The way the Western Empire fell was that an army commander, Odoacer, who had been one of the powers behind the throne for awhile, decided that having an emperor sucked when the emperor's dad had a fight with him about the allotment of lands to the army troops. So Odoacer had the emperor deposed and in theory recognized the Eastern Roman Emperor, Zeno, as the only Roman Emperor. Odoacer got "permission" to hold Italy (which was more or less all that the Western Empire still controlled at the end) as a "Patrician". In reality it was Odoacer's kingdom, since Zeno was at the time fighting for his life against all sorts of internal enemies. Odoacer controlled Italy and Illyria and Pannonia and janx until 488.
In 488 Zeno got rid of some of those internal political enemies by sending one of his rivals, Theodoric Amal, and his Ostrogothic buddies out of the Eastern Empire to go to Italy with permission to get rid of Odoacer and settle over there. After five years of war Theodoric managed to force Odoacer into retreating behind the walls of his capital, Ravenna, but since Ravenna was hard to capture he offered Odoacer peace terms that allowed joint rule between the two of them over Italy. Odoacer gave up, opened the gates, the Ostrogoths came in, and sat down to a celebratory banquet, whereat Theodoric had Odoacer murdered and took charge by himself.
Theodoric controlled the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy until 526, and under his rule Italy was actually not doing all that badly. Most of the governmental offices were preserved from the late Roman period, with mostly the same people working in them - there weren't all that many Ostrogoths, after all, and most of the ones that were around mostly busied themselves with fighting Burgundians and Scirians and Gepidae and so forth, not mucking around in Italy itself. Because his reign was a comparative golden age, Theodoric gets called "the Great". When he died, though, some bad stuff happened. There was a power struggle over the regency for the next king in line for the throne, and the loser - Theodoric's daughter Amalasuntha - went asking for the Eastern Roman Empire's help in getting rid of her enemy, Theodahad. Justinian, the Roman Emperor, said "cool beans, an excuse to intervene in Italy and control it for reals" and sent over an army that conquered most of the peninsula.
Except it didn't. There were a few Goth holdouts left by 540, which was when most campaigning ended. The Eastern Empire had to reduce its military commitment because of Sasanian attacks. Then it got hit by the plague. And suddenly those Goths started winning again. The Empire eventually beat them, but it took until 555, and by then Italy was a virtual wasteland. Plague and constant warfare for decades turned what had been a comparatively thriving state into a disaster area. Ten years later the Lombards came in and captured much of the peninsula. By 700 they controlled northern Italy, and two Lombard duchies were in control of the inland part of southern Italy. The Byzantines - we can call them Byzantines now - had Sicily, extreme southern Italy, Rome, Ravenna, and a strip of land connecting Rome and Ravenna.
During the course of the first episode of iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire, the Lombards under their king Aistulf managed to capture Ravenna, and the Pope at the time, Stephen II, said "screw it, we hate iconoclasts anyway" and made an alliance with Pepin the Short of Francia to fight off the Lombards. Pepin won the war and in return for giving him the excuse to intervene in northern Italy gave the Papacy control of the old Exarchate of Ravenna. Basically, the area of what would eventually become the Papal States. Pepin left the rest of the Lombard state as it was, but his successor Charlemagne ended up invading and conquering the Lombard kingdom in 774. Northern Italy was thus incorporated into the Carolingian monarchy, except for the autonomous Papal States and Venice, which was still controlled by nominally Byzantine dukes.
Southern Italy was a different story. The Byzantines held outposts on the coast, plus much of the southern tip in Calabria and Apulia. Inland, the Lombard feudatories in Benevento and such were in charge. And in Sicily, the Byzantines held onto it entirely until Arab and Moorish raiding parties started to take control of the western portion of the island in the early 9th century. Those raiding parties would expand and drive the Byzantines off after a hundred fifty years. But the Byzantines would strike back and capture the Lombard duchies (mostly) in the 870s under Basil I. They thus had a strong hold over south Italy from then on until the eleventh century. Then came the Normans, who were going all the hell over Europe at that time, who ended up conquering south Italy and Sicily from the Byzantines and creating their own little kingdom, appropriately titled the Kingdom of Sicily.
Venice was another matter. Nicephorus I, the Byzantine Emperor, and Charlemagne had a few fights over it, and the Venetians themselves changed sides a couple of times too. Eventually Charlemagne decided that he didn't care enough to press the issue and Nicephorus wanted to focus on reconquering Greece from the Slavs, so they basically agreed to leave the place be and let the Venetians exercise de facto independence, though they were more or less allied to the Byzantines until the twelfth century. The old
duces became doges, and Venice developed into a republic, but still small and not in control of a large fleet, colonial empire, or terra firma yet.
North Italy started going all cluster
after the Carolingian kingdom broke up. First Lothair I was in charge of the Italian part of the empire, but when he died it got split up between a few of his sons. The Eastern and Western Francian rulers started fighting over control of Italy, and first Charles the Bald, and then Charles the Fat took charge, and then a dude named Berengar became Emperor with a power base in Italy but spent almost all of his reign fighting off rivals and antikings. So northern Italy would basically be a feudatory mess until the Ottonians of East Francia/Germany took charge and constituted the Holy Roman Empire out of Italy and Germany.
Under the Ottonians, northern Italy was definitely a secondary concern, and this continued for centuries afterwards as well. The Emperors were usually off in Germany and Italy was left without a strong hand; since there were few large landowners after the bloodletting of the late 9th and early 10th centuries, towns stepped into the gap, which was cool since northern Italy was urbanizing pretty quickly compared to most of the rest of Europe. This is where we see the rise of Genoa in addition to Venice. Inland cities eventually formed leagues to oppose the Emperors whenever they tried to extend their power south again (the most famous of these being the Lombard league). The Lombard League beat Barbarossa at Legnano in 1176 and continued a strong tradition of resisting imperial authority until the advent of Henry VI and Frederick II 'Stupor Mundi'. Henry VI, however, ended up controlling Norman Sicily, and that meant he had a base in Italy to attack the Lombard League and its successor organizations. Things got very ugly between 1194 and 1250, when the Pope and the Lombard League and a series of rebels in Germany and the Angevins of France all ganged up on the Imperials, and won. After Fred II, the Empire's control over Italy was mostly fictional. The interregnum Emperors were generally quite weak (exceptions being Henry VII and Louis IV) and so ceded what authority they still had to some of the stronger rulers in the area. This was how, for instance, the duchy of Milan got created. Northern Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries rapidly became dotted with a series of territories, which in most specifics differed little from the ones that prevailed during the 18th century. Meanwhile Sicily and south Italy, going variously by the "Kingdom of Naples" and "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies" monikers, was controlled first by the Angevins of France and then the Aragonese and then the Spanish Habsburgs and then the Austrian Habsburgs and then the Spanish Bourbons until its ultimate demise in 1860. It didn't change a whole lot, boundary-wise, either.
Then there's a whole lot of interesting social changes that probably take place like the urbanization of northern Italy and economic stuff like the rise of the maritime trading republics outside of the Italian arena and a whole series of wars and revolutions, some of which are extremely interesting and some of which are mostly "same old, same old", but frankly this post is too long as it is and I'm far too tired and besides I need to induce myself to vomit or I'll never get this crap out of my throat and it hurts like a mother
er.
Any specific questions I'd be more than happy to address, though, providing I know about what you're talking about.
you.
