Signoria

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.

Later, imperial orders such as the Carolingians, the Ottonians, and Hohenstaufens also imposed their overlordship in Italy, but their successes were as transitory as Justinian's success, and a unified Italian state remained a dream until the nineteenth century.

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