Overview
After 476 Italy fractured. It passed through the Ostrogothic kingdom, Justinian’s costly Byzantine reconquest in the Gothic Wars of 535-554, and the Lombard invasion of 568, leaving the peninsula divided for centuries among the Papal States in the center, Byzantine and later Norman rule in the south, and self-governing cities in the north.
Key developments
The Papal States gave the popes temporal power; in 800 Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome, and Italy later became an arena for the struggle between supporters of the pope (Guelphs) and the emperor (Ghibellines). The maritime republics — Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi — grew rich on Mediterranean trade and the Crusades; the Venetian Marco Polo traveled to Yuan-dynasty China late in the 13th century. Northern communes such as Florence and Milan prospered and drifted toward rule by signori.
End and transition
The Black Death of 1347-51 devastated Italy, but its wealthy cities — above all Florence, where Dante had shaped a literary Italian — were moving toward the cultural rebirth of the Renaissance.