Berengar had lost men, wealth and prestige, he was too clearly profitless for his subjects, and the death at Hungarian hands of many bishops and counts left the greatest magnates greater than ever. The plot against him, already begun, gathered strength. It was headed by Adalbert II the Rich of Tuscany, whose wife Bertha, the widow of a Provençal count, was daughter of Lothar II of Lorraine and thus granddaughter of the Emperor Lothar I; and its object was to restore Lothar I's line to Italy in the person of Louis of Provence, grandson of the Emperor Louis II. The Spoletan party, the Empress Ageltrude, and Pope John IX, the old partisan of Lambert, were, it seems, won to the plan, and the hand of the Byzantine princess Anna, daughter of Leo VI, was obtained for the pretender. When Louis came to Italy in September 900, Berengar, faced by a general defection, could only retreat beyond the Mincio, while his rival, surrounded by the magnates, proceeded to Rome to receive the imperial crown in February 901 from the new Pope Benedict IV. But Louis had no great capacity, and the magnates were fickle of set purpose, for, says the chronicler Liudprand in a classic passage, they preferred two kings to play off one against the other. In 902 a counter-change was brought about. Berengar advanced to Pavia, and Louis, who had been unable to get away quickly enough, was allowed to withdraw on taking an oath never to return. Within three years (905), however, Bertha once more tempted her kinsman to invade Italy. He was to be furnished, perhaps, with a Byzantine subsidy[1]. Once more Berengar fled east, this time to Bavaria, for Adalard, Bishop of Verona, his chief stronghold, called in his rival. Louis heedlessly thought himself secure and was surprised and captured (21 July) by Berengar to whom the Veronese citizens, though not their bishop, were always loyal. No risks were taken by the victor, and Louis was sent back to Provence blind and helpless. By an atrocity unlike his usual dealings Berengar at last secured an undisputed throne. Real control over great nobles and bishops he was never to obtain.
While the Regnum Italicum lay invertebrate in the hands of the magnates, South Italy was even more disordered and tormented. For sixty years the land had suffered from the intolerable scourge of Saracen ravages. While a robber colony, established almost impregnably on the river Garigliano, spread desolation in the heart of Italy over the Terra di Lavoro and the Roman Campagna, the true base of the Muslims lay in Sicily. There the mixed Berber and Arab population, who had swarmed in under the Aghlabid dynasty of Ḳairawān, were on the point of completing the conquest of the Christian and Greek eastern portion of
- ↑ At least the Pseudo-Symeon Magister states (Ann. Leon. Basil. fil. cap. 14) that the eunuch Rhodophylus in 904 was taking 100 lbs. of gold "to the Franks." But the other narrators, e.g. John Cameniates, De excidio Thessalonicae, cap. 59, state that this sum was for the Byzantine army then fighting "the Africans," and in any case it was diverted to ransom the walls of Thessalonica from destruction by the Moslems.
