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Lombard Kingdom

In order to understand the future history of Italy, it is necessary to form a clear conception of the method pursued by the Lombards in their conquest. Penetrating the peninsula, and advancing like a glacier or half-liquid stream of mud, they occupied the valley of the Po, and moved slowly downward through the center of the country. Numerous as they were compared with their Gothic predecessors, they had not strength or multitude enough to occupy the whole peninsula. Venice, which, since the days of Attila, had offered an asylum to Roman refugees from the northern cities, was left untouched. So was Genoa with its Riviera. Ravenna, intrenched within her I lagoons, remained a Greek city. Rome, protected by invincible prestige, escaped. The seacoast cities of the south, and the islands, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, preserved llieir independence. Thus the Lombards neither occupied the extremities nor subjugated the brain-center of the country.

The strength of Alhoiu's kingdom was in the north; his capital, Pavia. As his people pressed southward, they omitted to possess themselves of the coasts; and, what was worse for the future of these conquerors, the original impetus of the invasion was checked by the untimely murder of Alboin in 573. After this event, the semi-independent chiefs of the Lombard tribe, who borrowed the title of dukes from their Roman predecessors, seem to have l>een contented with consolidating their power in the districts each had occupied. The duchies of Spoleto in the center, and of lienevento in the south, inserted wedgelike into the middle of the peninsula, and inclosing independent Rome, were but loosely united to the kingdom at Pavia. Italy was broken up into districts, each offering points for attack from without, and fostering the seeds of internal revolution. Three separate capitals must be discriminated - Pavia, the seat of the new Lombard kingdom; Ravenna, the garrison city of the Byzantine emperor; and Rome, the rallying point of the old nation, where the successor of St. Peter was already beginning to assume that national protectorate which proved so influential in the future.

The rule of the Lombards proved at first far more oppressive to the native population, and was less tolerant of their old customs, than that of the Goths had been. Wherever the Lombards had the upper hand, they placed the country under military rule, resembling in its general character what we now know as the feudal system. Though there is reason to suppose that the Roman laws were still administered within the cities, yet the Lombard code was that of the kingdom; and the Lombards being Arians, they added the oppression of religious intolerance to that of martial despotism and barbarous cupidity.

The Italians were reduced to the last extremity when Gregory the Great (590-604), having strengthened his position by diplomatic relations with the duchy of Spoleto, and brought about the conversion of the Lombards to orthodoxy, raised the cause of the remaining Roman population throughout Italy. The fruit of his policy, which made of Rome a counterpoise against the effete empire of the Greeks upon the one hand and against the pressure of the feudal kingdom on the other, was seen in the succeeding century.

When Leo the Isaurian published his decrees against the worship of images in 726, Gregory II allied himself with Liudprand, the Lombard king, threw off allegiance to Byzantium and established the autonomy of Rome. This pope initiated the dangerous policy of playing one hostile force off against another with a view to securing independence. He used the Lombards in his struggle with the Greeks, leaving to his successors the duty of checking these unnatural allies. This was accomplished by calling the Franks in against the Lombards. Liudprand pressed hard, not only upon the Greek dominions of the exarchate, but also upon Rome. His successors, Kachis and Astolf, attempted to follow the same game of conquest.

But the popes, Gregory III, Zachary and Stephen II, determining at any cost to espouse the national cause and to aggrandize their own office, continued to rely upon the Franks. Pippin twice crossed the Alps, and forced Astolf to relinquish his acquisitions, including Ravenna, Pcntapolis, the coast towns of Romagna, and some cities in the duchy of Spoleto. These he handed over to the pope of Rome. This donation of Pippin in 756 confirmed the papal see in the protectorate of the Italic party, and conferred upon it sovereign rights. The virtual outcome of the contest carried on by Rome since the year 726 with Byzantium and I'avia was to place the popes in the position held by the Greek exarch, and to confirm the limitation of the Lombard kingdom. We must, however, be cautious to remember that the south of Italy was comparatively unaffected. The dukes of the Greek empire and the Lombard dukes of Benevento. together with a few autonomous commercial cities, still divided Italy below the Campagna of Rome.