Who Were the Lombards?

Short answer

The Lombards (Latin Langobardi, “long beards”) were a Germanic people who had migrated from Scandinavia to the middle Danube by the first century AD, settled in Pannonia in the fifth century, and invaded Italy in 568 under King Alboin. They founded a kingdom centered on Pavia that lasted until 774, when Charlemagne deposed the last Lombard king. The duchy of Benevento, in southern Italy, survived as a Lombard principality until absorbed by the Norman kingdom in the eleventh century. The Lombards brought with them a distinctive language, law, and material culture that was eventually absorbed into the Latin Christian world of medieval Italy.

Origins and Migration

The earliest historical references to the Lombards place them in the lower Elbe region of northern Germany, where they appear in Roman sources of the first century AD. The name Langobardi, “long beards,” appears to refer to a distinctive male hairstyle that the Romans found noteworthy. By the first century AD, the Lombards were part of the Suevic confederation; by the second century they had moved to the middle Elbe; by the late fourth century they had moved to the middle Danube, in the area that would later be known as Pannonia.

The Lombard migration was a long, slow process, not a single event. The Origo Gentis Langobardorum, a seventh-century account of the early history of the people, traces their wanderings through Scandinavia, central Europe, and the Balkans before their settlement in Pannonia. The story may be partly legendary, but it preserves the memory of a long and gradual process of migration that brought the Lombards to the borders of the Roman and Byzantine empires.

The Avar Empire and the Move to Italy

The Lombards settled in Pannonia in the late fifth century, but they were not the only people in the region. In the 560s, the Avars, a confederation of central Asian nomads, moved into the Pannonian basin and subjugated the Lombards and other Slavic peoples. The Lombard king Audoin paid tribute to the Avar khagan; the Avars in turn used the Lombards as vassals in their raids on the Byzantine Balkans.

The trigger for the Lombard invasion of Italy was the destruction of the Gepid kingdom in 567 by an alliance of Lombards and Avars. Once the Gepids were removed, the Avars turned on the Lombards, demanding tribute and a quota of warriors. The Lombard king Alboin, who had helped defeat the Gepids, decided to move his people to Italy, where the Ostrogothic kingdom had been destroyed by the Byzantine reconquest and where the Byzantine presence was weak. The migration, in 568, was the largest single Lombard movement; it took the Lombards, with their families and their goods, from the middle Danube across the Alps into northern Italy.

The Lombard Kingdom in Italy

The Lombards moved quickly, taking the major cities of the Po valley, including Milan, Pavia, and Verona, in the first year of the invasion. By 572, Alboin had been murdered and the Lombards had begun to expand southward, occupying Tuscany and Spoleto and threatening Rome. The eastern part of the peninsula, the coast of Calabria, the heel and toe of Italy, the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and the southern duchy of Benevento, founded by Lombard forces who had been sent to reinforce Alboin’s army, escaped the initial conquest.

The Lombard kingdom was, in its early form, a federation of duchies of which the duchy of Spoleto, in central Italy, and the duchy of Benevento, in the south, were the most important. The northern kingdom, centered on Pavia, was the largest and most durable; the duchy of Benevento became, in the late eighth and ninth centuries, an effectively independent principality that would survive the Frankish conquest of the northern kingdom in 774.

Lombard Law and Society

The Lombard kingdom produced a substantial body of legal material. The Edict of King Rothari (643), the first systematic Lombard law code, combined Lombard custom with Roman provisions; subsequent 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 brought a distinctive language, Langobardic, that 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 Lombard society was, in its early form, an aristocratic and military one. The king ruled with the assistance of a council of warriors and the bishops of the major cities; the dukes (duces) and the gasindi (royal retainers) were the principal political officers. The Lombard church was, at first, Arian; the conversion of the Lombards to Catholic Christianity, completed in the early eighth century under King Aripert II, brought the Lombards into the religious mainstream of Latin Christendom. The Lombard nobility was gradually absorbed into the Frankish, Byzantine, and Norman aristocratic orders over the course of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries.

The End of the Lombard Kingdom

The Lombard kingdom came to an end in 774, when Charlemagne, the Frankish king, took the Lombard capital of Pavia and deposed King Desiderius. The campaign was the result of a complex set of political, religious, and personal pressures: the relationship between Charlemagne and the pope, the alliance of the pope with the Lombards, the marriage of Charlemagne to a Lombard princess, and the political manoeuvering of the Italian nobility. The conquest of the Lombard kingdom was one of the central events of the Carolingian period, and the political fragmentation of the Frankish empire after 843 would, in a sense, restore the Lombard principality of Benevento to a new prominence in southern Italy.

The Lombard duchy of Benevento survived as a Lombard principality for nearly three centuries after 774. The 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 were the last political heirs of the Lombard invasion of 568. They were absorbed, in the eleventh century, into the Norman kingdom of Sicily, which united the Lombard, Norman, Byzantine, and Islamic political traditions of southern Italy into a single state.