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death of the Emperor Lambert in October 898 dealt a blow to the royal power in North Italy, the Regnum Italicum of the tenth century. In place of the born ruler, who had mastered his own vassals and made himself protector of the Papacy, there succeeded Berengar, mild and cheatable. Berengar, too, was weak in resources. His own domains lay awkwardly in the extreme north-east, in Friuli and the modern Veneto, not like Lambert's in the centre; and he had not like Lambert the support of a large group of the great nobles and bishops who formed the real source of power in Italy. Two magnates in especial were equally faithless and formidable, Adalbert the Rich, Marquess of Tuscany, in the centre, and Adalbert, Marquess of Ivrea, on the western frontier. In vain did Berengar marry his daughter Gisela to Adalbert of Ivrea and give the Tuscan his freedom from the prison to which Lambert had consigned him for revolt. A plot was hatching, when disaster befel king and kingdom.

Already in 898 the Hungarians, or Magyars, had raided the present Veneto from their newly-won settlements on the river Theiss. In 899 a larger swarm made its way from Aquileia to Pavia. Berengar, always a gallant warrior, strove to rise to the occasion. From the whole Regnum Italicum his vassals came to the number of 15,000 men-at-arms. Before them the outnumbered Magyars fled back, but were overtaken at the river Brenta. Their horses were worn out, they could not escape, and the tradition, perhaps influenced by a sense of tragedy, tells of their proffers refused by the haughty Christians. Yet on 24 September they surprised their heedless foes and scattered them with fearful slaughter. For nearly a year the Lombard plain lay at their mercy, though few fortified cities were taken and they did not cross the Apennines. Amid his faithless vassals, with his land desolated, Berengar submitted to pay blackmail, which at least kept the Magyars his friends if it did not save Lombardy from occasional incursions. The only mitigation of the calamity was the defeat of the Hungarians on the water when in 900 they assaulted Venice under her doge Pietro Tribuno.