Kingdom of Italy (medieval)
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The Kingdom of Italy (Regnum Italiæ or Regnum Italicum) was a creation of the Lombards who invaded the Italian peninsula, following the destruction of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, in 568. The Lombard kingdom proved to be more stable than its Ostrogothic predecessor, but in 774, on the pretext of defending the Papacy, the Franks, led by Charlemagne, conquered the Lombard kingdom. They kept the Italo-Lombard realm separate from their own, but the kingdom shared in all the partitions, divisions, civil wars, and succession crises of the Carolingian Empire of which it became a part until, by the end of the ninth century, the Italian kingdom was an independent, but highly decentralised, state. In 951 the Italian throne was claimed by Otto the Great, already King of Germany. The two thrones together under one crown formed a basis for the Holy Roman Empire. Central government in Italy disappeared rapidly in the High Middle Ages, but the idea of the kingdom carried on. By the Renaissance it was little more than a legal fiction and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) did away with most of it even in law, but it may have lasted in titulo until the dissolution of the Empire in 1806, by which time Napoleon Bonaparte had established his own Regno d'Italia with no regard for the medieval ghost.
