Monarchy could take the form of empire. Only in Italy perhaps, among western lands, was there still a sense of Constantinople as the imperial centre of the Roman world. Tenth-century historians, namely Widukind, Liudprand, Flodoard and Richer, produced powerful images of royalty. In this respect, Italy in the tenth century was different from other post-Carolingian lands. And even in Italy, but still more clearly elsewhere in Frankish Europe, an ideal-type of Carolingian government was transmitted to the learned through the written residue of capitularies, conciliar decrees and documents. In the course of the tenth century, the patrilinear dynastic link with the Carolingians was broken in both west and east Frankish kingdoms. In 888, the old Carolingian realms had created kings out of their own guts. The west Frankish kingdom has been treated in much recent historiography as a tenth-century paradigm. The caliph's response to the tenth-century Ottonian kingdom prefigured that of many modern historians.

All over Lombard Italy, the dukes were the titular holders of local power, but their ties with the kings had different degrees of intensity and subordination. Only in northern Italy were the dukes really bound to the kingdom and the kings. After the conquests of Byzantine territory by King Rothari in the 640s, the Lombard kings for a long time limited their military activity to internal affairs and to occasional defence against invasions, by the Franks to the west and the Avars to the east. After the Frankish conquest, the Lombard kingdom survived as a distinct state, but at the price of losing its national foundation. Many aspects of the Carolingian government of Italy up to Lothar depended on the role the kingdom played within the empire. The political configuration of the kingdom of Italy took on a new character during the reign of Louis II. The aristocracy was prepared to grant prerogatives to the emperor than to the king.