EXARCHATE OF ITALY (OF RAVENNA). — Once Italy had been restored to the Empire after the fall of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, its government was entrusted to the Byzantine commander who had achieved the final victory, Narseto, with practically unlimited powers extending also to the sphere of civil administration. When Narseto was removed by the emperor Justin II, around 568, he was not given a successor with the same powers, and the Italian peninsula had only a civil governor, the praefectus praetorio Italiae, based in Ravenna; a supreme military command for the troops in Italy ceased to exist. But the evident need to reconstitute it soon became apparent, with powers taking precedence over those of the civil officials,
when the rapid spread of the Lombard invasion as far as southern Italy showed how necessary a single military direction of military operations was, capable of directing all the administrative resources of the peninsula toward the needs connected with the renewed state of war. Therefore, in 584 the emperor Maurice entrusted supreme military command in Italy to a high dignitary of his court, whom he sent to Ravenna with the title of exarch.
The exarch (exarchus, the Latin transliteration of the Greek term ἐξάρχος, “the one who is first”) likewise had a permanent seat in Ravenna, in the palatium that had successively been the residence of Honorius and the last emperors in the West, of Odoacer, and of Theodoric and his successors. Appointed by the sovereign, he was normally invested with the eminent dignity of patrician; he had military jurisdiction over the Italian peninsula and effective control over the civil administration. The exact designation of this dignitary is therefore “exarch of Italy” (“exarchate of Italy”), not “exarch of Ravenna” (“exarchate of Ravenna”), as is commonly said. The generally accepted opinion that the first exarch was named Decius is likewise unfounded, since in reality the series of exarchs of Italy begins with Smaragdus, while the office was attributed to a certain Decius only through an error. During the seventh century, after the disappearance of the praefectus praetorio, the exarch definitively combined the civil powers in his hands as well, and assumed the role of a veritable lieutenant of the emperor in the peninsula; at certain periods he even had the authority to confirm papal elections. In the first half of the eighth century, the resumption of Lombard conquests under Liutprand reduced the exarch to exercising his authority continuously and effectively only over those territories of the peninsula that remained in the Empire and were in immediate contact with his residence. It was only then that the designation “exarchatus Ravennae, Ravennantium” appeared; it is found for the first time in the biography of Stephen II (752–57) in the Liber Pontificalis. It derived not from an innovation introduced into official Byzantine terminology, but from usage that had become established in the circles of the Church of Rome, which used this designation for precisely those territories over which the exarch had exercised true direct jurisdiction during the preceding decades: eastern Emilia, between the right bank of the Panaro and the Adriatic, between the Po di Volano–Comacchio Marshes area and the Pentapolis area on the left bank of the Musone. These were the territories that, having already largely fallen under Liutprand’s power, were completely conquered in 750–51 by Aistulf, who on 4 July 751 dated one of his privileges from the palatium of Ravenna, after having taken the exarch Eutychius prisoner, the last in the series. Most of these territories were transferred to the temporal government of the Church of Rome as a result of the Carolingian donations, beginning with Pippin. The history of the exarchate, no longer of Italy but of Ravenna, no longer Byzantine from 750–51,
from 756–57 onward is a chapter in the history of the temporal dominions of the Church of Rome.
BIBLIOTHEK: Ch. Diehl, Einheit zur Administration byzantine dans l'exarchat de Ravenna (602-751), Paris 1888; L. M. Hammann, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der byzantinischen Verwaltung in Italie (549-750), Leipzig 1889; E. Caspar, Pippin und die Römische Kirche, Berlin 1914, pp. 123–30; K. Heldmann, Das Kaisertum Nazis der Grossen, Weimar 1928, pp. 124–31, 140, 202–204; M. Uhlitz, Die Restitution des Exarchates R. durch die Ottonen, in Mittel. d. Oesterr. Jutt. I. Geschichtsforsch., 50 (1936), pp. 1–34; R. Cessi, Le prime conseguenze della caduta dell'E. nel 751, in Atti del V Congresso interno di studi bizantini, Rome 1939, pp. 79–84; O. Bertolini, Roma di fronte a Bisanzio e ai Longobardi, Bologna [1941–42], V. indice; id., Le prime manifestazioni concrete del potere temporale dei papi sull'E. di R. (756-57), in Atti dell'Istituto veneto, Cl. di scienze mor. e lett., 106 (1947–48), pp. 280–300.