Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/839

 LOMBARDS 815 quest. It brought the Langobards face to face, not merely with the emperors at Constantinople, but with the first of the great statesmen popes, Gregory the Great (590-604). But Lombard conquest was bungling and wasteful. It was ever ready to lapse into mere plunder and warfare ; and when they had spoiled a city they proceeded to tear down its walls and raze it to the ground. But Authari s chief connexion with the fortunes of his people was an important, though an accidental one. The Lombard chronicler tells us a romantic tale of the way in which Authari sought his bride from Garibald, duke of the Bavarians, how he went incognito in the embassy to judge of her attractions, and how she recognized her disguised suitor. The bride was the Christian Theodelinda, and she became to the Langobards what Bertha was to the Anglo- Saxons, and Clotilda to the Franks. She became the mediator between the Lombards and the Catholic Church. Authari, who had brought her to Italy, died shortly after his marriage. But Theodelinda had so won on the Lombard chiefs that they bid her as queen choose the one among them whom she would have for her husband and for king. She chose Agilulf, duke of Turin (592-615). He was not a true Langobard, but a Thuringian. It was the beginning of peace between the Lombards and the Catholic clergy. Agilulf could not abandon his tradi tional Arianism, and he was a very uneasy neighbour, not only to the Greek exarch, but to Rome itself. But he was favourably disposed both to peace and to the Catholic Church. Gregory interfered to prevent a national con spiracy against the Langobards, like that of St Brice s day in England against the Danes, or that later uprising against the French, the Sicilian Vespers. He was right both in point of humanity and of policy. The Arian and Catholic bishops went on for a time side by side ; but the Lombard kings and clergy rapidly yielded to the religious influences around them, even while the national antipathies continued unabated and vehement. Gregory, who despaired of any serious effort on the part of the Greek emperors to expel the Lombards, endeavoured to promote peace be tween the Italians and Agilulf ; and, in spite of the feeble hostility of the exarchs of Ravenna, the pope and the king of the Lombards became the two real powers in the north and centre of Italy. Agilulf was followed, after two unim portant reigns, by his son-in-law, the husband of Theode- linda s daughter, King Rothari (636-652), the Lombard legislator, still an Arian though he favoured the Catholics. He was the first of their kings who did for the Lombards what was done by all the Teutonic conquerors as soon as they felt themselves a nation on Roman soil ; he collected their customs under the name of laws, and he did this, not in their own Teutonic dialect, but in Latin. The use of Latin implies the use of Latin scribes or notaries, and implies that the laws were a notice to the Italians of the usages and rules of their conquerors, which, so far as they applied, were to be not merely the personal law of the Lombards, but the law of the land, and binding on Lombards and Romans alike. But such rude legislation could not provide for all questions arising even in the shattered and decayed state of Roman civilization. It is probable that among themselves the Italians kept to their old usages and legal precedents where they were not overridden by the conquerors law, and by degrees a good many of the Roman civil arrangements made their way into thejLombard code, while all ecclesiastical ones, and they were a large class, were untouched by it. The precise nature of the relations, legal and political, of the Lombards, as a conquering race, or a military caste, to the Italians is still a subject of controversy, pwing to the prevailing mixture of clearness and obscurity in the documents of the time. There must have been, of course, much change of property; but appearances are conflicting as to the terms on which land generally was held by he old possessors or the new comers, and as to the relative legal position of the two. Savigny held that, making allowance for the anomalies and usurpation of conquest, the Roman population held the bulk of the land as they had held it before, and were governed by an uninterrupted and acknowledged exercise of Roman law in their old municipal organization. Later inquirers, Leo, Troya, and more recently Hegel, have found that the supposition does not tally with a whole series of facts, which point to a Lombard territorial law ignoring completely any parallel Roman and personal law, to a great restriction of full civil rights among the Romans, analogous to the condition of the rayah under the Turks, and to a reduction of the Roman occupiers to a class of half-free &quot; aldii,&quot; holding immov able tenancies under lords of superior race and privilege, and sub ject to the sacrifice either of the third part of their holdings or the third part of the produce. Probably something like this, with exceptions and anomalies, represents the state of things, at least at first ; but it must be remembered that regular and consistent arrange ments were very unlikely to have been thought of early in such a conquest as that of the Lombards, that the Romans suffered probably rather from the insolence of barbarians than from the rules of a constitutional settlement, and that a conquered race always and naturally exaggerates its own humiliations and grievances, and in this case has the chief telling of the story. It might also be ex pected that the tribal customs of Teutonic conquerors would be more modified in Italy than elsewhere, by the deeply-rooted traditions and customs of the old Roman rule. The Lombards were rough and harsh, and the Italians never ceased to hate them ; but we know by experience how two portions of a population possessed of equal civil rights can hate one another, where they differ in blood and history. The Roman losses, both of property and rights, were likely to be great at first ; how far they continued permanent dur ing the two centuries of the Lombard kingdom, or how far the legal distinctions between Rome and Lombard gradually passed into desuetude, is a further question. The legislation of the Lombard kings, in form f a territorial and not a personal law, shows no signs of a disposition either to depress or to favour the Romans, but only the purpose to, maintain, in a rough fashion, strict order and dis cipline impartially among all their subjects. From Rothari (ob. 652) to Liutprand (712-744) the Lombard kings, succeeding one another in the irregular fashion of the time, sometimes by descent, sometimes by election, sometimes by conspiracy and violence, strove fitfully to enlarge their boundaries, and contended with the aristocracy of dukes inherent in the original organization of the nation, an element which, though much weakened, always embarrassed the power of the crown, and checked the unity of the nation. Their old enemies the Franks on the west, and the Slavs or Huns, ever ready to break in on the north-east, and sometimes called in by mutinous and traitorous dukes of Friuli and Trent, were constant and serious dangers. By the popes, who represented Italian interests, they were always looked upon with dislike and jealousy, even when they had become zealous Catholics, the founders of churches and monasteries ; with the Greek empire there was chronic war. From time to time they made raids into the unsubdued parts of Italy, and added a city or two to their dominions. But there was no sustained effort for the complete subjugation of Italy till Liutprand, the most powerful of the line. He tried it, and failed. He broke up the independence of the great southern duchies, Benevento and Spoleto. For a time, in the heat of the dispute about images, he won the pope to his side against the Greeks. For a time, but only for a time, he deprived the Greeks of Ravenna. Aistulf, his successor, carried on the same policy. He even threatened Rome itself, and claimed a capitation tax. But the popes, thoroughly irritated and alarmed, and hopeless of aid from the East, turned to the family which was rising into power among the Franks of the West, the mayors of the palace of Austrasia. Pope Gregory III. applied in vain to Charles Martel. But with his successors Pippin and Charles the popes were more successful. In return for the transfer by the pope of the Frank crown from the decayed line of Clovis to his own, Pippin crossed the Alps, defeated Aistulf, and gave to the pope the lands which Aistulf had torn from the empire, Ravenna and the Pentapolis (754-756). But the angry quarrels still went on between the popes and