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 plundering. When the spring of 554 appeared, Lothaire with his part of the army insisted on marching back to Gaul, there to deposit in safety the plunder which they had reaped. In an unimportant engagement near Pesaro he was worsted by the Roman generals, and this hastened his northward march. At Ceneda in Venetia he died of a raging fever. Pestilence broke out in his army, which was so wasted as to be incapable of further operations in Italy. Meanwhile his brother Buccelin, whose army was also suffering grievously from disease, partly induced by free indulgence in the grapes of Campania, encamped at Casilinum, the site of modern Capua. Here, after a time, Narses accepted the offered battle (554). The barbarians, whose army was in the form of a wedge, pierced the Roman centre. But by a most skilful manœuvre Narses contrived to draw his lines into a curve, so that his mounted archers on each flank could aim their arrows at the backs of the troops who formed the other side of the Alamannic wedge. They thus fell in whole ranks by the hands of unseen antagonists. Soon the Roman centre, which had been belated in its march, arrived upon the field and completed the work of destruction. Buccelin and his whole army were destroyed, though we need not accept the statement of the Greek historian (Agathias ii. 9) that only five men out of the barbaric host of 30,000 escaped, and only eighty out of the Roman 18,000 perished.

The only other important military operation of Narses which is recorded—and that indistinctly—is his defeat of the Herulian king Sindbal, who had served under him at Capua, but who subsequently revolted, was defeated, taken captive and hanged by the eunuch’s order (565). In the main the thirteen years after the battle of Capua (554–567) were years of peace, and during them Narses ruled Italy from Ravenna with the title of prefect. He rebuilt Milan and other cities destroyed in the Gothic War; and two inscriptions on the Salarian bridge at Rome have preserved to modern times the record of repairs effected by him in the year 564.

His administration, however, was not popular. The effect of the imperial organization was to wring the last solidus out of the emaciated and fever-stricken population of Italy, and the belief of his subjects was that no small portion of their contributions remained in the eunuch’s private coffers. At the close of 565 Justinian died, and a deputation of Romans waited upon his successor Justin II., representing that they found “the Greeks” harder taskmasters than the Goths, that Narses the eunuch was determined to reduce them all to slavery, and that unless he were removed they would transfer their allegiance to the barbarians. This deputation led to the recall of Narses in 567, accompanied, according to a somewhat late tradition, by an insulting message from the empress Sophia, who sent him a golden distaff, and bade him, as he was not a man, go and spin wool in the apartments of the women. “I will spin her such a hank,” Narses is represented as saying, “that she shall not find the end of it in her lifetime”; and forthwith he sent messengers to the Lombards in Pannonia, bearing some of the fruits of Italy, and inviting them to enter the land which bore such goodly produce. Hence came the invasion of Alboin (568), which wrested the greater part of Italy from the empire, and changed the destinies of the peninsula.

Narses, who had retired to Naples, was persuaded by the pope (John III.) to return to Rome. He died there about 573, and his body, enclosed in a leaden coffin, was carried to Constantinople and buried there. Several years after his death the secret of the hiding-place of his vast stores of wealth is said to have been revealed by an old man to the emperor Tiberius II., for whose charities to the poor and the captives they furnished an opportune supply.

 NARSINGHGARH, a native state of Central India, in the Bhopal agency. Area, 741 sq. m.; pop. (1901) 92,093; estimated revenue, £33,000; tribute to Holkar, £4000. The chief, whose title is raja, is a Rajput of the Omat clan. The state was founded about 1681 by a minister of Rajgarh, who compelled the ruler of that state to transfer to him half his territory. The town of Narsinghgarh had a population in 1901 of 8778.

 NARSINGHPUR, a town and district of British India, in the Nerbudda division of the Central Provinces. The town is on the river Singri, and has a railway station 52 m. E. of Jubbulpore; pop. (1901) 11,233. The district has an area of 1976 sq. m. It forms a portion of the upper part of the Nerbudda valley. The first of those wide alluvial basins which, alternating with rocky gorges, give so varied a character to the river’s course, opens out just below the famous marble rocks in Jubbulpore, and extends westward for 225 m., including the whole of Narsinghpur, together with the greater part of Hoshangabad. The Satpura hills to the south are here a generally regular range, nowhere more than 500 ft. above the plain, and running almost parallel to the river, at a distance of 15 or 20 m. In the intervening valley, the rich level of black wheat land is seldom broken, except by occasional mounds of gravel or nodular limestone, which afford serviceable village sites. Along the foot of the boundary hills the alluvium gives way to belts of red gravelly soil, rice and sugar-cane take the place of wheat, and forest trees that of mango groves. The population in 1901 was 315,518, showing a decrease of 14.5% in the decade, due to famine. The principal crops are wheat, millets, rice, pulses, oil-seeds and cotton. There are manufactures of cotton, silk, brass and iron-ware. At Mohpani are coal-mines. The Great Indian Peninsula railway runs through the district, with a branch to Mohpani.

See Narsinghpur District Gazetteer (Bombay, 1906).

 NARTHEX (Gr. , the name of the plant giant-fennel, in Lat. ferula), the name applied in architecture, probably from a supposed resemblance in shape to the reed-like plant, to the long arcaded porch forming the entrance into a Christian church, to which the catechumens and penitents were admitted. Sometimes there was a second narthex or vestibule within the church when the outer one was known as the exonarthex. In Byzantine churches this inner narthex formed part of the main structure of the church, being divided from it by a screen of columns. A narthex is found in some German churches, where, however, it had no ritual meaning but was introduced as a western transept to give more importance to the west end. One of the finest examples to be found in England is that of Ely cathedral, where its northern portion, however, was, apparently never completed.

NARVA (Rugodiv of Russian annals, also Ivangorod), a seaport and fortress of Russia, in the government of St Petersburg, 100 m. by rail W.S.W. of the city of St Petersburg. Pop. (1897) 16,577. It stands on the Narova river, which flows from Lake Peipus or Chudskoye, and enters the Gulf of Finland in Narva Bay, 8 m. below this town. The town was founded in 1223 by Danes, and changed hands between the Teutonic knights, Danes, Swedes and Russians until it was taken by Peter the Great in 1704, after the Russians had suffered here a terrible defeat at the hands of Charles XII. of Sweden four years