Duchy of Benevento

Benevento, an inland city of southern Italy, was the seat of the southernmost Lombard duchy, founded in the later sixth century and ruled by Lombard dukes until 774. Separated from the Lombard kingdom in the north by lands loyal to Rome and Ravenna, it always went its own way. When the Franks conquered the Lombard kingdom, Benevento survived on its own as a principality for nearly three more centuries, before falling to the Normans and ending as a small papal territory.

How the duchy began is disputed. Some scholars place Lombard settlement in the south as early as 571, before the conquest of the Po valley was complete; others argue for a later arrival around 590. Either way, the first duke was Zotto, leader of a war band that came down along the coast of Campania. He was eventually brought under the authority of the Lombard king, and his nephew Arechis succeeded him, setting a pattern of hereditary rule.

Arechis took Capua and Crotone and plundered Amalfi, though Naples resisted him. By the end of his reign the Byzantine Empire held little in the south beyond Naples, Amalfi, Gaeta, Sorrento, Calabria and the Apulian ports. In 662 Duke Grimoald I marched north, seized Pavia and made himself king of the Lombards. The next year the emperor Constans II landed at Taranto to win back the south and besieged Benevento, but Grimoald's son Romuald held the city and later destroyed part of the imperial army near Forino. A peace was made in 680. In the eighth century the main threat came from the Lombard kings themselves, who repeatedly imposed their own candidates on the duchy.

Isolation bred independence. The church of Benevento developed its own liturgical music, Beneventan chant, which was not fully replaced by Gregorian chant until the eleventh century, and a distinctive Beneventan script for writing Latin. Paul the Deacon, who came south with a royal bride and settled at Monte Cassino, wrote the history of the Lombards that is still the main source for the duchy's early centuries.

When Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom in 774, Duke Arechis II considered claiming the royal title but settled for that of prince. A Frankish siege of Salerno forced him to accept Frankish overlordship in 787, yet Benevento kept its practical independence and reached its height in the early ninth century under Sicard, who took Amalfi and imposed tribute on Naples. After Sicard's murder in 839 a ten-year civil war drew in Muslim mercenaries and ended with the emperor Louis II splitting the realm into the principalities of Benevento and Salerno.

Benevento was joined with Capua in 899 and briefly reunited with Salerno under Pandulf Ironhead, who had it made an archbishopric in 969, but by the early eleventh century it was the weakest of the three Lombard states. The Norman Robert Guiscard captured it in 1053 and handed it to Pope Leo IX. In 1081 the princely title went back to the pope, by which time hardly more than the city itself remained, and no more princes were named. Benevento then survived for centuries as a small enclave of the Papal States under a papal governor, until the French occupied it in the Napoleonic period and Talleyrand held it as a principality from 1806 to 1814–1815.

Our 1000 and 1200 maps show the state as the Duchy of Benevento, although by 1000 it had been a Lombard principality for more than two centuries and by 1200 was a papal possession. On the 1000 map it borders the Emirate of Sicily, the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire; by 1200 its chief neighbour is the Papal States.