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Rh Ivrea, now husband of Bertha's Tuscan daughter Ermingarde, invited Rodolph II, King of Jurane Burgundy. The accustomed tragicomedy followed. Rodolph came in 922 and was recognised north of the Apennines, while Berengar held out in Verona and won infamy by letting in his Hungarian allies who this time penetrated to Campania. Next year the rivals fought one of the rare pitched battles of the time at Fiorenzuola near Piacenza where Berengar had the worse and the death of 1500 men depleted the scanty ranks of the kingdom's military caste. Thenceforth Berengar vegetated, seemingly under truce, at Verona till his murder by one of his vassals on 7 April 924. He had watched, rather than caused, the anarchy of the realm, just as his lavish grants to the prelates registered rather than caused the cessation of a central government.

Rodolph was not more fortunate. He had two kingdoms, and while he was in Burgundy the Magyars laid Lombardy waste. They burnt Pavia itself in 924 and only left Italy to pass over the Alps and be exterminated by pestilence in Languedoc. The hopes of the house of Lothar revived. Adalbert of Ivrea was dead, and his widow Ermingarde joined with her brother Guido of Tuscany and Lampert, Archbishop of Milan, in calling in once more her half-brother Hugh of Provence. In 925 they revolted, twice repelled Rodolph's efforts at reconquest, and on 6 July 926 elevated Hugh to the throne. In him a strong king had come. Hugh, wily and voluptuous, had his domains and vassals in Provence behind him and a group of magnates in his favour in Italy. He set himself to increase the latter by endowing his Provençal kindred. One nephew, Theobald I, was given the march of Spoleto, another, Manasse, Archbishop of Arles, was later put in charge of three sees in commendam. A Provençal immigration set in to the disgust of the Italian nobles. Hugh, who no more than his contemporaries ventured to reconstitute the ancient royal government or to recall the alienations of revenue and administrative functions, did succeed in making the great vassals, as well as the bishops, his nominees.

To be crowned Emperor was the natural goal of Hugh's ambition. Without the protectorate over the Papacy an Italian king had but a maimed dominion in central Italy, and to a mere protection of the Papacy the functions of the Emperor had been reduced since the time of Lambert. Indeed it seems that Hugh came into Italy with the Pope's approval and struck a bargain with him at Mantua in 926. John X was in a dangerous plight. Theophylact was dead, Marquess Alberic was dead, their daughter and widow, the sinister Marozia, led their Roman faction, and had become hostile to the self-willed Pope. If John X probably strengthened himself by obtaining the Spoletan march, which Alberic had held, for his own brother Peter, perhaps in return for Berengar I's coronation, Marozia gained far more power by her marriage to Marquess Guido of Tuscany. In the faction-fighting Marquess Peter was driven from Rome c. 927, but a terrible Hungarian