and helped create a north-south axis which was to dominate the west throughout the Middle Ages.

The Frankish involvement in Italy did nothing to promote the unity of the peninsula. The essential structure of the Lombard kingdom was preserved, although an élite of Frankish officials and ecclesiastics was brought in and vast amounts of land were entrusted to the Church. The position of the former Byzantine territories stretching from Rome north to Bologna remained ambiguous; the pope claimed them as the Patrimony of St Peter, but considerable power remained in the hands of local figures such as the archbishop of Ravenna and the nobles of the Campagna. In practice the Frankish kings exercised extensive influence. To the south the state of Benevento remained a centre of Lombard legitimism under descendants of the old royal house, although later in the century separate princedoms split off, based on Capua and Salerno, and Lombard power was undermined by Arab raids and the Byzantine reconquista. Even before 876 the eastern empire possessed a major presence in the form of direct possessions, such as Calabria, the Terra d'Otranto, and Sicily, and the largely autonomous maritime cities of Venice, Gaeta, Naples, and Amalfi. The middle and late ninth century were dominated by the raids of Arab pirates, who went so far as to set up bases on Italian soil and to sack the Vatican suburb of Rome in 846. The resistance, led by the last Carolingian emperor based in Italy, Louis II, and Pope John VIII, was spirited but unsuccessful. Italy's misery was increased by the sudden invasion of the Magyars, steppe nomads who sacked and pillaged their way as far south as Otranto in 899. Political confusion reigned by 900, with the throne of Pavia fought over by rival claimants, the papacy the plaything of noble factions, and the rise throughout the peninsula of magnate families who enforced their control of the countryside by the setting up of fortified villages (castelli). On the Christian side the only beneficiary of this disunity was Byzantium, whose prestige was heightened by disenchantment with the weakness and uncouthness of the Franks and by its enduring cultural and artistic influence in Rome and the south.

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