At the end of 1037 the Emperor Conrad II celebrated Christmas in Parma. That evening a violent confrontation took place when a group of locals attacked the imperial party. Both sides sustained casualties and a section of the city was destroyed in an accompanying fire. The scholarship which addresses the causes of the riot in Parma generally falls into two camps. The first presents the riot as a consequence of the same motivations as the earlier riot in Milan, envisaging an attack on the bishop by those excluded from his circle which sought to reduce its burdens and extend its powers. In contrast, Salvatorelli and more recently Zimmerman and Wolfram present fundamentally different causes for the riot in Parma, seeing it as simply a reaction against a display of imperial domination within the city; Conrad, as the representative of this domination, was therefore a natural target for the rioters. This article will argue that the former of these schools is partially correct, but that the political situation in Parma was more complicated than is typically allowed, that the tension between the bishop and a section of his city was more nuanced than is often presented, and that the presence of the emperor was not coincidental to the riot.

The Parmense riot was not the earliest incident in which a group within an Italian city became involved in conflict with imperial forces. Similar uprisings were recorded in Pavia and Ravenna during the early years of Conrad's reign.