to be foreign countries where it was forbidden to travel without royal permission. With the collapse of the Lombard Kingdom in 773, Duke Arechis II was elevated to Prince under the new Frankish Empire, in compensation for having some of his territory transferred back to the Papal States. In November 774, the Duke of Benevento Duke Arechis II, immediately after being crowned prince, decided to send members of the Benevento Cortisani and Baccari families to occupy the central area of the Biferno river in the neighboring region of Molise, seeking to expand their political dominance. Benevento was acclaimed by a chronicler as a "second Pavia"— Ticinum geminum— after the Lombard capital was lost. This principality was short-lived: in 851, Salerno broke off under Siconulf and, by the end of that century, Capua was independent as well. Benevento was ruled again by the Byzantines between 891 and 895. The so-called Langobardia minor was unified for the last time by Duke Pandolfo Testa di Ferro, who expanded his extensive control in the Mezzogiorno from his base in Benevento and Capua. Before his death (March 981), he had also gained the title of Duke of Spoleto from Emperor Otto I. However, both Benevento and Salerno rebelled to his son and heir, Pandulf II. The first decades of the 11th century saw two more German-descended rulers in southern Italy: Henry II, conquered in 1022 both Capua and Benevento, but returned after the failed siege of Troia. Conrad II obtained similar results in 1038. In these years the three states (Benevento, Capua, and Salerno) were often engaged in local wars and disputes that favoured the rise of the Normans from mercenaries to ruler of the whole of Southern Italy. The greatest of them was Robert Guiscard, who captured Benevento in 1053 after the Emperor Henry III had first authorised its conquest in 1047 when Pandulf III and Landulf VI shut the gates to him. These princes were later expelled from the city and then recalled after the pope failed to defend it from Guiscard. The city fell to Normans in 1077. It was a papal city until after 1081. Papal rule Benevento passed to the papacy peacefully when the emperor Henry III ceded it to Leo IX, in exchange for the pope's consent to the establishment of the Diocese of Bamberg (1053). Landulf II, Archbishop of Benevento, promoted reform, but also allied with the Normans.