Signore

A signoria (Italian pronunciation: [siɲɲoˈriːa]; from signore [siɲˈɲoːre], or "lord"; an abstract noun meaning (roughly) "government; governing authority; de facto sovereignty; lordship"; plural: signorie) was the governing authority in many of the Italian city states during the medieval and renaissance periods.

In the sixth century AD, the Emperor Justinian reconquered Italy from the Ostrogoths. The invasion of a new wave of Germanic tribes, the Lombards, doomed this attempt to resurrect the Western Roman Empire, but the repercussions of Justinian's failure resounded further still. For the next thirteen centuries, whilst new nation-states arose in the lands north of the Alps, the Italian political landscape was a patchwork of feuding city states, petty tyrannies, and foreign invaders.

For several centuries, the armies and exarchs, Justinian's successors, were a tenacious force in Italian affairs, strong enough to prevent other powers such as the Holy Roman Empire or the papacy from establishing a unified Italian state but too weak to drive out these "interlopers" and re-create Roman Italy.

No ultramontanian empire could succeed in unifying Italy or in achieving more than a temporary hegemony because its success threatened the survival of medieval Italy's other powers: the Byzantines, the Papacy, and the Normans. They and the descendants of the Lombards, who became fused with earlier Italian ethnic groups, conspired and fought against and eventually destroyed any attempt to create a dominant political order in Italy.

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