King of Italy

• 1. Introduction

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  King of Italy is a title with roots stretching back to the 5th century, and its story spans more than a thousand years of conquest, dynasty, and collapse. On the 4th of September 476, a barbarian warlord named Odoacer became the first person to hold it, stepping into a power vacuum left by the fallen Western Roman Empire. He had been appointed Duke of Italy by the Byzantine Emperor Zeno in Constantinople, but the Germanic troops under his command proclaimed him Rex Italiae on their own terms.

  What followed was not a clean line of succession from one king to the next. It was a revolving door of foreign dynasties, each seizing the title as a prize of conquest. Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, and eventually Holy Roman Emperors all wore the crown of Italy, each with their own claims and their own legitimacy problems. The Iron Crown of Lombardy became the physical symbol of that authority, passing from one set of hands to the next across centuries.

  By 1806, the Holy Roman Empire itself had dissolved. Napoleon had already seized the crown in 1805, crowning himself at the Milan Cathedral. And when Italy finally unified as a single modern nation in 1861, the House of Savoy took the title at last for a people who actually called themselves Italian. That kingdom lasted until the 2nd of June 1946, when a national referendum ended the monarchy for good.

• 2. Odoacer and the Ostrogoths

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  Odoacer lived until around the age of sixty, and died on the 15th of March 493, killed by the very man who had been invited to replace him. The Byzantine Emperor Zeno had grown uneasy with Odoacer's independent power and arranged for Theoderic the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, to take Italy back under nominal Roman authority. Theoderic defeated Odoacer in 493, and the Ostrogothic era began.

  The arrangement was an unusual one. Officially, the Ostrogothic kings ruled Roman citizens in Italy as viceroys of the emperors in Constantinople, while governing their own Gothic people as their king. In practice, they ran the kingdom entirely on their own terms. Theoderic, born around 454, reigned until his death on the 30th of August 526, and his period of rule represented the high-water mark of Ostrogothic power in Italy.

  After Theoderic died, the dynasty fractured quickly. His grandson Athalaric took the throne as a child around 516 and died in 534. A queen, Amalasuintha, born around 495, held power briefly until her death on the 30th of April 535. A succession of short-lived rulers followed, each losing ground to a resurgent Byzantine Empire under Emperor Justinian. The last Ostrogothic king, Teia, fell in 552 or 553, and Byzantine authority was briefly restored over Italy.

• 3. Lombards and the Franks

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  In 568, a Germanic people called the Lombards entered the Italian peninsula under their king Alboin, who had been born somewhere in the 530s. They pushed the Byzantines back steadily, taking control of most of the peninsula. Only certain territories held out: the Exarchate of Ravenna, and the duchies of Rome, Venetia, and Naples, along with the southernmost regions.

  The Lombards ruled for over two centuries, with a long succession of kings that included figures such as Liutprand, who was born around 680 and reigned until 744. Their grip on northern Italy finally loosened in the 8th century, when Charlemagne led the Franks to victory. In 774, Charlemagne defeated the last Lombard king, Desiderius, and took the title of King of the Lombards for himself. Desiderius had been born around 720 and lived until roughly 786.

  Charlemagne reorganized the kingdom in 781, naming his young son Pepin, born in 777, as King of Italy, while retaining overall control himself. When Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor in 800, the Kingdom of Italy became one of the constituent realms of a larger empire. Later, beginning with Louis the Pious in 818, the Carolingian Emperor ruled the Kingdom of Italy directly rather than installing a separate sub-king.

• 4. The Feudal Anarchy

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  After the death of Charles the Fat in January 888, Italy fell into what historians have named the Feudal Anarchy, a period running from 888 to 962 in which multiple claimants fought over the kingship simultaneously. During this time, a new form of the title appeared: Rex Italicorum, meaning King of the Italians or King of the Italics, distinct from the older Rex Italiae.

  The chaos produced a remarkable cast of rival kings. Berengar I, born around 845, claimed the throne multiple times across several decades, eventually reunifying Italy after the death of his rival Lambert around 898 and ruling until his own death on the 7th of April 924. Lambert himself had been born around 880 and died on the 15th of October 898. A Carolingian claimant, Arnulf of Carinthia, briefly seized control in 894 before losing Italy again in 896.

  Louis III, a grandson of Louis II of Italy, was invited in by nobles hostile to Berengar around February 901 but was deposed before the 21st of April 905. After him came a further series of claimants: Rudolph of the Elder House of Welf, Hugh of the Bosonids, and finally Berengar II of the Anscarids, who held the title alongside his son Adalbert from November 950 until they were deposed around the 25th of December 961 by Otto I, who had invaded Italy in 951 and had Berengar and Adalbert serve as his vassals before finally removing them.

• 5. Italy Within the Holy Roman Empire

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  Otto I is considered the founding emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of Italy became one of its constituent realms. The title Rex Italicorum continued under Otto and his successors, with Henry II being the last to use that particular form; Henry was born on the 6th of May 973 and reigned until the 13th of July 1024. After him, emperors reverted to the plainer title of King of Italy.

  The emperors were crowned with the Iron Crown of Lombardy at cities including Pavia, Milan, and Bologna. Over the following centuries, the territory the emperors actually controlled on the Italian peninsula shrank considerably. States such as the Republic of Venice and the Papal States absorbed more and more land from the Kingdom of Italy. Central Italy, along the Rome-Ravenna axis, was the domain of the Papal States, under the direct personal rule of the pope. Southern Italy had never been part of the Holy Roman Empire at all, remaining under Byzantine influence until the Norman Kingdom of Sicily took control in the 11th century.

  The last emperor to be crowned King of Italy was Charles V, born on the 24th of February 1500, who was crowned on the 24th of February 1530 and ceased to hold the title on the 16th of January 1556. After Charles V, emperors still claimed the Italian crown in theory but stopped undergoing the coronation ceremony. Habsburg imperial control in Italy eventually receded to Trent and South Tyrol until the Empire dissolved in 1806.

• 6. Napoleon's Kingdom

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  On the 17th of March 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned with the Iron Crown of Lombardy at the Milan Cathedral, reviving the Kingdom of Italy as a French client state centred in northern Italy. Napoleon held the title in personal union with his role as Emperor of the French, and his full title in Italian law read: by the Grace of God and the Constitutions, Emperor of the French and King of Italy.

  The very next year, Holy Roman Emperor Francis II abdicated his imperial title, a move that effectively ended the empire that had claimed Italy for centuries. Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, however, did not outlast him. When Napoleon was deposed in April 1814, the kingdom collapsed with him. The Congress of Vienna, convened by the European powers to reorganize the continent, replaced it with a collection of independent duchies and kingdoms rather than restoring any unified Italian state.

  For the next several decades, from 1815 to 1866, the House of Habsburg-Lorraine used a related but distinct title: King of Lombardy-Venetia. No one claimed the overarching title King of Italy during the gap between Napoleon's fall in 1814 and Italian unification in 1861.

• 7. The House of Savoy

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  Victor Emmanuel II was born on the 14th of March 1820, and on the 17th of March 1861 he became the first king of a unified Italian state covering the entire peninsula. The path to unification had run through an unlikely alliance. Giuseppe Garibaldi, formerly a republican leader in southern Italy, joined forces with the House of Savoy to overthrow the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. A popular plebiscite followed, and the former Kingdom of Sardinia merged with the south to form the Kingdom of Italy. The Papal States and the city of Rome were not incorporated until 1870, completing the process.

  The full title borne by the Savoy kings was extraordinary in its length: it listed dozens of territories, styles, and precedences accumulated over centuries. Among them were King of Ethiopia, King of Sardinia, Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Armenia, as well as dozens of duchy, marquisate, county, and baronial titles stretching across both Italy and the old Savoyard lands along the French-Italian border.

• 8. The End of the Monarchy

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  On the 2nd of June 1946, Italians voted in an institutional referendum on whether to keep the monarchy or establish a republic. The republican side won. The Italian monarchy formally ended on the 12th of June 1946, and Umberto II, the last King of Italy, left the country. He had held the title for only thirty-four days, from the 9th of May to the 12th of June.

  Umberto II had been born in 1904 and died on the 18th of March 1983, spending the remainder of his life in exile. The title of King of Italy, which had been claimed in various forms since Odoacer took it in 476, passed out of use entirely with his departure. No successor state or pretender carried the legal authority that the referendum had extinguished.

  The title's long history reflects how Italy functioned for most of its existence: not as a single unified nation but as a geographic and cultural idea over which external powers fought for control. The Risorgimento, the unification movement of the mid-19th century, was the first time the title belonged to a kingdom that actually encompassed the whole peninsula and was governed by a dynasty rooted in Italian soil, and even that experiment lasted fewer than ninety years before the referendum of June 1946 brought it to a close.