Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/838

 814 LOMBARDS the great prize which the Goths had won and lost. Through the eastern passes, and the border land of Friuli, they invaded Italy. It is said that they were invited by Narses, the conqueror of the Goths, in revenge for his ill treatment by the masters whom he had served. 2. In 568 Alboin, king of the Langobards, with the women and children of the tribe and all their possessions, with Saxon allies, with the subject tribe of the Gepidse, and a mixed host of other barbarians, descended into Italy by the great plain at the head of the Adriatic. There was little resistance to them. The war which had ended in the downfall of the Goths had exhausted Italy ; it was followed by famine and pestilence ; and the Government at Constantinople, away in the East, made but faint efforts to retain the province which Belisarius and Narses had recovered for it. Except in a few fortified places, such as Ticinum or Pavia, the Italians did not venture to encounter the new invaders ; and, though Alboin was not without generosity, the Lombards, wherever resisted, justi fied the opinion of their ferocity by the savage cruelty of the invasion. In 572, according to the tragic tale of the Lombard chronicler, a tale which recalls the story of Candaules in Herodotus, Alboin, the fierce conqueror, fell a victim to the revenge of his wife Rosamond, the daughter of the king of the Gepidas, whose skull Alboin had turned into a drinking cup, out of which he forced Rosamond to drink ; but the Langobards had already shown themselves in ravaging bands all over Italy, and in the north had begun to take possession. Military chiefs, whom, after the Latin writers, we call &quot; dukes,&quot; correspond ing to the German &quot; Herzog,&quot; were placed, or placed themselves, first in the border cities, like Friuli and Trent, which commanded the north-eastern passes, and then in other principal places in Italy ; and this arrangement became characteristic of the Lombard settlement. The principal seat of the settlement was the rich plain watered by the Po and its affluents, which was in future to receive its name from them ; but their power extended across the Apennines into Liguria and Tuscany, and then south wards to the outlying dukedoms of Spoleto and Benevento. The invaders failed to secure any maritime ports such as Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Salerno, Ravenna, or any territory that was conveniently commanded from the sea. Pavia, or, as it was called, Ticinum, the one place which had obstinately resisted Alboin, became the seat of their kings, as it had been one of the seats of the Gothic kingdom. After the short and cruel reign of Cleph, the successor of Alboin, the Lombards (as we may begin for convenience sake to call them) tried for ten years the experiment of a national confederacy of their dukes, without any king at their head. It was the rule of some thirty-five or thirty-six petty tyrants, under whose oppression and private wars even the invaders suffered, while the Italians were remorse lessly trodden under foot. With anarchy among themselves and so precarious a hold on the country, hated by the Italian population and by their natural leaders the Catholic clergy, threatened also by an alliance of the Greek empire with their natural and persistent rivals the Franks beyond the Alps, they resolved to sacrifice their turbulent independence to the usual necessities of the Teutonic invaders which led to the election of a king. In 584 they chose Authari, the grandson of Alboin, and endowed the royal domain with a half of their possessions. From this time till the fall of the Lombard power before the arms of their rivals the Franks under Charles the Great, the kingly rule continued. Authari, &quot;the Long haired,&quot; with his Roman title of Flavius, marks the change from the war-king of an invading host to the permanent representative of the unity and law of the nation, and the increased power of the crown, by the possession of a great domain, to enforce its will. The independence of the dukes was surrendered to the king. The dukedoms in the neighbourhood of the seat of power were gradually absorbed, and their holders transformed into royal officers. Those of the northern marches, Trent and Friuli, with the important dukedom of Turin, retained longer the kind of independence which marchlands visually give where invasion is to be feared. The great dukedom of Benevento in the south, with its neighbour Spoleto, threatened at one time to be a separate principality, and even to the last resisted, with varying success, according to the personal characters of its dukes, the full claims of the royal authority at Pavia. The kingdom of the Lombards lasted more than two hundred years, from Alboin (568) to the fall of Desiderius (774), much longer than the preceding Teutonic kingdom of Theodoric and the Goths, But it differed from the other Teutonic conquests in Gaul, in Britain, in Spain. It was never complete in point of territory : there were always two, and almost to the last three, capitals the Lombard one, Pavia, the Latin one, Rome, the Greek one,. Ravenna ; and the Lombards never could get access to the sea. And it never was complete over the subject race : it profoundly affected the Italians of the north ; in its turn it was entirely transformed by contact with them ; but the Lombards never overcame the natural repulsion of the two races, and never amalgamated with the Italians till their power as a ruling race was crushed by the victory given to the Roman element by the restored empire of the Franks. The Langobards, German in their faults and in their strength, but coarser, at least at first, than the Germans whom the Italians had known, the Goths of Theodoric and Totila, found themselves continually in the presence of a subject population very different from i anything which the other Teutonic conquerors met with i among the provincials, like them, exhausted, dispirited, i civilization round them, intelligent, subtle, sensitive, feel ing themselves infinitely superior in experience and knowledge to the rough barbarians whom they could not fight, and capable of hatred such as only cultivated races can nourish. The Lombards who came into Italy with the most cruel incidents of conquest, and who, when they had occupied the lands and cities of Upper Italy, still went on sending forth furious bands to plunder and destroy where they did not care to stay, never were able to overcome the mingled fear and scorn and loathing of the Italians. They adapted themselves very quickly indeed to many Italian fashions. Within thirty years of the invasion, Authari took the fancy of decking himself with the imperial title of Flavius, even while his bands were leading Italian captives in leash like dogs under the walls of Rome, and under the eyes of Pope Gregory ; and it was retained by his successor. They soon became Catholics ; and then in all the usages of religion, in church building, in found ing monasteries, in their veneration for relics, they vied with Italians. Authari s queen, Theodelinda, solemnly placed the Lombard nation under the patronage of St John the Baptist, and at Monza she built in his honour the first Lombard church, and the royal palace near it. King Liutprand (712-744) bought the relics of St Augustine for a large sum to be placed in his church at Pavia. Their i Teutonic speech disappeared ; except in names and a few technical words all traces of it are lost. But to the last they had the unpardonable crime of being a ruling barbarian race or caste in Italy. To the end they are &quot; nefandissimi,&quot; execrable, loathsome, filthy. So wrote Gregory the Great when they first appeared. So wrote Pope Stephen IV., at the end of their rule, when stirring up the kings of the Franks to destroy them. Authari s short reign (584-591) was one of renewed effort for con-
 * unwarlike, but with the remains and memory of a great