476-527: Leonid Dynasty, Odovacar, Theoderic
When the last ruling Western Emperor was dethroned in 476 by the general Flavius Odovacar and his imperial regalia sent back to Constantinople, Italy legally fell back under the overlordship of the Roman Emperor in the East. Technically, the Roman Empire was now de iure back under the sole rulership of Emperor Zenon.
De facto however, Odovacar ruled independently as King of Italy. The Eastern Empire, atrophied as it was, exerted no actual power over Italy. When the Ostrogoths were diverted to the peninsula in 488 by Emperor Zeno and took it over, their King Theoderic continued to pay lip service to the Eastern Empire and claim he was ruling as the Augustus' representative, but the general situation did not change.
Still, the unity between East and West of the Empire had by no means been broken yet. Italy was a stable and prosperous place under "barbarian" rule which had not yet lost its ancient wealth and late antique administrative structures. Consuls were elected into the 500s, and the Senate kept existing. Long distance trade and diplomatic contacts mostly continued unabated, Germanic rulers were keen to signal that they were in some way subservient to the Emperor, the post-Roman West yet remained firmly a part of the Roman world that the Augusti of the East had a great interest in for strategic and symbolic reasons.
The city of Rome remained the second centre of the Empire in the mind of the Eastern Romans, with an enormous symbolic significance as the birthplace of the Roman people and cradle of the Empire. Sooner or later, they would return to it.
535: Justinian's Reconquests
Upon becoming Emperor, Justinian set his mind towards a project of unprecedented ambition - to reconquer the lost Western provinces of the Roman empire. For this project, he summoned up all the remaining economic and military resources of the Roman Empire, and he would end up massively overstraining them for fleeting gains.
After almost half a century of Germanic rule had passed, Roman troops again landed in Italy in 535 and made rapid gains, pushing the Ostrogoths back to and capturing Rome in 536 without a fight. The Romans, however, did not endear themselves to the local populace. Roman armies, largely composed of barbarian elements, plundered and pillaged. To the Latin populace, the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman troops and administrators appeared like foreign invaders. The arrival of imperial tax collectors provoked open resistance.
The war dragged on back and forth until 552 and left Italy in ruins. Casualties among the civilian populace were high, cities and water supplies were destroyed, many Roman Italians sold into slavery or massacred, hunger and plagues ravaged the countryside. Rome itself changed hands numerous times and went from a metropolis with still several hundred thousand people to a town with less than 30,000 inhabitants.
When the impoverished province of Italy was finally integrated directly into the Empire and all its senatorial offices and titles abolished, much of what was left of the Late Roman heritage in Italy had been destroyed. While the reconquest was propagandistically exploited and did succeed in temporarily strengthening relations between Italy and Constantinople, it in some ways drove both further apart. There was massive resistance in Italy to the remote Eastern Emperor heavy-handedly interfering in Western church affairs and doctrine. But it was not until the latter sixth and seventh century that close relations would come to a conclusive end and Italy would stop playing a major role for the Eastern Romans.
568: Lombards in Italy
There was not much time to enjoy the fruits of victory. Shortly after Justinian's death, another disaster struck and decisively severed much of Italy from imperial control permanently. The Germanic Lombards invaded the peninsula and faced little organized resistance from the war-weary, unhappy locals or the overwhelmed imperial administration, leaving only the city of Rome, a few stretches of territory in middle Italy and along the coasts as well as the islands in Roman hands. The remaining Roman possessions on the Italic mainland, formerly still organized along Diocletianic administrative divisions, were reorganized into the Exarchate of Ravenna in 584.
By now, Italy had slowly but decisively been transformed from the former center of the Empire to a marginalized frontier province, impoverished and divided, a battlefield for "Greek" exarchs and Lombard warlords. The Empire's attention was turned towards the much more vital East and the Balkans which were under increasing pressure. The exarch of Ravenna and the Pope in Rome operated mostly independently and could hope for little help from the overchallenged imperial centre, though they formally recognized its suzerainty. Italy and the Eastern Empire began to drift apart for good. In 605, Emperor Phocas had to recognize the Lombard kingdoms and concede that reconquest was impossible.
Still, it is reported that Emperor Maurice drew up a will in 597 assigning his elder son as Emperor in Constantinople and his younger son ruling in old Rome. The idea of a united Western and Eastern Empire was not dead yet, though it existed merely on paper and was never realized.
7th Century: Birth of the "Byzantine" Empire
While Italy and the East were developing apart, at the beginning of the 600s there was little sign of the fundamental upheavals that would shake the Roman world and the Mediterranean. Parts of Italy still had diplomatic connections to the distant Emperor of Constantinople. The idea of belonging to the Imperium Romanum still had real weight. When the Emperor Phocas usurped power in the East in 602, his portraits were sent to Rome, where Senate and clergy acclaimed him and Pope Gregory I, representative of imperial authority in the urbs aeterna, congratulated the Emperor in a letter. The Romans dedicated a column in his honor on the Forum Romanum, the last monument of antiquity. Constantinople was still seen as the political, cultural and ecclesiastical center of the world by at least some segments of the Italian people.
Over the course of the seventh century however, the Roman Empire would experience a devastating and irreversible transformation. After an apocalyptic war against the Sassanians, the entire East of the Imperium fell to the Islamic invasions save for western Anatolia, and Africa was captured not long after. Meanwhile, the Balkans and Greece were largely wrested from imperial control by Slavs and Avars. The truncated Roman Empire, limited to stretches of land in Greece, Asia Minor and Italy, turned into what we may call “Byzantium”.
By the end of this period between the reconquests and the Islamic invasions, a large and growing rift had appeared between Italy and the rump of the Roman Empire, which more and more came to be seen as distant, foreign and Greek. Social, economic, and cultural horizons contracted; regionalism set in both in the East and West. The former unity of the Mediterranean had almost entirely vanished. We have definitively entered the "Medieval" period.
Constans II was the last Roman emperor to visit Rome in 663, after almost two centuries without an imperial presence, in a desperate and misguided attempt at relocating the imperial capital, as he presumably believed the East irrevocably lost and was planning to organize the defense of the crumbling Empire from Sicily. The former capital had by now lost all the splendor of antiquity, and it quickly proved futile to make Italy the imperial center, as it had become an impoverished periphery. No Eastern Emperor ever visited the West again until the equally desperate John V Palaiologos over half a millennium later. And unlike in the sixth century, when it had been common for educated elites from Italy to visit the imperial capital, few Latin-speaking Westerners were seen in Constantinople in the seventh century and afterwards.
8th Century: The End of the Exarchate, Frankish Italy
While stretches of Italy were still under nominal Byzantine control in the eight century, the distant “Greek” Emperors exerted little actual influence, and the Italians were eager to emancipate themselves from their yoke. The first half of the 8th century was marked by factional conflict and constant strife between Italy and the imperial authorities. Justinian II attempted to intervene militarily against the recalcitrant Pope Sergius but was stopped by contingents from Ravenna, and the successor John VII moved openly against the Byzantine exarch. In 709, the disloyal archbishop of Ravenna was captured by Byzantine forces and tortured, dealing irreparable damage to the relations between both. The Lombards too waged constant war against the exarchate's scattered possessions. Byzantine Italy was fracturing.
In 751, the last Exarch of Ravenna was put to death by the Lombards. The Papacy and Archbishopric of Ravenna claimed what remained of the Exarchate in central Italy for themselves with the help of the Franks, the birth of what would later become the Papal State. Byzantine influence retreated to Venetia, Sicily and the coasts of Southern Italy. Rome passed from the hands of the Roman Empire forever. By the 770s, the Papal name replaced that of the emperor on Roman coins and documents. While not yet formally broken, relations had turned to open hostility. Fears of a “Greek reconquista” in Italy never materialized. The Byzantines had neither the strength nor will to defend these far-flung foreign possessions. Upon accession of Leo III, he sent to Charlemagne the protocol of his election alongside a pledge of loyalty and keys and banner of the city of Rome, as had previously been custom to do towards the Byzantine sovereign. The Franks became the new imperial suzerain of Rome.