Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/192

 156 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE when Gregory became pope. After the death of Alboin, who R. . had led them into Italy, they went for ten years with the without a king, and were ruled instead by some Lombards thirty-five dukes in as many different districts. Then the nobles elected a king again in the north, which on that account has since been called Lombardy; but the Duchies of Friuli in northeastern, of Spoleto in central, and of Beneventum in southern Italy remained practically inde- pendent, and other dukes occasionally made the king trouble. The emperors were too occupied at home to send adequate forces against the Lombards, and yet would not make peace with them, although the exarch at Ravenna could not pro- tect Rome and Naples. Gregory, on the contrary, favored coming to terms with the Lombards. In 592, in order to save Rome, he made peace on his own authority with the Duke of Spoleto. Next the king of the Lombards besieged the city, but Gregory by a personal interview persuaded him to withdraw and vainly urged the emperor to make peace with him. At last in 599 peace was made. When the war was resumed in 601 between the Empire and the Lom- bards, Rome seems to have remained neutral, and Gregory rejoiced in 603 at the baptism into the Catholic faith of the heir to the Lombard throne. This, however, did not mean the end of hostilities between the Lombard kings, the Lom- bard dukes, the exarch, and the pope, which continued in- termittently until the Lombards finally captured Ravenna in 751 and then were conquered in their turn by the Franks a few years later. Gregory's election to the Papacy had to be sanctioned by the Emperor Maurice before he was consecrated, and he The papal dul >" infor med the four patriarchs at Constanti- power under nople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, of Gregory 1 • . . J nis accession and his adherence to the teachings of the oecumenical councils. However, he abated none of the papal claims in theory and advanced them greatly in practice by his energetic activity throughout the West. It was not easy to maintain anything like a general super- vision of church affairs in those troubled times, when com-