THE LOMBARDS IN ITALY, AND THE RISE OF THE PAPACY
568-653
The Wanderings of the Lombards—Alboin conquers Northern Italy—His tragic
end—Anarchy among the Lombard dukes—Reign of Authari, and Frankish
wars—Conquest and conversion of Agilulf—Rothari the Law-giver—State
of Rome and Italy—Career of St. Gregory—He founds the temporal power
of the Papacy.
In the third year of Justin II., and only fifteen years after Narses had
swept the Goth and Frank out of Italy, a new horde of barbarians came
pouring down on that unhappy land. The ravages of eighteen years of war,
and a terrible pestilence which supervened, had left all the northern
parts of the peninsula desolate, and well-nigh uninhabited,—‘the land
seemed to have sunk back into primeval silence and solitude.’[28] The
imperial troops held a few strong places beyond the Po, such as Verona
and Pavia, but had made no effort to restore the military frontier along
the Alps, and the land lay open to the spoiler. Southern Italy had
suffered less, and Ravenna was still strong and well guarded, but the
Transpadane lowlands—destined ere long to change their name to the
‘Lombard plain’—were as destitute of civil population as they were of
military resources.
Footnote 28:
_Paulus Diaconus_, ii. 5.
The new invaders of Italy were the Lombards (Langobardi), a Teutonic
people, who, according to their ancient tribal legends, had once dwelt
in Scandinavia, but had descended ten generations before into northern
Germany, and from thence had slowly worked their way down to the Danube.
They had only come into touch with the frontier of the empire when
Odoacer smote the Rugii, in 487. After that tribe had been scattered,
they moved into its abiding place on the mid-Danube, and became the
neighbours of the Ostrogoths and the Gepidae.
[Sidenote: The Lombards.] The Lombards were the least tinctured with
civilisation of all the Teutonic tribes, even more barbarous, it would
seem, than our own Saxon forefathers. Living far back in the darkness of
the North, they had been kept from any knowledge of Roman culture, and
did not even approach the boundaries of the empire till it had already
been broken up and laid desolate. They were still heathen, and still
living in the stage of primitive tribal life which Tacitus painted in
the Germania. They were divided into many tribal families, or clans,
which they called ‘faras,’ and their subdivisions were ruled by elective
aldermen[29] or dukes, but the whole nation chose its king from among
the royal houses of the Lethings and Gungings, who claimed to descend
from Gambara, the wise queen who had led the race across the Baltic from
Scandinavia ten generations back.
Footnote 29:
The Lombards seem to have called them ‘Aldones’—_cf._ Ealderman in
English antiquity.
During the times of Justinian’s Ostrogothic war the Lombards were under
the rule of Audoin, whom Narses bribed with great gifts to aid him
against Baduila. Five thousand warriors, under the command of their king
himself, joined Narses in the invasion of Italy in 552, and took a
distinguished part in the victory of Taginae. It must have been in this
campaign that the Lombards learnt of the fertility and the weakness of
Italy; but they were still engaged in wars with their neighbours on the
Danube, and their king was an old man, wherefore we need not think it
strange that they waited fifteen years before they turned their
knowledge to account.
The Lombards were the close neighbours and the bitter foes of the
Gepidae, the Gothic tribe who had remained behind in the Hungarian
plains when the other sections of the Goths moved westward to Spain and
Italy. [Sidenote: Wars of Alboin.] The long struggle between Lombard and
Gepid only came to an end in 567, when the Lombards called in to their
aid the Tartar race of the Avars, and by their assistance almost
entirely exterminated the Gepidae, whose scattered remnant only survived
as slaves of the conquering horde. By this time Alboin, the son of
Audoin, was reigning over the Lombards. He it was who slew with his own
hand Cunimund, the king of the Gepidae. The barbarous victor struck off
the head of his enemy, and had the skull mounted in gold, and fashioned
into a drinking-cup, as the supreme token of his triumph. Yet, but a
short time before, ere the last struggle had begun between the Lombards
and the Gepidae, he had taken to wife Rosamund, the daughter of the man
whom he now slew and beheaded.
THE LOMBARD KINGS IN ITALY.
1. ALBOIN
568-72. Garibald, Duke of
----- Bavaria.
2. CLEPHO |
572-73. +----------+---------------+
| | |
3. AUTHARI=Theodelinda=4. AGILULF Gundoald
583-90. | 590-615. |
| |
+-----------+-------+ |
| | |
5. ADALOALD Gundiberga=6. ARIOALD 9. ARIBERT
615-25. 625-36. 653-62.
|
+-----------------+--------------+--------------+
| | |
10. GODEBERT 12. BERTHARI A daughter=11. GRIMOALD
662. 672-88. | 662-71.
| | |
Reginbert, duke 13. CUNIBERT Garibald.
of Turin. 688-700.
| |
15. ARIBERT II. 14. LIUTBERT
701-11. 700-701.
Kings not connected with this House were (7) Rothari, 636-52; (8)
Rodoald, 652-53; (16) Ansprand, 712; (17) Liutprand, 712-43; (18)
Hildebrand, 743-44; (19) Ratchis, 744-49; (20) Aistulf, 749-56; (21)
Desiderius, 756-74.
Having ended this great national feud by the extermination of the
Gepidae, Alboin determined to put into effect a scheme which must have
been long maturing in his brain, the conquest of Italy. The Lombard
historian of a later day asserted that he had been tempted to the
invasion by the treachery of Narses, who, in discontent with Justin II.,
had urged Alboin to invade the peninsula, and sent him as gifts samples
of all the generous fruits and wines that Italy produces. But this is
the mere echo of a Lombard saga. Narses, now over eighty years of age
and on his deathbed, had other matters to think about than the spiting
of his new master. Nor did the Lombards, who had ridden all over Italy
in 552, need to be reminded of its existence or its fertility.
Before leaving Pannonia, Alboin made over his old kingdom to his allies
the Avars, only stipulating that it should be restored to him if ever he
returned from Italy; a rather futile compact to make with such a
faithless race as this Tartar horde. Crossing the Carinthian Alps, in
the summer of 568, the whole Lombard nation—men, women, and children,
with their cattle and slaves—descended into the Venetian plains, and
spread themselves over the deserted lands. There was hardly any
opposition. In cities that had once been great, like Aquileia and Milan,
the scanty population did not even close the gates, but awaited the
invader with apathy. Only the places where there was an Imperial
garrison offered resistance. Verona, protected by the rushing Adige,
Padua in its marshes, and Pavia, the ancient royal city of the Goths,
were among the few towns that refused to admit the Lombards. [Sidenote:
Alboin conquers Northern Italy.] The newcomers spread themselves over
the whole valley of the Po, as far as the Tuscan Apennines and the gates
of Ravenna, and begun to settle down on the fairest spots among the
ruined Roman villages. They divided themselves, like the Franks in Gaul
or the East-Angles in Britain, into two folks, the Neustrian, or
Western, and the Austrian, or Eastern, Lombards. The former stretched
from the Cottian Alps to the Adda, the latter from the Adda to the
Julian Alps. Piedmont formed the bulk of Neustria; Venetia the bulk of
Austria. Many scattered portions of tribes came to join Alboin in his
new conquest. Not only did he grant lands to broken bands of Saxons and
Suabians, but even foreigners, such as Bulgarians and Slavs, found
shelter with him.
While Alboin was founding the new kingdom of Lombardy, the cities which
at first resisted began to drop into his hands. Verona fell early, but
Pavia made a long defence. So desperately did it hold out against the
host left to blockade it that the king swore, in his wrath, to slay
every living thing within its walls. But when, after three years, the
starving citizens threw open their gates, he relented of his hard vow,
‘because there was much Christian folk in that city,’ and made Pavia his
capital and royal stronghold.
In the next year, however, he came to his end. The Lombard chronicler,
Paul the Deacon, repeating some familiar Lombard saga, tells the grim
tale of his death thus:—‘King Alboin sat over long at the wine in his
city of Verona, so that he grew boisterous, and he sent for the cup
which he had made from the skull of king Cunimund, his father-in-law,
and forced his queen, Rosamund, to drink from it, bidding her drink
joyfully with her father. Then the queen conceived a deep grief and
anger in her heart, and questioned with herself how she might avenge her
father by slaying her husband. So she strove to persuade Helmichis, the
king’s armour-bearer, who was also his foster-brother, to slay his lord.
And Helmichis would not, but counselled her to win Peredeo, the
strongest champion of the Lombards, to do the deed. [Sidenote: Murder of
Alboin.] Then Rosamund sold her honour to Peredeo, and became his
mistress, and said to him, “Now hast thou done a thing for which either
thou must kill Alboin, or he thee.” So he unwillingly consented to the
deed, and at mid-day, when all the palace lay asleep, Rosamund bound the
king’s sword so tightly to the bed-head that it could not be drawn, and
then bid Peredeo go in and slay her husband. When Alboin heard an armed
man enter, he sprang from his couch, and strove to draw his sword
without avail. For some space he fought hard for his life with a stool
that he caught up, but what could the best of warriors do without arms
against an armed champion? He was slain like a weakling, and, after
passing unharmed through so many battles, died by the counsel of one
woman, and she his own wife. So the Lombards took up his body, with much
weeping, and buried it beneath the great flight of steps over against
the palace, where it lay till my own days.’ (May 572.)
Helmichis strove in vain to make himself king in his master’s room, but
the Lombards would have none of him, and he was forced to fly with
Rosamund and the murderer Peredeo, to take shelter with the Romans at
Ravenna. There all three of them came to evil ends, ‘for the hand of
Heaven was upon them for doing such a foul deed.’
Meanwhile the Lombards crowned as king, in the room of Alboin, Clepho,
one of the mightiest of their dukes, though not of the royal blood; for
Alboin had no son, and was the last of the Lethings. Clepho completed
the conquest of all northern Italy, as far as the southern limits of
Tuscany and the gates of Ravenna. [Sidenote: Anarchy, 573-83.] But ere
he had reigned a year he was slain by one of his own slaves, whom he had
wronged. After he was dead the Lombards chose no more kings to reign
over them for ten years, but each tribe went forth conquering and
plundering under its own elective duke. It is said that no less than
thirty-five of these chiefs were ranging over Italy at the same time
(573-83). Nothing can show better the survival of primitive Teutonic
ideas among the Lombards than this period of anarchy. They had not yet
learned to look upon the king as a necessary part of the constitution of
the tribe, but, like the Germans of the first century, regarded him as a
war-chief, to be followed in time of peril alone. The Goths or the
Franks, who had advanced to a further stage, could not have borne to
live kingless for ten whole years.
Strangely enough, the loss of their supreme head seems to have detracted
in no wise from the warlike vigour of the Lombards. In the ten kingless
years they went on subduing the land, and pushed their incursions
farther to the west and south. Three dukes of Neustria crossed the Alps
and harried Provence, then in the hands of king Guntram the Frank, the
peaceful brother of the warlike Sigibert and the wicked Chilperich. They
took many cities, and were only driven out of the land, after much
fighting, by Mummolus, the great Gallo-Roman general, who served king
Guntram so well; but for him, Provence might have become part of
Lombardy. Meanwhile other Lombard dukes were pressing southward down the
Italian peninsula. They did not act on any combined plan of invasion,
but each passed on with his war-band, leaving to right and to left many
cities held by Imperialist garrisons, till he found a place of
settlement that pleased his eye. Hence it came to pass that Lombard
duchies and Roman cities were curiously intermixed. In central Italy,
Faroald, the first duke of Spoleto, left Ravenna and Ancona to the
north, and established himself in the central valley of the Tiber, with
Imperialist garrisons all around him. Zotto, the first duke of
Benevento, passed even farther to the south, and founded a realm in the
Samnite valleys, which was almost entirely out of touch with the other
Lombard states. It was hemmed in to east and west by the Roman garrisons
of Rome, Naples, and Calabria. The dukes of Lucca and Chiusi, who held
the bulk of Tuscany, did not push their limits down to the Tiber, but
stopped short at the Ciminian hills, leaving a considerable district
north of Rome in the hands of the Imperialists. Even in northern Italy
the dukes of Neustria left Genoa and the Ligurian coast alone, and those
of Austria did not subdue the marshland of Mantua and Padua, nor follow
the fugitive inhabitants of Venetia into the islands where Venice and
Grado were just beginning to grow up in the security of the lagoons. All
over Italy Lombard and Roman districts were hopelessly confused, and,
save that the Po valley was wholly Lombard, and Bruttium and Calabria
wholly Roman, there was no part of the land that was not shared between
the invader and the old Imperial Government.
Coming into a country already desolate and well-nigh dispeopled, and
bringing with them the customs of primitive Germany, untinctured with
any Roman intermixture, the Lombards established a polity even less
centralised than that of the Visigoths, and infinitely below the
standard of government which Theodoric had once set up in Italy eighty
years before. [Sidenote: The Lombard Monarchy.] When the nation once
more chose a king, his power was hopelessly circumscribed by the
authority of the great hereditary dukes. Spoleto and Benevento hardly
paid even a nominal homage to the king who reigned at Pavia. Only when
he presented himself with a large army in central Italy could he hope to
win attention for his orders. Even in the valley of the Po, and in
Tuscany, his power was very imperfect. The authority of the royal name
had been fatally injured by the extinction, with Alboin, of the ancient
kingly house of the Lethings. The Lombard monarchs, like their
Visigothic contemporaries in Spain, only held their crown when once they
had been elected, by the right of the sword. In a short history of two
hundred years the Lombard kingdom saw nine successive races of kings
mount the throne. All represented old ducal families. The rulers of
Turin, Brescia, Benevento, Friuli, and Istria all, at one time or
another, won the royal crown, besides two or three kings who were not
even Lombards by birth, but strangers from the neighbouring land of
Bavaria.
In the wasted regions of northern Italy, it would seem that the Lombards
formed for some time the large majority of the population. Unlike the
Goths in Spain, or the Franks in central Gaul, they did not merely
consist of a few scattered families lost among the masses of the old
inhabitants. There is a greater breach in the old Roman traditions of
municipal and social life in the valley of the Po than in most of the
other lands of the Western Empire. In the seventh century Lombardy must
have preserved less traces of its ancient imperial organisation than
Spain, Gaul, or Burgundy, and must have presented a much more primitive
and Teutonic aspect. This is as we should expect, from the fact that the
Lombards came from the very back of Germany, and first met with the
influence of the older world of Rome when they moved into Italy.
[Illustration:
ITALY IN A.D. 590.
]
Outside the Po valley, however, Italy was in a very different state;
southern Italy and much of central Italy preserved its ancient
organisation almost undisturbed; the Exarchate of Ravenna, the _Ducatus
Romanus_, and the southern peninsulas of Apulia and Bruttium remained
unchanged down to the ninth century. Records show us in the
neighbourhood of Rome the old social organisation of the land, in
domains inhabited by _coloni_, and owned by Roman church corporations,
or absentee proprietors, at a time when in the northern plains the
feudal system of the semi-independent dukes, each surrounded by their
land-holding _comites_, was in full operation. In organisation, no less
than in blood, northern Italy and southern Italy were fatally sundered,
and two nations differing in all their usages of life and manners of
thought were growing up.
The parts of Italy which remained under the imperial sceptre and
preserved their ancient social and political organisation were strangely
scattered. In the reign of Maurice (582-602) the emperor was still
obeyed in eight regions. First was the Istrian peninsula, and the marsh
and lagoon islands of the Venetian coast, with the strong cities of
Padua and Mantua thrust inland like a wedge into the side of Lombardy.
Second came the Ligurian coast with the city of Genoa, crushed in
between the Apennines and the sea; its rugged valleys and cliffs did not
yet tempt the Lombards out of their smiling plain to court the
neighbourhood of the sea, for the Lombards were essentially unmaritime.
[Sidenote: Imperial possessions in Italy.] Third is found the tract of
land round Ravenna, the Exarchate, as it now became called—a title which
it shared for a space with Africa, where exarchs also reigned. The
Exarchate stretched along the coast of the Adriatic, from the delta of
the Po up to the gates of Rimini, reaching as far inland as the
Apennines, and comprising the whole southern half of the ancient
province of Æmilia. Farther down the coast lay the fourth imperial
district, from Rimini to Ancona, which was often called the Pentapolis
and the Decapolis, from two groups of five and ten cities respectively
which it contained.[30] In Umbria lay a fifth detached district where
the emperor was still acknowledged; it centred around Perugia, and was
much hemmed in by the Lombard duchies of Chiusi and Spoleto, but it
stretched out one horn toward the Pentapolis on the north, and the other
toward Rome on the south. The sixth district was the Roman territory,
now known as the _Ducatus Romanus_, from the _dux_ who acted as civil
governor in the ancient city in subordination to the exarch at Ravenna.
The Roman duchy reached from Civita Vecchia to Terracina, and from the
Apennines to the sea, taking in the southern corner of Etruria, and
well-nigh the whole of Latium. It was cut off by the Lombard town of
Capua from the duchy of Naples, a narrow coast-strip containing the
towns of Naples and Amalfi, and ruled by a duke resident in the larger
place. Lastly, all the toe and heel of Italy, Calabria Bruttium and
southern Lucania, the whole coast line from Brindisi to Policastro,
formed the eighth Roman district. It was evident that the administration
of such a number of fragmentary possessions would be a hard task for the
exarch, cut off as he was from access by land to the greater part of the
regions for which he was responsible. It was not so easy to foresee that
the main result of the scission of Italy by the Lombard conquests was
destined to be the rise of the temporal power of the Papacy, that most
unexpected of the developments of the seventh century.
Footnote 30:
The ‘five cities’ were Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, Ancona; the
‘ten cities’—Osimo, Umana, Jesi, Fossombrone, Montefeltro, Urbino,
Cagli, Gubbio, Pontericcioli, and the Territorium Valvense. Bury’s
_Later Roman Empire_, vol. ii. p. 146.
After the anarchy under the tribal dukes had lasted ten years, the
Lombards chose them another king. The election seems to have been made
mainly under the pressure of the war with the Franks, which they had
brought upon themselves by their reckless invasion and ravaging of
Provence in 574-75. Guntram of Burgundy induced his Austrasian kinsman
to help him, and the Lombards were attacked by the Austrasians, who
descended the valley of the Adige and attacked Trent, as well as by the
Burgundians. Moreover, Tiberius II. of Constantinople had sent gifts to
the kings of the Franks in order to induce them to aid him in Italy, and
had done what he could, while the Persian and Avaric wars still dragged
on, to send help to the exarch of Ravenna.
The new Lombard king was Authari, the son of that Clepho whose murder
had left the throne vacant in 573. So greatly was the need of providing
for the maintenance of the central power felt, that the dukes not only
did him homage, and ceded him the royal city of Pavia, but promised him
a half of all the lands that were in their hands as a royal domain to
maintain him, his _comitatus_, and his officers. We may doubt if the
promise was very exactly kept. Nor did all the dukes unite in the
election. The first act of king Authari had to be to subdue and expel
duke Droctulf, who had called in the Romans, and fortified himself in
Brescello to defend the middle valley of the Po against the king.
[Sidenote: Wars of Authari, 583-90.] For the whole of his reign Authari
was involved in recurring struggles with the Franks, whose young and
warlike king, Childebert II., the son of Brunhildis, was set on resuming
the schemes of his cousin Theudebert for conquering Italy. The seven
years’ reign of Authari was mainly occupied in warding off Frankish
attacks on Italy; Guntram and Childebert, stirred up by Smaragdus, the
exarch of Ravenna, threatened three or four times to cross the Alps, and
twice actually invaded Lombardy. The more dangerous assault was in 590,
when two great armies advanced simultaneously, the one from Burgundy
over the Cenis against Milan, the other from Austrasia over the Brenner
against Trent and Verona. Both forced their way to their goal, and did
much damage to the Lombards, but they failed to meet with each other, or
with the Roman troops which the exarch had promised to bring to their
aid. Famine and pestilence thinned their ranks, and they could not reach
the Lombard king, who had shut himself up in the impregnable Pavia. At
last they returned each to their own land, without profiting in the
least by their great expedition.[31]
Footnote 31:
See p. 170.
In the intervals between the Frankish invasions Authari had done
something to consolidate the Lombard power in north Italy, by capturing
the great lagoon-fortress of Commacchio, whose seizure cut the
communication between Padua and Ravenna. At about the same time Faroald,
duke of Spoleto, took Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, and completely
destroyed the city, whose only surviving remnant, the solitary church of
St. Apollinare in Classe, stands up in such forlorn grandeur in the
Ravennese marshes. Authari is said to have pushed one plundering
expedition through Benevento into Bruttium, to have ridden to the
extreme south point of the Italian peninsula, and to have touched with
his spear a sea-swept pillar near Reggio, crying, ‘Here shall be the
boundary of the kingdom of the Lombards.’ A vain boast, if it was ever
made, for Bruttium was not destined to fall at any time into Lombard
hands.
Authari married Theodelinda, the daughter of Garibald, duke of Bavaria,
a pious Christian and a Catholic, whose coming seems to have led the
wild Lombards to Christianity, much as the influence of queen Bertha
worked on the Jutes of Kent. She had not been long wedded to him when he
died; the Lombard _witan_, who had formed a high idea of her wisdom and
virtue, consulted her as to the choice of a new king. She recommended to
them Agilulf, duke of Turin, a cousin of Authari. To him she gave her
hand, and he was at the same time raised on the shield at Milan as king
of the Lombards (590).
Agilulf was led by his wife’s persuasion to be baptized, and ere long
the greater part of the nation followed his example. The majority of the
Lombards, like most of the other Teutonic races, adopted Arianism, and
only conformed to orthodoxy in the seventh century. It was Agilulf and
Theodelinda who built the famous Basilica of Monza, where the iron crown
of Lombardy is even now preserved. In its sacristy are still shown many
relics of the pious queen; most curious among them is a hen and chickens
of gold of the most quaint and archaic workmanship, a marvellous example
of the earliest art of a Teutonic people just emerging from barbarism.
With it is preserved the crown of Agilulf, which he dedicated to St.
John, and which bears the inscription: AGILULF GRATIA DEI VIR GLORIOSUS
REX TOTIUS ITALIAE OFFERT SANCTO IOHANNI BAPTISTAE IN ECCLESIA MODICIAE.
The first three kings of the Lombards had been short-lived, but Agilulf
survived for the respectable term of twenty-five years (591-616), and
reigned long enough to see his son grow up and become his colleague on
the throne. More fortunate than his predecessor Authari, he was
delivered from the danger of Frankish invasions by the series of wars
between the sons of Brunhildis and Fredegundis, which broke out in 593,
and afterwards by the home troubles of Austrasia and Burgundy, caused by
the strife between Brunhildis and the great nobles. [Sidenote: Conquests
of Agilulf.] Agilulf was, therefore, enabled to lop away from the empire
several of the detached districts which had hitherto adhered to it. For
the greater part of his reign he was in constant war with the Romans,
and stripped the exarchs of Sutrium, Orte, Tuder, Perugia, and other
south-Tuscan and Umbrian towns (598). By the mediation of Pope Gregory
the Great a treaty was, for the first time, concluded between the
Lombards and the empire in 599, but the exarch Gallicinus broke the
peace, by seizing the person of Agilulf’s daughter as she chanced to be
passing through imperial territory. This second Lombard war, which fell
into the reign of Phocas, proved most disastrous for the Romans. Agilulf
began by capturing Padua, the great fortress of the Venetian marshes
(602). The fall of Padua cut off Mantua from succour, and that city, the
last stronghold of the empire in the interior of Lombardy, also fell in
602. The ministers of Phocas only obtained a final pacification in 605
by promising to pay an annual tribute of 1200 gold solidi, and ceding
the south-Tuscan strongholds of Orvieto and Bagnarea.
There was no more fight left in emperor or exarch for many a year; in
the throes of the disastrous Persian war, Phocas and Heraclius were
unable to send aid to Rome or Ravenna. The opportunity afforded to
Agilulf of completing the conquest of Italy was such as never occurred
again. But contented with his annual tribute, and perhaps tamed down by
approaching old age, the Lombard king remained quiescent. Apparently he
preferred to give his realm peace, and to occupy himself in keeping down
his unruly dukes. In the course of his reign there were three or four
dangerous rebellions of these chiefs, but Agilulf put them all down,
apparently without much difficulty. There was also trouble on the
north-eastern frontier from the Avars and Slavs, the same foes who were
so grievously afflicting the Roman empire at this time. The Slavs made
their way into Istria and Cilly, and became troublesome neighbours to
Italy, though some of their nearest tribes were reduced to pay tribute
by the dukes of Friuli. The Avars were more active and more dangerous;
in spite of repeated treaties with Agilulf, their Chagan burst into
north Italy in 610, slew Gisulf, duke of Friuli, in battle, ravaged all
Venetia, and carried off many captives. Fortunately for the Lombards
these invasions were not continued, as the Avars found better prey and
less fighting in the Balkan peninsula.
In spite of such troubles, the reign of Agilulf was a time of growth,
expansion, and ripening civilisation for the Lombards. They had all, by
the end of his reign, received Christianity, had settled down in their
new home, and were beginning to build churches and palaces, instead of
confining their attention to destroying them. Agilulf had found a _modus
vivendi_ with Gregory the Great and the Papacy, and taught his subjects
to live in some sort of peace with their neighbours, instead of
persisting in the unending war which had filled the first thirty years
of Lombard dominion in Italy.
Agilulf was succeeded by his only son, Adaloald, a boy of fourteen, whom
he had induced the Lombard _witan_ to salute as his colleague, and raise
on the shield some years before. The regency was held by queen
Theodelinda, who was both pious and popular, till the young king came of
age; but soon after he had attained his majority, Adaloald was stricken
with madness, and the nation chose in his stead Arioald, duke of Turin,
who appears to have been no kinsman of the royal house, but had married
the young king’s sister, Gundiberga (626). Little is known of this
king’s reign of twelve years; we hear neither of wars with the Franks,
nor of conquests from the Roman; we only read that he was, unlike his
predecessor, an Arian. When he died, however, he was succeeded by a
ruler of far greater mark, ‘Duke Rothari of Brescia, of the race of
Arod, a strong man, and one who walked in the paths of justice, though
he was not an orthodox Christian, but followed the deceitful heresy of
the Arians.’
[Sidenote: Conquests of Rothari, 636-52.] Rothari finally completed the
conquest of northern Italy, by taking the two districts which had still
remained in the hands of the Imperialists down to his day. He subdued
the whole Ligurian coast from Nice to Luna, with the great city of Genoa
its capital (641). He also took the city of Oderzo, the last mainland
possession of the Romans in Venetia. After this time the lagoon islands
alone acknowledged the eastern Caesar as their suzerain, and their
homage was formal rather than real. Rothari’s conquests were not won
without severe fighting. His greatest victory was won on the Scultenna,
not far from Modena, over the exarch Plato, who had invaded Lombard
territory, but was defeated with a loss of 8000 men, and driven back
into Ravenna. The new activity of the Romans, to which this battle bears
witness, may be attributed to the fact that the Persian and Saracen wars
of Heraclius were at last ended, and under his grandson, Constans II.,
the Eastern empire was beginning to recover some measure of strength
(642).
[Sidenote: Laws of Rothari.] But Rothari is better remembered as the
framer of the Lombard Code of Laws than as the conqueror of Liguria. In
643 he published the compilation of the traditional usages of the
nation, which had hitherto never been committed to writing. It is
noticeable that the code is promulgated, not on the king’s personal
authority, but, like the English laws of Ine, ‘_Pro communi gentis
nostrae utilitate, pari consilio parique consensu cum primatis judicibus
nostris cunctoque felicissimo exercitu nostro_’—that is to say, by the
king, with the counsel of his _witan_, and the assent of the armed
folk-moot of the Lombard nation. The _Edictum Rotharis_ is a very
primitive body of legislation, such as might have been promulgated in
the depths of the German forests, instead of in the heart of Italy. It
is mainly composed of elaborate lists of weregelds, of laws against
armed violence, of rules of inheritance, of statements concerning the
obligation of the follower towards his lord, of provisions for judicial
duels, _per campionem_. There is hardly any mention either of things
ecclesiastical or of city life, merely a provision against breach of
peace in a church, and some rules about _magistri comacenses_, or
skilled Roman artisans. We have from the laws a picture of a people
dwelling apart by families, or _faras_, each in its own farm-clearing,
surrounded by woods or open pasture land. Some are ‘free Lombards,’
called even thus early ‘_barones_,’ others the ‘men’ of a duke or of the
king. Below them are _aldii_, who correspond to mediæval villeins, the
half-free occupiers of the land of the Lombard master. These, no doubt,
are the remains of the old Roman population, _coloni_ who had once
cultivated the _massa_ of a Roman _curialis_. The royal authority is
found relegated to the local dukes in all military matters, while civil
affairs are dealt with by the king’s _schulthais_, or reeve (as the old
English would have called him), or to the _castaldus_, who seems to have
been the king’s representative in the city, as opposed to the
country-side. It is noticeable, as showing the extremely un-Roman
character of the Lombard laws, that they are drawn up by a German
official, the notary Ansoald, not by a Roman bishop or lawyer, as would
certainly have been the case in Gaul or Spain. Their execrable Latin,
which makes light of all concords, or rules of government of
prepositions, could not have been the work of any educated Italian.
With the death of Rothari in 652, began a time of trouble and confusion
for the Lombards, in which they ceased to win ground from the Romans,
and fell into civil strife and anarchy. It commenced by the murder of
Rothari’s son, Rodoald, after he had reigned less than six months. He
was a prince of licentious manners, and fell a victim to the dagger of
an outraged husband (653).
The eighty years of Italian history during which the Lombards were
settling down in the valley of the Po, and along the Umbrian and Samnite
slopes of the Apennines, have won their chief importance in the story of
the world, not from the doings of Agilulf or Rothari, but from the
events that were taking place in Rome. To these years we may ascribe the
foundation of the temporal power of the Papacy, and the development of
the œcumenical position of the bishop of Rome to an extent which had
hitherto been uncontemplated. These movements owe most of their strength
to a single man, Pope Gregory the Great.
After the first shock of the Lombard invasion had rent Italy in twain,
the Imperial governors resolved to take up their residence in Ravenna,
not in Rome—in the capital of the Italy of Theodoric, not that of the
Italy of Augustus. [Sidenote: Rise of the Papacy.] They chose the strong
marsh-fortress close to the Lombard border, not the decayed city of the
Tiber, still scarred by the traces of Baduila’s harrying. The exarch
stationed himself at Ravenna, and delegated his civil and military
authority in the scattered portions of Imperial Italy to minor
officials, of whom the _duces_ of Rome and Naples were the chief. This
removal of the seat of the viceroy from the ancient metropolis was
destined to have the most far-reaching results. Its first was that the
chief lay official in Rome was an individual of far less authority and
prestige than the chief ecclesiastical personage there resident. The
bishops of Rome had always been men of importance; their claim to a
patriarchal primacy over all the Western sees of Europe had already been
formulated. In the ancient civil ‘prefecture’ of Italy—that is, in the
Italian peninsula, Africa, and Illyricum—it had much reality. The
African and Dalmatian churches referred matters of difficulty to Rome
for decision, no less than did the church of Italy. We find Gregory the
Great exercising a real influence in places as distant as Salona,
Larissa, and Carthage. During the existence of the kingdom of the
Ostrogoths, the Popes had obtained a kind of recognition from the
Teutonic kings, as the accredited representatives of the Catholic and
Roman population of Italy. They were certainly the most important
subjects of the realm outside the ranks of the Gothic conquerors, and
were allowed to petition or plead with the king in behalf of all the
Catholic Italians. The reconquest of Italy by Justinian had threatened
to lower the prestige and power of the Popes, by placing them once more
under a master who was both the legitimate ruler of the whole empire and
an orthodox Catholic. Justinian had dealt in a very autocratic manner
with the Roman bishops, as the tales of the woes of Vigilius and
Silverius show. He summoned them to Constantinople, bullied, imprisoned,
or tried them at his good pleasure. The continued survival of the
Imperial power in Italy would have checked the growth of Papal authority
in a great measure.
But the Lombard invasion changed the aspect of affairs. The Imperial
governors and garrisons were swept into corners of the peninsula, and
the Popes left without any master on the spot to curb them. The
unfortunate Eastern wars of Maurice, Phocas, and Heraclius prevented
them from turning any adequate attention to Italy. They sent the exarchs
over to make what fight they could, without giving them adequate
supplies, either of men or money. The exarchs, penned up in Ravenna,
could only communicate with Rome with the greatest difficulty: the
land-route of communication was almost cut by the Lombards of Spoleto;
the sea-route was long and difficult. Hence Rome was left to itself, to
fall or stand by its own strength and its own counsel. The Pope and the
‘Duke’ of Rome were continually thrown upon their own resources, without
the power of asking advice or aid, either from the emperor or the
exarch. For twenty-seven years, as Pope Gregory once wrote, Rome was
continually in imminent peril of Lombard conquest (572-599), and obliged
to provide for itself. In this time of stress and storm the Popes won
their first secular authority over Rome and its vicinity, and reduced
the civil magistrates to a place of quite secondary importance.
[Sidenote: Gregory the Great, 590-604.] The man to whom the increase in
the power of the Papacy was mainly due was Pope Gregory the Great, whose
sway of fourteen years (590-604) covers the second half of the reign of
Maurice and the first two years of Phocas. Gregory was a man of
exceptional capacity, and of exceptional opportunities, at once
administrator, diplomatist, monk, and saint. He was a noble Roman, who
had spent his early manhood in the civil service, and had risen to the
rank of prefect of the city. In early middle age he suddenly cast
secular things aside, employed his wealth to found monasteries, and
entered one himself as a simple monk. He plunged into the most rigid
extremes of asceticism, and almost killed himself by his perpetual
macerations of the flesh. Ere long he became abbot, and signalised
himself by the stringent discipline which he maintained over his monks,
as well as by his fiery zeal and untiring charity. It was at this time
of his life that there occurred the scene so well known to all English
readers. When he found the Northumbrian boys exposed for sale in the
market-place of Rome, he conceived pity in his heart for the uncared-for
heathen of Britain, and determined to cross the northern seas, and bear
the Gospel to the Saxon and Angle. But Pope Pelagius II. interfered to
prevent the most able, as well as the most saintly, of his clergy from
leaving the service of the Roman See, and risking his life among the
Pagans. He forbade Gregory’s departure for England, and sent him instead
to represent the Papacy at the court of Constantinople. A few years
after his return from this mission, which was long enough to enable him
to get a clear view of the weakness of the emperor Maurice, and of his
impotence to interfere in Italian matters, Gregory was chosen bishop of
Rome, when Pelagius died of the plague (590).
Gregory was elected without the Imperial sanction. Rome was so closely
beset by the Lombards that there was neither time nor means for asking
Maurice’s consent, but the emperor afterwards confirmed the elevation of
the saintly abbot. All Italy—nay, even the whole of the Christian
West—knew of him already as the most prominent of the Roman clergy, and
he was able at once to assume a position of great independence and
authority. Gregory’s most striking feature was his extraordinary
self-confidence and conviction in the absolute wisdom and righteousness
of his own ideas. The legend, started by his admirers not long after his
death, to the effect that he was actually inspired by the Holy Ghost,
who visited him in the form of a dove, very adequately represents his
own notion of his infallibility. It was this self-confidence which
enabled him to take up the line of stern and unbending autocracy which
he always adopted. Other men were mute and obedient before the imperious
saint, in whom they recognised their moral superior. Few, save the
emperor Maurice and the fanatical John the Faster, patriarch of
Constantinople, ever ventured to confront or withstand him.
Unquestionably he was the most able, and one of the best-intentioned,
men of his age. He left his mark on all that he touched, from the
conversion of the English and the Lombards down to the official music of
the Western Church—the Gregorian chants that still preserve his name.
Although posterity enshrined him as one of the four great doctors of the
Latin Church, his theological work was the weakest part of his activity.
His writings are full of tropes, far-fetched conceits, misinterpretation
of Scripture (he was ignorant of Hebrew and even of Greek), and pedantic
arguments from analogy.
It was as statesman and administrator, and fosterer of missionary work
that Gregory was truly great. In Rome he ruled as a temporal governor
rather than a bishop. It was he who provided against the attacks of the
Lombards, arrayed soldiers for the defence of the walls, fed the
starving people from the funds of the church, and negotiated with the
chiefs of the enemy in behalf of the people of the _Ducatus Romanus_. In
592 he concluded, on his own authority, a truce with the duke of
Spoleto, while the exarch was set on continuing the war. Maurice
stigmatised this conduct as ‘fatuous;’ but, as the emperor left Rome to
provide for itself, he should hardly have complained. [Sidenote: Secular
activity of Gregory.] In another crisis, Gregory appointed, on his own
authority, a tribune to command the garrison of Naples and a governor
for the Tuscan town of Nepi. Finally, it was he who, in 599, negotiated
the treaty of peace with king Agilulf, which ended the thirty years of
continuous war which had followed the first coming of the Lombards to
Italy. When rebuked by the exarch, he claimed to take precedence of him,
not only in virtue of his priestly office, but also in place and
dignity. In short, for all practical purposes, Gregory made himself the
half-independent governor of Rome.
But Gregory’s progress in asserting his authority as Patriarch of the
West was even more important than his advances toward temporal power. He
it was who recovered Spain and Britain for the Catholic Church—the
former by the conversion of Reccared from Arianism,[32] the latter by
sending the mission of St. Augustine to Kent, and obtaining the baptism
of king Ethelbert. Through the influence of queen Theodelinda, he
obtained control over the Lombard king Agilulf, and induced him to bring
up his son Adaloald as a Catholic.[33] [Sidenote: International
authority of Gregory.] He could claim, in short, that he had reunited
Italy, Spain, and Britain to the body of the Church of Christ. He also
exercised considerable influence in Gaul, mainly through the influence
of the great queen-mother Brunhildis, a favourer of all things Roman,
with whom he maintained a long and friendly correspondence. We have
already shown how the bishops of the Imperial provinces of Africa and
Illyricum deferred to his judgment and decisions. Justly, then, may
Gregory be styled the first Patriarch of the united West.
Footnote 32:
See pp. 141, 142.
Footnote 33:
See p. 195.
His successors were, for many generations, not men of mark. But by his
work he had gained for them a temporal authority and a spiritual
precedence which they were never again to lose. When he died, in 604, he
left the Roman See exalted to a pitch of greatness which it had never
before known, revered by all the Teutonic peoples of Europe, and
half-freed from its allegiance to the rulers of Constantinople.
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