emperor and the daughter of a Greek emperor is itself notable.

It was also helpful that Constantine himself was something of a Francophile. In De Administrando he gave his son advice on marital alliances, including this passage:

“Never shall an emperor of the Romans ally himself in marriage with a nation of customs differing from and alien to those of the Roman order… unless it be with the Franks alone; for they alone were excepted by that great man, the holy Constantine, because he himself drew origin from those parts; for there is much relationship and converse between Franks and Romans.”​

Alberic was only half a Frank, and as a Roman he was much closer to the “customs” of Constantinople than of Paris or Aachen. Yet he was also newly-crowned and an unknown quantity as emperor, and the bride he was asking for was not merely some distant imperial cousin, but one of Constantine’s daughters. True enough, he had them to spare – the emperor had five young daughters, all unmarried. Yet they were also born while Constantine reigned as emperor, making them each a porphyrogenita of an emperor who was himself a porphyrogenitos. Such “twice-purple-born” princesses were not simply prizes to be given away to whichever Frankish upstart was calling himself imperator this year.

The emperors in Constantinople by this time were not intrinsically hostile to the Latins who claimed the imperial mantle. Since 812, the emperors in Constantinople had conceded the use of the imperial title of basileus to the western emperors, but reserved for themselves the formulation Basileus Rhomaion (Emperor of the Romans). Louis II, the Carolingian Emperor and King of Italy (r. 844-875), illustrates the conflict over terms well. His original title of Imperator Augustus elicited no condemnation from Constantinople. After his conquest of Bari from the Muslims, however, relations with the Greeks deteriorated, and Louis asserted himself as Imperator Romanorum to the outrage of the eastern emperor Basil. In Basil’s court Louis was referred to only as Baslieus Phrangias – Emperor of the Franks. Thus the Greeks were, in general, willing to accept that their Frankish counterparts were emperors; they were simply not willing to allow any other Emperor of the Romans.

Liutprand seems to have made a significant gaffe in the 954 embassy, in which he referred to Alberic as Imperator Romanorum and Constantine, apparently to his face, as Imperator Graecorum, the Emperor of the Greeks. In the Latin mind, this made a good deal of sense – Alberic was born in Rome to a Roman noble family, presently ruled Rome, and had been titled until his coronation princeps Romanorum. His Roman-ness seemed in little doubt. Yet to the easterners, who still called themselves “Romans” and had never ceased to do so, it was a presumptuous usurpation of the only true and enduring Roman Empire, and an outrageous diminution of the universality of the emperor to suggest he was only the emperor “of the Greeks.”

Constantine was a consummate diplomat, and not the kind of man to be thrown into a fury by Liutprand’s (probably inadvertent) insults. Even after this blunder, he was perfectly willing to acknowledge Alberic with the same title of basileus that his Frankish predecessors had enjoyed; Constantine cared very little about Alberic's relationship to Charlemagne or lack thereof. Clearly, however, Constantine had reservations about Alberic’s proposed marriage. Whether on the basis of Alberic’s newness as emperor, the preciousness of his noble daughters, or Liutprand’s insult – or some combination of those – he opted to decline Alberic’s request. He was respectful to Liutprand and the rest of the embassy and even sent them home with more gifts for Alberic, but he did not send them home with a bride.

The Southern Princes

In the initial Lombard conquest of southern Italy, the Byzantines had grimly hung on in Apulia and Calabria as well as certain coastal enclaves that could be supported by the Byzantine navy. The interior of the southern peninsula had been overrun by the Lombards, who created from it the Duchy of Benevento, in theory a vassal of the Lombard king but in practice quite autonomous. Benevento had survived the Carolingian conquest of the Lombard kingdom, but had fractured in the mid-9th century into the rival principalities of Benevento, Capua, and Salerno. In 910, the Prince of Capua conquered Benevento, bringing the number of Lombard states down to two.

On the Tyrrhenian coast, the surviving Byzantine coastal enclaves had originally been united in the Duchy of Naples, but over the course of the century both Gaeta and Amalfi had gained their independence from the Neapolitan dukes. All three were in theory vassals of the Byzantine Emperor, but the control of Constantinople over them was usually no more than nominal. Naples and Amalfi in particular were substantial centers of seagoing trade, and despite their small size the Italo-Greek city-states were able to maintain their virtual independence thanks to a combination of wealth and favorable terrain.

Too far from either the Franks or Greeks for either to firmly control, the micro-states of the Lombards and Italo-Greeks had engaged in a complex interplay of wars, dynastic politics, and shifting alliances for generations. The conquest of Sicily by the Muslims in the 9th century brought a new power into the equation. Sometimes the principalities joined forces against the Saracens; sometimes they allied with the Saracens to fight the Greeks, Franks, or one another.

For most of Alberic’s life in power, his attention had been focused northwards, but his southern neighbors were never completely neglected. The Tusculani had been on good terms with the ruling houses of Gaeta and Naples ever since Docibilis II of Gaeta and John II of Naples fought alongside Alberic’s father, Alberic of Spoleto, at the famous Battle of the Garigliano in 915. Marozia had been the godmother of one of the sons of John III of Naples (the nephew of John II), and around 930 arranged the marriage of John and her niece Theodora. Soon after taking power in Rome, Alberic had arranged for the marriage of his brother Constantine to Gemma, the daughter of Docibilis II. The Neapolitans and Gaetans had been his allies in Rome and Spoleto, though as his power grew his use for them had declined.

Alberic seems not to have been involved in the southern Lombard war of 946, in which John III of Naples and Landulf II “the Red” of Benevento-Capua made war on Salerno, whose young prince Gisulf had sheltered Landulf’s exiled brother and cousin. As the Beneventans and Neapolitans climbed through the hills near La Cava, however, they were ambushed by Patrician Mastalo of Amalfi, Gisulf’s ally, and the soldiers of that tiny city-state were evidently able to rout the forces of John and Landulf. Though the immediate causes of this conflict were personal, it also occurred within a larger political context – Landulf and John pursued an anti-Byzantine policy, attempting to distance themselves from Greek control, while Mastalo and Gisulf were loyalists who hoped remaining close friends with Constantinople would yield dividends.

Soldiers illustrated in the Joshua Roll, 10th c. Constantinople​

The Longobard Revolt

In 955, a popular revolt broke out against the Byzantines in Apulia and Calabria. The cause of the revolt is not clear, but it was seized upon as an opportunity by Landulf and John. These princes had previously avoided open conflict with Constantinople while pursuing a “soft” anti-Byzantine policy, but now they upped the ante by supporting the rebels openly and renouncing Constantinople’s yoke.

They had clearly underestimated Constantine’s commitment to dominance in southern Italy. The emperor dispatched a strong fleet and army under the command of the general and patrikios Marianos Argyros to put down the rebellion and force Naples back into obedience. Dismayed at the might of the forces arrayed against them, they appealed to the new emperor in the west, Alberic, for protection.

It was a difficult position for Alberic. On the one hand, he had made an effort to maintain good relations with Constantine ever since the 949 embassy, and had no particular interest in picking a fight with Constantine while Otto still loomed in the north. On the other hand, John of Naples was not only Alberic’s cousin-in-law but his friend and ally who had aided him in his rise. Landulf and John were also offering to recognize Alberic’s suzerainty for his aid, which would place a considerable part of southern Italy under his dominion. Finally, there was the possibility that a show of strength might convince Constantine to come to the negotiating table and deliver a bride after mere talk had failed to do so.

Alberic decided to assist his ally, leaving Lombardy in the care of Margrave Crescentius and his seventeen year old son and co-king Octavian while he took the field personally. It took some time for him to prepare his campaign, however, and even when in the south he does not seem to have moved eagerly towards a fight. At Capua, he paused to receive the forces and allegiance of Landulf. While he lingered there, Marianos demonstrated his command ability with a coup de main against Naples, landing his troops directly in the harbor of the city – which was not protected by walls – in an amphibious attack that forced John to quickly surrender. He then marched north to compel Landulf’s surrender as well.

Marianos was halted on the south bank of the Volturno by the presence of the Italian-Capuan army on the other side. Alberic was plainly uninterested in fighting a war in which his primary ally had already been defeated, and sought out a negotiated agreement with Marianos. Marianos agreed to talk, and Alberic’s emissaries discussed possibilities with him, probably suggesting a division of control or other partial settlement. That night, however, Marianos launched a crossing of the Volturno in secret, and in the morning Alberic found his strong defensive position had been ruined. Alberic and Landulf retreated to Capua, and in the end the best Alberic could do was reach an accord with Marianos that Landulf and John would remain in power, which Marianos may have been planning to allow anyway. Alberic withdrew from the south, having accomplished little. Marianos had easily put down the rebellion, and was posted as strategos and patrikios of Byzantine Italy. John and Landulf both retained their positions, though they were compelled to swear their allegiance to the empire once again. Gisulf, finally rewarded for his loyalty, was made a patrikios.[C]

Alberic’s intervention was a failure, but he did not abandon his interests in the south. Constantinople was capable of bringing significant force to bear in extremis, but the army of Marianos was an expeditionary force, not a garrison, and could not occupy Italy indefinitely. With a mind to continue exerting pressure there, Alberic turned to his cousin Crescentius, who since 948 had been Margrave of Friuli. Crescentius had links with the south, being the brother-in-law of John of Naples, and seems to have been someone Alberic trusted with a largely autonomous command. Alberic removed Crescentius from the March of Friuli in the aftermath of the failed campaign of 955 and installed him in the Duchy of Spoleto, which had been vacant since the death of Alberic’s brother Constantine in 953. If Crescentius minded being shuffled around the country in this way, he seems not to have shown it.

Next Time: Showdown

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Liutprand describes a carzimasium as “a child-eunuch” (that is, a eunuch who was castrated in childhood) who has both “testicles and penis cut off.” He notes that carzimasia were in great demand in Spain.
[2] The Byzantine polymath Leo the Mathematician was said to have built automata for the emperors (probably the Phyrgian emperors Theophilos or Michael III) in the mid-9th century, including singing birds, roaring lions, and a “levitating” throne. Liutprand’s strikingly similar account a century later seems to corroborate these tales and demonstrates that such devices were still in use by the time of Constantine VII, albeit apparently only as a means to bewilder credulous barbarian ambassadors.

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] All the details of the 949 embassy given above are from the IOTL writings of Liutprand, who did indeed go to Constantinople in 949, albeit on behalf of King Berengar rather than King Alberic.
[B] On this, both my fictional narrator and I agree. I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but I find the Byzantine connection to Charles Constantine rather unlikely. Firstly, the match is only mentioned once, by Mystikos, who refers to it only as a proposed marriage or betrothal. Secondly, no record of the marriage exists in the west, which is incredible given that it would have been the first ever marriage between a Frankish emperor and a Byzantine princess. Thirdly, Anna was buried in Constantinople, which seems unlikely if she had been living in Provence. Fourthly, the mere fact that Charles is called “Constantine” in a few sources is very thin evidence for him having Greek blood. It seems most likely to me that this theory is wishful thinking by later historians who, after discovering the letter from Mystikos, fancied that it was evidence for an imperial link to Burgundinian royalty.
[C] The revolt of 955 is historical and goes about the same ITTL as IOTL because of Alberic’s half-hearted efforts. Marianos Argyros is not a particularly well-known historical figure, but he was one of the top generals of Constantine VII alongside such men as Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes, which places him in pretty elite company. I figured the chances that Marianos would be out-generaled by an amateur like Alberic would be pretty low.

 

[Carp]

XII. Showdown​

Modern Illustration of the Battle of Augsburg (954)​

Otto the Victor

Alberic’s victory at Augusta in 953 did not obscure the fact that it was the Germans, not the Italians, who were the most dangerous opponents of the Magyars. Magyar raiders had once had the run of Europe, but by the mid-10th century they were clearly losing that capability. Since Henry’s victory over the Magyars at Riade in 933, their record against the Germans had been growing steadily worse. After defeats in 938, the Magyars would never set foot in Saxony again. In 943 and 948, the Bavarians had inflicted defeats on the Magyars, and as mentioned Duke Henry of Bavaria was able to launch a successful retaliatory raid in 950. Flodoard, speaking of that expedition, claims that Henry was able to force the Magyars to be his tributaries.

The Magyars could not simply ignore Germany and turn on Italy, which despite the ambush in 953 was by far the easier nut to crack. For one thing, Italy and Magyar-occupied Pannonia were not neighbors – Carinthia lay between them, and that was increasingly strongly held by the Bavarians. But more than that, German hegemony was the greatest overall threat to Magyar strategic dominance. Germany had shown itself capable of defying Magyar strength and even attacking the Magyars in their new home territory. The raid of 953 had only made its way through Germany at all thanks to an ongoing civil war, and that had now ended to the advantage of Germany’s formidable monarch.

Thus in 954, a year after the ignoble end of the “Great Raid,” the Magyars launched a campaign on Germany that was very different from their previous forays. Its objective was not to collect plunder or exact tribute, but to inflict a defeat on the Germans that would salvage the worsening strategic situation. The fact that this was a different sort of war was illustrated by the fact that the Magyars, formerly ignorant of siege warfare and uninterested in cities that could not be easily taken by storm, set out to besiege the city of Augsburg with a force that included both infantry and siege weaponry. Their primary goal, however, was not to take Augsburg, but to force Otto into a confrontation in the broad fields around the city, where they would be able to destroy his army and deliver a hobbling blow to his kingdom. Bulcsu, who Alberic had graciously released from captivity, seems to have been the overall commander of this force as well.

After massing his armies at Ulm, King Otto obliged, and fought a pitched battle with the Magyars near Augsburg. A Magyar attempt at encirclement failed, according to the German chronicler Widukind because of the greed of the Magyars, who upon defeating the German rearguard stopped to plunder its baggage. The Germans were able to launch a counterattack, and after an intensely bloody contest, the Magyar cavalry was compelled to withdraw. The infantrymen of the Magyars, who may have been in large part Slav auxiliaries, were slaughtered. The cavalry, however, was able to extricate itself, and though the Magyar riders had suffered significant casualties they were probably not any worse off in that regard than the Germans, who had also paid a heavy toll.[A]

Although Augsburg was a tactical victory for the Germans, in strategic terms it was a draw, albeit one that maintained the status quo of German superiority. The Magyars and their leaders were able to withdraw with the bulk of their best troops – that is to say their cavalry – but they had not managed to achieve their goal of humbling the Germans, and neither side had been able to remove the other from the strategic situation.

Papal Politics

In November of 955, Pope Agapetus II passed away. This robbed Alberic of an important bulwark against German ambition, and clearly he felt it necessary to replace him with someone equally respected in the north. The clear choice was the eminent Marinus of Bomarzo, who had been Agapetus’ legate to the Ingelheim synod of 948 and who thereby had met with Otto personally. He was swiftly elected under the watchful eye of the prefect Demetrius as Pope Marinus III. New of the choice pleased Otto, who sent a legation to Rome seeking the transfer of the diocese of Halberstadt to Magdeburg, which Otto desired to turn into an archdiocese which would spread the faith to the pagan Slavs. Agapetus II had responded positively to all of Otto’s similar proposals for reorganization, and Otto clearly thought Marinus was likely to follow in his footsteps.

The main opponent to Otto’s scheme was his own bastard son, Archbishop William of Mainz. Otto had only selected William to the archdiocese in 954, and no doubt William was duly grateful, but he resisted the idea of Halberstadt – which was his suffragan diocese – being taken from him and being given to a new, competing archdiocese. Agapetus had allowed all of Otto’s wishes to be fulfilled so far, but there was now a new pope on the throne. Additionally, Agapetus had made William the Apostolic Vicar of Germany, which made him in theory the agent of the Papacy throughout the realm and gave him some potential leverage in Rome regardless of who sat upon the chair of Saint Peter.

Marinus would never get to weigh in on the issue. He lasted only a few months in office before dying of a fever, and in the spring of 956 Alberic again had to find a new candidate. His choice now fell upon Constantine, the Bishop cardinalis of Porto who had been consecrated in that position by Agapetus and had served him as Librarian of the Holy Roman Church. In August, he ascended to the chair of Saint Peter as Pope Constantine II.[B] By the time Otto’s ambassadors arrived, Marinus was in the ground and Constantine was on the throne. Whether prompted by Alberic or acting out of his own sense of legality or political logic, Constantine sided with William, his apostolic vicar, and against Otto. Otto’s ambassadors had to return to Germany empty-handed.

Otto clearly felt cheated. It was well known across Christendom that no pope ascended to the throne without Alberic’s say-so, and Otto suspected that Alberic had purposefully replaced a pope widely considered friendly to Otto with one that would be an obstruction to his efforts. More importantly, however, it was compelling evidence that if Otto was going to reconstruct the German state as he wished to, including a strong, militarized, and politicized church that supported the king and provided a counterbalance the great dukes, he needed papal support, and that was something he could never count on as long as Alberic held Rome in a white-knuckle grip.

Liudolf’s Second Invasion

The original objectives of the German campaign into Italy in 957 are still hotly debated. Scholars have questioned whether Otto’s intention was to force Alberic from the throne entirely or merely to humble him. Deposing Alberic at a stroke might have seemed possible - Lombardy had been fairly quiet since Alberic’s successes in the early 950s, but there were resentments growing against him amid the nobility there, and it was common knowledge that the Lombard magnates were quick to turn on a king who seemed like a losing bet. Even if that could not be accomplished, however, it might be enough to duplicate the exploits of Otto’s late brother, Duke Henry of Bavaria, and conquer Friuli. If that march were in German hands, it would be a constant source of weakness to Alberic as a staging ground from which German incursions could be launched into the heart of Lombardy at any time. That threat could convince Alberic to make his pet pope more cooperative, and as soon as Alberic died or faltered, that solid foothold could be used to bring the rest of Italy – including the pope and the imperial crown – under German dominion.

Otto did not undertake this expedition personally, but entrusted it to his son Liudolf. Liudolf had been deposed from Swabia following his failed rebellion, but had since reconciled with his father and had fought valorously alongside him at Augsburg. He may have entered Italy with the understanding that Italy, Friuli, or whatever lands he conquered would be his own, as belated compensation for his loss of Swabia. Liudolf had failed in his own invasion of Italy in 951, but things were different now – he was five years older, with experience gained both in defeat and victory. This time he was also fully supported by his father with troops and money. As a bit of extra insurance, Otto dispatched Duke Burchard III of Swabia, an older and more experienced commander, to act as Liudolf’s able lieutenant.

Alberic had anticipated this eventuality for some time, but he had inadvertently damaged himself by the transferal of his cousin Crescentius from Friuli to Spoleto. This had left Friuli vacant, and Alberic had finally relented to his son’s requests for authority and entrusted him with the march. Octavian was certainly enthusiastic, but he was also eighteen years old and had little administrative or command experience. When Liudolf invaded the country, Octavian had only been in command there for slightly over a year.

The initial drive into the march was highly successful. The Germans crossed the Brenner Pass in July, and after a brief siege the Bishop of Trento surrendered his city. Octavian, who seemed like he took after his uncle Anscar more than his father Alberic, obligingly led an army against the invaders without waiting for reinforcements. He was completely defeated north of Verona and only barely escaped. This rendered Verona indefensible, and it too surrendered to the Germans. Once again, the eastern march had swiftly disintegrated in the face of a German invasion.

Alberic had initially hoped to defend Mantua, where he had stood against Duke Henry, but the success of Liudolf triggered an insurrection in Lombardy (Liutprand claims Otto’s bribes were at work here). Alberic had up to now tried a careful balancing act, but it was impossible for a king to truly remain neutral between the counts and the bishops; to the nobility, his failure to persecute the bishops in the manner of Hugh seemed like favoritism. Liudolf may have had only Friuli in mind at first, but hearing of an uprising in his favor he decided to march on Pavia. Alberic abandoned Mantua and marched west.

The Siege of Pavia

All of Lombardy north of the Po and as far west as Novara seemed to fall into the hands of Liudolf, with the exception of a few alpine fortresses (including Como, held by the Count-Patrician Boniface) and the cities of Milan and Pavia, which had strong garrisons and loyal bishops. Alberic continued to retreat west, and the Germans pursued him. Upon reaching Pavia, they found that the city was now defended by King Octavian; even if the young heir had not yet shown much skill in command, Alberic probably guessed he could be counted on to not turn traitor. (It was, after all, his crown at stake as well.) This meant that Pavia was a prize of great importance – if it were taken, it would not only mean the fall of the symbolic capital of Italy, but the likely capture of the emperor’s son. It also meant that if the city were besieged, Alberic would be inevitably drawn to do battle, as he would not be able to abide the city’s loss.

Alberic, however, had spent years preparing Pavia for a siege. Its garrison was strong, its cellars were stocked with supplies, its walls were repaired and strengthened, and before the arrival of the Germans the emperor had taken the precaution of deporting many of the city’s commoners to nearby towns to reduce the number of mouths to feed. The Germans were accustomed to siege warfare, but it had not been possible to take an extensive siege train with them across the Alps and through all of Lombardy in their pursuit of Alberic. Liudolf counted on the siege forcing Alberic to show himself and face combat. As long as Octavian could hold the walls of Pavia, however, the emperor could take his time.

Octavian’s leadership had been lackluster so far, but he offered a stout defense of the city. Liutprand writes that two weeks into the siege, the morale of the defenders seemed to be flagging as they felt they had been abandoned by the emperor. He provides a speech by Octavian to his troops, in which the king assures them that “so much trust has the Emperor of Rome placed in you, that he has placed me among you, so that you might know whatever you endure his own son endures also, and whatever be the judgment of God shall be shared among us all.” Come nightfall, the king then led a raid on the camp of the Germans, setting tents aflame and causing mayhem before slipping back within the walls “with not one man lost.” The feat may be exaggerated, but it renewed the will of the defenders to resist.

Once again, Alberic was content to wait. The rebellion had not yet spread to Ivrea and a few rebels in Emilia were quickly crushed by loyalists, and the emperor made sure to gather every man in the remainder of the kingdom who would fight for him. Eventually, however, his hand was forced by the news, eight weeks into the siege, that King Otto himself had crossed the Brenner Pass with an army. Knowing that he could not defeat the combined might of Germany, Alberic had no choice but to march on Pavia to do battle with Liudolf. It was crucial, for his purposes, that Liudolf be compelled to do battle rather than to wait for his father, so Alberic sent him emissaries promising extravagant rewards for peace. Liutprand writes that Alberic offered to give him vast riches; then all of Lombardy north of the Po; then the Iron Crown; and finally even to designate Liudolf as Alberic’s heir and successor. We have no corroboration of those offers, but if they were made, Liudolf didn’t bite.

As Liutprand tells it, Duke Burchard counseled retreat, or at least avoiding action until Otto’s arrival. Liudolf was in Italy, however, to win a principality for himself; that very motivation may well have been why Otto had sent him here. Otto’s arrival now seemed like a lack of trust in his son, and if Liudolf waited for Otto to arrive any victory would be Otto’s, not his own. He also did not trust Burchard, who was after all the loyal follower Otto had installed in Swabia after stripping that duchy from Liudolf. Wouldn’t such a man naturally counsel what was best for Otto, not Liudolf? Besides, Alberic’s desperation was evident – he sounded willing to do almost anything to avoid having to face the Germans in battle. Indeed, he had studiously avoided fighting Liudolf in the failed invasion of 951. Now, however, he was compelled to do battle; it was the perfect time to draw the coward in and destroy him.

A stream near Pavia blanketed in winter fog​

The Battle of Olona

Pavia lay on the north bank of the Ticino River, a tributary of the Po. Liutprand reports that around the end of the siege, the plain around Pavia was “thick with fog,” which tells us that the confrontation could have been no earlier than November, the beginning of the fog season in the Po valley. This weather would play a key role in the engagements to come.

News that Alberic had crossed the Po to the east led Liudolf to march eastward in response, as he did not wish to be caught between Alberic’s army and the city. A portion of his force, composed mainly of Lombard allies, was left to watch the Pavia and prevent Octavian’s escape. Octavian probably had no knowledge of his father’s movements, but could certainly see Liudolf’s army departing. Several weeks before, he had launched a second sally against the Germans that had been less successful than his first; it turned into a bloody affair with casualties on both sides, and Octavian had been forced to make a fighting retreat back to the walls. This time, however, he waited for night and for the fog to roll in over the plain. At dawn, he sent a group of his men down the river in boats, using the fog to slip past the watchmen and land behind the besiegers’ lines. The plan worked perfectly – the Lombard besiegers were not as disciplined as the Germans. The river force took them by surprise, and when the battle was joined Octavian led a charge of his horsemen from the city gates, catching the besiegers between two attacking forces. The besiegers, or at least those east of the city, were completely routed. Liutprand reports that Octavian captured many of the Italian knights, who were expecting the relative lenience of his father, and then ordered their summary execution for treason.

Alberic, meanwhile, had attempted to take Liudolf by surprise with his cavalry while the Germans marched eastwards, but his stratagem failed and the Italian cavalry was bloodily repulsed. The royal forces fled over the Olona river in the vicinity of Curtis Olumna, the old rural palace of the Lombard kings. The armies camped on either side of the river for the night, with Alberic trying to negotiate one last time to maintain his position – now, perhaps, actually as desperate as he had pretended to be earlier. Liutprand claims both Alberic and Liudolf were ignorant of Octavian’s breakout earlier that day.

The next morning, seemingly aided by the same fog that had helped Octavian, Liudolf sent Burchard with a strong force of cavalry to cross the river further northwards while he attacked the Italians directly. Octavian had been pursuing Liudolf west with a small force of cavalry, possibly aided by information from captives, and stumbled directly upon the German camp. As Liudolf’s forces were preparing a crossing, Octavian’s cavalry – probably not more than a hundred men – came bolting recklessly out of the fog and attacked them from behind.

The battle at this point is hard to reconstruct, but it appears that in the confusion and limited visibility, all commanders lost control of their forces. Hearing the sounds of battle, part of Alberic’s force surged across the river, shortly followed by much of the rest in a ragged, spontaneous attack. The disposition of Liudolf’s forces is unclear as they seem to have immediately lost cohesion. A chaotic battle followed, in which the Saxon chronicler Widukind later wrote that “some men, not knowing their friend from their foe, attacked their own comrades.” Despite the total breakdown in discipline of the Italian army, the surrounded German army fared worse and broke in confusion. The Italians took many captives, including Liudolf.

Around this time Burchard, who may also have been delayed by the fog, arrived at the previous location of the Italian army. Sighting the enemy at their camp, the Swabians immediately attacked, slaughtered the defenders, and plundered the emperor’s baggage. By the time they had done this, however, the fog was burning away, and Burchard realized he had engaged only the rearguard of the Italian army, the bulk of which was on the other side of the river. Burchard also realized that his cavalrymen were the only intact component of Liudolf’s force with remained.[C]

A parlay was held between Alberic and Burchard. Duke Burchard offered to ransom Liudolf on Otto’s behalf; Alberic refused. According to Liutprand, he instead ordered Burchard to “send for your uncle the king to come before me at the bridge of Lodi, and make no further mischief in my kingdom on his way,” warning that if Otto refused “I ought to do what Berengar did to Louis, since this villain has broken his word to me.”[1] This seems rather undiplomatic for Alberic, but he had blinded enemies before (see: Sarlio in 938), and thus if said it could not have been considered a wholly empty threat.

Amicitia

In late November or early December 957, Otto arrived at the Adda river, east of Lodi, with his considerable army. Lodi was the site of an ancient Roman bridge crossing the Adda, and this bridge was selected for the first face to face meeting of King Otto and Emperor Alberic.

Both men were at that point forty-five years old, but the similarities ended there. Otto was a legendary warlord, the kind of ruler his fellow Saxons most admired; he was renowned for his courage and strength. Alberic was always a reluctant warrior who was known for no physical feats, and despite commanding a handful of battles it is uncertain if he ever personally struck an enemy in his life. Otto was stout and athletic, a ruddy-faced man with long hair and a beard that “covered his breast” which he is reputed to have sworn oaths upon, and who wore the un-ostentatious Frankish dress.[2] Alberic was a man described by Liutprand as “lean,” not sickly but not particularly robust either, whose dark hair and short beard were always immaculate, and who always dressed richly “in the Roman [i.e. Byzantine] fashion.” Otto was known by all as a zealous and devout man; Alberic was a patron of monasticism but had a cynical view of the church and its leaders, whose venality and debauchery had been the milieu of his early life. We cannot certainly know the minds of the two men, but chroniclers agree that they openly disliked each other – by Alberic’s standards, Otto was likely no more than a warmongering, illiterate barbarian (the illiterate part, at least, was true), while Otto surely saw Alberic as a conniving, cowardly usurper.

The product of the meeting was an amicitia, or treaty of friendship, which was probably negotiated over several days. While the text does not survive, contemporary chronicles and letters give us a fairly clear idea as to the major points of the agreement.

• Release of all prisoners, including Prince Liudolf
• Acknowledgement of the pre-war borders, including the restitution of Friuli to Alberic; possibly clarification of or minor changes to the border between Bavaria and Friuli
• Acknowledgement of each others titles, namely Otto as King of Germany and Alberic as King of Italy and Roman Emperor
• Acknowledgement of the absolute authority of the other within his kingdom, including over the appointments of lay and ecclesiastical magnates
• Recognition of German suzerainty over Burgundy (though it is unclear if this meant only Upper Burgundy or Provence as well)
• Mutual agreement to not support or ally with the “heretics or pagans” (presumably meaning the Saracens and the Magyars)
• Ecclesiastical concessions to Otto, including the establishment of the Archdiocese of Magdeburg and the acknowledgement of German ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Denmark, Pannonia, and “Slavia” (probably not part of the actual text, as these things were not technically Alberic’s to give, but there was a papal delegation in attendance at Lodi and such concessions were no doubt part of an extra-textual “understanding”)​

The document was supposedly signed by Alberic, Otto, Octavian, and Liudolf, as well as the “counts and bishops of both realms,” though practically speaking only a small minority of those from each country had the opportunity to do so. Aside from merely signing, the two monarchs also swore an oath upon the Iron Crown; Alberic no doubt hoped that the pious Otto would be more reluctant to break an oath if it was sworn upon what was effectively a reliquary for one of the Holy Nails that had been used to crucify Christ.

Both sides knew that a treaty did not necessarily mean perpetual peace, even when relics and oaths were involved. Otto’s father, Henry, had signed an amicitia with the King Charles III of France at Bonn in 921, only to throw it out a little over a year later when he signed another amicitia with the man trying to overthrow Charles. A great deal depended on the trustworthiness of Otto, who despite Liudolf’s defeat probably still had the more powerful army in the field. Both sides had little choice but to make an agreement, however; Otto could not risk the safety of his son and heir[3] and Alberic could not simply keep Liudolf a hostage indefinitely, as that would guarantee war. In 957, at least, Otto kept his word, and the Germans retreated to their home country.

The German retreat was a disaster for the rebellious Lombard nobles, who had now lost their powerful foreign ally. Some fled the country, and others were reconciled with Alberic, but many continued to resist – perhaps because of the fate suffered by those captured by Octavian at Pavia. A group of the rebels now appealed to Lothair, King of Provence – now 30 years of age – and invited him to take his father’s throne. Lothair may have considered it, and evidently it the threat was serious enough that Alberic sent Octavian to Turin with an army to support Count-Patrician Arduin of Auriate. In the end, however, the Provencal invasion did not materialize. Lothair may have surmised that Alberic, having defeated Otto (or at least Otto’s son) would not be easily toppled despite the ongoing rebellion. The two monarchs negotiated their own amicitia in 958, in which Alberic pledged his support to Lothair for a future campaign against Fraxinet. The pirate enclave was a constant thorn in Lothair’s side, but was all but impossible to besiege by land alone; critically, Alberic had a fleet, and Lothair did not.

With all northern threats now seemingly removed for the first time in his reign, Alberic could turn his full focus towards the destruction of the disloyal faction in Lombardy. The last holdouts would not be overcome for nearly a year, but by November of 958 Alberic could boast of the complete pacification of rural Lombardy.

Next Time: Agatha

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] The Bosonid King of Provence Louis III had invaded Italy in 900 and gained the imperial throne, but was defeated by Berengar of Friuli in 902, who forced him to return to Provence and swear never to return. He returned anyway in 905 in a second attempt to conquer Italy, but failed again and was captured. For breaking his word, Berengar had blinded him, and he was thereafter known as Louis the Blind. Burchard and Otto would certainly have understood this context.
[2] Liutprand may well have met Otto, if not at the Adda than later in his career as a diplomat. Unfortunately his physical descriptions are tainted by his tendency to portray enemies of Alberic as grotesque homunculi (Otto at the Adda is a “watery-eyed, swollen-cheeked, balding dwarf”).[D]
[3] Technically at this moment Otto had two sons; after the death of the infant Henry, Queen Alda had born a second son named Bruno in 956.

Footnotes (Out of Character)
[A] Why didn’t this almost-Lechfeld go like actual-Lechfeld? In a word, weather (which is sort of the theme word for this whole update). The actual battle of Lechfeld in 955 did not annihilate the Magyar army. What did annihilate the Magyar army was the three days that followed of Magyar retreat in a sudden downpour, which caused severe flooding across Bavaria. Otto had commanded the local Bavarian forces to be vigilant at the bridges and crossings, and as the Magyars retreated they were hampered by the swollen rivers and destroyed piecemeal in dozens of small engagements throughout the country. But the “Battle of Augsburg” ITTL takes place in 954, not 955, and the sudden downpour of that year isn't a factor. Thus, despite the initial battle going just as well for the Germans, the result is not as crushing, and the Magyars are not yet destroyed as an offensive force. They’ll be back.
[B] Constantine, Bishop of Porto was a real person who really was the chief librarian for Agapetus, but he never became pope and we know nothing else about him. If you were wondering who the first “Pope Constantine” was, he was an early 8th century Syrian who is considered to have been the last pope of non-European origin before the election of Pope Francis in 2013.
[C] Otto did actually entrust Liudolf with a campaign into Lombardy in 957, possibly also with the expectation that he would rule/administer at least part of what he conquered, though IOTL the campaign was against Berengar of Ivrea. Liudolf did quite well, then suddenly came down with a fever at Novara and died that very year at the age of 27. Though his defeat and capture ITTL is no doubt humiliating, at least he’s still alive in this universe.
[D] No really, he’s brutal. If you don’t believe me, read the Wikipedia page for Nikephoros II Phokas and read Liutprand's description. Actually, you should do that even if you do believe me.[/B][/B]

 

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XIII. Agatha​

Reconstruction of a Byzantine Dromon of the Macedonian Dynasty
​

Sicilian Wars

In 953, the year that Alberic became emperor, Al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah succeeded his father as Caliph in Ifriqiya. Al-Mu’izz was one of the Fatimiyun – the Fatimids – a dynasty that claimed descent from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and now led a powerful Ismaili Muslim state in northern Africa. The Fatimid Caliphate had overthrown the Aghlabids, who had conquered Sicily from the Byzantines, and now held the island themselves.

Al-Mu’izz was a man of ambition, and possessed a firm belief that expansion at the expense of the unbelievers was a religious duty. His primary aim was the conquest of Egypt, which he would accomplish in his lifetime, but he also took an aggressive stance towards the Greeks. In 956 he dispatched his lieutenants, the brothers Ammar and Hasan al-Kalbi, with a fleet to attack Byzantine Italy. The Kalbid brothers crushingly defeated a Byzantine fleet in the Strait of Messina that summer, and then launched raids up and down the coast of Calabria.

The imperial governor in southern Italy was the strategos, anthypatos, and patrikios of Calabria and Longobardia, Marianos Argyros, who had only the year before put down a serious rebellion and restored Naples and Capua to obedience. Marianos was not merely a soldier, but an ambassador, and traveled to the court of Caliph Al-Mu’izz to attempt to negotiate a truce. The Caliph agreed to grant one in exchange for tribute, but hostilities broke out again in 957 when a Byzantine fleet commander – seemingly without higher authorization – razed a mosque that Hasan al-Kalbi had erected in Rhegion, raided Sicily in the environs of Palermo, and defeated Hasan’s fleet near Mazara after it had been scattered by a storm. In the wake of this incident, Marianos again went to the Al-Mansuriya to negotiate peace, but this time Al-Mu’izz angrily refused and dispatched another fleet under the Kalbid brothers to attack Byzantine Italy.[A]

The Embassy of 958

It was in this context that Emperor Alberic, having only just concluded peace with Otto in November of 957, decided to send a new embassy to his counterpart in the east, Emperor Constantine VII.

At the time of his 954 embassy, Alberic had only held the imperial title for a year. Now, however, he had been emperor for four years and had managed to fend off the most serious attack yet from his chief rival in Europe. Furthermore, while Alberic himself had no doubts as to his Roman dignity – he had compelled Otto to recognize him as Imperator Romanorum in their mutual treaty – a marital alliance was more important to him than recognition of any particular title. He sent a letter to Constantine along with his ambassadors (including Liutprand, who evidently was not out of favor on account of his earlier gaffe) in which he referred to himself as “merely” Imperator Augustus and Constantine as Imperator Romanorum.

A last chance to make a further positive impression appeared in April, when a Muslim force landed near Naples and laid siege to the city. Liutprand says that Alberic ordered his cousin, Duke Crescentius of Spoleto, to intervene, but the timing suggests that Crescentius did not wait for orders from the emperor. He was, after all, the brother-in-law of Duke John III of Naples, and Alberic had charged him with looking after Italian interests in the south. Taking a modest force of crack horsemen, Crescentius rode to Naples and raided the camp of the besieging Saracens from the landward side. Latin sources exaggerate this as a “battle;” in reality it seems to have been mere skirmishing, and when the Muslims did lift the siege soon after it was more likely because of the approach of a Greek army under strategos Marianos than a result of Crescentius’s raiding.

The embassy set out from Venice in early summer, and arrived in Constantinople at a time when the strategic situation was very different than it had been in the time of the last embassy in 954. Then the Byzantines and the Fatimids had been observing a truce and southern Italy was at peace; now, however, the empire and the caliphate were in a state of open war. The Fatimids had already raided Calabria and attacked Naples, and a major invasion might not be far away. Conflict with the Fatimids was undesirable, and merely distracted from much more successful campaigns against the Muslims in the east, where the indomitable general Nikephoros Phokas was just beginning his career of military achievement.

Correspondingly, Liutprand’s argument was overall a stronger one than last time. Alberic, he could say, had demonstrated his strength and longevity as emperor, and with a royal marriage the western emperor would not only be dissuaded from interfering with Byzantine Italy (as he had briefly and abortively done in 955), but would be an active ally against the Fatimids (as demonstrated at Naples). Alberic had no “state navy,” but the Pisans were skilled sailors, and a navy levied from them and other Italian ports could still contribute meaningfully to action against the Saracen threat. For what it was worth, the Italian ambassadors also seem to have followed their lord’s lead regarding the issue of titles.[1]

Constantine’s remaining reservation seems to have been personal. As mentioned, the emperor had five unmarried daughters – who, by 958, were apparently still unmarried – but all of them had been born prior to the birth of his son, Romanos, in 938. Alberic’s son Octavian had been born in the same year, which meant that all of Constantine’s daughters were older than him. The most logical choice, then, was the youngest, Agatha, who would be only two years older than her proposed husband. Yet Agatha was Constantine’s favorite. The emperor, now 53 years old, had been occasionally ill over the last year, and Agatha had served as his devoted personal secretary, assisting him in the administration of the empire.[B]

The embassy of 958 dragged on for weeks, though Liutprand did not seem to mind. For all his polemic and propagandizing, his observations not only of court ceremony but snippets of day-to-day life in 10th century Constantinople have been invaluable to modern historians. Finally, in August, Constantine gave his assent to the match. Part of the Italian embassy returned home to inform Emperor Alberic; the remainder, including Liutprand, waited in Constantinople to accompany the princess. Once preparations had been made, a Greek flotilla carried Agatha, Liutprand, and a small army of servants, eunuchs, guards, and officials to the port of Ancona, where Alberic was waiting.

Despite any misgivings she may have had at the time, the marriage was a profound stroke of luck for Agatha. A little over a year later, Emperor Constantine would be dead. Soon after the succession of his son Romanos as emperor, his wife Theophano would convince him to send all his sisters to an island convent to prevent them from being a threat to his power. Only Agatha’s foreign marriage prevented her from suffering the same fate.

Greeks Bearing Gifts

Constantine may have been reluctant to send his daughter away, but having decided to do so, it was unthinkable that she not be sent in a manner that befitted a porphyrogenita. This was, after all, the emperor who wrote an entire treatise on the importance and conduct of the ceremonies of the imperial palace. Just as he had awed foreign visitors with the automata of his throne room, he would awe the Italians – and, if things went well, his new son-in-law – with the wealth, might, and majesty of the Roman Empire.

Liutprand gives a fulsome description of Agatha’s party, though having been to Constantinople thrice already and dined at the palace on numerous occasions the ostentation of the easterners was no longer a shock to him (as he assures us). Clearly, however, more of an impression was made on others. Liutprand pauses in his descriptions to add an amusing anecdote about a Lombard comes who mistook Agatha’s eunuch servants for foreign princes, as they were more finely dressed than anyone among the Italians save the emperor himself. Liuptrand’s writing focuses mainly on the gifts brought to Alberic – chests full of silk costumes, suits of gilded armor, coffers of precious stones and ornaments, detailed enamelwork and carvings of ivory, and even a number of trained falcons. Among the “gifts” were also people – artisans, artists, and architects who were to become part of Agatha’s new household – but they receive only a passing mention in Liutprand’s narrative.

Liutprand focused on these items with a certain cultural context in mind. Rich dowries were a necessity in post-Carolingian royal relations; the dowry was so important among the ruling class that some contemporary clergymen expressed the opinion that a marriage was actually invalid without it. In an age when concubinage was still common among royalty, dowry separated the wife from the concubine. Usually, dowry came in the form of land, but Constantine was not ceding any territory to Alberic. Correspondingly it was necessary to show the legitimacy of the marriage by interpreting the rich gifts of Constantine as dowry. A great dowry also suggested the great worth of the bride, and the great payment Constantine was willing to make to link his family with Alberic’s. Liutprand, who always in the business of aggrandizing Alberic, was a clever enough man to know how to display the marriage in the best possible light for his western audience.

The Byzantines, however, attached a somewhat different meaning to the giving of gifts. Imperial gifts were seen in the eastern tradition as a sign of the subjection of the recipient to the giver. The lesser kings (archontes) that received rich gifts from the emperor were, in the act of receiving, showing that they were humble recipients of the imperial largesse. Rich gifts from the emperor demonstrated the prosperity and superiority of the empire and the dependence of the recipients upon imperial splendor and might. Constantine was thus adding his own subtext to the arrival of his daughter – Alberic was acknowledged as a basileus, but there remained only one Basileus Rhomaion, and the former was not equal to the latter. Even the specific gifts may have had hidden meanings – Octavian was delighted by the imperial falcons, but one must recall the words of the 10th century Oneirocritikon of Achmet (“Interpretation of Dreams”), known to Constantine: “the hawk and the falcon signify a position of power second from the king.”

The true “gift,” from Liutprand’s point of view, was Agatha herself. She was, in the first place, presented more beautifully than any of Constantine’s other offerings; Liutprand spends a whole chapter on her manners and appearance, noting her garments of purple silk (for a “purple-born” princess, of course, the color is meaningful, and he repeats it often) and precious stones, and what seems to have been some kind of “headdress” of gold and peacock-feathers. He unleashes the full arsenal of his vocabulary to describe the beauty, elegance, and indeed “radiance” of the princess. Agatha was certainly described positively by other chroniclers, but for Liutprand, in whose descriptions the good are always beautiful and the bad are inevitably hideous, she could not be anything but the most beautiful woman in Christendom.

Artist's interpretation of a young Agatha Porphyrogenita
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The Eastern Princess

Yet Agatha was far more than a gilded gift. She was a woman of tremendous intelligence and skill. Constantine, the “scholar-emperor,” placed a very high value on learning and literacy, and all of his daughters received what was probably the best schooling it was possible for a woman to get anywhere in Christendom. He may also have been motivated to do this by the fact that he had only one son, Romanos, who had been born after all his five sisters. It was far from impossible that one of them would end up ruling the empire herself (or alongside a noble consort), and thus of great importance that they be capable of doing so.

Agatha was highly literate in Greek and Latin; some poems of hers, composed in the courtly “Attic” dialect of Medieval Greek, survive today. She was a voracious reader and a patron of translators. Her interests in the arts extended beyond literature; aside from reading, her favored hobby seemed to be painting (something she shared with her father), and while no works of hers are known to survive she was reputed to be excellent. These were all plainly unusual activities for an Italian noblewoman, whose stereotypical pastime was spinning. Liutprand writes that shortly after her coronation at Pavia, the queen confounded the ladies of Alberic’s court (including her new mother-in-law, Gisela of Ivrea) by airily dismissing spinning as the “labor of farmers’ wives.”

Alberic had worked hard to acquire a Byzantine princess for the legitimacy it would give to is house. He may have expected little else than a woman of imperial blood to bear his grandchildren. What he got, however, was a woman who was as competent an administrator as any high official in her father’s empire. Her duties as Constantine’s personal secretary clearly went beyond mere letter-writing or dictation; indeed it is possible, even likely, that during some of Constantine’s bouts with illness late in his life she was effectively the administrative regent of the empire, keeping the immense bureaucracy of Constantinople running smoothly even when the man at its head was absent. By 960 she was already involving herself in the affairs of Alberic’s administration; Liutprand, with a bit of apparent jealousy given his own later title, notes that the chancery clerks came to refer to her informally as the cancellaria (“Chancelloress”). While Octavian amused himself with hunting and hawking, Agatha arranged audiences with civic prefects and exchanged letters with bishops.

Thietmar, the German bishop and chronicler of the late 10th century, complained that the Tusculani were “a house ruled and corrupted by women.” This was certainly a reference to the Empress Marozia, but it was also clearly targeted at his Agatha, the “foreign queen” who had by that time become the august matriarch of the family. If anything, however, it was Agatha who would be the greater influence on the course of 10th century Italy than her grandmother-in-law, whose talents had never included rulership.

This was not yet in evidence in 958, when Agatha was just a young woman who had (as far as we know) never before left Thrace, and was now a diplomatic bride-to-be in a foreign land.

Late Roman golden tableware​

The Wedding Tour

Royal marriages were closely linked with coronations, and were often rolled into the same ceremony. Alberic’s Italy, however, had two symbolic hearts, Rome and Pavia. It was necessary for the coronation to be in Pavia, as Agatha was in 958 to be only Queen of Italy, not empress, but Alberic also desired to display his new daughter-in-law in Rome, either for political or symbolic reasons. Thus he opted to take the highly unusual route of having the actual wedding in Rome, but effectively celebrating the wedding twice – once as a wedding feast in Rome, and the second time as a “coronation feast” in Pavia.

From Ancona, the imperial party traveled on the Via Flaminia, once the backbone of the Exarchate of Ravenna, across the peninsula to Rome. There they were joined by Octavian, who had been purposefully left behind in Rome so he would not meet his new bride until the time of the wedding. Liutprand, who traveled with the wedding tour, noted Agatha’s astonishment at the decrepit state of the great city, which by that time was composed largely of ruin-strewn fields within its massive walls. Liutprand records her taking particular interest in the equestrian statue of Constantine, who was thought to be her ancestor.[2] She visited the tombs and relics of the saints. A later rumor claimed that she went to Subiaco to visit her soon-to-be-grandmother-in-law Marozia at her convent and received her blessing; Marozia may still have been alive at the time, but the supposed visit is unmentioned by any contemporary and the tale probably originated in the 12th century.

King Octavian and Agatha were married on October 1st at the Basilica of Saint Paul, and a feast with the Roman nobles was held at a Tusculani palace in the city. After remaining there for several days, the party proceeded north to Lucca, and from there to Pavia, where Octavian crowned his wife as Queen of Italy on October 28th. A great feast was held the following day. For Alberic it was also a victory feast; the last holdouts of the 957 rebellion had finally surrendered, or very nearly so, returning the kingdom to a state of peace.

Everywhere she went, Agatha was the talk of the Italians, though it was by no means all positive. She astounded the nobility of Rome and Pavia alike when, while they took up the meat with their hands, the queen took out “a golden fork which she used to spit the meat and raise it to her mouth.”[C] Her eunuch servants were considered bizarre in Lombardy, and some took offense at the fact that her handmaidens were more richly dressed than the wives of the Lombard counts. She made for an impressive and exotic sight, but there was from the very beginning grumbling about her ostentation and general “foreign-ness.”

It was a moment of triumph for Alberic, who was at the height of his prestige and power in Lombardy. The man whose star rose the most abruptly, however, was Liutprand, whom Alberic rewarded magnificently for the successful conclusion of his mission. He was given the title of archicancellarius (Arch-chancellor), which made him the head of the imperial chancery and thus nominally Alberic’s prime minister. In 962, with the death of the previous occupant, Liutprand was made the Bishop of Mantua as well.

The Emperors’ League

In practical terms, the alliance between the two emperors sealed by the marriage of Agatha had few immediate consequences. The threat from Al-Mu’izz in 968 turned out to be less significant than thought: On its way to attack the Byzantines at Otranto, the fleet of Hasan and Ammar al-Kalbi was almost totally destroyed in a storm, and Ammar drowned. By the end of the year, the Caliph agreed to a five-year truce with Constantine.

Constantine VII died in November of 959, and was succeeded by his son Romanos II. While the subsequent imprisonment of Agatha’s sisters did aggrieve Agatha, Alberic did not let the outrage of his daughter-in-law affect his policy towards Romanos, which remained pacific. The marriage does seem to have stopped any further interference by Alberic in the affairs of the southern Lombards for the rest of his reign. While Alberic maintained relations with Naples, Gaeta, and Capua, he did not seek to pry away their allegiance or launch any military campaigns hostile to the Byzantines.

The only proposed “joint operation” was apparently a request by Alberic in 961 for Byzantine naval support for an attack against Fraxinet, in keeping with Alberic’s earlier promise to support Lothair of Provence against the Muslims. At the time, however, the Byzantine army and navy were heavily engaged in an invasion of Crete that would not be successfully completed until the next year, and no operation against Fraxinet seems to have taken place.

In 963, Emperor Romanos II unexpectedly died at the age of 25. The two sons of Romanos were too young to rule, and the throne was seized by the general Nikephoros II Phokas, who married Theophano, the widow of Romanos. This immediately had a chilling effect on Rome-Constantinople relations, as Nikephoros had a much more conservative view of the imperial dignity than Constantine and made it very clear to Alberic’s ambassadors that he considered there to be only one basileus. There were also personal reasons for the breach – Romanos was suspicious of Agatha’s in-laws and may have considered them a potential threat to his rule, while Agatha was convinced that Theophano had poisoned her brother and Nikephoros had been her accomplice. This antipathy would not lead to war in Alberic's life, but it would complicate the reign of his son.

Next Time: The Conqueror

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Medieval Greek sources usually render Alberic’s name as Alpherikos and title him as Basileos Phrangias (Emperor of the Franks) or more rarely Basileos Longobardon (Emperor of the Lombards). Some confusion was apparently caused by the fact that in the west, Alberic was often known as Albericus Romanus (“Alberic the Roman”), which some Greeks assumed was a name (Romanos) rather than a title, and thereby concluded that Alpherikos – plainly a barbarian name – took the “proper” Greek name Romanos upon becoming emperor. This led to several later Byzantine histories listing “Romanos” as the first Tusculan emperor, followed by his son Oktavianos.
[2] She was wrong on two counts. Firstly, though the Macedonian emperors claimed descent from Constantine, this was very likely a fiction to conceal that Basil I was born to a peasant family. Secondly, the famous bronze equestrian statue of a Roman emperor was assumed to be Constantine in the medieval period, but it is now known to be a statue of Marcus Aurelius.

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] The timeline of conflict between Constantine and Al-Mu’izz ITTL is identical to OTL.
[B] The age of Constantine’s five daughters is not known. We know that they were born before Romanos, and there’s one reference I’ve found to Agatha being the youngest. I’ve decided to interpret her date of birth in a manner that’s the most favorable to me, making her only two years older than Romanos. We don’t actually know that Agatha was her father’s favorite IOTL, but the bit about her being his private secretary when he was ill is true, as is the likelihood that she was indeed well-educated and administratively competent. The further details of Agatha – like her painting hobby – are made up by me, though Constantine was indeed a painter.
[C] The fork anecdote, as well as a number of details of Agatha’s party, is based off the arrival IOTL of the Byzantine princess Theophano, the wife of Otto II, in Germany in 972. She too amazed the local nobility by eating with a fork.

 

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XIV. The Conqueror​

Personifications of Slavia, Germany, France, and Rome paying tribute to Otto, late 10th c.
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Prince Taksony

The chronology of Magyar rulers in the 10th century is highly uncertain, but within several years of the Magyar defeat at Augsburg the fejedelem (ruling prince) Zoltan was replaced by his son Taksony.[1] Known in the Latin west as “Taxis,” Taksony had been the leader of the 947 invasion of Lombardy that had killed King Anscar and destroyed his army. Taksony first turned his attention to the Byzantines, but a major Magyar raid into Thrace around 960 was defeated by strategos Marianos Argyros, who had been re-deployed there after concluding a peace with the Fatimids in 958. Taksony finally achieved modest success against the Germans with a devastating raid into Bohemia in 962, which achieved its objective of plundering the country before King Otto of Germany could mount a counter-attack.

The early 960s also saw the renewal of Magyar raids into Italy. Friuli and Emilia were plundered by an incursion in 960. A larger force entered the country and turned south in 962, and spent several months raiding Byzantine Apulia. Part of that force, however, was attacked and defeated on their way back through Spoleto by Duke Crescentius, and King Octavian managed to ambush another detachment as they made a crossing over the river Po. While Alberic’s Italy was not truly capable of defending its borders from Magyar incursions, improved organization of defenses in Friuli made it increasingly difficult for raiders to return safely with their loot. Denied in every direction, with their great raids now tending to result in more spilled Magyar blood than plunder, Taksony was forced into strategy of border raids against Bavaria and Carinthia (whose duke, Henry II, was still underage), and occasionally striking out on larger attacks when political opportunity permitted. It was a sensible course of action, but one that likely eroded his leadership of his people – the Magyar raiders had thrived on a plunder economy, and the promise of immense profit and glory was no longer one Taksony could reliably offer.

Succession

Apart from these occasional Magyar raids, Alberic’s reign following the 958 amicitia was largely peaceful. Italy was untroubled by any serious internal revolt. The emperor had attempted to gain Byzantine support for an attack on Fraxinet in 961, but Emperor Romanos II was too busy with an invasion of Crete. Alberic and King Lothair of Burgundy went ahead with an offensive against the Saracens in the summer of 963, with Alberic’s fleet composed of ships largely from Pisa and Luni blockaded the coastal fortress of Fraxinet while Lothair’s army besieged it from the landward side. The effort was complicated by poor coordination, however, and Alberic’s levy fleet was scattered and damaged by a storm. Despite defeating the Saracens in a land battle near the fortress, the Provencal attempt against Fraxinet itself was unsuccessful, and the enclave would remain a threat to the Christian states for a while longer.

In November of 964, King Octavian was interrupted during a boar hunt near Cividale by a messenger who bore news that his father, the emperor, was gravely ill. Octavian rode quickly to Mantua, the present site of the emperor’s itinerant court. A cough had evidently turned into pneumonia. For a while, Alberic seemed to rally, but then his health took a rapid turn for the worse. On December 9th, Albericus Romanus, the man who rose from the son of a countess to the Emperor of Rome, breathed his last at the age of 52. His final achievement was among the greatest of his reign: he was the first Italian ruler in a century to die in his own bed in his own country, neither perishing by violence nor dying in exile.

There were no challengers to the succession of Octavian within Italy. He had already long since been elected and crowned as co-king, and his only brother, Deodatus,[A] was fifteen years old and had been dedicated to the Church by his father. At the time of his father’s death, he was 26 years old, the son of the last king and the nephew of his predecessor. The transition to his rule seemed as though it would be seamless.

Outside the kingdom, however, the eyes of the King of Germany turned to the now-vacant imperial throne. Otto had agreed to recognize Alberic as emperor, but Alberic was dead, and Octavian had not been crowned as such by the pope. It has been suggested that Otto had already been preparing a campaign against the Magyars, believing that the time had come for Germany to subject them in the same manner it had subjected Denmark, Bohemia, and the Wends. Otto, however, had missed the chance to intervene after a royal death in 947, and he was not going to miss it again. As soon as it was logically possible, the German king led a Swabian-Bavarian army over the Brenner Pass into Italy. Octavian seemed to grasp the severity of the threat, and did not go immediately running after the enemy. Instead he sent his loyal miles to drum up the support of his vassals and rally an army at Mantua.

The Siege of Mantua

Otto’s advance was rapid. The bishop of Verona surrendered the city to him, and he soon lay siege to Mantua as Octavian still awaited more forces. Mantua was a strong defensive position, re-fortified by Alberic and surrounded by marshlands. Nevertheless, its stores were not extensive, and Octavian’s attempts to degrade Otto’s forces with the brilliant sallies he had managed at Pavia in 957 were unsuccessful and costly. Octavian had a stroke of luck when a Venetian flotilla managed to force its way up the Mincino river and restock Alberic’s stores. The Doge of Venice, Pietro IV Candiano, was in fact a staunch ally of Octavian.

A brief historical detour will explain why. Pietro was the son of the former doge, Pietro III, and had originally been associated in the office with his father, but the two had fallen out and the younger Pietro seems to have attempted a rebellion. He was defeated and captured, but his father’s intercession saved him from execution, and he was instead exiled to the mainland in 950. Pietro offered his services to the then-king, Alberic of Rome. He was certainly present in the campaigns against Italian rebels in the wake of the 951 and 952 German invasions, as well as the Battle of Augusta in 953 and Alberic’s luckless march into southern Italy in 955. He seems to have attached himself principally to the young Octavian, who at some point after 955 aided him in the creation of a fleet, with which he blockaded Venice and attacked its ships. After several years of this predation, his father died, and the Venetians – perhaps seeking to co-opt their persecutor – elected his renegade son as the new doge.

Liutprand alleges, rather incredibly, that Octavian “conspired” against his father to arrange the marriage of Pietro his sister Marina in 962, as Alberic had intended that both his daughters be given to the church.[2] It is difficult to imagine Alberic acquiescing to the “theft” of his own daughter in such a way, and it has been suggested that Marina herself – seventeen years of age at the time of her marriage – may have been an active participant (or indeed the primary actor) in this “conspiracy” in order to avoid having to take the vows. What we know of her later career seems to bear this out - she was a politically active (and at times divisive) Dogaressa of Venice, very much unlike her mild and pious older sister Theodora who was eventually to be revered as a saint.[3] Pietro, however, needed no urging from his wife to assist Octavian in 965. As a dowry, Pietro had received extensive lands in Friuli, and for their use swore his fealty to Alberic and Octavian, thereby placing Venice at their disposal.[B]

The arrival of the Venetian flotilla buoyed the morale of Octavian’s men, but Otto and his engineers worked to ensure that Pietro would not be able to repeat this stunt, and built boats, bridges, and wooden towers to obstruct further reinforcement. A second attempt two weeks later was driven back with two of the Venetian cargo ships captured by the Germans. In March, six weeks into the siege, an attack to relieve the city was launched from the outside by Duke Crescentius of Spoleto. He successfully routed Otto’s Bavarian troops south of the city, but was counter-attacked by the Swabians and defeated. Crescentius managed to escape, but any hope of outside relief seemed lost.

There was growing hunger and desperation within the city, but Otto’s forces were also weakened, as the malarial marshes took their toll on the foreign invaders and the German soldiers began to grumble about the hardship of a siege so far from home that had now dragged on for nearly three months. Several attempts to overwhelm the defenders in a surprise attack had failed, with heavy casualties on both sides. According to Liutprand, Octavian – who was seemingly always prone to mercurial shifts in mood – descended into a black depression, refusing even to speak with his lieutenants. The 28 year old Queen Agatha continued to direct the city’s defense, but eventually sought terms with Otto, who had been urged by his vassal Duke Burchard IIIto come to a deal.

Otto would not be denied his imperial crown, but he was willing to recognize Octavian as his vassal king. In addition, he demanded that the March of Friuli be ceded to German control. Agatha either convinced her husband to accept or accepted on his behalf. In early May, the siege was lifted, and Octavian was compelled to join Otto in a march on Rome.

Pope Constantine II had been a loyal pontiff to Alberic, but he was not a man of great bravery. The real power in the city was wielded by Gratianus, the city prefect, who had apparently replaced Demetrius around 960. With Otto’s army outside the walls and King Octavian in his custody, the prefect opted to give no resistance and opened the gates to the invaders. On May 19th 965, Otto, King of the Germans, was crowned as Imperator Romanorum. It was the culmination to a stunning display of Otto’s power; the independence of Italy that Alberic had worked carefully for years to maintain was dashed apart within a few months of his death.

Alberic had studiously observed his alliance with Constantinople, but Otto was under no such obligation and considered southern Italy to be his by the fact of his new crown. Marching to Capua, he received the allegiance of its co-princes, the brothers Landulf and Pandulf. A campaign against the Byzantines in Italy, however, would have to be delayed; word now arrived from the north that the Magyars had taken advantage of his war with Octavian to launch a major attack on Bavaria. Otto retreated north, leaving Octavian at Bologna and installing his son Liudolf in Verona before crossing back over the mountains.

"Bishop Liutprand is threatened at Ratisbon," early 20th c. print
​

The Sergian Crisis

Although Otto had accomplished his lightning invasion with little support from inside the kingdom, Octavian’s defeat suggested new possibilities for all those who had chafed under the rule of Alberic. In Lombardy, bishops and noblemen alike began to cozy up to Liudolf, now ruling as Margrave of Friuli, and distancing themselves from Octavian. The semblance of order Alberic had managed to impose upon Lombardy by the repeated crushing of rebellions vanished like mist; any lord or bishop with a on obligation they wished to shirk or privilege they wished to confirm merely turned to Liudolf if Octavian would not indulge them, and Liudolf was only too happy to help and thereby increase his nominal power in Lombardy. Octavian could take no forceful action against Otto’s son without risking the kingdom he had left. Even Prefect Gratianus began to assert his own independence from Octavian in the home of the Tusculani clan, leaving only Tuscany and Spoleto (under Crescentius) as fully loyal constituents of Octavian’s much-diminished kingdom.

In June of 967, Pope Constantine II died. Gratianus was in effective control of Rome, but he did not dare appoint a pope himself. Octavian considered himself the rightful Prince of Rome in the mold of his father, and asserted his right to approve Constantine’s successor. Gratianus, who had since shifted his allegiance to the Germans, opposed his entry into the city, but Octavian had significant support within the city. When Octavian attacked the walls, a revolt against Gratianus broke out nearly simultaneously within them. The prefect fled the city, and Octavian was cheered as a liberator. As his candidate he selected his uncle Sergius, the Bishop of Nepi, who took the throne as Pope Sergius IV. This was completely intolerable to Emperor Otto, who based on the precedent set by the Carolingian emperors considered the approval of a new pope to be his own exclusive right. When word reached him of Octavian’s actions, Otto sent a delegation to Italy to demand that the king come before the German emperor to explain himself. Octavian refused, sending a delegation in his stead, headed by Liutprand, the Bishop of Mantua, who was Alberic’s archicancellarius and may have continued in that role under Octavian.

If this was intended to be a diplomatic gesture, it failed miserably. Liutprand came before the emperor at Ratisbon and was treated discourteously by Otto, who was infuriated that Octavian had not come in person and considered Liutprand’s embassy to be an insult and a rejection of his authority. Curtly dismissed in the presence of the emperor, Liutprand launched into an apparently impromptu invective. To the emperor’s face and in the presence of his court, the Bishop of Mantua denounced Otto as a usurper and tyrant who had no rights in Rome. If Otto wished to come to Rome, Liutprand said, he should “come as a barefoot penitent, for he is Rome’s servant, not its master.” According to both Liutprand and Thietmar, this outrage caused a German lord (the sources disagree on who, exactly, it was) to draw his sword and move as if to strike Liutprand; he was stopped only by the physical intervention of Ulrich, Bishop of Augsburg. Ulrich was a steadfast Ottonian loyalist and clearly did not intervene for love of Liutprand, but he was also a man of intelligence and great moral character (who would later be revered as a saint) who surely realized the great scandal that would be caused by the murder of a bishop and emissary at the imperial court. Liutprand’s life was saved, but he was angrily dismissed from the court, and Otto prepared a new invasion of Italy.[C]

The Flight

Otto’s army came over the Brenner Pass in March of 968. Octavian had spent the previous winter thoroughly burning whatever bridges remained with Otto by raiding in Emilia and Lombardy, targeting the counts and bishops that had adhered to Liudolf. Upon Otto’s arrival in Friuli, Octavian seems to have resolved to meet him in the field. That was always a dangerous gamble, especially against the powerful German army, but a campaign of sieges may not have offered much more – the chance that Otto would agree to a negotiated solution as in 965 was remote, and Otto had taken pains to take a full siege train and complement of engineers to prevent this invasion from faltering as his last invasion had at the walls of Mantua.

The confrontation came in early May in Emilia, near the city of Regium (Reggio Emilia). We have no detailed source for the battle itself, but all sources agree that Octavian was outmatched; no bold leadership or clever stratagem was to overcome Otto’s superior numbers, quality, and leadership. Octavian was decisively defeated, and he and the remainder of his force fled into Tuscany. He and his lieutenants attempted to mount a defense there, but Otto moved inexorably forward, besieging castles and cities while a detachment under Liudolf pursued Octavian and ravaged the lands of those who harbored him. In July, with his position rapidly deteriorating, Octavian followed the example of Hugh. With his family, his most loyal retainers, and his treasury, the King of Italy boarded a galley in Pisa and fled the country.

Octavian’s first port of call was Naples, where Duke John III, Alberic’s cousin-in-law, still ruled. John was happy to receive the exiled king and his most noble wife, but was unable to offer them safe harbor for long. Otto, having ejected Octavian from Tuscany, marched on Rome and deposed Pope Sergius, who was stripped of his vestments and imprisoned in a monastery. Otto convened a synod at Rome and engineered the selection of Gregory, a Roman nobleman who was willing to be a collaborator. The newly elected Pope Gregory V was disliked by the Roman people, but Otto’s might and pacified the city at least temporarily.

Otto then marched on Naples. Duke John admitted that he could not protect them if Otto was so bold as to attack a Byzantine vassal – which he was – and so provided him with several ships and some of his own men to take the royal family into refuge elsewhere. There were, unfortunately, few options. The Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros II was hostile to Agatha and Octavian. Relations between Alberic and Lothair of Provence had been good, but it was doubtful that Lothair would be brave enough to shelter Octavian in defiance of Otto. In the end, Octavian and his family fled to a place where Otto, who had no fleet to speak of, could not follow – Corsica.[D]

Otto in the South

Although Emperor Nikephoros had made great strides against Byzantine enemies in the east, an attempt to reconquer Sicily with a large force had failed miserably in 964. The army and fleet had been annihilated by the Fatimids, and the army’s commander Manuel Phokas, the emperor’s cousin, had been killed. In 965, a revolt broke out in Calabria against the Byzantine governor Nikephoros Hexakionites, who had raised taxes on the citizens to help rebuild the ships that had been lost in the previous year. It was put down, but only with difficulty, and the unrest further weakened Byzantine power there.

After the flight of Octavian from Naples, Otto first marched on Spoleto, where Duke Crescentius now stood alone. The duke knelt to the German emperor and swore his allegiance, and Otto allowed him to retain his lands. Otto called Crescentius, along with his son-in-law Prince Landulf of Capua (Landulf had married Crescentius’ daughter Theodora around 960), to join him in an invasion of Byzantine Apulia. This met with considerable success, and the imperial force took Sipious that winter and defeated a Byzantine relief army west of Bari in September of 968.

Leaving Pandulf and Crescentius temporarily in charge of prosecuting the war in the south, Otto returned to Lombardy, where he secured the coronation of Liudolf as King of Italy. He set about remaking the kingdom into great estates, installing Adalbert, eldest son of the late Margrave Berengar of Ivrea, in the recreated March of Ivrea, but giving much of the southern portion of that march to Aleram, the Count of Vercelli, who was created as Margrave of Liguria. Then, returning to Rome with his son, he had him crowned as co-emperor, a practice common in the east but never before done by the Carolingian emperors or the reguli.

Otto wanted not only southern Italy, but what Alberic had managed to get – a purple-born bride for his grandson Otto, Liudolf’s son, now 14 years old. Emperor Nikephoros accepted a German delegation, but he may have only received it to buy time - he thought it bad enough that a porphyrogenita had gone to Octavian, and was not about to make such a concession to Otto no matter how bleak the situation looked in Italy. While the German delegates waited fruitlessly, Nikephoros negotiated a peace with the Fatimid Caliph Al-Mu’izz, accepting the final loss of Sicily as the price of avoiding fighting a war with both the Germans and the Fatimids at once.

Otto had returned to Germany in early 969, allowing the ambassadors to do their work and leaving Crescentius and Landulf to continue putting military pressure on Nikephoros. That summer, however, a Greek army landed in Apulia, sharply defeated the Spoletan-Capuan forces, and relieved the ongoing siege of Bari. Otto was unable to come immediately to their assistance – he was leading his own campaign into Pannonia in an imitation of Duke Henry in 950. The raid was a success, and Taksony was compelled to pay Otto tribute, though the same type of campaign that had reduced the Slavs to vassalage was impossible here. The Slavs were farmers who gathered in fortified settlements that could be besieged, conquered, and held; the Magyars were still largely nomads who could simply pack up and move when the Germans advanced. Although the Germans could boast of successfully taking the fight to their enemy and compelling his submission, any mastery of the Magyars could only be temporary.

970 seemed likely to be a favorable year for Otto. Having pacified the Magyars, he was free to launch a new campaign into southern Italy. A change in leadership also made his chances at a favorable settlement with Constantinople seem better – Nikephoros had been assassinated and replaced in December of 969 by his once-friend and subordinate John Tzimiskes with the aid of Nikephoros’s wife, Theophano (the widow of Romanos II). It was alleged that John and Theophano had become lovers, and that John was resentful after being stripped of his command by Nikephoros. Although Otto was unlikely to have known of John’s disposition towards the imperial ambitions of the Germans, he was at least not Nikephoros, and might be more willing to deal once new pressure was applied.

Before he could confront the Greeks, however, Otto had to deal with Rome. The Romans had never liked Pope Gregory V, and in the spring of 970 a revolt broke out against the pope and Prefect Gratianus. Gratianus and Gregory had taken refuge in the Fortress of the Holy Angel across the Tiber and withstood all attack against them, but could not regain control of the city. Both the rebels and the prefect appealed to Crescentius, but he seems to have done nothing until the arrival of Otto in Lombardy. The prefect then shifted his appeals to Otto, while the people sent word to Corsica, where Octavian had been in exile for the past two years. Both monarchs now set their eyes upon Rome and the restoration of their rule over that most venerable city.

Tusculani family tree as of 964 (click for huge). Note that this tree
reflects the family immediately after Alberic's death and is not current
for this chapter, which goes until 970.
​

Next Time: Revanche

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Zoltan may not have been immediately succeeded by Taksony; De Administrando Imperii of Constantine VII claims the leader of the Magyars c. 950 was Fajsz, who is believed to have been Taksony’s cousin. By the late 950s, however, Taksony was certainly in overall command.
[2] It has been suggested that politics, rather than piety, was Alberic’s reason for planning for all of his children save Octavian to enter a church career. The value of his daughters as diplomatic brides seems to have been low given his rather poor or nonexistent relations with the rest of the Latin kingdoms. Alberic himself had justified taking the crown of Italy by his marriage to a woman of the Anscarid house, and may have wanted to prevent any future “allies” from claiming Italy in this way. He does not seem to have had the same misgivings about his nieces Marozia and Orania, who were married to key local lords (Marozia to Count Peter of Ravenna, and Orania to Manfred of Auriate, the son and heir of Count-Patrician Arduin).
[3] The fact that Pietro was already married did not hamper him from accepting his new bride. He repudiated his previous wife, who was in any case disliked by the Venetians as she was of common birth. One assumes the daughter of an emperor was immeasurably preferable.

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] Deodatus is the direct Latin translation of the Greek name Theodoros (“god has given” or “gift of god”). Sometimes rendered as Adeodatus, the name appears in the Late Roman period (it was the name of the son of Saint Augustine) and as late as the 7th century (in which two popes had that name) but after then it seems to have died out and been replaced by its Greek counterpart (except in France, where it survives today as Dieudonne). For some reason it pops up in the Tusculani family tree IOTL. I don’t know why a family that so often named girls “Theodora” would decide to use the Latin version for a son.
[B] Special thanks to Daztur, who scanned some pages out of his book on Venice to give me some background on Pietro IV. Thanks Daztur!
[C] This fictional event is inspired by a similar occasion in the life of the 12th century emperor Frederick “Barbarossa,” whose vassal Otto von Wittelsbach allegedly had to be physically restrained by the emperor from killing a cardinal who was acting as a Papal legate. The legate had been sent by Pope Adrian IV, and his offense had been to suggest that the empire was a “benefice” granted by the Pope, which could be understood to imply a feudal relationship in which Frederick was Adrian’s vassal. Otto apparently took his lord’s honor very seriously. (In fact, the picture provided is a modern illustration of that very event.)
[D] This is an echo of the real-life Adalbert of Ivrea, the son of Berengar, who fled to Corsica and from there launched two unsuccessful attempts to retake Italy from Otto.[/B]

 

[Carp]

XV. Revanche​

Ruins of a medieval tower by the Gulf of Sagone in Corsica [A]​

The King of the Isle

The island of Corsica had been recovered from the Vandals by the famed Belisarius in the 6th century. After nearly 200 years of nominal and largely ineffective rule from distant Constantinople, the island was conquered by the Lombards around 725. Charlemagne had added it to his empire in the late 8th century, but in the years after his imperial coronation it was increasingly beset by Andalusian mujahideen, whom the Christians considered merely pirates. Responsibility for the island’s protection was given to Boniface, Count of Lucca, who was Charlemagne’s governor in Italy. Boniface made a spirited attempt to bring peace to the island, building several fortresses and largely succeeding at keeping the invaders at bay. His sound policies were continued by his son, Boniface II, who went as far as launching a retaliatory raid against Muslim Africa. After his death in 838, however, his successors became preoccupied with the politics of a steadily destabilizing Carolingian continent, and the Saracens returned. Margrave Adalbert of Tuscany attempted a restoration in the mid-9th century, but was largely unsuccessful at expelling the Saracen menace. Most of the coastline was abandoned, including the two old Roman coastal cities of Adjacium (Ajaccio) and Aleria. The Corsicans retreated into the mountains and fought an ongoing low-level guerilla war against the Saracen pirates, much like their ancestors had resisted Roman domination in ancient times when the island was notorious for banditry and rebelliousness.

By 930, the Corsicans – possibly with some perfunctory support from Berengar or Hugh – seem to have reclaimed the parts of the island which had been possessed permanently by the Saracens. Piracy, however, remained a problem, and the locals were unable to stop Andalusi corsairs from using the island’s coves as temporary berths from which to launch attacks on Provence and Liguria. A Fatimid fleet had sacked Genoa and raided Corsica and Sardinia on its return voyage in 934, and neither Emperor Hugh nor the Corsicans had been able to do anything about it. Neither Anscar nor Alberic had made any serious effort to enforce their authority on the island, but conditions had improved there nonetheless thanks to the growth of Pisan naval influence and political changes in Africa and Andalusia. Saracen raids were now infrequent, albeit not eliminated. Corsica was not entirely isolated from the rest of Christendom – contact with the mainland had been maintained by the occasional Pisan mariner and more importantly the Church, which still had to appoint and dispatch bishops. Thus, even though no deputy of Alberic (as far as is known) ever set foot on the island, he and his son Octavian were known there, albeit only as distant, purely nominal kings.

Liutprand hardly mentions Octavian’s two years in Corsica.[1] Instead, the narrative here is taken up by Basil Notarius (“Basil the Notary/Scribe”), a Byzantine priest who had been sent to Italy as part of the wedding retinue of Agatha.[B] Basil’s chronicle is fragmentary, but a valuable source of information on Octavian’s reign and the only source for his life in Corsica. Basil is a clear partisan of Agatha, and his view of Octavian is far more balanced than Liutprand’s propaganda. He is not afraid to criticize Octavian, sometimes quite harshly – the king, according to Basil, was often boorish and crude, was a captive to his emotions and frequently given to outbursts of anger or sullen depression, was illiterate and uninterested in art or learning, and had an useemly fondness for violence. His worst sin in Basil’s mind was his serial infidelity to Agatha; Basil notes with distaste that “the king wooed and showered gifts upon maidens that caught his eye as if he had no wife at all… where he traveled men would parade their daughters and nieces before him, detestably proffering to the king their precious virtue in the hope that one would catch his fancy and they would gain his favor thereby, much to the peril of their souls.” But Octavian also had qualities Basil admired – when not in a depression, he was energetic and irrepressible; he was always courageous; he had a keen sense of justice, often harsh but usually fair; and he had sympathy for the common people and did not disdain them. Basil’s description of his morose “black moods” and his great energy and excitability when not affected by them has caused some pop historians to claim Octavian had bipolar disorder or some similar ailment, but posthumous diagnosis of king who died a millennium ago is surely a fool’s errand.

Octavian was in poor spirits upon his flight from Italy, but his Corsican exile seemed to have a salutary effect on him. The arrival of an Italian king and a Byzantine princess in Corsica was a remarkable occurrence to a people so long neglected, and Basil writes that Octavian and Agatha were welcomed warmly by the Corsicans. Octavian spent only two years upon the island, but it passed in a whirl of activity. The island was divided into innumerable mountain-valley communities and petty lordships, and while Octavian’s army was slight compared to any in Italy, in Corsica he was a giant among pygmies. Men came to him for judgments and for redress of grievances by their neighbors. He was best known for upholding the rights against the common people against the lords of the south, who at first resisted his rule; when the locally powerful Count of Cinarca defied his command, Octavian attacked and killed him, and made Cinarca’s tower overlooking the Gulf of Sagone his new headquarters. Thereafter even the southern lords bent their knees and accepted his judgments. Basil reported that he led a successful ambush of a party of Saracens who had drawn up their ships and emcamped at Ajaccio, capturing their ships and enslaving the pirates, who he used to expand and fortify his new “capital.” The king dubbed Cinarca’s former home Octavianopolis, but the name that caught on locally was Torregia, a corruption of the medieval Latin for “royal tower.” He attracted a retinue of young Corsican men, who joined him in hunting, feasting, and combat despite their mostly common origins, and followed him loyally about the country.

Based on both local legends and Basil’s account, Octavian was a highly successful and widely beloved King of Corsica, all the more so for only ruling there for two years. Yet when the invitation came from Rome in 970 to deliver the city from Emperor Otto, Octavian did not hesitate to leave his miniature kingdom – he had a birthright to claim. He seems to have taken much of his Corsican “retinue” with him, though it is unlikely this amounted to more than a few dozen men; later claims that he brought a “Corsican army” with him to Rome are surely overblown, as Corsica had no such thing to offer. Octavian left no regent in Corisca, though he appointed the brother-in-law of the late Count of Cinarca as the castellan of Octavianopolis. Aside from this, he left the island much as he had found it, albeit with a somewhat chastened noble class.

He may, however, have left one loose end that was eventually to have more significant consequences. According to local legend, having destroyed Cinarca, Octavian savored his victory by feasting in the count’s own hall and then seducing the count’s young widow. The countess, Petronella, was found to be with child after Octavian’s departure. While the timing left the issue of paternity ambiguous, Petronella herself seemed to have no doubt, as she named the son she bore in 971 “Octavian.”

The Imperial City

Aside from a sense of optimism, it is uncertain what caused Octavian to think that he would be able to contest Rome with Otto in 970. The flotilla of ships under his command carried a force too small to be worthy of the name of “army,” while Otto had deliberately prepared a large German expeditionary force to strike a decisive blow against the Greeks in the south. It was not in any sense a fair contest.

Octavian reached Rome well before Otto, and was hailed by the citizens as their liberator. The rather grim Tusculani legacy in the city, represented by Marozia’s reign of fear and the iron-fisted regime of Alberic that followed it, seems to have been totally forgotten. Octavian’s uncle, Pope Sergius IV, was freed and reinstated on the throne. Yet Otto was already on his way through Tuscany on his quest to suppress the rebellion, and the best efforts of Octavian could not even dislodge Prefect Gratianus from his fortress across the river. This rendered the city plainly indefensible, and after only ruling the city for a week, Octavian abandoned it again on Otto’s approach. A desperate defense by the people was quickly broken, and Otto once again was master of Rome. Gratianus and Pope Gregory V were again restored. To establish a clearer precedent for the papal succession, Otto and Gregory drew up a treaty, which as far as we are aware entailed a reform of the papal election system and probably an explicit reiteration of the emperor’s right to confirm a newly elected pope.

We do not know the exact text of the treaty because it was so briefly in effect.[C] The favorite prince of the Romans had failed to recover his city, but the deadliest weapon of the Romans was already at work. The hilltop fortress of Tusculum had originally been built as a refuge for the ancient Roman upper classes to escape the hot and unhealthy summers of Rome, and since the fall of the empire Rome had become even more unhealthy. Fields around the city had been reclaimed by marshes, and the destruction of the aqueducts had forced the inhabitants of the city to crowd in the flood plain of the Tiber, the Campus Martius, where mosquitos thrived. The summer Otto spent at Rome in 970 was especially hot and humid, and his rule there coincided neatly with a severe outbreak of the “Roman Fever” – almost certainly malaria. The Germans dropped like flies, and Otto himself became severely ill. Liudolf directed a withdrawal from the city, but it was too late for the German Emperor, who died on August 2nd at Viterbo.[D]

Octavian had sailed to Gaeta after his withdrawal from Rome; he had learned that the hostile emperor Nikephoros II Phokas had been assassinated in the previous year, and his throne had been usurped by his former subordinate John Tzimiskes. According to Basil, Octavian hoped to make contact with John and gain Byzantine support for his return. While in Gaeta, however, Octavian heard of the plague in Rome, abandoned these plans, and returned to his family’s old castle of Tusculum in the hills above Rome. By the time he arrived, the Germans had withdrawn and Otto had just died. Once he was satisfied that the plague seemed to be subsiding, he descended into Rome with his little army. Pope Sergius, who had fled the city and returned alongside Octavian, claimed that the plague had been the judgment of God against the foreign king and his false pope, and the people turned their despair at the losses of the plague into a righteous fury directed at Gratianus and Gregory. The prefect was beaten to death in the streets by a mob, while Gregory was captured by Octavian’s men only to be strangled in prison not long thereafter. The act continued an unbroken precedent of four generations, stretching back to Theophylact, of Tusculani rulers disposing of a pontiff in such a way.

Now Octavian called his uncle Crescentius to his aid, who had watched patiently from Spoleto as all this had unfolded. The duke had been unwilling to take any part in Octavian’s seemingly hopeless plan to take Rome from Otto, but now that Otto was dead, his duty to family came to the fore. Crescentius and Octavian pursued the retreating Liudolf. No decisive battle was fought, but he was harried all the way to Arezzo, where he was finally able to take refuge with his army. Unable for the moment to take Arezzo, the Tusculani returned to Rome, where on August 20th Octavian was crowned by his uncle as Imperator Romanorum, and Agatha as his Imperatrix.

Imperial Priorities

Liudolf had already been crowned King of Germany, King of Italy, and Roman Emperor alongside his father. He controlled far more of Italy than Octavian did, and on balance he could reasonably claim the loyalty of many more of its feudatories. Even with his plague-winnowed army, he could have very easily campaigned against Octavian on favorable terms after regrouping at Arezzo. Yet the core of Otto’s “empire” was not Italy, but Germany, and Liudolf knew that Otto’s death would send dangerous shock waves throughout the northern kingdom.

Two claimants could potentially contest the throne of Germany with him. The first was his half-brother Bruno, the son of Otto and Empress Alda of Provence. Bruno was royal and imperial on both sides of the family; Alda’s father, after all, was Hugh, once emperor and king in Italy. Alda had developed her own following and allies in the German court (particularly, it seems, among the clergy) in apparent opposition to Liudolf, and might use them to try and usurp the throne for her own son. Her support among the German nobility was weak, however, and at the time of Otto’s death Bruno was only 14 years old. The election of an anti-king still in his minority was unlikely.

The second and far more dangerous contender was Liudolf’s cousin Henry II, Duke of Bavaria, who was the son of Otto’s younger brother Henry, Liudolf’s old nemesis. The 19-year-old Henry was not only an Ottonian, but by his mother Judith a scion of the “native” Bavarian dynasty of Luitpoldings, and as such enjoyed deep support in his large and powerful duchy. To make matters worse, Henry had only recently married Princess Gisela, the daughter of King Conrad of Burgundy. Duke Burchard III of Swabia was Conrad’s uncle (his sister Bertha was the king’s father), and also the brother-in-law of Henry II on account of his marriage to Henry’s sister Hadwig. This had the makings of a very threatening Bavarian-Swabian-Burgundinian axis. While Conrad was an amicable man who usually avoided intrigue, Burchard and Henry had reasons to be disgruntled. Burchard and Liudolf had been on rather poor terms ever since the disastrous Battle of Olona, after which each had blamed the other for the failure. Duke Henry was a prideful, combative, and highly ambitious young man who may very well have blamed Liudolf for the death of his father, who had been killed during Liudolf’s rebellion against Otto.

Every day that Liudolf spent in Italy was another day that news of Otto’s death would percolate northwards, and another day that his rivals would be able to conspire against him and prepare their own bids for the throne. To remain and fight Octavian was militarily sound, but a political impossibility. Once his army had recovered sufficiently, Liudolf rode north for Germany, leaving Italy to its fate.

“Octavian and Aemilia,” late 19th c. painting​

The Romance of Arezzo

Octavian’s first target was Arezzo, whose bishop Eberhard had sheltered Liudolf and was a staunch Ottonian partisan.[2] Eberhard was defiant even as Octavian ravaged the countryside and supplies dwindled within the walls. The Aretini, however, were less enthusiastic about courting ruin for the sake of the German cause than their bishop. Liutprand claims that they soon overthrew Eberhard and offered the city to Octavian if he would forgo a sack. The emperor agreed, and received the fealty of the citizens on the steps of the city’s cathedral.

Octavian’s siege of Arezzo, of course, is better known as the inspiration for the tale of “Octavian and Aemilia” that first appears in 12th century poetry and remains in the cultural pantheon today (manifesting most recently as a major motion picture). According to the legend as recounted in its first known poetic form, Octavian – for whom romantic liaisons were never far from his mind, even in war – glimpses a “flaxen-haired maid” upon the walls while besieging Arezzo and falls in love with her at first sight. When Arezzo surrenders, Octavian is just as determined to find the woman and his army is to plunder the city. Upon his entry into the city, however, he is confronted by the very woman he espied, who turns out to be Aemilia (or Immilia in the original spelling), the niece of Bishop Eberhard. Aemilia spurns the lovesick conqueror until he swears to protect the city from a sack, and Octavian intervenes personally to prevent the death of her uncle despite their mutual antipathy. Octavian takes Aemilia as his lover, but she tragically dies in childbirth less than a year later.

The timing is plausible enough; the third of Octavian’s known bastard sons, the admirable John Aureus, is the right age to have been born a year or so after the siege of Arezzo. Contemporaries of John repeated the claim that his mother was named Immilia and that she was a noblewoman of Tuscany, and the fact that she is totally unmentioned in the historical record until well into John’s adulthood (and then only posthumously) may support the notion that she died in childbirth or soon thereafter. Yet the details about Immilia’s relationship to Bishop Eberhard – or indeed to Arezzo specifically – do not appear before the 12th century, and no 10th or 11th century source makes any reference to Octavian himself intervening to save the city, as opposed to the city being saved by negotiation between the besiegers and the defenders. Basil Notarius skips the entire Tuscan campaign, either because his whole account did not survive or because he was fairly uninterested in military matters. It seems most likely that John, who was a romantic figure even in his own life, captivated the imagination of later poets and inspired a semi-fictional narrative that connected his somewhat nebulous origins to his father’s military and romantic exploits.

The War in Tuscany

Though bereft of its German kings, Northern Italy was not merely abandoned wholesale to Octavian. Liudolf had the benefit of several years to install counts and bishops who promised loyalty to him, and the new magnates Adalbert, Margrave of Ivrea and Aleram, Margrave of Liguria were dead set against a Tusculani revival. As he departed for Germany, Liudolf charged them with defeating or at least containing Octavian until matters in Germany could be placed on a more stable footing. As in the days of the reguli, Italy was once again the battleground of the great magnates.

The relatively swift fall of Arezzo opened the whole Arno valley to Octavian’s advance. The situation there was chaotic, as no new margrave had been set up there by the Germans; Liudolf, like Alberic, seems to have desired to keep it under his direct control, but since he hardly set foot in the territory the result seems to have been a sort of benign anarchy. The local lords offered only a scattered and desultory resistance to Octavian, and the cities – whose burghers were more interested in protecting their prosperity than anything else – were frequently prepared to gave themselves up to prevent plundering.

Adalbert and Aleram realized the gravity of the situation and moved to contest Octavian’s swiftly advancing takeover of Tuscany. Together, their forces were considerable, and certainly larger than those of Alberic, who was relying chiefly on the Spoletan milites of Crescentius. Nevertheless, there was a key weakness in the pro-German alliance – Arduin, the Count of Auriate, by now better known as Arduin Glaber (“the Bald”). Arduin been distinguished in Alberic’s service, fighting alongside Octavian at Augusta, receiving the title of patricius, and eventually securing the marriage of his son Manfred to Octavian’s cousin Orania, the daughter of Constantine. The failure of Otto or Aleram to remove him seems like an oversight, but Arduin was also well-known for his effective opposition to the Saracens of Fraxinet and his services in the Alps may have been perceived as too important to throw away. He gave an oath of loyalty to Otto easily enough and made no trouble in Octavian’s years of Corsican exile. With Otto dead, however, only his loyalty to Aleram still bound him, which turned out to be less significant than his personal and familial ties to Octavian. Arduin had been more powerful and more distinguished than Aleram during the reign of Alberic, and may additionally have resented the latter being placed over him as margrave. Critically, the Count of Auriate and his milites were part of the army Aleram now marched with into Tuscany, and Arduin was highly respected by many of the other milites of Ivrea now fighting under both Adalbert and Aleram.

The Battle of Alina

Octavian was besieging the city of Prato when he learned that the two margraves had crossed the Apennines. As they had the superior force, Adalbert and Aleram planned to confront Octavian and force his retreat, thus lifting the siege. Octavian, however, had no plan to draw back, and instead advanced, meeting the margravial army near Alina, halfway between Prato and Pistoia. Though now nearly face to face, neither side was particularly eager for a pitched battle. Octavian was clearly at a disadvantage, but the margraves also had no interest in risking their superior position on a throw of the dice. For some days the armies hovered near one another, with their leaders probably conducting negotiations.

Liutprand now takes the wheel of the narrative entirely; no other source even mentions the battle specifically. According to him, when Octavian’s negotiations with the margraves yielded no satisfactory result, he made a very public challenge to each, offering to face them in single combat. When the margraves demurred, Octavian mocked them by comparing them to his hunting trophies, boasting that he had killed “swine far larger than either of you.” He targeted Adalbert out for special provocation, recalling that they had fought together at Augusta and that he would never have stood beside Adalbert had he known he was not only a traitor, but a coward.

This was enough to provoke Adalbert, who accepted Octavian’s challenge. Both were men in their prime; Octavian was 32, and Adalbert perhaps four years older. Whatever flaws Octavian may have had, however, swordsmanship was not one of them. Liutprand describes him as overcoming and slaying his old comrade in full view of both armies, and displays his usual delight in the gory deaths of villains by describing the death-blow as a stroke of Octavian’s sword that cut Adalbert open “from his shoulder to his loin.” It was at this moment that Count Arduin, followed by all his men, left the margravial battle line and crossed over to Octavian’s side. The days of hesitation to attack an apparently inferior foe, the public death of Adalbert, and the unexpected defection of one of the army’s top commanders and all his men shattered the morale of the remaining margravial forces, who joined Octavian’s army en masse while Aleram fled the field practically alone.

That, at least, is Liutprand’s account. We have no other, save Thietmar’s chronicle which says that Emperor Liudolf’s “deputies” were defeated by Octavian in Italy but mentions no specific battle. The Homeric “duel of champions” between two watching armies was not common in this era, and modern scholars have proposed that Liutprand was cribbing from classical or Bibilical sources that feature such duels.[3] The dominant theory among the skeptics holds that it was primarily Arduin’s defection which caused a catastrophic defeat of the margravial army, that Adalbert was simply killed in the fighting (albeit possibly by Octavian), and that Liutprand’s narrative is an attempt to attribute Octavian’s victory to the emperor himself and his great personal heroism instead of admitting that the result turned entirely on Arduin’s treachery.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is evident that following a confrontation in Tuscany, the margravial army was utterly defeated, Adalbert was killed, Aleram fled, and a number of the margravial force, including Arduin, joined Octavian. As a result, the rest of the cities and much of the nobility in the Arno valley hastened to offer their submission. Octavian entered his father’s favored capital of Lucca in late October and was hailed as imperator by a great crowd. Tuscany was lost to the pro-German faction, and Lombardy now lay open to Octavian.

Next Time: The Year of Iron

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Liutprand was in exile, just not in Corsica. His outburst to Otto had made him unwelcome in the new German order, and Liudolf had deposed him from the diocese of Mantua after Octavian’s flight. Liutprand fled to Venice and the protection of Doge Pietro IV.
[2] Some have proposed on the basis of his name that he was in fact German, which may be the case, but the name Eberhard was not unknown among Italy’s Frankish aristocracy.
[3] Though duels of one sort or another were not unheard of. Much earlier in Liutprand’s own narrative, Margrave Lambert of Tuscany challenges King Hugh of Italy to a judicial duel over Hugh’s attempt to disinherit him. Lambert wins, but his victory fails to stop his eventual disinheriting, deposition, and blinding on Hugh’s orders.

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] That is actually the Torre Sagone, which as far as I know is a Genoese-era tower, but at least it’s in the right general location for Octavianopolis/Torregia.
[B] "Basil Notarius" is a wholly fictional person. It made sense, however, that somebody in the grand retinue of the highly-literate Agatha would be taking notes. He'll continue to pop up as a source during Agatha's lifetime.
[C] This is the TTL equivalent of the OTL Diploma Ottonianum, in which Otto and the Pope agreed that the Emperor would uphold the liberty of the Pope and in turn would have the right to approve (or, presumably, reject) the canonically elected candidate. ITTL, the document is a dead letter almost immediately after its creation because of Otto’s death. In one of those funny coincidences of alternate history, the pope IOTL who signed the Diploma along with Otto was John XII – that is, Octavian.
[D] The “Roman Fever” very nearly did this to Frederick Barbarossa in the mid-12th century. He entered Rome at the head of a great army and in the midst of a successful campaign, only for his forces to be ravaged by an outbreak of disease, which was probably (though not certainly) malaria. Frederick didn’t die, but he lost his imperial chancellor and a number of major noblemen, and his army was so badly damaged that he had to call off the campaign and head back to Germany.

 

[Carp]

XVI. The Year of Iron​

Imperial Coronation of Octavian and Agatha by Pope Sergius IV in 970, 11th c.​

A Land at War

Ivrea had been rocked by the catastrophic loss of the “margravial army” of Adalbert II of Ivrea[1] and Aleram of Liguria. Despite Adalbert’s death, his march was not without a ruler – his younger brother Guy had been appointed as co-margrave by Otto alongside him, and Guy had remained behind while Adalbert marched on Tuscany. Yet Adalbert had been the more popular of the two, and Guy now faced a serious rival in the person of his half-brother Amadeus. Emperor Otto had preferred the sons of Berengar for the March of Ivrea, but by installing them he had passed over Amadeus, the son of King Anscar, either out of personal preference or possibly because of the closer blood relationship between Amadeus and Octavian.[2] Amadeus, who had demanded (unsuccessfully) the head of Bulcsu after the victory at Augusta as vengeance for his father’s death, was clearly not a man who took well to being wronged, and for two years he had been waiting for a chance at revenge. The death of Adalbert and the destruction or defection of his army at Alina was a god-sent opportunity for Amadeus, and without waiting for Octavian’s arrival he launched his own rebellion against Guy for control of the march.

South of Ivrea, Aleram had managed to flee back to his own territory, but having lost most of his army he was now terribly weakened. His most powerful vassal, Count Arduin of Auriate, had defected to Octavian, and Arduin’s son Manfred now defended his father’s holdings in Auriate and Susa. Matters were complicated by opportunistic incursions by the Saracens of Fraxinet, who in the absence of their usual foil (that is, Arduin) were free to plunder the villages and monasteries of the Alpine foothills once again.

On the opposite end of the peninsula, Prince Pandulf of Capua, the son-in-law of Duke Crescentius, was locked in a struggle with the Greeks. Pandulf and Crescentius had been defeated and driven from their siege of Bari in 969, but the Greeks had made little progress since then, thanks in large part to the assassination of Emperor Nikephoros II in December of 969. This fortuitous event gave Pandulf a moment to retrench and consolidate his position. But the events since then had been a disaster for Pandulf – the death of Otto meant that the German military relief he expected in 970 never arrived, and Octavian’s return diverted the forces of Pandulf’s ally Crescentius to the north. Not even the Neapolitans could be counted on for support, as in 968 the Neapolitan Duke John III had died, leaving his son Marinus II in command of Naples. Marinus had Tusculani blood – he was the nephew of Duke Crescentius – but his policy so far had been pro-Byzantine, and he was at the moment Pandulf’s enemy. The prince’s only remaining ally was Prince Gisulf of Salerno, who at some point had abandoned his longtime pro-Greek stance and was now firmly in Pandulf’s camp. It was better than standing alone, but Salerno offered no great military strength. Now the two Lombard princes were faced with the newly-appointed “Catapan of Italy,” patrikios Michael Abidelas, a Byzantine governor-general in command of all the Greek possessions in the south. He had been charged with coordinating the defense of Byzantine Italy against Otto, but with Otto dead he opted to seize the initiative himself.

Not even that “most serene” commune of Venice was spared from upheavals. Doge Pietro IV Candiano had been elected to replace his father after a long exile in which he had fought for Alberic and then menaced his own city as a pirate. His marriage in 962 with Octavian’s sister, Marina, had not only brought him close to the Tusculani, but given him extensive fiefs in Friuli for which he owed fealty to the King of Italy. This had caused some concern in Venice, as the new doge was now a great inland count beholden to a foreign king rather than simply one of their own. A ruler of sensitivity and wisdom could have perhaps assuaged these fears, but Pietro had neither, and resentment against him had steadily grown. As consequences of Octavian’s flight in 968, Pietro had lost his lord and patron and his dowry lands were confiscated. Though this presumably removed one source of resentment against him, it did not seem to quiet his political opponents, and the loss of his mainland revenues and armsmen put him in a greatly weakened position. The city seemed to be on the brink of civil war, to the point where Pietro felt it necessary to dispatch his wife, Dogaressa Marina – who was also Octavian’s little sister – to appeal to the new emperor for support.

So it was that Octavian, having only just reclaimed his father’s Tuscan capital of Lucca, now received entreaties from all corners of the peninsula for his aid. Basil Notarius, whose narrative cuts back in after a post-Corsica lacuna, describes Octavian being pulled in all directions by his family. Marina begged him to come to Venice, Crescentius wanted to be sent back south to aid his nephew Pandulf, and Gisela, his mother, pleaded with him to intervene on behalf of her nephew Amadeus. Finally, according to Basil, his wife Agatha counseled him to entrench and solidify his position. The empress argued that the true threat was still the German “emperor” (Basil calls him pseudobasileus) Liudolf, who would surely return to Italy. Basil is, as mentioned, ever a partisan of Agatha, and may have exaggerated her role in Octavian’s decisionmaking, but if the story is accurate it is our first real indication of the empress directly influencing the policy of her husband.

Octavian seems to have followed what Basil describes as his wife’s advice, although not totally. Count-Patrician Arduin was sent back to Liguria to overthrow Aleram and reinforce his son Manfred, while the bulk of Octavian’s forces crossed the Porretta pass into Emilia and Romagna. Before leaving Lucca, the emperor entrusted the governance of Italy (or at least the parts he controlled) to Agatha, who would remain in Lucca with their only child together, the 11-year old Helena.

Rota Fortunae

The success and failure of the reguli had hinged on the perception of the Italian nobility. The counts of Lombardy flocked to a victorious ruler, and abandoned him just as quickly if he was defeated. It was relatively rare that any of the various wars between Italy’s kings and usurpers during the Saeculum Regulorum encompassed more than a single battle; the support for any one of these would-be kings was so shallow that all save the true irreconcilables jumped ship as soon as they appeared to be on the losing side.[3] This was a dehabilitating curse for Lombardy, and Alberic had attempted to mitigate it by installing what Liutprand called the comites indigeni (“native counts”), mostly Roman and Lombardic petty noblemen from central Italy, wherever the opportunity permitted. This effort had met with only the most modest success, for blood did not guarantee loyalty, and Romans and Lombards were no less pragmatic than Franks and Burgundinians.

In 970, however, this “curse” was working in the favor of Octavian, who was now gaining a kingdom, not defending it. At the time of his arrival in Italy, the whole kingdom seemed to be hostile to him, and even his uncle Crescentius had been at best a neutral observer until Otto’s death. After the thorough routing of the margravial army at Alina – in which, thanks to massive defections, Octavian emerged from the fight with a larger army than he had started with – the suspicion was beginning to spread that Liudolf, not Octavian, was the sucker’s bet.

The softness of Liudolf’s support was aggravated by other factors. When Octavian had been a vassal king and Liudolf merely the Margrave of Friuli, Liudolf had made lavish promises and granted broad privileges to the nobles of Lombardy to pry their support away from Octavian. Once Liudolf became king, however, those same nobles became his own vassals, and the new king was no longer so generous with his grants. With the confidence of a hegemon, Liudolf broke promises, denied privilieges, and eroded local rule. A few lords were aggrandized, but the losers far outnumbered the winners. Had Liudolf been just another magnate, they might have already invited in another, like King Lothair of Provence, to replace him, but Liudolf was backed by the formidable might of Otto’s Germany.

Octavian’s crossing of the Apennines did not immediately provoke a mass defection. While some nobles installed by Alberic who had survived Otto’s regime do appear to have thrown their support to Octavian, most seemed to prefer a watchful neutrality, waiting to see if Liudolf would return and dispatch the insurgent emperor or whether the German was to be permanently banished beyond the Alps. Neutrality, however, meant that they were of no help to Liudolf’s scattered deputies, and the best the pro-German faction could do was to hold fast and await German relief.

The Romagnol Campaign

Among the emperor’s forces Liutprand reports the presence of Duke Crescentius, his eldest son John Crescentius,[4] Count-Patrician Benedict of Como (who had been ejected from his territory by Liudolf in 968), and Count Theodorus of Clavenna (apparently another Roman count settled in the Alps by Alberic who was now divested of his territories). Liutprand himself was also with the army, having returned from his exile in Venice (possibly along with Marina). Octavian laid siege to Bologna, and sent two columns of cavalry under John Crescentius and Count Theodorus to “forage” for the army. In reality their mission seems to have been half logistics and half terrorism, as they targeted the lands of Liudolf’s adherents specifically for plunder and rapine.

Octavian’s landing at Rome, the death of Otto, and the defeat of Liudolf’s supporters at Alina had come in quick succession and few of the urban bishops had been seriously been preparing for a siege. Octavian, in the meantime, had a rather small force that was presently divided, but he was continually reinforced through the efforts of Empress Agatha, who established control over the cities of the Arno and levied urban militias and any other freemen who could bear arms. These forces were not particularly formidable, but in a siege every man that could use a shovel and man a palisade was valuable.

By Christmas of 970, Bologna and Modena had been captured, and Octavian had received the allegiance of Peter, Count of Ravenna, who by his marriage to Marozia (daughter of Constantine) was Octavian’s cousin-in-law. Despite this relationship, Peter had initially resisted joining Octavian, but having John Crescentius storm into his territory and menace his lands seems to have “induced” him to switch sides. The cities of the Pentapolis from Imola to Pesaro also came into Octavian’s camp after Peter’s conversion. In Romagna proper, only Ravenna and Ferrara held out. Ravenna, the capital of the old Exarchate, was much diminished demographically and economically, but was still a strong position ringed by marshlands; Ferrara was itself nearly as strong. Liutprand reports that Octavian conferred with his major vassals at Modena, and the decision was made to focus their efforts on Emilia in the new year rather than wasting months on either of the more formidable holdouts in Romagna.

The Swabian Invasion

Liudolf had returned to Germany in October to find a tense situation. His cousin and primary rival for the crown, Duke Henry II of Bavaria, was already closely aligned with Henry’s brother-in-law Duke Burchard III of Swabia. He had also attracted the support of a number of the disaffected Saxon nobility, including Margrave Gunther of Merseburg and the renegade Egbert the One-Eyed. He had foreign friends as well, as he was married to Gisela, the daughter of King Conrad of Burgundy, and was developing an alliance with Duke Boleslav II of Bohemia and Misezko, the Prince of the Poles (who had only been a baptized Christian for the past four years).

Although Liudolf had already been crowned co-king and co-emperor with his father, he felt it necessary to stage a second “election” and coronation at Fritzlar, which was attended by the great magnates of the kingdom. Duke Henry did not contest it – he had, after all, only recently learned of the death of Otto, and it had caught him as off-guard as anyone else. For the time being there would be no rebellion, but he flaunted Liudolf’s authority in more benign ways, like holding a Christmas feast in his own territory in the manner of a king.

Liudolf was in a difficult spot. Italy was crumbling; his bishops and deputies held on in the major cities, but Aleram and Guy were both hard pressed by Arduin and Amadeus, respectively, and could certainly not offer any protection to the kingdom beyond Ivrea. No other force existed in Lombardy or Friuli capable of fighting Octavian, who gained progress slowly but surely, one fort or city at a time. If Liudolf returned to Italy, however, Henry would be left to work his schemes with no opposition, and would continue to gain support as he painted Liudolf as the absentee king more interested in Italy than Germany.

Liudolf opted not to leave. Instead, he ordered Duke Burchard to march to Lombardy and restore order there. In this way, he could send a strong force to oppose Octavian while also removing Henry’s main ally, at least temporarily, from the country. To refuse would mean civil war, which neither Henry nor Burchard were ready to commit to at this moment, and so Burchard complied. It was now the dead of winter, however; summoning the ducal army would take time, and the Alpine passes were filled with deep snow. Octavian would be unmolested for another few months. He used them to drive northwest through Emilia, with Count Theodorus even crossing the Po and raiding around Cremona. That city – somewhat unexpectedly, by Liutprand’s description – switched sides without a siege, giving Octavian a foothold in Lombardy proper.

The Duke of Swabia entered Italy by way of the Brenner Pass in March. From Verona, he marched westward towards Cremona, hearing of that city’s recent capture and perhaps hoping to take Octavian unawares. But Cremona had only been “captured” by Theodorus and his cavalry, and when they learned of the approach of the Swabians they were able to extricate themselves easily, cross the Po, and ride hard for Parma where Octavian was besieging the city with the main body of his force.

Phony War

Duke Burchard had been ordered into Italy, but his participation was not exactly enthusiastic. He was presumably not eager to order his loyal countrymen into a bloody battle for the sake of a king whom he disliked and he might very shortly be fighting to depose. After retaking Cremona his pace seemed to slacken, crossing the Po in April with no apparent hurry. It may be that at this point he was already in communication with Octavian, but nevertheless the emperor was cautious, lifting the siege of Parma and drawing back to Regium (Reggio Emilia), the site of his defeat by Otto in 968.

Octavian seems to have passed the tiresome sieges of the campaign in his usual way of hunting and falconry, punctuated by the occasional war council. Through the exertions of his wife, however, he seems to have been well-informed of the politics of Germany. While the emperor was out in the field playing the general, Agatha had taken it upon herself to undertake the empire’s foreign policy on her husband’s behalf. She had sent ambassadors – specifically her ambassadors, Greeks who had come with her to Italy in 958 – to Duke Henry over the winter. Henry was no great friend of an independent Italy; presumably he wanted Otto’s empire as much as Liudolf did. Yet he must have known that the fall of Octavian in Italy would be a success for Liudolf that would bouy him in Germany, and may have shared that concern with his brother-in-law Burchard. Political considerations, his desire to avoid pointless casualties, and – according to Liutprand – a considerable bribe from Octavian may have all played a role in Burchard opting to avoid battle with Octavian. They had come fairly close to one another at Regium, but Burchard eventually withdrew back north of the Po to Mantua and moved west towards Ivrea.

On the logic of the enemy of one’s enemy being one’s friend, Octavian ought to have supported Amadeus. Certainly his mother Gisela urged him to support her nephew. Agatha, however, was dead-set against it, according to Liutprand believing that the son of King Anscar was too great a threat to her husband’s rule and should not be permitted to control Ivrea. Octavian and Amadeus had been on amicable terms during Alberic’s reign, but Agatha poisoned her husband against his cousin, insinuating that Amadeus had launched his attempt against Guy on his own in order that he should rule independently in Ivrea, and that Liudolf might even prop him up as a puppet King of Italy against Octavian now that Liudolf ruled in Germany. While Octavian was in Romagna, she sent messengers to Arduin forbidding him to assist Amadeus. Amadeus hadn’t really needed assistance against Guy thus far, who by March had fled the lowlands and was taking refuge at Como, but Burchard’s force was now moving to assist the beleaguered margrave. It has been suggested that Agatha may also have been in direct contact with Burchard, offering him Amadeus as an easier target and giving him assurances that Amadeus would be unsupported, but the claim is not directly supported by contemporary evidence.

By June, the effective border between Octavian and Burchard had become the Po. Burchard’s withdrawal from Emilia had destroyed the morale of the holdouts there, and by the end of that month Parma, Piacenza, and Ferrara had all come into Octavian’s grasp. In all Romagna and Emilia, only Ravenna still held out. In the west, Arduin had captured Aleram after besieging Asti and had captured Turin. The deposed Aleram was sent back to Lucca, where Agatha ordered him to be banished to a monastery on the island of Capraia off the coast of Corsica. Amadeus had been crushingly defeated by Burchard, restoring Ivrea north of Turin to Margrave Guy; Amadeus was captured and imprisoned by his half-brother. The result of this was not exactly a truce – Burchard engaged in some desultory raiding in western Lombardy, and Count Theodorus launched his own forays over the Po to plunder in the environs of Cremona and Mantua. It was in the interest of both Burchard and Octavian, however, that the war be limited to border raids for the time being – Octavian lacked the strength to press north against Burchard, and Burchard lacked the motivation to try and wrest Liguria or Emilia from Octavian.

Illustration of Emperor John Tzimiskes returning after his victory over the Rus and Bulgarians with the captive Tsar Boris II in tow, 12th c.​

The Peace of Winter

This situation allowed Octavian to finally permit Duke Crescentius to ride south in support of Prince Pandulf, who was hanging on grimly in his mountain castles while Marinus II of Naples and Catapan Michael raided his territory. It also allowed Octavian to launch his own razzia, crossing the Adige and Brenta near their mouths to plunder around Padua and sack the river port of Mira. This was very near to Venetian territory, and may have been intended as a demonstration of force to the foes of the still-precarious Doge Pietro IV. Dogaressa Marina had recently returned to her husband’s side in Venice, as if daring the anti-Candiano partisans to strike at the sister and brother-in-law of the emperor who, if not in total control of Italy, certainly had the means to despoil Venice’s landward possessions. According to the contemporary Venetian chronicler John the Deacon, Marina had also returned with a band of “rough and well-armed Corsicans,” probably some of Octavian’s island retinue assigned to his sister’s protection.

The tumultuous “Year of Iron” since Octavian’s landing culminated in August of 971 with the Battle of the Calor, in which Duke Crescentius and Prince Pandulf ambushed an Italo-Greek army as it passed through a ravine. This set the Catapan back on his heels, and Crescentius followed his victory with a thorough plundering of the Neapolitan countryside until Marinus sued for peace.

The emperor since 969, John Tzimiskes, had been the co-conspirator and possibly the lover of Theophano, the daughter of a tavern-keeper who had become the wife of Romanos II and then of Nikephoros II Phokas after the former’s untimely demise. After the assassination of Nikephoros, John was of a mind to marry Theophano, now twice-widowed. Theophano, however, was widely loathed, particularly by the religious class. Polyeuktos, the Patriarch of Constantinople, put his foot down – he refused to perform the imperial coronation unless John punished those responsible for the emperor’s murder. John himself had been part of the conspiracy, but Polyeuktos was pragmatic enough to see that while he could not stand against John personally, he could rid the government of Theophano and her cronies – the patriarch demanded only that John punish the other conspirators. The support of Polyeuktos was more valuable to John than that of Theophano, so he turned on his lover and her friends. The infamous empress was sent into exile and banished from politics forever. Without Theophano, John was no longer linked to the imperial family, so he fetched Theodora, one of the daughters of Constantine VII (and thus Agatha’s sister) from the convent where she had been confined and married her.

John was already proving himself a very capable commander-in-chief. In March of 970, he had fought and defeated the Rus, who had invaded Bulgaria along with Pecheneg and Magyar allies, at the Battle of Arcadiopolis. John had been temporarily distracted thereafter by an internal rebellion against his new rule, but returned to the Balkans in the spring of 971, captured the Bulgarian capital of Preslav and the Bulgarian Tsar Boris II, and forced the surrender and evacuation of a Rus army under Prince Sviatoslav, the Grand Prince of Kiev. The Bulgarian empire was proclaimed to be dissolved (though the western half of it would endure for some time to come), and the Byzantines also asserted direct control over the troubled Serbian lands with the creation of a new “Catapanate of Rascia.”

John returned to Constantinople in the winter of 971-972 to celebrate a triumph, and found Agatha’s ambassadors waiting for him. His banishment of Theophano and marriage to Theodora made John more palatable to Agatha, who may also have known John personally from her youth when he was a general in Constantine’s service, and she had decided he was more likely than the irascible Nikephoros to be open to an equitable peace. Agatha’s ambassadors offered a truce between Rome and Constantinople, proposing that Octavian would see to the restoration of certain Byzantine fortresses in Apulia which had been captured by Pandulf, and in exchange John would recognize Octavian’s suzerainty over Gaeta and Benevento-Capua. John, who was already planning for a campaign against the Arabs in the coming spring, decided it was in his best interest to accept the offer rather than to waste time and resources asserting Byzantine suzerainty over Capua, which was likely to be purely nominal anyway.

Octavian had since made his headquarters at Piacenza. From there it was just a river crossing and a short march to Pavia, but he dared not make the trip while Burchard was still in Lombardy. He would not have to wait long – after propping up Guy in Ivrea, Burchard remained in Italy only a few months longer, and returned to Swabia in late autumn before the passes could be made dangerous by the winter snows. Octavian, too, rested for the winter, and divided Italy enjoyed a few months of nervous peace. With spring came word came of the peace his wife had arranged with John, and this freed the Crescentii[5] to return to the north with their Spoletan forces. In March of 972, Emperor Octavian crossed the Po and went straight for the jugular, marching on Pavia, the capital of Lombardy.

Map of Italy and its environs in early 972 following the peace
between Octavian and John Tzimiskes (Click for big)
​

Next Time: The Unholy Alliance

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Distinguished from his grandfather Adalbert I, Margrave of Ivrea, the father of Berengar, Anscar, and Gisela.
[2] Gisela of Ivrea, Octavian’s mother, was the full sister of King Anscar but only the half-sister of Berengar. Thus while Octavian and Amadeus were cousins, Octavian was the half-cousin of Adalbert II and Guy. The consensus view of modern scholarship is that the difference between full and half-cousins was probably not something meaningful enough for Otto to base his decision on, and it is assumed that for whatever reason Otto (or Liudolf) simply preferred Adalbert (and Guy) to Amadeus.
[3] In this light the accomplishment of Berengar of Friuli, who held Italy for longer than any of the other reguli and yet lost considerably more battles than he won, is even more impressive. He owed his survival to rather good luck and a strong base of support in Friuli itself, which he could retreat to and plan his return even after a crushing defeat. Many of the other reguli were foreign kings and lacked the same redoubt of strength within Italy.
[4] No contemporary source calls the eldest son of Crescentius “John Crescentius” – he was christened merely as John – but the dual moniker is a centuries-old historians’ convention prompted by the proliferation of Johns in this period.
[5] “Crescentii” came into regular use in the early 11th century to describe the “cadette branch” of the House of Theophylact – that is, the descendents of Theodora, younger sister of Marozia, and more specifically those desecended from her son Duke Crescentius, known later as “Crescentius the Elder” to distinguish him from his younger son Crescentius and later relatives of that name.

 

[Carp]

XVII. The Unholy Alliance​

Prince Géza portrayed as a Christian ruler, 14th century illustration
​

Lombardy Regained

In March, Emperor Octavian crossed the Po with his army and besieged Pavia, the traditional capital of Lombardy. Having defended the city against the siege himself, Octavian was aware of how strong a position it was. Luckily for Octavian, its fervently pro-German bishop Liutfred had died of apparently natural causes less than a year before, and there had been no opportunity to appoint his replacement. Octavian sent Liutprand, the Bishop of Mantua, to negotiate with the city’s defenders, probably because Liutprand was himself a native Pavian of a distinguished family. The Pavians were leaderless and demoralized; Emperor Liudolf had not been in Italy for more than a year and Duke Burchard III of Swabia had abandoned the country in the previous autumn. The man that stepped forward to lead them was a deacon of the city’s cathedral, Peter Canepanova, who had been an acquaintance of Liutprand in his younger days. The two clergymen negotiated the surrender of the city to Octavian, which would allow some pro-German elements to leave the city in peace. After a mere week-long siege, Octavian accepted the terms and the city capitulated. Octavian favored Peter by installing him as the city’s new bishop.

With the seat of the Lombard kingdom (and its strongest city) now in Octavian’s hands, the situation in the north reached a tipping point. The rest of central Lombardy rapidly fell into Octavian’s hands. The imperial army next marched into Ivrea, whose Anscarid margrave Guy had little hope of resistance. He had won a civil war against his half-brother Amadeus, presently his prisoner, only with the aid of Duke Burchard; what supporters he had left no longer seemed willing to fight for him. He fled into exile in Germany. Amadeus managed to gain his freedom and initially joined Octavian, but perhaps getting wind that the emperor had been turned against him by the machinations of Empress Agatha, he slipped away from the imperial camp one night and fled to Provence by way of Burgundy, allegedly disguised as a monk. At Novara, Octavian issued a proclamation that the March of Ivrea was henceforth abolished.[1] Count Boniface of Como and Theodorus of Clavenna were restored to their properties, along with a number of other loyalists who had been dispossessed by Otto and Liudolf.

Aside from some scattered holdouts (and the city of Ravenna), all that remained was Friuli. If Pavia was the strongest city in the country, Verona was surely in the running for the second strongest. Like Pavia, however, the siege was destined to be cut short. Verona’s bishop at that time was Ratherius, an octogenarian Flemish clergyman who had been appointed to the position by Emperor Hugh more than 40 years previously. Ratherius had been one of the instigators of Duke Arnulf’s failed invasion of Lombardy in 934 and had been expelled from the country. He had returned in King Anscar’s reign and was restored to his see, but soon after his death the new King Alberic had expelled him from the country again. After the peace with Otto, Ratherius had returned and Alberic had allowed him to retain his post, but he made enemies among the Veronese noblemen and people and was forced to flee the city not long thereafter. He had petitioned Alberic to restore him; Alberic banished him instead. Ratherius had returned to Italy once more after Octavian’s submission to Otto, and Liudolf had allowed him to reclaim his diocese once more, satisfied that he was solidly anti-Tusculani.[A]

Ratherius was a highly learned man as well as a skilled writer and preacher, but his foreign birth and strong opinions (especially when it came to the moral failings of others) had made him unpopular in the city. Now, when he called upon the people to resist Octavian, they revolted instead. Ratherius fled Italy for the fourth and last time, and the formidable city was handed over to Octavian without bloodshed. Resistance in the rest of the march rapidly collapsed.

The German Revolt

Liudolf had used the occasion of Burchard’s absence to attempt a consolidation of his position against his chief rival Duke Henry II of Bavaria. He removed several Saxon lords of dubious loyalty who may have already been plotting with Henry, but a breach only opened between Liudolf and Henry with the death in the summer of 972 of Michael, Bishop of Ratisbon. Emperor Otto had stripped the Bavarian dukes of their ability to appoint bishops in their own sees, as they had done in the days of the autonomous Liutpolding Duke Arnulf “the Bad.” Henry, however, flaunted royal authority by selecting his own candidate for the see. This made an enemy of the great Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg, a loyal supporter of Otto and his son, but Ulrich – now 82 years old – was quite ill and not capable of vigorously opposing Henry’s usurpation.

Emperor Liudolf summoned Henry to his presence at Goslar. The duke was probably reluctant to attend, and delayed for a while, but presumably decided that an outright refusal when his ally Burchard was still in Italy was untenable. Henry made the journey to Goslar, but according to Thietmar the duke was warned that Liudolf was planning to arrest him and fled back to Bavaria just before he was to arrive at Goslar.[2] Liudolf rallied his supporters and proceeded to Fritzlar, where in the presence of loyal nobles Henry was denounced as an outlaw in absentia for flaunting royal authority and conspiring with the Bohemians and Poles against the crown. He then marched on Ratisbon, and when Henry fled again to his ally Boleslav, Duke of Bohemia, Liudolf invaded that country.

It may have been these events which prompted Burchard to return when he did. Liudolf called him to support his attack against Bohemia to compel Boleslav’s allegiance. Instead, Burchard besieged the pro-imperial garrison at Ratisbon, and his wife Hedwig, Duke Henry’s sister, incited the Bavarians into rebelling against the emperor. Henry’s defiance had now exploded into a war for the crown.

Nagyfejedelem

Taksony (Latin Taxis), the prince of the Magyars, died in 971 or 972 and was succeeded by his son Géza, who was soon to show himself as a new kind of Magyar leader. His predecessors, as far as we can tell, presided over a fairly loose confederation ruled by a number of different princes of the Arpad house. Géza, however, was an aspiring authoritarian in the manner of Otto who dreamed of a strong and centralized principality. He chose the castrum of Esztergom as his capital, and is alleged to have begun his rule by murdering his male relatives who could feasibly become his competitors.[3]

Géza was ruthless and utterly pragmatic in a manner that even Alberic would probably have admired. In his own realm, he ruled with an iron fist; beyond his borders, however, he was conciliatory. The “foreign policy” of Taksony, such as it was, was no different than that of his predecessors – the Magyars raided where they pleased and generally had no dealings with foreign powers unless they involved ransoms or temporary truces dictated by battlefield defeats. Taksony’s reign, however, had only seen the continuation of the decline of Magyar power. The Germans under Otto had not only repelled Magyar attacks, but launched their own raids into Pannonia and ate steadily away at the Magyars’ Transdanubian territory, even forcing Taksony to pay them tribute. If the Magyar state was to be spared the fate of Bohemia, as a permanent subject of the Germans, a new approach was needed.

In 972, the first year we know Géza was in power (he may have succeeded his father as early as 971), Germany was in the throes of civil war and Octavian was completing his reconquest of Italy. The Italian emperor seemed to be a capable and committed enemy of the Germans, who – even if they were indisposed at the present – would surely emerge from their civil war and continue to be the greatest threat to the Magyar state. So it was that in the summer of 972, a short time after Octavian had completed his pacification of the north, a group of Magyar legates came before the imperial court at Pavia. Unlike previous such emissaries, Géza’s legates had not come to demand tribute or to negotiate a ransom, but to establish friendly relations with Octavian in pursuit of an alliance against Germany.

The greatest obstacle to any Italian-Hungarian alignment was the continued and unrepentant paganism of the Magyars. In religious matters too, however, Géza was a pragmatist. According to Liutprand, Octavian told the Magyar legates that he could not enter into any agreement with a pagan king, so Géza arranged to be baptized that very year. Other sources are not so sure – Géza may have been baptized as late as 975. Most later chroniclers claim that Géza was baptized alongside his brother Béla and his young son Vajk, neither of whom are mentioned by Liutprand. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that either diplomatic pressure from Octavian or the desire to cultivate a favorable relationship with the Italian emperor (or perhaps both) was the proximate cause of Géza’s conversion. It may be that Géza was also influenced by his wife Sarolt, who was a Christian of the Greek rite like her father, the Transylvanian ruler Gyula.[4] Yet the Christian sources also admit that Géza never gave up his pagan faith and continued to observe pagan rites for the rest of his life – Christianity, for him, was no more than a political tool, and aside from his baptism nothing about his life suggests that Géza was a “Christian king.” He built neither churches nor monasteries, and interfered not at all with the practice of paganism among his people.

Géza’s embassy in 972 did not suddenly and abruptly create an alliance between him and Octavian as has sometimes been claimed, but it did mark the beginning of an important process in the alignment of the interests of the two states. It was also a landmark in the Christianization of Hungary and the history of the Church in central Europe. As part of his agreement with Otto at Lodi, Alberic had “influenced” Pope Constantine II to confirm the jurisdiction of German sees over Pannonia that Pope Agapetus II had first established. Shortly after Géza’s legates met Octavian, however, the Tusculani Pope Sergius IV revoked these grants. He signed bulls confirming that Pannonia (or at least part of it) was hereafter under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Aquileia, who already presided over Carniola, a Bavarian march at the confluence of Friuli, Croatia, Carinthia, and southern Transdanubia. It was a controversial and probably un-canonical act that immediately roused the ire of the Bavarian bishops (and, soon enough, the German king), but Géza embraced the decision. He expelled the German missionary Bruno from his territory in 972, but from that point forward welcomed Italian missionaries in his territory. Though his personal Christianity was only a thin veneer adopted for political expediency, the conversion of the Hungarians began in earnest under his rule – including his son Vajk, who would be raised in the Latin rite of Christianity from infancy.[5]

The War in Germany

Burchard’s return and Hedwig’s provocation of a Bavarian revolt had rescued the beleaguered Duke Henry, who with his Swabian, Bohemian, and Polish allies subsequently defeated Liudolf at the Battle of Leuchtenberg. Liudolf was forced to retreat into Franconia, but he was not finished yet – a rising in Saxony against the emperor had not been as helpful as Henry had hoped and was quickly crushed by Liudolf’s allies in the north. For a while, the war stalled as both sides struggled for control of Franconia, with Henry usually on the offensive.

In his youth, King Lothair of France had been very nearly the vassal of Otto – the emperor was his uncle, and his other uncle Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne, had effectively been his regent. Now, however, he was 31 years old, both Otto and Bruno were dead, and Lothair – as the last male-line Carolingian king in Europe – saw himself as the rightful hegemon of the continent. He may have also been influenced by his mother Gerberga, Otto’s sister, who was still living. The queen mother had always preferred her younger brother Henry to her older brother Otto, and had supported Henry in his rebellion for the crown in 938-939. She seems to have remained in favor of Henry’s line over that of Otto, and counseled a pro-Henry (II) policy in the 972-973 civil war.

Lothair posed as Europe’s kingmaker and offered his mediation in the German struggle. Henry, probably assuming his aunt Gerberga’s influence would work in his favor, quickly agreed, but Liudolf rejected the offer. When Duke Richar of Lower Lorraine died that year, Lothair switched from conciliator to meddler. Lotharingia – at this time meaning the portion of Middle Francia north of Burgundy[6] – had been under the dominion of West Francia until Duke Gilbert of Lotharingia transferred his allegiance to the Saxon king Henry the Fowler in 925. Gilbert switched sides again early in the reign of Henry’s son Otto, but was killed in 939 at the Battle of Andernach, and Lotharingia had thereafter been incorporated into the German realm. Lothair saw no reason it should remain so, and upon Richar’s death he entered the duchy with an army in support of Lambert and Reginar, the sons of Reginar III, Count of Hainaut, whom Otto had exiled to Bohemia after a failed revolt in 958. With Germany in a civil war and the ducal position vacant, Lothair was only too happy to restore the lands of Reginar's sons and thereby assert his own control over the duchy.

This usurpation did not please Henry, who considered Lotharingia to be rightfully his own, but for the time being he could not afford to fight against both Lothair and Liudolf. Liudolf, however, was not to be a problem for much longer. He had been weakened by Lothair’s occupation of Lorraine, which had mainly been loyal to him. In August, while attempting to relieve the siege of Fritzlar, Liudolf skirmished with Henry’s Bavarians and was mortally wounded. His 19 year old son Otto attempted to rally his father’s Saxon supporters to fight on, but the cause was clearly lost. Shortly thereafter, he and his mother Ida of Swabia fled across the sea to the court of King Edgar of England, who was Otto’s relation.[7]

Liudolf’s supporters now reconciled themselves with the new order, and on August 26th Henry was elected and crowned as King Henry II of Germany at Fritzlar. He was only 22 years old.

Agatha's Rise

After the fall of Verona and Friuli, all that was left was Ravenna. By coincidence, however, its archbishop Peter IV had died a few months before at the end of 971. A visit by Duke Crescentius and a showing by a Venetian fleet was all that was necessary to convince the leaders of the city that resistance was now useless. The ships had been contributed by Doge Pietro IV Candiano of Venice, who had been restored to his dowry lands in Friuli and had renewed his oath of fealty to Octavian. In June of 972, Octavian’s family and court had joined him at Pavia, and the war for Italy was finally over. Thus, by the time of Henry’s victory in August of 973, Octavian had been ruling unchallenged in Italy for more than a year.

In wartime, Octavian had been active and energetic – he was no military genius, but he was a brave and eager commander who was compared favorably by his contemporaries to his uncle Anscar. In peacetime, however, he seemed listless. Unlike in Corsica, where he had ridden through the country dispensing justice and overcoming enemies, Italy was a massive and complex polity that had to be managed with skill and care. His instinct was to answer offense or disloyalty with immediate force, but amongst the fickle counts of Lombardy such a course was likely to alienate his support and provoke a rebellion. He never seems to have quite understood, as his father had, that keeping hold of Lombardy in the 10th century required a ruler who saw the relationship between the king and the Lombard counts as necessarily flexible and personal.

This was Agatha’s moment. At long last, she was the reigning empress over all Italy, and she set herself to the task of taking command of its governance. That first required the sidelining of Bishop Liutprand of Mantua. Octavian had restored the sharp-tongued ecclesiastic to the position of archicancellarius (arch-chancellor) he had held under Alberic, which made him in theory the chief of the imperial chancery and Octavian’s prime minister. Although Liutprand wrote adoringly of Agatha when she was Octavian’s young bride, in his later years Agatha became his chief rival in the government. This was not a fair match – Liutprand was a good writer, but a poor politician, who despite his career as a diplomat was prone to alienating people. The clerks themselves seem to have preferred Agatha, and Liutprand’s attempts to hold on to power by appealing to Octavian himself were less than successful. Liutprand claims that on several occasions the emperor had to admonish his wife to know her place at the court, but the suggestion that Octavian had to give this admonition repeatedly over a period of years suggests it was one that was not well-followed. Agatha may have demurely accepted when the emperor gave his command, but Octavian had no interest in the sustained functioning of the chancery, and as soon as the emperor’s back was turned Agatha picked the reigns back up.

Taking advantage of Octavian’s respect for Liutprand, Agatha convinced her husband to send him on another “goodwill” mission to Constantinople in 974. It was pointless, as the eastern emperor John Tzimiskes was campaigning in Syria; the mission seems to mostly have been intended as a way for Agatha to remove Liutprand from the picture and for her servants to bring back Greek texts from the eastern empire. By the time he returned, Agatha had further solidified her hold on the chancery. Liutprand would continue a vain struggle for power for the next few years, before failing health compelled him to give up the fight. The latter portions of his chronicle make clear his bitterness at the usurpations of the young woman he himself had brought to Italy, but Octavian would suffer no evil spoken of his empress.

For Agatha, keeping Octavian occupied was somewhat more challenging than thwarting Liutprand. Certainly the emperor was easily distracted, spending most of his time hunting, hawking, drinking, and chasing the daughters (and, on occasion, wives) of his noblemen. He was, however, still the emperor, and while he was not very invested in governance, he was also not a fool. When Octavian and Agatha faced off on an issue, Octavian inevitably won; he was clearly very capable of asserting his own will when he wanted to. Yet the emperor also seems to have been self-aware enough to know that his wife was more knowledgeable in some matters than he was – it was not always necessary to distract or evade him, as he seems to have respected his wife’s intelligence and could occasionally be convinced by Agatha to do things her way.

The ruins of the Saracen fortress of Fraxinet near the modern village of La Garde-Freinet
​

Fraxinet

In 972, Octavian received not only Géza’s legates, but the distinguished Majolus, Abbot of Cluny, the second successor of the saintly Odo. Majolus had come to receive confirmation of certain privileges by the newly reinstated pope Sergius, as well as to procure relics for his abbey. Majolus was likely smart enough to know that he would get nowhere with Pope Sergius unless he could win the support of his imperial nephew, and presented himself to Octavian before proceeding to Rome. Octavian was suspicious of him from the start, as Majolus had been a spiritual advisor to Emperor Otto, but Liutprand reports that the monk won over the emperor with his “great piety and holiness.” A later hagiography claimed that Majolus, who had a reputation of seeing future events in his dreams, predicted the death of Liudolf during his visit at Pavia; if true, that may have pleased Octavian more than any display of piety. The emperor sent him on to Rome and encouraged Sergius to give him the privileges that he wanted, which Sergius duly did.

Majolus returned with a party of monks over the Saint Bernard pass. As he trekked over the mountains, his party was set upon by Saracen raiders from Fraxinet. His fellow monks encouraged the abbot to flee, but he refused to leave without them, and was captured. According to later hagiographies, the Saracens demanded that he convert to Islam; when he refused, they decided to hold him for ransom instead. A letter was sent to the monks of Cluny, who delivered a massive ransom, a thousand pounds of silver, into the hands of the corsairs. Only when paid did they finally let the abbot free.

The Saracens surely rejoiced at this great windfall, but it was to be their undoing. The capture and imprisonment of one of the most revered monks in Latin Christendom was a major scandal of the day that embarrassed and angered both Emperor Octavian and King Lothair of Provence. Octavian now recalled his father’s alliance with Lothair against the Saracens and sought to renew it, and the two rulers resolved to make another attempt to stamp out the infidels. Lothair raised an army to attack them, and Octavian commanded Count-Patrician Arduin of Auriate to assist him. In 973 or 974 a joint Italian-Provencal army led by Count Arduin and Prince Hugh, the son of King Lothair, fought and routed the Saracens, and then pressed the attack to Fraxinet itself. Octavian dispatched a fleet gathered from Pisa, Gaeta, Luni, and some of the Ligurian towns to attack the pirates’ den from the sea. This time, no storm intervened, and the citadel that had been a thorn in the side of Christian Provence since 889 was surrounded and then overcome. Its defenders were slaughtered wholesale as they tried to escape their besieged citadel, the abbot’s ransom was returned to Cluny, and the rest of the Saracens’ ill-gotten gains was divided amongst the victors.[B]

Italy and Provence

This victory marked the beginning of a new relationship between Provence and Italy. Before Otto’s death, Provence had been aligned with the Germans on account of the marriage of Emperor Otto to Lothair’s sister Alda. Alda, however, soon felt threatened in the new regime of King Henry II, and she and her children, including Otto’s only living son Bruno, fled to France and then to Provence not long after Henry’s coronation. It has been alleged that this alienated Lothair from the new German king; but Lothair was perhaps already inclined to be opposed to Henry, as his daughter Emma was the Queen of France, having been married to Lothair of France since 965. Liutprand states towards the end of his chronicle that Lothair acknowledged the suzerainty of Emperor Octavian. If true, it was surely only a nominal recognition, but one that emphasized the exit of Provence from the German orbit and its new alignment with its larger neighbors, France and Italy, whose kings pursued a clear anti-German policy.

Provence in the 970s was not the most powerful of European kingdoms, but Lothair’s reign had been quite successful. With his capable wife Adelaide as his close advisor and consors regni (partner in the kingdom), the king had consolidated his hold over some of his more wayward feudatories, carefully limited the autonomy of his vassals, and annexed the County of Vienne after the death of Charles Constantine in 962 without male issue. Better still, he seems to have managed this without provoking serious internal opposition. The mild and amicable Lothair was known in Provence after his death, and perhaps even in life, as “Lothair the Good” – though that epithet may have been primarily intended to contrast him to his famously wicked stepmother, who as we have seen was loathed by the Provencals as Malamaria, “Maria the Bad.” Provence was surely less grand a kingdom than Italy, but in terms of royal power and internal stability it was far superior to Octavian’s fractious realm. The conquest of Fraxinet removed the last great internal threat to the kingdom, and Lothair resettled the uninhabited lands around it with new milites and peasants. There are indications that trade began to intensify between Lombardy and Provence after the destruction of Fraxinet made the alpine passes safe for travelers again.

The Saracens did not merely benefit Provence by their absence. Their presence, too, had left the country with some benefits. Despite being universally maligned by Christians as a den of pirates, Fraxinet was a Muslim frontier state in which agriculture and trade was conducted alongside jihad. The “Moors” introduced buckwheat to Provence, and it has been alleged that cork cultivation and the use of pine resin for waterproofing ships were also techniques learned from the Muslim occupiers.

According to Basil Notarius, an even closer alignment between the two rulers very nearly came about in the form of a proposed marriage between Octavian’s daughter Helena and Prince Hugh in the year of Fraxinet’s destruction. The plan was derailed, however, by Agatha, who flatly refused to allow it. Helena was the only living legitimate child of the imperial couple, and was also Agatha’s delight – the empress took charge of her schooling personally, and the bright child seemed to everyone to take after her mother much more than her frequently absent father. The empress was not about to send her over the mountains as a diplomatic bride, and eventually Octavian gave up the attempt.

Next Time: The Fallen Empire

Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Upon accession as king, Alberic made himself Margrave of Ivrea and issued at least one capitulary as rex et marchio prior to 953. No reference to Alberic as marchio is extant from after his imperial coronation, but it is assumed that he did not actually abolish it in his lifetime.
[2] Widukind claims that Henry was warned by Alda, Otto’s widow, but this seems unlikely. Although there was surely tension between Alda and Liudolf on account of her influence and the potential claims of her son Bruno, Henry wanted the throne for himself in opposition to both sons of Otto. The idea that Alda would see him as an ally is questionable.
[3] The only known survivors of this purge were Géza’s younger brother Béla, who was still a minor at the time of Géza’s succession, and his probable cousin Koppány, who ruled a sub-realm in the south of the country.
[4] “Gyula” seems to have been a military title representing a high command just under the position of the fejedelem, and may have been misinterpreted as a given name by the Greeks and Latins. This is supported by the fact that every ruler of Transylvania in his line is named “Gyula” in contemporary Christian sources. The actual name of Gyula, father of Sarolt, was probably Zubor, though he is usually called “Gyula the Elder” to distinguish him from his son of the same name/title. The Transylvanian Gyulas were adherents of the Greek rite of Christianity, starting with the reported baptism of Gyula the Elder (whom the Greeks called Gylas) at Constantinople in 950. The Gyulas have traditionally been assumed to be Magyars based on the Magyar title of gyula and the fact that an earlier “Gyula” was one of the original chieftains of Magyar legend alongside Arpad. They could, however, have been Pecheneg chieftains; the Greeks record the name of a Pecheneg tribe at that time as Gylas – the same as their rendering of Gyula – and there are allusions to a strong Pecheneg presence in Transylvania, including in later Hungarian chronicles. Whether the family was Magyar or Pecheneg or some mix thereof thus cannot be certainly known. Regardless, the Transylvanian state of the Gyulas seems to have enjoyed great autonomy from the rule of the fejedelem, possibly being only nominally subordinated to the Magyar high prince. The marriage of Géza to Sarolt was likely an attempt by Géza or his father to tie this principality more closely to Magyar rule.
[5] The speed of conversion among the Magyars in Géza’s lifetime should not be overstated. Despite claims of late 10th century chroniclers that “thousands” were converted by the Italian priests, the vast majority of the Magyar people were probably still pagan by the end of the first millennium.
[6] The original “Lotharingia” was the kingdom of Middle Francia given to and named after Lothair, the eldest son of Louis the Pious. It included not only a swath of territory west of the Rhine between East and West Francia, but Upper and Lower Burgundy and the Kingdom of Italy as well. This was an awkward geographical construct, divided by the Alps, which endured only for the life of Lothair; thereafter the kingdom separated into its constituent parts. By the 10th century “Lotharingia” referred specifically to the territory between France and Germany bordered by the lower Rhine in the north and Upper Burgundy in the south, and was no longer understood to comprise any Burgundinian or Italian territory.
[7] Otto “the Younger” and King Edgar were first cousins once removed. Edgar was the grandson of King Edward the Elder, while Otto was Edward’s great-grandson through his grandmother Eadgyth, Emperor Otto’s first wife.

Timeline Notes (Out of Character)
[A] The real Ratherius had a somewhat similar career, being repeatedly exiled, imprisoned, or chased out of the city.
[B] This is almost totally historical, albeit with some different characters involved – IOTL the hero of the hour is Count William of Provence, who leads an attack (along with Arduin Glaber of Auriate) against the Saracens after the abduction of Majolus. ITTL, however, the assassination of Boso, Count of Arles on Marozia’s orders means that William, his son, was never born, and the Provencal commander is Prince Hugh instead. Prince Hugh is a completely fictional person, as IOTL Lothair died quite young and only had time to have one child with Adelaide, a daughter named Emma.