Battle of Legnano
The cities of northern Italy beat a Holy Roman Emperor in the field at Legnano in May 1176. Frederick Barbarossa had spent twenty years attempting to make imperial authority real in Italy. The Diet of Roncaglia in 1158 asserted his rights over the communes — the appointment of magistrates, tolls, coinage, courts — on the basis of Roman law dug out for him by jurists at Bologna, and he enforced it by destroying Milan in 1162 and dispersing its population. The response was the Lombard League, formed in 1167 by some sixteen cities that had spent the previous century fighting each other, in alliance with Pope Alexander III against an emperor who had installed his own antipope. They rebuilt Milan and founded a new fortress city named Alessandria after the pope. The battle came on Frederick's fifth expedition, when he was waiting for reinforcements from Germany that had largely not come. His cavalry broke the League's horse and drove it from the field, and then failed against the infantry, who formed round the carroccio — the wagon carrying the city's standard and altar, which was the emblem the militia was sworn to defend — and held long enough for the League's cavalry to rally and return. Frederick was unhorsed and thought dead for days. The Peace of Constance in 1183 conceded the communes' self-government while preserving his formal overlordship, which is roughly what they had wanted. The battle's later career is longer than its military importance. Nineteenth-century Italian nationalists made it the founding victory of Italians against Germans, Verdi wrote an opera about it in 1849, and the Italian national anthem's last verse names it. A northern Italian party took the name of the League in the 1990s.
- Year: 1176 CE
- Category: Military
