THE LOMBARD INVASION (568)
The Imperial dominion over all Italy had lasted scarce a dozen years
before another Barbarian nation, the Lombards, came and repeated the
experiment in which the Goths had failed. The period of Lombard dominion
lasted two hundred years (568-774). It is rather an uninteresting time;
nevertheless, like most history, it has a dramatic side. It makes a play
for four characters. The Lombards occupy the larger part of the stage,
but the protagonist is the Papacy. The Empire is the third character.
Finally, the Franks come in and dispossess the Lombards. The plot,
though it must spread over several chapters, is simple.
The scene of the play was pitiful. For nearly twenty years (535-553)
Italy had been one perpetual battlefield; whichever side won, the
unfortunate natives had to lodge and feed a foreign army, and endure all
the insolence of a brutal soldiery. Plague, pestilence, and famine
followed. The ordinary business of life came to a stop. Houses,
churches, aqueducts went to ruin; roads were left unmended, rivers
undiked. Great tracts of fertile land were abandoned. Cattle roamed
without herdsmen, harvests withered up, grapes shrivelled on the vines.
From lack of food came the pest. Mothers abandoned sick babies, sons
left their fathers' bodies unburied. The inhabitants of the cities fared
no better. Rome, for instance, had been captured five times. Before the
war her population had been 250,000; at its close not one tenth was
left. It is said that in one period every living thing deserted the
city, and for forty days the ancient mistress of the world lay like a
city of the dead. With peace came some respite; but the frightful
squeeze of Byzantine taxation was as bad as Barbarian conquest. Italy
sank into ignorance and misery. The Latin inhabitants hardly cared who
their masters were. They never had spirit enough to take arms and fight,
but meekly bowed their heads. Such was the scene on which these three
great actors, the Lombards, the Papacy, and the Empire, played their
parts. It is now time to describe the actors. We give precedence to the
Empire, as is its due.
This remnant of the Roman Empire, with its capital on the confines of
Europe and Asia, was an anomalous thing. It is a wonder that it
continued to exist at all. In fact, there is no better evidence of the
immense solidity of Roman political organization than the prolonged life
of the Eastern Empire. The countries under its sway, Thrace, Illyria,
Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, had no bond to hold them
together, except common submission to one central authority. By the end
of the sixth century, the Roman Empire was really Greek. The Greek
language was spoken almost exclusively in Constantinople, Latin having
dropped even from official use. Yet the Empire was still regarded as
the Roman Empire, and was looked up to by the young Barbarian kingdoms
of Europe with the respect which they deemed due to the Empire of
Augustus and Trajan. For instance, a king of the Franks addresses the
Emperor thus: "Glorious, pious, perpetual, renowned, triumphant Lord,
ever Augustus, my father Maurice, Imperator," and is content to be
called in return, "Childipert, glorious man, king of the Franks." Yet it
must be remembered that Constantinople at this time was the chief city
of Europe. Greek thought and Greek art lingered there. Justinian had
just built St. Sophia. In fact, Constantinople continued for centuries
to be the most civilized city in the world.
The Imperial government was an autocracy; all the reins, civil,
military, ecclesiastical, were gathered into the hands of the Emperor.
Its foreign policy was to repel its enemies, Persians to the east, Avars
to the north, Arabs to the south; its domestic policy was to hold its
provinces together and to extort money. The Emperors, many of whom were
able men, usually spent such time as could be spared from questions of
national defence and of finance in the study of theology, for at
Constantinople the problems of government were in great measure
religious. Next to the actual physical needs of life, the main interest
of the people was religion. A statesman who sought to preserve the
Empire whole, of necessity endeavoured to hold together its incohesive
parts by means of religious unity. This political need of religious
unity is the explanation, in the main, of the frequent theological
edicts and enactments.
The Emperors governed Italy, after the reconquest, by an Imperial
lieutenant, the Exarch, who resided at Ravenna, under a system of
administration preserved in mutilated form from times prior to the fall
of Romulus Augustulus. An attempt was made to keep civil and military
affairs separate, but the pressure of constant war threw all the power
into military hands. The peninsula, or such part of it as remained
Imperial after the Lombard invasion, was divided for administrative and
military purposes into dukedoms and counties, which were governed by
dukes and generals. The Byzantine officials were usually Greeks, bred in
Constantinople and trained in the Imperial system; they regarded
themselves as foreigners, and had neither the will nor the skill to be
of use to Italy. Their public business was to raise money for the
Empire, their private business to raise money for themselves.
In spite of these oppressions the Latin people preferred the Greeks to
the Lombards, partly because of their common Greco-Roman civilization,
partly because the Empire was still the Roman Empire; and this popular
support stood the Empire in good stead in the long war which it waged
with the Lombards. The Latin people did not fight, but they gave food
and information. The Empire, however, was ill prepared for a contest.
The recall of Narses removed from Italy the last bulwark against
Barbarian invasion. The Imperial army was weak, cities were poorly
garrisoned, fortifications badly constructed; and, but for the control
of the sea which enabled the Empire to hold the towns on the sea-coast,
the whole of Italy would have fallen, like a ripe apple, into the hands
of the invaders. The Empire, in fact, was exhausted by the effort of
reconquest and had neither moral nor material strength to spare from its
home needs.
The Lombards, if inferior in dignity to the Empire, played a far more
active part in this historic drama. They came originally from the
mysterious North, and after wandering about eastern Europe had at last
settled near the Danube, where part of them were converted to Arian
Christianity. Discontented with their habitation, and pressed by wilder
Barbarians behind them, they were glad to take advantage of the
defenceless condition of Italy. They knew how pleasant a land it was,
for many of them had served as mercenaries under Narses. The whole
nation, with a motley following from various tribes, amounted to about
two or three hundred thousand persons. They crossed the Alps in 568.
There were many points of difference between these invaders and the
Goths. The Lombards had had little intercourse with the Empire, and were
far less civilized than their predecessors, and far inferior in both
military and administrative capacity. Their leader, Alboin, cannot be
compared in any respect with Theodoric. Moreover, Theodoric came,
nominally at least, as lieutenant of the Emperor, and affected to deem
his sovereignty the continuation of Imperial rule; whereas the Lombards
regarded only the title of the sword and invariably fought the Empire as
an enemy.
The invaders met little active resistance; if they had had control of
the sea, they would readily have conquered the whole peninsula. They
overran the North and strips of territory down the centre within a few
years, and afterwards gradually spread little by little; but they never
conquered the South, the duchy of Rome, or the Adriatic coast. For the
greater part of the two hundred years during which the Lombard dominion
existed, the map of Italy bore the following aspect: the Empire retained
the little peninsula of Istria; the long strip of coast from the
lowlands of Venetia to Ancona, protected by its maritime cities,
Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Sinigaglia; and the duchy of Rome, which spread
along the Tyrrhene shore from Civita Vecchia to Gaeta; Naples and
Amalfi; the territories of the heel and toe; and also Sicily and
Sardinia. The boundaries were never fixed. Of the Lombard kingdom all
one need remember is that it was a loose confederation of three dozen
duchies; and that of these duchies, Spoleto, a little north of Rome, and
Benevento, a little northeast of Naples, were the most important, as
well as the most detached from the kingdom. In fact, these two were
independent duchies, and rarely if ever took commands from Pavia, the
king's capital, except upon compulsion.
At the time of the invasion the Lombards were barbarians; and they did
not make rapid progress in civilization. Fond of their native ways, of
hunting and brawling, they were loath to adopt the arts of peace, and
left most forms of craft and industry to the conquered Latins.
Nevertheless, it was impossible to avoid the consequences of daily
contact with a far more developed people, and their manners became more
civilized with each generation. The royal house affords an indication of
the change which was wrought during the two hundred years. Alboin, the
original invader (died 573), killed another Barbarian king, married his
daughter, and forced her to drink from a cup made of her father's skull.
The last Lombard king, Desiderius (died about 780), cultivated the
society of scholars, and his daughter learned by heart "the golden
maxims of philosophy and the gems of poetry." Each advance of the
Lombards in civilization was a gain to the Latins, who, especially in
the country where they worked on farms, were little better than serfs.
The two races drew together slowly. The conversion of the Lombards from
Arian to Catholic Christianity (600-700) diminished the distance between
them. Intermarriage must soon have begun; but not until the conquest by
the Franks does there seem to have been any real blending of the races.
The most conspicuous trait in the Lombard character was political
incompetence. It would have required but a little steadiness of purpose,
a little political foresight, a little spurt of energy, to conquer
Ravenna, Rome, Naples and the other cities held by the Byzantines, and
make Italy into one kingdom. Failure was due to the weakness of the
central government, which was unable to weld the petty dukedoms
together. This cutting up of Italy into many divisions left deep scars.
Each city, with the territory immediately around it, began to regard
itself as a separate state, with no sense of duty towards a common
country; each cultivated individuality and jealousy of its neighbours,
until these qualities, gradually growing during two hundred years,
presented insuperable difficulties to the formation of an Italian
national kingdom.
In spite of their political incompetence the Lombards left their mark on
Italy, especially on Lombardy and the regions occupied by the strong
duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. For centuries Lombard blood appears in
men of vigorous character; and Lombard names, softened to suit Italian
ears, linger on among the nobility. In fact, the aristocracy of Italy
from Milan to Naples was mainly Teutonic, and the principal element of
the Teutonic strain was Lombard.