The debate on the end of the Lombard kingdom in 774 and its transition into the Carolingian world is an extremely rich one within the Italian (and not only) historiography of the last decades. Historians have examined – and are still examining – the position of the Italian peninsula within the Frankish Kingdom, the adoption of Carolingian institutions and capitularies and their integration into the Lombard tradition. Two aspects have received the most attention in recent research within this framework. The first concerns the agents of public power, i.e. the political role and the social structure of the elites of the Kingdom of Italy, as well as their transformation following the phenomena of social mobility and mobility strictu sensu, that of people of transalpine origin who moved to central and northern Italy after the conquest of the Lombard Kingdom. The second aspect deals with the economic resources of public power in the Early Middle Ages, i.e. the structure and management of fiscal assets. The historiography has recently stressed that these kinds of properties appear in royal diplomas and judicial records almost only when public authorities assigned them to other subjects, who, due to the geography of the surviving sources, appeared to be in most cases ecclesiastical institutions. These two lines of research, which are currently the focus of two Progetti di rilevanza nazionale (PRIN) funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR)1, are also those considered by Igor Santos Salazar in his recent book on Carolingian Lombardy.

The book focuses on public power and the specific features of Carolingian governance in Italy, by considering a particular region: the Königslandschaft of the Kingdom of Italy, where both the capital city, Pavia, and the most important royal curtes, including those of Marengo and Olona, were located. Lombardy has thus a wider geographical meaning than today's Italian region and refers to the territory between the rivers Sesia and Mincio, which extends from the Alps to the river Po. As the author repeatedly remarks, this area represented a veritable “royal landscape”, which is crossed by rivers, and dominated, especially in the southern part, by extensive fiscal properties and several curtes.

The introduction contains a short but extremely valuable historiographical framework on the concept of statehood in the early Middle Ages and explains the author's objectives and methodological choices, including the selected chronology, which does not correspond to that traditionally used. The end of the Carolingian world is usually dated to the death of Charles the Fat in 888. Rather, Santos Salazar ends his book with the death of Berengar I (of Friuli), arguing that the structures of power in the Kingdom of Italy did not collapse with the death of the last of the Carolingians, but with the loss of the king’s central role in the Spielregeln der Politik2 of the Italian peninsula, i.e. following the affirmation of local powers after 924.

The first section of the book is dedicated to the sources of the Lombard area, which offers one of the richest documentary patrimonies of the Italian peninsula, second only to Lucca for the chosen chronology. Santos Salazar not only outlines a map of the archival sources, but also examines why certain institutions preserved these charters, giving the reader the tools to understand how the "documentary landscape" of Lombardy heavily influences our knowledge of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period. This area provides some impressive dossiers of documents, such as those of the monasteries of St. Ambrose in Milan, St. Salvatore in Brescia and St. Sixtus in Piacenza, or that of the Church of Cremona, which enable us to research the patrimony of such ecclesiastical institutions and their relationship with public authority. However, there are also some remarkable silences in this geography of the Lombard sources. The most relevant concerns the two main cities of the region, Pavia and Milan, from which we would expect a large group of diplomas, which are, however, largely missing. The author takes into account not only the charters, i.e. primarily the diplomas and judicial records, which makes us see the king and his officers during the practice of power, but also the legislative sources, i.e. the capitularia, which make it possible to analyze the ideology of public authority and the principles of Carolingian government, as well as the chronicles. By contrast, other kind of sources, such as archaeological, numismatic, and epigraphic ones, which could be interesting for the investigation of the political authority of Carolingian and post-Carolingian rulers in Italy, are left only on the sidelines.

The second section examines the political history of the Kingdom of Italy, with a special focus on the conflicts for the royal and imperial title, which had major consequences on the Lombard area, and on the relationship between the king and the Italian elites. Although the political events of the period under consideration are complex to follow even in the simplest of textbooks, the author succeeds here in providing a compelling narrative that is well-articulated and never fragmentary. One of the greatest strengths of the book is the attention given by Santos Salazar, in this section as well as in the following ones, to the sources and their gaps, which are convincingly discussed and, when possible, explained.

The third section begins with a discussion about the ideology of Carolingian power in Italy and, in particular, the new conceptualisation of the res publica, which refers to the political body that has the king at the top and ensures the common good. When mentioned in capitularies and diplomas from the Italian peninsula, this does not only revolve around the idea of the kingdom in a broad sense, but also appear in relation to two specific and linked issues: public officials, i.e. those entrusted by the sovereign with the ministerium, and fiscal assets.

The following chapters deal with the first of these issues, and especially with the bishops and counts based in Lombardy, who were the cornerstones of both government and administration in the Carolingian kingdom. Santos Salazar examines the career of these agents of royal power and underlines the importance of personal links between the king and the public officials, the Königsnahe: individual careers were often affected by fluctuations, which depended mainly on the rapid succession of different rulers and on the ensuing transformation of the political landscape of the kingdom, especially (but not only) after the death of Charles the Fat. The author also illustrates the way in which the title of comes was granted to a variety of people, with disparate origins and even different tasks (e.g. the count's administrative tasks appear rather fluid, so much so that, especially in the first part of the considered chronology, the count is not even associated with a city or another central place). According to the most recent research on Carolingian Europe, Santos Salazar convincingly argues that such a flexible political and institutional framework favoured both rapid social ascent and descent, involving public officials, whose recruitment method is almost never clear, as well as other members of the elites, who did not bear a title but were well embedded in the political arena, as shown by the composition of the judicial assemblies.

The last section focuses on both fiscal assets, and the spaces of representation of Carolingian authority, namely assemblies, cities and rural palaces. The author briefly outlines the debate on the economic resources of public power between the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, by stressing the role of land property not only for the sustenance of the king and his court, but also for the balance of political competition by the royal authority. The king granted fiscal assets to the main lay and ecclesiastical subjects of the region to build a network of ties that went far beyond the simple economic value, and implied, as Santos Salazar clearly points out, a marked political and social character. The public resources located in the Königslandschaft of the Kingdom of Italy are therefore mapped in this section to understand not only their geographical position but also how they were administered. Lombard sources provide a good insight into the lowlands, near the river Po, where major royal curtes (Corteolona, Corianum, etc.) were located. Santos Salazar appropriately stresses a fact already known to recent historiography: fiscal properties, both those located in the lowlands and those on the Alpine side, are embedded in a water landscape, which also unveils the essential role of rivers, and especially of the Po and its tributaries, as the main communication route in Northern Italy. In this section, the author makes extensive use not only of royal diplomas but also of placita. While the former illustrate the relationship between sovereigns and the ecclesiastical institutions they favoured, the judicial records, especially in the first half of the 9th century, disclose the interests of secular elites, and their competition for access to or exploitation of public lands and other fiscal resources.

Although the largest dossiers of sources come from monastic archives, Santos Salazar does not particularly emphasize their political role in the Kingdom of Italy, which has instead been underlined in other recent publications, always mentioned in the volume.3 Even though the relationship between some of these monasteries and the royal family, especially its female branch, is clearly stated by the author, the book certainly focuses more on lay officers and bishops, leaving the reader to wonder if such abbeys played a less important role in the administration of fiscal assets and in the Carolingian governance of the Italian peninsula.

Notes:
1 Ruling in hard times. Patterns of power and practices of government in the making of Carolingian Italy http://www.sismed.eu/it/progetti-di-ricerca/ruling-in-hard-times/ (28.04.2022); Fiscal Estate in Medieval Italy. Continuity and Change (9th–12th centuries) http://www.sismed.eu/it/progetti-di-ricerca/fiscal-estate/ (28.04.2022).
2 Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter. Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde. Darmstadt 1996.
3 Ross Balzaretti, The lands of Saint Ambrose. Monks and society in early medieval Milan. Turnhout 2019; Tiziana Lazzari (eds.), Il patrimonio delle regine. Beni del fisco e politica regia tra IX e X secolo, in: Reti Medievali Rivista 13/2 (2012), pp. 123–139.