The modest Roman town of Urvinum Mataurense ("the little city on the river Mataurus") became an important strategic stronghold in the Gothic wars of the 6th century, captured in 538 from the Goths by the champion of the Emperor of the East, Belisarius, and frequently mentioned by the Byzantine historian Procopius. Though Pippin presented Urbino to the Papacy, independent traditions were expressed in its commune, until, around 1200 it came into the possession of the fighting nobles of nearby Montefeltro. They had no direct authority over the commune, but could pressure the commune to elect them podestà (potestas, "power") as Bonconte di Montefeltro managed in 1213, with the result that the Urbinese rebelled, formed an alliance with the independent commune of Rimini (1228), and by 1234 were masters of the city again. In the struggles between Guelphs_and_Ghibellines factions, associated with individual families and cities, rather than the struggle between Hohenstaufen emperors and the Papacy as they had been, the 13th and 14th century Montefeltro lords of Urbino were leaders of the Ghibellines of the Marche and in the Romagna.
The most famous member of the Montefeltro was Federico, lord of Urbino 1444 to 1482, an very successful condottiere, a skillful diplomat and an enthusiastic patron of art and literature. At his court, Piero della Francesca wrote on the science of perspective, Francesco di Giorgio Martini his Trattato di architettura ("Treatis on Architecture") and Raphael's father Giovanni Santi his poetical account of the chief artists of his time. Federico's brilliant court, through the descriptions in Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano ("The Book of the Courtier"), set standards of what characterized a then a modern European "gentleman" that were valid for centuries.
Cesare Borgia dispossessed Guidobaldo da Montefeltre, duke of Urbino, and Elisabetta Gonzaga in 1502, with the connivance of his Papal father Alexander VI. After the Medici pope Leo X's brief attempt to establish a young Medici as duke, thwarted by the early death of Lorenzo II de' Medici in 1519, Urbino remained part of the Papal States under a dynasty of Della Rovere dukes. In 1626 Pope Urban VIII incorporated the independent Duchy of Urbino into the papal dominions, the gift of the weary last Della Rovere duke in retirement after the assassination of his heir, to be governed by the archbishop. Its great library was removed to Rome and added to the Vatican Library in 1657. The later history of Urbino is part of the history of the Papal States and, after 1870, of the History of Italy.