The Lombards in Italy

Introduction

When the Lombards entered Italy in 568, they were one of the last of the major Germanic peoples to move into the territory of the old Western Roman Empire. They were also, by the standards of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, comparatively un-Romanized: a confederation of warriors, most of them still pagan or Arian Christian, with little administrative experience and no intention of preserving the Roman provincial framework in the form it had taken under Theodoric. The kingdom they created in the years that followed was, in the long run, the most completely Latinized of the post-Roman Germanic states, but the process of integration took nearly two centuries and was carried out in dialogue — and frequent conflict — with the papacy, the surviving Byzantine territories, and, eventually, the Carolingian Franks.

The Coming of the Lombards

The Lombards (Latin Langobardi, “long beards”) had been a small Germanic confederation living east of the Elbe in the first century AD; by the fourth century they had moved to the middle Danube, and by the late fifth century they had settled in Pannonia, the Roman province bounded by the Danube and the Alps, under the leadership of kings drawn from a dynasty sometimes called the Lethings. Their invasion of Italy in 568 was precipitated by the destruction of the Gepid kingdom, their neighbors in the middle Danube, by an alliance of Lombards and Avars; once the Avars had moved into the Gepid territory, the Lombards decided to move on to Italy.

The invasion was led by King Alboin, who crossed the Alps in 568 with a war-band of warriors and their families. The Lombards took control of the Po valley in the first few years of the invasion, taking the major cities of the north, including Milan, Pavia, and Verona, and establishing their capital at Pavia. By 572, Alboin had been murdered, and the Lombards had begun to expand southward, occupying Tuscany and Spoleto and threatening Rome itself. The eastern part of the peninsula, the coast of Calabria, the heel and toe of Italy, the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and the south-central duchy of Benevento, founded by Lombard forces who had been sent to reinforce Alboin’s army and who stayed to make their own kingdom, escaped the initial conquest. The papal territories in central Italy were reduced to a thin strip around Rome and an exarchate at Ravenna.

Arian and Pagan Kings

The early Lombard kings were Arian Christian, and the conversion of the Lombards to Catholic Christianity was a slow process, in contrast to the more rapid conversions of the Franks, the Visigoths, and the Anglo-Saxons. Queen Theodelinda, a Bavarian Catholic who married the Arian king Authari in 589 and his successor Agilulf in 590, was a major patron of the Catholic church; her foundations of Monza and other northern monasteries helped to give Lombard Italy a Catholic monastic culture, especially within the royal household. The Catholic rite, however, did not become the public religion of the Lombard kingdom until the reign of Aripert II, who was a Catholic when he took the throne in 700 and whose successors were uniformly Catholic. The long period of Arian ruling dynasties meant that the Lombards were slower than the Franks to draw on the resources of the Roman Catholic church, and the relationship between the Lombard kings and the papacy was, accordingly, more politically fraught.

The most famous example of this tension is the Lombard siege of Rome in 756, when the Arian king Aistulf captured the exarchate of Ravenna and threatened the city itself. The siege was lifted only when the pope, Stephen II, made the journey across the Alps to the Frankish court, consecrated the Frankish mayor of the palace Pippin the Short as king in 751, and persuaded him to intervene in Italy. The resulting Frankish campaigns against the Lombards, culminating in the campaigns of Charlemagne, would be the decisive external force in the history of the Lombard kingdom.

The Duchies and the Kingdom

The Lombard kingdom was, in its early form, a federation of dukes (duces) of whom the most important were the dukes of Spoleto, in central Italy, and the dukes of Benevento, in the south. The duchy of Benevento in particular was, for most of the eighth century, effectively an independent Lombard state; it absorbed the Lombard groups that had settled in southern Italy, expanded into Calabria and Apulia, and survived the Frankish conquest of the northern Lombard kingdom in 774, the dissolution of the northern kingdom by Charlemagne, and the establishment of the Frankish duchy of Spoleto. The Beneventan duchy would, in the ninth and tenth centuries, evolve into the principalities of Capua, Salerno, and Benevento, which would survive as independent or semi-independent political units until the Norman conquest of southern Italy in the eleventh century.

The northern Lombard kingdom, centered on Pavia, was the largest and most durable of the Lombard states. Its kings, drawn from a small number of dynasties, ruled with the assistance of a council of the leading warriors and the bishops of the major cities. The law of the kingdom was, from 643, codified by King Rothari in the Edictum Rothari, a substantial body of legal material that combined Lombard custom with Roman provisions; later Lombard kings added their own novellae, and the cumulative body of Lombard law was one of the most sophisticated legal systems of the early Middle Ages. The Lombards also developed a distinctive architecture, marked by carved stone reliefs, narrow windows, and a famous set of tempietti (small churches) at Cividale, Milan, and Benevento.

The Latinization of Lombard Italy

The Lombards did not, in the early period, speak Latin. Their language, sometimes called Langobardic, was a West Germanic tongue related to Old Saxon and Old English; it survives in a few runic inscriptions, a few glosses, and a small body of legal and ecclesiastical vocabulary that has entered modern Italian. The cultural pressure of a heavily Roman and Latin-speaking majority, however, was overwhelming, and by the eighth century the Lombard aristocracy was increasingly using Latin, both as a written language and as the language of daily life.

The church was the principal agent of the Latinization of Lombard Italy. The Catholic church in Lombard-controlled regions used Latin in the liturgy and in the chancery; the schools attached to the cathedrals and monasteries taught Latin grammar and the Latin classics; the Lombards gradually adopted the Roman Christian onomastic, marriage, and inheritance practices that the church required. The process was complete by the eighth century: the Lombard duchy of Benevento produced, in Paul the Deacon (c. 720–799), a historian whose History of the Lombards is a model of Latin prose and a major source for the early medieval history of Italy.

The Carolingian Conquest and the Papal States

The decisive moment in the history of the Lombard kingdom came in 754, when the pope Stephen II consecrated the Frankish king Pippin the Short and obtained his promise to recover the exarchate of Ravenna and other imperial territories from the Lombards. Pippin’s campaigns in 754 and 756 forced the Lombard king Aistulf to surrender Ravenna and the surrounding territory; the pope, rather than returning the territory to the Byzantine emperor, kept it as a donation to St. Peter, founding the Papal States. The new political entity would be the basis of the papacy’s temporal power for the next eleven centuries.

The Lombard kingdom survived this loss, but not for long. Charlemagne, crowned emperor in 800, took the Lombard kingdom in a campaign in 773–774, deposing King Desiderius and assuming the title of king of the Lombards. The Lombard kingdom became part of the Carolingian Empire, and the duchy of Spoleto and the duchy of Benevento were, for a time, reduced to Frankish vassalage. The political history of Lombard Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries is largely the history of the absorption of the Lombard nobility into the Frankish aristocracy, of the persistence of the Lombard duchy of Benevento in the south, and of the rise of the Papal States as a major political power in the peninsula. By the eleventh century, the Lombard language had been replaced by vernacular Italian, the Lombard aristocracy had been largely absorbed into the Norman and Frankish ruling class, and the kingdom of the Lombards survived only in legend and in the legal tradition. The Lombard legal tradition, however, continued to influence Italian law well into the modern period, and the kingdom of the Lombards was a defining moment in the formation of medieval Italy.

Southern Italy After the Carolingians

The Carolingian annexation of the northern Lombard kingdom in 774 did not, in fact, put an end to Lombard political power in Italy. The duchy of Benevento, which had been a Lombard principality since the late sixth century, was never fully incorporated into the Carolingian realm, and over the course of the ninth century the Beneventan dukes asserted their independence from both the Frankish emperor in the north and the Byzantine dukes of southern Italy. By the time of Duke Sicard of Benevento (r. 832–839), the Beneventan duchy had become the most important political unit in southern Italy, ruling a large part of the peninsula south of the duchy of Spoleto.

The Beneventan duchy fragmented in the early ninth century into the principalities of Benevento, Capua, and Salerno, each of which was governed by a prince drawn from the Beneventan dynasty. These principalities, plus the surviving Byzantine territories in the south (the categoria of Calabria, the cities of Apulia, the ports of Bari, Taranto, and Brindisi) and the Lombard duchy of Spoleto, formed the complex political landscape that the Norman conquerors would inherit in the eleventh century. The Norman kingdom of Sicily, founded by Robert Guiscard and Roger II, was the first state to unite southern Italy under a single government since the fall of the Roman empire; it was also, in a sense, the final political expression of the Lombard invasion of 568.

The Material and Visual Culture of Lombard Italy

The Lombards brought with them a distinctive material culture that combined Germanic animal ornament, late Roman provincial styles, and the Byzantine influences that the Lombards encountered in their southward expansion. The most distinctive surviving examples of Lombard visual art are the carved stone reliefs from Cividale del Friuli, where the monastery of Santa Maria in Valle contains a remarkable group of reliefs depicting the life of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. The smaller churches, or tempietti, of Lombard Italy — Santa Maria in Valle, the Tempietto del Clitunno at Campello sul Clitunno, the Baptistery of the Arians at Ravenna — are among the most striking examples of early medieval Italian architecture. The Lombard practice of ring-and-bracelet votive offerings, continued by the Beneventan dukes and carried on by the Normans, produced some of the most accomplished metalwork of the high Middle Ages.