Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/203

160 Adalman was induced to resign, and he himself was dispossessed in favour of a new Archbishop, Walpert. Exiles began to make their way to Otto's court, among them our chief informant about these Italian kings, the chronicler Liudprand, who thereby became the bitter enemy of Berengar II with his house and wreaked his revenge in his historical writings. If there had survived another business-like Italian chronicle, like that of Flodoard for France, Liudprand would have earned more gratitude from posterity than he does for his vivid narrative, his pointed character-sketches, and the brush-like abundance of "local colour" with which he overlays his scanty facts. As it is, in his Antapodosis (Retribution) we have a difficulty in obtaining a firm foothold for history amid the crumbling and quaking mass of rancorous, if often contemporary, gossip which Liudprand loves to heap up. Of noble birth, bred at King Hugh's court, and once Berengar II's secretary, he was in the best position to give accurate and full information, but he had a soul above documents. It is hardly his fault that he depended on oral tradition for all events before his own time, for there seems to have been no Italian chronicle for him to use, but he evidently made no record at the time and when he wrote rested wholly on a memory which rejected dates and political circumstances and was singularly retentive of amorous scandal however devoid of probability. He does not even tell in his unfinished work the cause and events of his persecution by Berengar to which he frequently alludes, while sketching with fine precision the diary of his reception at Constantinople whither he first went as Berengar's envoy. For what interested him he could remember and tell to the life. To his credit be it said he was no liar, though he may be found suppressing an unpleasant fact; what he heard he told, and perhaps we may grant him that he gave a ready, and sometimes a determined, belief to the gossip of anterooms and the tradition of wrathful factions. It is unfortunate, for he was a practical statesman, and knew and sometimes reveals the motives of his times.

Berengar had had a free hand in Italy, and had even recovered Verona, because Otto was occupied in German revolts and frontier wars, but in 955 occurred the decisive victory of the Lechfeld in which Otto put an end once for all to Hungarian raids. He had succeeded where all the Italian kings had failed, he had rescued central Europe, and was therefrom with little doubt its destined ruler. His intervention in Italy, Henry of Bavaria being now dead, was renewed by the agency of his reconciled rebel son Liudolf. In 957 the duke made his invasion with the usual rapid success. Berengar II fled, Adalbert was defeated in battle, and all Lombardy had submitted when Liudolf died of fever at Pombia near Lake Maggiore, the first German victor to lose his gains owing to the alien climate of Italy.

The death of Liudolf was followed by the immediate recovery of his lost ground by Berengar. He came back with a new series of bitter feuds to pursue. Walpert of Milan and other prelates fled to Otto, and