The direct line of Otto the Great had now ended, and though the Franks might elect and the Saxons accept Henry II[167], Italy was nowise affected by their acts. Neither the Empire nor the Lombard kingdom could as yet be of right claimed by the German king. Her princes placed Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, on the vacant throne of Pavia, moved partly by the growing aversion to a Transalpine power, still more by the desire of impunity under a monarch feebler than any since Berengar. But the selfishness that had exalted Ardoin soon overthrew him. Ere long a party among the nobles, seconded by the Pope, invited Henry[168]; his strong army made opposition hopeless, and at Rome he received the imperial crown, A.D. 1014. It is, perhaps, more singular that the Transalpine kings should have clung so pertinaciously to Italian sovereignty than that the Lombards should have so frequently attempted to recover their independence. For the former had often little or no hereditary claim, they were not secure in their seat at home, they crossed a huge mountain barrier into a land of treachery and hatred. But Rome's glittering lure was irresistible, and the disunion of Italy promised an easy conquest. Surrounded by martial vassals, these Emperors were generally for the moment supreme: once their pennons had disappeared in the gorges of Tyrol, things reverted to their former condition, and Tuscany was little more dependent than France. In Southern Italy the Greek viceroy ruled from Bari, and Rome was an outpost instead of the centre of Teutonic power. A curious evidence of the wavering politics of the time is furnished by the Annals of Benevento, the Lombard town which on the confines of the Greek and Roman realms gave steady obedience to neither. They usually date by and recognize the princes of Constantinople[169], seldom mentioning the Franks, till the reign of Conrad II; after him the Western becomes _Imperator_, the Greek, appearing more rarely, is _Imperator Constantinopolitanus_. Assailed by the Saracens, masters already of Sicily, these regions seemed on the eve of being lost to Christendom, and the Romans sometimes bethought themselves of returning under the Byzantine sceptre. As the weakness of the Greeks in the South favoured the rise of the Norman kingdom, so did the liberties of the northern cities shoot up in the absence of the Emperors and the feuds of the princes. Milan, Pavia, Cremona, were only the foremost among many populous centres of industry, some of them self-governing, all quickly absorbing or repelling the rural nobility, and not afraid to display by tumults their aversion to the Germans. [Sidenote: Conrad II.]