regalia, the imperial rights, should be recognized by the towns which sought the help of the emperor. The Roncaglia Decrees of 1158, drawn up, interestingly, by a team of four lawyers from Bologna, spoke of the right to extract the fodrum, the tax to support imperial armies on the march; to extract tolls and taxes from the cities and, most fundamental of all, the imperial bannus--the emperor's personal suzerainty over property and justice. Imperial officials were to be appointed to oversee these rights.
If the Roncaglia Decrees had been carried out, imperial power in Italy would have been restored to an extensive degree. But the fact that they soon became a dead letter is evidence of the political realities which undermined any attempt to reestablish strong imperial authority. The communes of the north resented attempts to dictate their form of government even more than they hated the territorial encroachments of their powerful neighbours. The popes, having provided themselves with the theoretical justification that they needed for taking political action, tried to guard against a potential growth in imperial territory by alliances with the emperor's enemies: the communes in the north and the Norman kingdom in the south. It was a dangerous game and one in which the state of play was dramatically altered by the accession of the young Emperor Henry VI to the throne of Sicily in 1194. But it was one in which the claims of the imperium came to have real political significance. Unlike the Byzantine state, which retained the theory whilst losing much of the substance of empire, the reestablishment of German claims over Italy, the old heart of the Roman Empire, provided, for a time, a real territorial basis for empire which was lacking elsewhere. It was certainly not to be found in the western lands of the successors of Charlemagne.
After the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire, the kings of the Franks had little influence over the lands of the Midi and the Spanish March. Though charters were often still dated by the reigns of the distant kings north of the Loire, they were seldom seen in the Mediterranean provinces. The Rhône valley was the territory of the kings of Burgundy and to the south, the collapse of the old Carolingian administrative system led to the
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