page_title: Salerno
section_title: Middle Ages to early modern age
hierarchical_section_title: Salerno / History / Middle Ages to early modern age
context_page_description: Salerno is an ancient city and comune in Campania and is the capital of the province of the same name. It is located on the Gulf of Salerno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. The city is divided into three distinct zones: the medieval sector, the 19th century sector and the more densely populated post-war area, with its several apartment blocks.
  Human settlement at Salerno has a rich and vibrant past, dating back to pre-historic times. The site has been one of the most important and strategic ports on the Mediterranean sea, yielding a rich Greco-Roman heritage. It was an independent Lombard principality, Principality of Salerno, in the early Middle Ages. During this time, the Schola Medica Salernitana, the first medical school in the world, was founded. In the 16th century, under the Sanseverino family, among the most powerful feudal lords in southern Italy, the city became a great centre of learning, culture and the arts, and the family hired several of the greatest intellectuals of the time. Later, in 1694, the city was struck by several catastrophic earthquakes and plagues.
context_section_description: Under the Lombard dukes Salerno enjoyed the most splendid period of its history.
  In 774 Arechis II of Benevento transferred the seat of the Duchy of Benevento to Salerno, in order to elude Charlemagne's offensive and to secure for himself the control of a strategic area, the centre of coastal and internal communications in Campania.
  With Arechis II, Salerno became a centre of studies with its famous Medical School. The Lombard prince ordered the city to be fortified; the Castle on the Bonadies mountain had already been built with walls and towers. In 839 Salerno declared independence from Benevento, becoming the capital of a flourishing principality stretching out to Capua, northern Calabria and Apulia up to Taranto.
  Around the year 1000 prince Guaimar IV annexed Amalfi, Sorrento, Gaeta and the whole duchy of Apulia and Calabria, starting to conceive a future unification of the whole southern Italy under Salerno's arms. The coins minted in the city circulated in all the Mediterranean, with the Opulenta Salernum wording to certify its richness.
  However, the stability of the Principate was continually shaken by the Saracen attacks and, most of all, by internal struggles. In 1056, one of the numerous plots led to the fall of Guaimar. His weaker son Gisulf II succeeded him, but the decline of the principality had begun. In 1077 Salerno reached its zenith but soon lost all its territory to the Normans.
  On 13 December 1076, the Norman conqueror Robert Guiscard, who had married Guaimar IV's daughter Sikelgaita, besieged Salerno and defeated his brother-in-law Gisulf. In this period the royal palace of Castel Terracena and the cathedral were built, and science was boosted as the Schola Medica Salernitana, considered the most ancient medical institution of European West, reached its maximum splendour. At this time in the late 11th century, the city was home to 50,000 people.
  In 1100 Salerno was made the capital of the Norman southern Italy, after Melfi. 
  Salerno was the most important city of the Normans for half a century, but with the Norman conquest of Sicily, the city of Palermo started to substitute Salerno as the most important city for the Normans. Indeed Salerno played a little part in the fall of the Norman Kingdom: after the Emperor Henry VI's invasion on behalf of his wife, Constance, the heiress to the kingdom, in 1191, Salerno surrendered and promised loyalty on the mere news of an incoming army. 
  This so disgusted the archbishop, Nicolò d'Aiello (from Naples), that he abandoned the city and fled to Naples, which held out in a siege. In 1194, the situation reversed itself: Naples capitulated, along with most other cities of the Mezzogiorno, and only Salerno resisted. It was sacked and pillaged, much reducing its importance and prosperity. 
  Henry had his reasons, though. He had entrusted Constance to some important Salerno citizens (advised & "ruled" by the archbishop d'Aiello) and after his retreat from invasion in 1191 they had received letters about the events from Nicolò D'Aiello and so betrayed Henry, attacked Constance at Castel Terracena and handed her over to King Tancred of Sicily, making the Empress captive for nearly one year. The combined treachery and stubbornness of D'Aiello and his followers cost Salerno much after the Hohenstaufen conquest: Henry's son, Frederick II, moreover, issued a series of edicts that reduced Salerno's role in favour of Naples (in particular, the foundation of the University of Naples in that city).
  From the 14th century onwards, most of the Salerno province became the territory of the Princes of Sanseverino, powerful feudal lords who acted as real owners of the region. They accumulated an enormous political and administrative power and attracted artists and men of letters in their own princely palace. In the 15th century the city was the scene of battles between the Angevin and the Aragonese royal houses with whom the local lords took sides alternatingly.
  In the first decades of the 16th century, the last descendant of the Sanseverino princes, Ferdinando Sanseverino, was in conf
caption: Salerno in a print from the 17th century.
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