March of Montferrat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The March (also margraviate or marquisate) of Montferrat was frontier march of the Kingdom of Italy during the Middle Ages. It was a state of the Holy Roman Empire. Western Liguria was constituted as the marca Aleramica ("Aleramic march") for Aleram in 961. Originally a county, it was raised to become the Duchy of Montferrat in 1574.
After Otto I of Germany displaced Berengar of Ivrea in Italy, he began, in a manner much like his predecessors Berengar and Hugh of Arles, to redefine the great fiefs of Italy. He reorganised the northwest into three great marches. Western Liguria he gave to Aleram, Eastern Liguria or the marca Januensis he gave to Oberto I, and Turin he made a march for Arduin Glaber.
Aleram's descendants were relatively obscure until the time of Rainier in the early twelfth century. Rainier's son William V married a sister of Conrad III of Germany and so greatly increased his family's prestige. He entered into the Italian policies of Conrad and Manuel I Comnenus, setting a Ghibelline precedent for his successors, and with his sons became involved in the Crusades. Boniface I of Montferrat was the leader of the Fourth Crusade and established the Kingdom of Thessalonica in the Latin Empire of Greece. Reuniting Thessalonic, inherited by Boniface' Greek son Demetrius, with Montferrat became a goal of Boniface' Italian heirs, though nothing ever came of their endeavours.
In the thirteenth century, Montferrat waffled between the Guelph and Ghibelline parties under Boniface II and William VII. They had to wage several long wars against the independence-minded communes of Asti and Alessandria and they became the standard-bearers of a renewed Lombard League forged to fight the spread of Angevin influence into northern Italy. The capital of Montferrat at this time was Chivasso, the centre of the margraves' power.
In 1305, the last Aleramici margrave died and Montferrat passed to a Greek imperial dynasty, the Palaeologi, who held it until 1533, during a period of diminishing territoriality. In that year, Montferrat was occupied by the Spanish before passing to the illustrious House of Gonzaga in the person of Frederick II. In 1574, the Gonzaga margrave was made a duke and the "march" ceased to exist as an entity, though it had already undergone the significant change from a feudal collection of frontier counties to one of the petty states of Renaissance Italy, divided into two separated territories.
[edit] See also
- Rulers of Montferrat, for a list of margraves and dukes
