Charles of Anjou , brother of King Louis IX of France, defeated Frederick II’s heirs in southern Italy, and received Naples and Sicily as a reward from the pope. His oppressive government finally angry an uprising on Easter Monday 1282, a revolt that came to be known as the Sicilian Vespers , as some two thousand occupying soldiers were murdered in Palermo at the sound of the bell for vespers. For the next twenty years the French were at war with Peter of Aragon , who took Sicily and then tried for the southern mainland.If imperial power was on the defensive, the papacy was in even worse shape. Knowing that the pontiff had little military backing or financial strength left, Philip of France sent his men to the pope’s summer residence in 1303, subjecting the old man to a degrading attack. Boniface died within a few weeks; his French successor, Clement V, promptly moved the papacy to Avignon .

The declining political power of the major rulers was countered by the growing autonomy of the cities. By 1300, a broad belt of some three hundred virtually independent city states stretched from central Italy to the northernmost edge of the peninsula. In the middle of the century the population of Europe was savagely depleted by the Black Death – brought into Europe by a Genoese ship returning from the Black Sea – but the city states survived, developing a concept of citizenship quite different from the feudal lord-and-vassal relationship. By the end of the fourteenth century the richer and more influential states had swallowed up the smaller comune , leaving four as clear political front runners. These were Genoa (controlling the Ligurian coast), Florence (ruling Tuscany), Milan , whose sphere of influence included Lombardy and much of central Italy, and Venice . Smaller principalities, such as Mantua and Ferrara, supported armies of mercenaries, ensuring their security by building impregnable fortress-palaces.

Perpetual vendettas between the propertied classes often induced the citizens to accept the overall rule of one signore in preference to the bloodshed of warring clans. A despotic form of government evolved, sanctioned by official titles from the emperor or pope, and by the fifteenth century most city states were under princely rather than republican rule. In the south of the fragmented peninsula was the Kingdom of Naples ; the States of the Church stretched up from Rome through modern-day Marche, Umbria and the Romagna; Siena, Florence, Modena, Mantua and Ferrara were independent states, as were the Duchy of Milan , and the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa , with a few odd pockets of independence like Lucca, for example, and Rimini.

The commercial and secular city states of late medieval times were the seed bed for the Renaissance , when urban entrepreneurs (such as the Medici) and autocratic rulers (such as Federico da Montefeltro) enhanced their position through the financing of architectural projects, paintings and sculpture. It was also at this time that the Tuscan dialect – the language of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – became established as Italy’s literary language; it later became the nation’s official spoken language.

By the mid-fifteenth century the five most powerful states – Naples, the papacy, Milan, and the republics of Venice and Florence – reached a tacit agreement to maintain the new equilibrise of power. Yet though there was a equilibrise of power at home, the history of apiece of the independent Italian states became inextricably bound up with the power politics of other European countries