I find Italy's history from the fall of the Western Roman empire to its eventual unification in the 1860s to be fairly fascinating, particularly its rather vibrant political scene during the Renaissance and beyond.
But I often wonder, is there scholarly consensus on what produced the highly fragmented nature of the area, at a time when many other fractious areas on the continent were gradually coalescing into larger dynastic states?
I mean, I know that it's wrong to think of many European polities at the time as very strong, centralized states in the same sense as we'd conceive of them today. But regardless, kingdoms like France, Spain, England, and even the Archduchy of Austria represented much larger territorial units that were ruled by central authorities that gradually grew in scope. Their scale eclipsed the Italian city states considerably. What caused this divergence?
So we have the Kingdom of Naples in the south, and the Papal state in the central part of the peninsula. But the northern part of Italy was fragmented and yet still a great center of wealth and prosperity. Had any single power been able to emerge as its master, it seems like it would have been a considerable power right in the center of Europe.
What prevented this area from being united by a common ruler or government--whether it be a dynastic family or some sort of analogue to the republican governments that ruled many of Italy's city-states? I guess one way to ask the question is something like "What did happen in France or Austria or Castille/Aragon that didn't happen in Italy?"
What stopped any given Duke of Milan from rising to conquer Florence and Venice and Pisa and Genoa, etc? Did the merchant republics of northern Italy simply have no aspirations to expand at home beyond their immediate environs?
I realize this is a complex question, and one that might not have anything resembling a clear-cut answer. But I'd appreciate any sort of insight into the topic, even if it's just ideas about what set Italy apart rather than any sort of grand unifying theory.
The short answer would be the incompleteness of the Lombard invasion of Italy following Justinian's conquests, which was the last time there was a politically and practically unified peninsula, albeit for quite a relatively short time.
The Lombard invasion carved new borders and thus new antagonistic frontiers in what had previously been a unified peninsula, which began the cultural divides between regions. If you look at maps of the areas of Lombard conquest, they really mirror the future regional divisions of the peninsula.
The incompleteness of the Lombard advance was followed by the incompleteness of Carolingian takeover (leaving southern Italy essentially autonomous). That was followed by the collapse of northern Italian "state" authority under the Ottonians and Salians, and the increasing fragmentation of Holy Roman imperial power which had a significant impact south of the Alps until the city states in Italy ceased recognition of German power, unless under absolute direct military threat.
The city-state nature of Italy has always tended toward regionalism, it's just that in times past, the public state was strong enough to mitigate those factors. Each time an Italian conquest remained incomplete, it contributed to the demise of the public state, and the increasing strength of the papacy almost demanded constant foreign interests to be involved in Italy, kept any one foreign or domestic entity from cementing a hold on the whole of the peninsula. Thus each city-state region tended to go its own way.
This being made easier by the natural divisions in geography (i.e. the Appenine mountains) with regards to the peninsula. So you would have the Po Plain being one entity, Genoa being another, Tuscany yet another, and of course Rome as a political power center all its own, still being separated from Campania, Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily.
This is why it took the 19th century to reunite the peninsula, as it was specifically the romantic ideology of nationalism, of Italy as one nation descended from a common history, to overcome the regional and functional divisions of culture and language. It was a plea to the unity of the past rather than the disunity of the present.
And one could argue, that ideology of past unity itself is still "constructed", as attested to the continued regional antagonism today, between north and south, as well as from city to city. Ask any Italian.
Sources:
Wickham, Chris. Early Medieval Italy. London: Macmillan, 1980.
Plumb, J. H. The Italian Renaissance: A Concise Survey of Its History and Culture. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Wilcox, Donald J. In Search of God and Self: Renaissance and Reformation Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
Flower, Raymond, and Alessandro Falassi. Italy: A Traveler's History. Singapore: SNP Editions, 2008.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out Trevalyan's Garibaldi Trilogy. Whenever Barbara Tuchman talked about history as a craft, she would rave about it - the second one in particular.
Doesn't talk much about pre 19-th century, of course, but it does describe in considerable detail what it took to finally unify the nation.
