Finally, according to ITYPETRAVEL.COM, the Muslims are, at the beginning of the century. XI, already all uprooted from the extreme of the peninsula. It can be said that over there all the Italian peoples and, through the intermediary of the popes and emperors, all of Christianity found themselves united in the effort against the infidels. It was the destiny of those regions, dominated by Mediterranean empires, Byzantium and Arabs and to some extent also the Roman Church (later Angevins, Swabians, Spaniards, who were either dynasties or governments having their centers outside Italy), to be almost always dragged into the vortex of a story greater than them, of having to almost always serve interests that transcended them. Only in Sicily did the Muslims still have a firm footing: and from there bands of marauders and pirate ships darted towards the coasts of the peninsula and the great Tyrrhenian islands. But with each passing day, they lost consistency; and they broke some ties with their African brothers. On the island, then, the old indigenous and Christian population has revived: especially in the eastern part. Emigration to Calabria and the bonds it created between the people on both sides of the Strait had reconnected this part of Sicily to the Christian world.
In short, the political order founded in the peninsula is extremely broken, incoherent, unsteady, albeit with materials that are largely peasant, by the Greeks of Byzantium, by the Arab emirs, by the Germanic conquerors, that is, by foreign and, some, repugnant forces. It is that in a country like Italy, among people strongly influenced by Rome and some even with more ancient and proper civilization, the task of the invaders was more difficult than elsewhere. As no one had been able to take over the whole peninsula, while aspiring to total possession of it, almost by suggestion of nature; thus no one had been so strong and spiritually rich as to imprint themselves, durably, those people over whom he had dominion. They retained a life of their own, a relatively robust framework of their own, which others could not destroy to replace their own. They could only fit into it, reinvigorating and enriching it. And this had happened. Because now the great travail of the different and opposing lineages, even if cohabitating, is close to ending. At least in Lombard and Frankish Italy, the history of the conquerors is dying out, as a history in itself; it is merging into a broader and more organic history that will be Italian history, nourished by the deep juices of this land. We have already said it: the nourished by the deep juices of this land. We have already said it: the nourished by the deep juices of this land. We have already said it: the Regnum Langobardorum is called the kingdom of Italy or Italic, and the word Langobardia from the beginning synonymous with the kingdom, is narrowing to the Po valley, or rather to the central part of it. Literary sources and documents of the time still sometimes distinguish Langobards and Romans : but both are unified in the face of Teutisci or Teutones , Franchi, Sassoni, etc., and now included in the broader denomination of “Italici “, Itali , Italienses. Certainly the high aristocracy derives almost entirely from the Lombards and Franks, immigrants. The middle and small aristocracy, town and country, has many Lombard elements in its ranks. But this aristocracy is no longer a lineage among other lineages: it has become a set of social groups and as such it acts or reacts, before decaying and, to a large extent, disappearing also as social groups. It took several centuries for this organic settlement process to take place. And the populations of most of the peninsula have emerged, from more to less, renewed: more in the north and in the center, less in the south. However, greater or lesser, this renewal is not so much ethnic (remember the small number of invaders; remember that they, as they became an aristocracy, died out on a large scale between the 11th and 14th centuries), how much social and spiritual: new layers of people, which came up after the old hierarchies of the Roman imperial age had expired or suppressed; new ways of living, in the conditions in which political and economic decay and the barbarian invasions had forced everyone; new freedom for local and family units; new capacity for initiative, and creative vigor, in so much paucity of the barbaric state.
