That being said, the decision on when to campaign in Italy was not always under the ruler’s control, and political contingency repeatedly demanded that imperial troops campaign in Italy during the July-October danger zone. Otto II was forced to summer in Rome twice, once to prepare a counter-attack against Saracen intrusion into southern Italy, and once to oversee a papal election. Otto III spent a whole year in Rome from 997-98; indeed, he intended to make Rome his permanent capital, but was forced to travel north to Lombardy or Germany on several occasions for health reasons. Frederick I did not intend to spend any of the summer in Rome, but was fatally delayed by northern Italian politics and a three-month siege of Tortona, and thus he did not arrive in Rome …show more content…
There were exceptions, such as Otto III’s desire to make Rome his capital and Henry IV’s decision to billet a force in Rome in the summer of 1083, but these exceptions proved the rule, as both initiatives were undone malaria, which killed Otto III and wiped out Henry’s garrison respectively. In his recent masterwork on the Holy Roman Empire, Peter Wilson picks up on this fact, and argues that malaria may have forced the empire to rely on “violent shock and awe” tactics in Italy, tactics that might achieve short term gains but which provoked long-term resentment of German barbarism. Case in point was Frederick Barbarossa’s siege of Tortona. In his impatience to get to Rome, Frederick tried to intimidate the town by publically hanging prisoners of war and fouling wells with corpses, and when Tortona finally surrendered, Frederick drove away its citizens, looted what remained of the town, and razed its castle to the