Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/840

 816 L M L M the Lombards. The Lombards were still to the Italians a &quot; foul and horrid &quot; race. At length, invited by Pope Add-in L, Pippin s son Charles once more descended into Italy. As the Lombard kingdom began, so it ended, with a siege of Pavia. Desiderius, the last king, became Charles s prisoner (774), and the Lombard power perished. Charles, with the title of king of the Franks and Lombards, became master of Italy, and in 800 the pope, who had crowned Pippin king of the Franks, claimed to bestow the Roman empire, and crowned his greater son emperor of the Romans (800). 3. To Italy the overthrow of the Lombard kings was the loss of its last chance of independence and unity. To the Lombards the conquest was the destruction of their legal and social supremacy. Henceforth they were equally with the Italians the subjects of the French king. Charles, the Carolingian king, expressly recognized the Roman law, and allowed all who would be counted Romans to &quot; profess &quot; it. Latin influences were not strong enough to extinguish the Lombard name and destroy altogether the recollec tions and habits of the Lombard rule ; Lombard law was still recognized, and survived in the schools of Pavia. Lombardy remained the name of the finest province of Italy, and indeed for a time was the name for Italy itself. But what was specially Lombard could not stand in the long run against the Italian atmosphere which surrounded it, with its countless and subtle forces, social, political, and religious. Generation after generation passed more and more into real Italians. Antipathies, indeed, survived, and men even in the 10th century called each other Roman or Langobard as terms of reproach. But the altered name of Lombard also denoted henceforth some of the proudest of Italians ; and, though the Lombard speech had utterly perished, their most common names still kept up the remembrance that their fathers had come from beyond the Alps. But the establishment of the Frank kingdom, and still more the re-establishment of the Christian empire as the source of law and jurisdiction in Christendom, had momentous influence on the history of the Italianized Lombards. The empire was the counterweight to the local tyrannies into which the local authorities established by the empire itself, the feudal powers, judicial and military, necessary for the purposes of government, invariably tended to degenerate. When they became intolerable, from the empire were sought the exemptions, privileges, immunities from that local authority, which, anomalous and anarchical as they were in theory, yet in fact were the foundations of all the liberties of the Middle Ages in the Swiss cantons, in the free towns of Germany and the Low Countries, in the Lombard cities of Italy. Italy was and ever has been a land of cities ; and, ever since the downfall of Rome and the decay of the municipal system, the bishops of the cities had really been at the head of the peaceful and industrial part of their population, and were a natural refuge for the oppressed, and sometimes for the mutinous and the evil doers, from the military and civil power of the duke or count or judge, too often a rule of cruelty or fraud. Under the Carolingian empire, a vast system grew up in the North Italian cities of episcopal &quot; immunities,&quot; by which a city with its surrounding district was removed, more or less completely, from the jurisdiction of the ordinary authority, military or civil, and placed under that of the bishop. These &quot; immunities &quot; led to the temporal sovereignty of the bishops ; under it the spirit of liberty grew more readily than under the military chief. Municipal organization, never quite forgotten, naturally revived under new forms, and with its &quot; consuls &quot; at the head of the citizens, with its &quot; arts &quot; and &quot; crafts &quot; ani &quot;guilds,&quot; grew up secure under the shadow of the church. In due time the city populations, free from the feudal yoke, and safe within the walls which in many instances the bishops had built for them, became impatient also of the bishop s government. The cities which the bishops had made thus independent of the dukes and counts next sought to be free from the bishops ; in due time they too gained their charters of privilege and liberty. Left to take care of themselves, islands in a sea of turbulence, they grew in the sense of self-reliance and independence ; they grew also to be aggressive, quarrelsome, and ambitious. Thus, by the llth century, the Lombard cities had become &quot; communes,&quot; commonalties, republics, managing their own affairs, and ready for attack or defence. Milan had recovered its greatness, ecclesiastically as well as politically ; it scarcely bowed to Rome, and it aspired to the position of a sovereign city, mistress over its neighbours. At length, in the 12th century, the inevitable conflict came between the republicanism of the Lombard cities and the German feudalism which still claimed their allegiance in the name of the empire. Leagues and counter-leagues were formed ; and a confederacy of cities, with Milan at its head, challenged the strength of Germany under one of its sternest emperors, Frederick Barbarossa. The struggle was terrible. At first Frederick was victorious ; Milan, I except its churches, was utterly destroyed ; everything I &quot;rebel&quot; cities; and they had to receive an imperial magistrate instead of their own (1158-62). But the Lombard league was again formed. Milan was rebuilt, with the help even of its jealous rivals, and at Legnano I (11 7 6) Frederick was utterly defeated. The Lombard cities had regained their independence ; and at the peace of i Constance (1183) Frederick found himself compelled to confirm it. From the peace of Constance the history of the Lombards is merely part of the history of Italy. Their cities went through the ordinary fortunes of most Italian cities. They quarrelled and fought with one another. They took opposite sides in the great strife of the time between pope and emperor, and were Guelt and Ghibelline by old tradition, or as one or other faction prevailed in them. They swayed backwards and forwards between the power of the people and the power of the few ; but democracy and ! oligarchy passed sooner or later into the hands of a master who veiled his lordship under various titles, and generally at last into the hands of a family. Then, in the larger political struggles and changes of Europe, they were incorporated into a kingdom, or principality, or duchy, carved out to suit the interest of a foreigner, or to make a heritage for the nephew of a pope. But in two ways especially the energetic race which grew out of the fusion of Langobards and Italians between the 9th and the 12th centuries has left the memory of itself. In England, at least, the enterprising traders and bankers who found their way to the West, from the 13th to the 16th centuries, though they certainly did not all come from Lombardy, bore the name of Lombards. In the next place, the Lombards, or the Italian builders whom they employed or followed, the &quot;masters of Como,&quot; of whom so much is said in the early Lombard laws, introduced a manner of building, stately, solemn, and elastic, to which their name has been attached, and which gives a character of its own to some of the most interesting churches in Italy. (R. W. C.) LOMBOK (called Tanah Sasak by the natives, and Saliparan or Selaparang by the Balinese, Lombok being properly the name only of a village on the north-east side), an island of the East Indian Archipelago, belonging to the Lesser Sunda group, and separated from Bali by the Strait of Lombok, from Sumbawa by the Strait of Alas. It stretches from about 115 44 to 116 40 E. long, and from 8 12 to 9 1 S. lat., and its area is estimated at 2080 square miles. Rising out of the sea with bold and often precipitous coasts, Lombok is mountainous towards the south, and in the north-east contains one of the principal volcanic summits of the whole archipelago Rindjani or Peak of Lombok, 8688 feet according to Horsburgh s measurement, 12,379 according to Melvill de Carnbee, and 11,834 according to Smits. There is no active crater in
 * that marked municipal independence was abolished in the