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178 rescued by Venice. Orseolo II arrived with his fleet, revictualled the town, and fought a three days' battle with the Muslims. In the end, worsted on both elements, they retreated by night. They still wasted Calabria and the whole west coast of Italy, yet here too they received a severe check in a naval battle near Reggio in 1006, in which the fleet of the Tuscan trading town of Pisa played the decisive part. Thus, even before the Holy Roman Empire reached its apogee, the future city-states of North Italy had made their first entry into international politics.

In the security of the frontiers, in the rebirth of civic life, in the resettlement of the country-side, in the renewal of intercourse and commerce, the success of the Ottonian rule was manifest. Nor were the omens inauspicious in the Church. During the wretched times of anarchy a demoralisation, analogous to that of which the career of King Hugh bears witness among the magnates, had invaded cathedral and cloister. The Papacy could be the bone of contention for lawless nobles; a great abbey, like Farfa, could be a nest of murder and luxury in the mid tenth century. Now at any rate, in the north under Alberic and the Ottos, in the Byzantine south, an improvement, slow and chequered as it might be, had set in. But in one aim the Ottos had failed, the extension of the Regnum Italicum over all Italy. Sardinia, which vegetated apart ruled by her native "judges" under an all but forgotten Byzantine suzerainty, might be disregarded; but the separation of the south of the peninsula from the north left the Holy Roman Empire imperfect. It was a case where geographical and climatic influences interacted on historical events and made them, so to say, their accomplices in moulding the future. South Italy as a whole was always a more barren land than the north, more sunburnt, less well-watered, a land of pasture rather than of agriculture or of intense cultivation, a land of great estates and sparse inhabitants. Long separated from the main Lombard kingdom by Roman territory, and protected by their mountain defiles, the Lombards of Benevento had fallen apart from their northern kinsmen. Charlemagne had not subdued them; Eastern Rome, by direct conquest and through her client sea-ports, had exercised a potent influence upon them; the Saracens held Sicily. Throughout the two centuries from 800 to 1000 the schism of the two halves of Italy, which Nature had half prescribed, steadily widened. Even what they had most in common, the tendency to autonomous city-states, took different embodiment and met a different destiny. The Norman Conquest only concluded and intensified a probable evolution.