Battle of Legnano

On 29 May 1176, near the town of Legnano north-west of Milan, the cities of the Lombard League defeated an army led in person by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The clash ended his fifth and last military expedition into Italy and pushed him towards a negotiated peace. It showed that a coalition of self-governing northern Italian towns could beat an imperial field army, and it later became a powerful symbol of Italian national identity.

By the twelfth century the towns of northern Italy had grown into communes, governments with their own militias, courts and taxes. They lay formally within the Holy Roman Empire, but Frederick wanted to turn imperial rights into real rule. At Roncaglia in 1158 he set out those claims, and in 1162 he destroyed Milan after it resisted. The cities were far from united: neighbours such as Pavia, Cremona and Como resented Milan's expansion, and Pavia and Como fought on the emperor's side. Frederick's support for rival popes also put him in conflict with Pope Alexander III. Fear of imperial power drew many communes into the Lombard League, which founded the new city of Alessandria, named after the pope.

Frederick returned to Italy in 1174. His siege of Alessandria, from October 1174 to April 1175, failed, and talks with the League broke down. In 1176 fresh troops arrived from Germany, though fewer than he needed: around 2,000 newly arrived horsemen joined about 1,000 already with him. Leaving his infantry behind for speed, he set out from Como for Pavia, where allies and supplies waited. The League marched north from Milan to catch him before he got there. Its army numbered perhaps 12,000 to 15,000 men, mostly Milanese foot soldiers, with cavalry from Milan and allied cities such as Brescia, Piacenza, Novara and Lodi. Its commander was probably the Milanese consul Guido da Landriano, though no contemporary account names him.

The fighting began when about 700 League horsemen ran into an imperial advance guard of around 300 and chased it back onto Frederick's main force. The imperial knights charged and scattered much of the League cavalry. They then came up against the Milanese infantry, drawn up around the carroccio, a wagon carrying the city's standard. Behind shields and long spears, the foot soldiers held out against repeated charges for hours.

The scattered League cavalry eventually regrouped and returned, and the imperial army was attacked from several sides. Its standard-bearer was killed, and Frederick, fighting in the front line, was unhorsed and vanished from sight. Many believed him dead. His army broke and fled, and many men were killed in the pursuit, taken prisoner or drowned trying to cross the Ticino. Imperial losses are often put at 1,500 to 2,500 killed, wounded or captured, a modern estimate rather than a figure from the time.

Frederick survived and still held loyal allies such as Pavia, but he had lost the army he needed for a quick military solution. Talks with the pope resumed, and the Peace of Venice in 1177 reconciled emperor and pope and gave the League a six-year truce. The Peace of Constance in 1183 recognised the League and confirmed the cities' wide powers of self-government, while they in turn accepted the emperor as their overlord.

In the nineteenth century, during the movement for Italian unification, Legnano was recast as a victory of Italians over foreign rule, even though Italian cities had fought on both sides. A heroic leader, Alberto da Giussano, and his "Company of Death" became central to the story, although they first appear in a fourteenth-century chronicle and are missing from the contemporary sources. Verdi's opera about the battle had its premiere in 1849, and Legnano is named in Italy's national anthem.

Our 1200 map shows the Holy Roman Empire, which then included northern Italy, a generation after the battle, with the Papal States to the south.