Lombards

LOMBARDS. - They are considered as belonging to the group of the Eastern Germans. The origin of the name (Langobardi, not Longobardi as is commonly used) is not clarified (from the long beard, as Paul the Deacon says, or from the long spears?); the name of Winnili, which Paul the Deacon likewise attributes to them, means only warriors. Of their language too there are very scanty data. Paul the Deacon, who at the end of the 8th century gathered in his Historia Langobardorum as much information as he could find, gives for prehistory a scarcely reliable account. Doubtful is their origin from Scandinavia, perhaps asserted on the model of the Ostrogoths; uncertain are the lands in which the people would have (outside of any chronological datum) subsequently settled. In reality the L. appear in history for the first time in the age of Augustus: in 5 A.D. Tiberius, after having subdued the Chauci, fought against the L. who dwelt on the lower Elbe. In the following years they appear in the coalition of peoples created by Marbod, then separate from it and in 17 fight with the Cherusci against him. Roman historiography shows that it esteemed the L. greatly for their valor and pride: Velleius Paterculus calls them: « ipsa ferocitate germanica ferociores »; Tacitus says: « Langobardos paucitas nobilitat; plurimis ac valentissimis nationibus cincti, non per obsequium, sed proeliis ac periclitando tuti sunt ». Apart from the report of a raid into Pannonia during the Marcomannic war (165 A.D.), the L. are no longer mentioned by Roman historical sources until the end of the 5th century, when they are found in Moravia far from their pristine seats.

Very probably, as had happened for other Germanic peoples, the L. had been caught in the vortex of the Hunnic irruption and forced to descend southward. When in 488 Odoacer overthrew the Kingdom of the Rugi, the L. descended to the Danube to occupy its seats; at the beginning of the 6th century they moved into the region comprised between the Danube and the Tisza, in contact with the important people of the Gepids. Now the L. entered into the game of imperial diplomacy, which used them to hold in check the Gepids and other barbarian peoples on the Danubian chessboard. The king of the L. Watke (c. 520-30) was in relations with the royal houses of various barbarian peoples, thus with the Merovingians. In 546 Justinian invited the new king Audoin to transport his people into imperial territory, on the right bank of the Danube, in Pannonia, eastern Noricum, Savia, where the L. came into harsher relations with the Gepids. For some years there was an understanding between the Lombard kings and the government of Constantinople: the latter sent subsidies and reinforcements to fight the Gepids; in exchange the L. sent reinforcements to Narses in Italy for the war against the Ostrogoths. Later the Gepids sought an understanding with the Emperor, and the L. drew closer to the Franks; the young king Alboin married Chlothsind, daughter of Chlothar I.

The situation on the Danube changed when, around 560, the Avars clashed with the Gepid mass. Now the L. found natural allies in the barbarians come from the East against the Gepids, who were crushed. Their king Cunimund fell by the hand of the king of the L. himself, Alboin, who took the royal family prisoner and forced the princess Rosamund to become his wife. The L., however, found themselves at the mercy of the Avars, and to escape such a dangerous situation Alboin decided to move his people into the Po plain, behind the shelter of the Alps.

The departure of the L. from Pannonia began on 2 April 568, according to the chronological record of Secundus of Trent used by Paul the Deacon in his Historia Langobardorum. The L. dragged along with them various other smaller ethnic groups, either conquered or vassal (Gepids, Sarmatians, Noricans, Suebi); even some tribes of Saxons, attracted by the hope of booty, came to reinforce Alboin's peoples. These barbarians, whose number is unknown, descended without meeting opposition to Cividale del Friuli (Forum Iulii), where however they appeared only on 21 March 569. The imperial garrisons, too scanty and scattered, offered, it seems, no resistance and shut themselves up in the castles and walled cities, leaving the invaders free to advance westward along the Via Postumia. A sad halo of terror immediately surrounded the name of the L. in Italy because of their massacres and destructions; the populations began to flee with their bishops toward the imperial centers. The L., during their Danubian sojourn, had accepted an Arian type of Christianity; many were still bound to old polytheistic cults, and anti-Catholic religious fanaticism influenced them considerably. On 3 September 569 Alboin occupied Milan, still desolate after the sackings of 539; afterward the whole of Liguria was occupied. Here and there some small islands of Byzantine domination remained, castles and fortified towns; Ticinum also put up good resistance and was occupied only in 572, although one should not think that Alboin remained three years at the siege. The imperial governors, Narses and then Longinus, were unable to create a valid barrier on the line of the Po, nor even on the Apennines; thus already in 569, it seems, bands of L. crossed the Po and began the devastations in Tuscia. The imperial insufficiency in remedying the invasion favored the formation of the legend that, to take revenge on the imperial court, Narses had invited Alboin to descend into the peninsula.

The intoxication of conquest and the greed of plundering brought about a rapid disintegration of this people whom the Romans had called compact and disciplined. The military leaders who led the various columns formed of fare, that is, of gentilicial groups, increased in prestige and authority in the eyes of their followers the more successful their enterprise proved. The fare settled without any order or criterion, wherever and however it was possible to satisfy their greed and violence. It is difficult, for example, to attribute the settlement of Gisulf's fare in Friuli to a political act of King Alboin rather than to a desire for conquest on the part of this Gisulf. The dispersion of the fare, while it benefited the various military leaders, harmed the authority of the King; thus the authority of the L. over the dependent ethnic elements also suffered a serious blow. To this new situation is due the crisis that struck the L. in 572: the Gepids who had gathered around Verona, captained by a certain Elmichi, rebelled against the L., rallying to their queen Rosamund. Elmichi and Rosamund killed Alboin and, having married, seized the throne. The L. reacted against the attempt of the Gepids and proclaimed as king one of their leaders, Cleph, son of Beleos, who however was killed by one of his clients after little more than a year. Elmichi and Rosamund with all their partisans, Gepids and L., separated from the Lombard mass and went to Ravenna, paying homage to the Emperor. The subsequent disappearance of Alboin and of Cleph was disastrous for the Lombard monarchical institution: Cleph's son, Authari, could not, because of his young age, have himself recognized as king. The L., preoccupied with the need to extend their occupation, in Tuscia, in the Tiber valley, and then further down still in the Beneventan Apennines, did not concern themselves with what was happening at Ticinum. The Lombard leaders in the cities they conquered one after another replaced the Byzantine dukes, assumed their title, and appropriated their functions and rights. Thus there now appeared Lombard dukes in the Italian cities: Paul the Deacon states that after the death of Cleph there were 35 dukes in Italy; but it is probable that the number was not stable, nor did all the cities have a duke.

At a certain point, the Lombard dukes had to think about the grave problem of settlement; to abandon Italy either for other regions or to return to Pannonia was not to be thought of. The poverty of the Italian region explains how even in 569 bands of barbarians dared to cross the western Alps to push on to plunder in the Rhone valley. They met mediocre resistance, so that raids into Burgundy and Provence became constant for some years: in 575 the L. threatened Marseilles itself.

But now the Merovingian king of Burgundy, Guntram, after driving them back, in order to protect himself in turn crossed the Alps and permanently occupied the valleys of the Dora Riparia (Susa) and of the Dora Baltea (Aosta). Shut up therefore in the peninsula, the L., who were still a people of shepherds - it seems that their wealth consisted in great herds of horses and pigs - or who at most in Pannonia had experienced a rudimentary agriculture, were forced to begin a new economic phase. It is to this rural settlement that Paul the Deacon refers with the much-discussed and sibylline phrases: «Hic Cleph multos Romanorum viros potentes, alios gladio extruxit, alios ab Italia exturbavit»; of the period in which the L. were under the dukes, he says: «His diebus multi nobilium Romanorum ob cupiditatem interfecti sunt. Reliqui vero per hospites divisi, ut terciam partem suarum frugum Langobardis persolverent, tributarii efficiuntur». And for the reign of Authari he repeats «Populi tamen aggravati per Langobardos hospites partiuntur». There would therefore have been the destruction, in considerable quantity, of the great Roman landowners; the owners, whether fled or killed, would have been replaced in their possessions by Lombard nobles; elsewhere barbarians would have installed themselves in the country houses and would have forced the peasants to place at their disposal, according to Roman military law, a third of the houses and of the products of the soil.

However, there is no evidence in the documents for this organization of the terciae among the Lombards, and it is doubtful that Paul the Deacon had any. It must be held that he applied to the Lombards what he read in the writers of the 6th century regarding the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Vandals, etc. Although the settlement brought the barbarian farae into Italian lands in their gentilician unity, the later Lombard documentation shows that there were no collective assignments, but individual ones: the landowners hold full right over the cultivated land. Connected to the problem of the lands is the problem of relations with the Roman citizens, a new one for the barbarians. Historians and jurists have long debated whether the Roman citizens were respected in their freedom or were reduced to the inferior condition of aldi. German historians have usually followed the latter conception, in contrast to the Italian tendency, defended with precision and acuteness by Schupfer. Certainly, the Lombards had to pass gradually, in their dealings with the Italians, to a regime of tolerance, but they did not go so far as to aggregate the Romans into their citizenship, which was based on a right of birth and on military capacity. Authari, like Alboin, like Rothari and like Liutprand, is rex gentis Langobardorum; the Romans are juridically outside it, but not politically: they are within the regnum Langobardorum. The Italians find themselves with personal freedom, to attend to their affairs, to buy, sell, and make wills, and with religious freedom. The freedom of subjects, not of equals. But as the Lombards, both in the cities and in the countryside, felt the need, in order to settle themselves, of the technical skills of the Italians, the attitude of the victors gradually changed, and although the principle of ethnic differentiation remained intact, relations between the two populations took on a character of mutual consideration. The later wars of conquest, from Rothari to Liutprand to Aistulf, no longer had to weigh upon the populations.

The Lombard invasion had not overly troubled the government of Constantinople: precisely in 569 the Avars resumed hostilities across the Danube and suspended them only after the Khagan Bayan bought peace with an annual tribute. Thus in Constantinople the irruption of the Lombards into Italy seemed only an episode in the thorny problem of relations with the Danubian barbarians. But the settlement was regarded otherwise. Lacking military means for energetic action, the governors of Ravenna resorted to the work of seduction upon the chiefs. The split between Lombards and Gepids in 572 was perhaps already a consequence of Byzantine policy; after the death of Cleph, corruption of the dukes was resumed: the dukes, isolated and in conflict among themselves, could more easily be greedy for gold than for glory.

Some military attempts were made, but without result: around 575 Baduarius, son-in-law of Justin II, was defeated and killed. The penetration into central Italy made the requests for help from the Italian cities more pressing; in 579, when Pelagius II succeeded Pope Benedict, Rome was completely blockaded. The emperor Maurice, in order to resolve the Lombard problem, had recourse to the Frankish kings, who looked with displeasure upon the Lombards settling on their borders. King Childebert undertook to intervene in Italy against the barbarians, in the pay of the Empire; in 584 he crossed the Alps and advanced into Liguria, but the dukes of the most exposed cities shut themselves up in the cities and offered the Frankish king tribute and submission. Childebert preferred to accept the Lombard proposals and withdrew without fighting, provoking the protests of the Emperor, who felt defrauded.

Paul the Deacon records under 584 the restoration of the Lombard monarchy in favor of Authari, son of Cleph, but it is not known how this came about; difficult to accept is Paul the Deacon's version that the dukes spontaneously, communi consilio, acclaimed Authari king and gave half of their possessions to create a royal patrimony for him. It is more probable that this was an act of force by the young Authari, backed by some interested duke: other dukes must have opposed it, such as that Droctulf who abandoned the Lombards and went over to the imperial forces and long resisted the King at Brescello. The interventions of King Childebert in Italy in agreement with the imperial government were repeated in 585, then in 588 and in 590. Authari sought on several occasions to come to an agreement with the Frankish king, offering to marry his sister Clotsuinda; rejected, he sought an understanding with the duke of Bavaria, Garibald, who gave him his daughter Theodelinda in marriage (589).

It is not to the struggle with the Franks and the imperial forces that the political crisis which disturbed the Lombards in 590 is due, but to the internal situation: Authari died suddenly in 590, and Paul the Deacon speaks of poison; the duke of Turin, Agilulf, seized the throne, married Theodelinda, and in this way was recognized by some dukes. Others, however, continued the struggle. Agilulf, in order to resist them, sought to come to an agreement with the Frankish kings and with the Khagan of the Avars. The imperial exarchs of Ravenna, left alone to fight, were concerned with maintaining communications with Rome across the Apennines.

In 598 there was finally a one-year truce between King Agilulf and the exarch of Ravenna; renewed in 600 and again, after a resumption of arms, in 604, then repeated year by year. Since the Empire did not wish and could not recognize the existence of the Lombard State, there could be no true peace, but both sides were convinced that the war effort was by then useless: thus the system of truces brought great relief, after so many years of war, to the Italian populations.

Meanwhile the Lombards, precisely because they were barbarians and almost primitive, had rapidly come under the influence of the Italian Catholic environment. It seems that Authari was concerned about the numerous conversions of the Lombards to Catholicism, as dangerous for national integrity. But under Agilulf the queen Theodelinda, a Catholic, created at court an important center of Latin Catholic propaganda. Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) had great influence in this missionary work among the Lombards. If by the duty of his episcopal office he had to collaborate with the imperial civil and military officials in the defense of Rome against the invaders, on the other hand he understood the necessity of putting an end to a sterile war in order to facilitate the influx of the barbarians to the Catholic faith. Gregory had correspondence with queen Theodelinda and found her favorable to his plans of conciliation between Agilulf and the imperial government. It is not certain that Agilulf abandoned Arianism, but his son by Theodelinda, Adaloald, was baptized in the Catholic faith on 7 April 603 in the basilica of St. John in Monza, built by the queen. The conversion of the Lombards, however, suffered setbacks. In the principal cities there were Arian bishops, and with them those Lombards who wished to defend the national tradition had to come to an agreement. Catholicization meant the triumph of Latin and of the popular vernacular, the disappearance of the national language and character. The struggle between Arianism and Catholicism appears to color the civil struggles that throughout the 7th century characterize the succession of kings on the Lombard throne. Against the Catholic Adaloald, who succeeded his father Agilulf in 616, certain dukes rebelled for unknown reasons, led by the duke of Turin, Arioald, who had married Gundeberga, sister of Adaloald. In 636 the duke of Brescia, Rothari, an Arian, was proclaimed king, but he married the Catholic widow of his predecessor. Paul the Deacon praises Rothari's political wisdom, but laments his siding with heresy. Perhaps connected with this religious attitude of his is, on the one hand, the resumption of the struggle with the Empire for the complete conquest of Liguria as far as the sea, and on the other the publication of the Edict (22 Nov. 643), a written systematization of Lombard customary law. Certainly the Edict aimed at the defense of the national tradition, but on the other hand it renewed and corrected custom and no longer represented Lombard society in its original integrity, but only as the legislator saw it after the transformation that had taken place in the seventy-five years of settlement in Italy, under the influence of an environment dominated by Roman law.

In the 7th century the king is the supreme head of the Lombard people

Lombard; he has absolute legislative powers, he is the supreme military leader. Originally the office was elective, but now the popular assembly can no longer meet, because of the dispersion across the peninsula; it is only a formal act, which a few fideles - dukes or gastalds - carry out, as was the custom, by raising the king upon their shields. Attempts to establish a dynasty are continuous, but they clash not against the will of the assembly, but against the overbearingness of some duke. Autari, following the custom of the Ostrogothic kings, assumed the title of Flavius, as if he wished to link himself ideally with the Constantinian dynasty, and a certain goldsmith uses symbolic ornaments of the Roman type for the Lombard kings. In the age of Rothari, the king has a capital such as his predecessors did not yet have: it is Ticinum (Pavia), chosen not for Gothic traditions, but for its strategic position; there is the king's palatium, court and administration, and there the king keeps his counsellors (gasindi) and his officials.

It is not easy to specify what the provincial administration of the Lombard state was. On descending into Italy the barbarians found there a theoretically perfect provincial organization: the provinciae, within these the civitates, and the pagi. The Lombards let it fall of its own accord. They established dukes and gastalds in many centres, great or small, according to the accidents of the conquest. In general those who came to be called duces and also iudices settled in the principal cities, but not absolutely. As military leaders, the dukes inherited the financial, judicial and administrative duties of the Byzantine officials. Special officials were the gastalds, assigned to the government of the royal patrimony with ample powers of government also over the population of the district. The king, relying on them, tended to replace the dukes with gastalds, whether autonomous or independent.

Lombard society comprised free men and unfree men, as did Roman society, and therefore the two societies were bound easily to tend to merge. Among the unfree were included the serfs of the land (rusticani), of the household

(ministeriales), and the aldi, semi-free, that is personally free, but bound to the land like the Roman coloni. Above them were the free men or arimanni (exercitales); originally equal through the equal right to arms, in the 7th century differing landed wealth distinguished them into various grades: from the propertyless one rose to the nobiles, great personages in authority and wealth.

The moral and economic transformation had by now induced the Lombards to abandon the primitive barbarism of the blood feud (faida), obligatory down to the seventh generation, in order to accede to simple pecuniary composition proportional to the valuation of the person killed («sicut adpraeiatus fuerit, id est vuergeld»). The death penalty remained restricted to a few cases: an attempt on the king's life, desertion, treason. Thefts and the flight of slaves had severe penalties; the regulation for rural offences was minute, revealing the importance for the Lombards of livestock and of crops. As in criminal law the guidrigildo distinguishes the free man from the slave, so in civil law, whoever is in the fullness of civil rights is distinguished by the «mundio» from whoever is subordinate to others. Whoever holds the mundio has the legal representation of whoever is under the mundio. In Lombard law the woman is perpetually a minor: from the mundio of the father she passes to that of the brother, of the husband, and, in the absence of relatives, of the king. The presence of the mundoaldo is required for the drawing up of the nuptial instrument (fabula) necessary for the stipulation of marriage: in it are established the «meta» (the gift of the bridegroom to the bride's family) and the «faderfio» (the gift of the family to the bride); once the marriage is consummated, the bridegroom makes a donation to the consort (morgengabe, morning gift). The right of donation and of alienation of one's own goods was exercised with a reservation for the children; the act required symbolic ceremonies (gnirethings = guarantee). Inheritance too was conditional: first of all there were the legitimate or illegitimate children; the woman participated in the absence of males; kinship was limited to the seventh degree. Slaves could be manumitted and attain full civil rights: manumission was of various types and value. In judicial procedure, the plaintiff summoned the accused to trial by sending him the «wadia», a symbolic object that confirmed the regularity of the proceeding. The proofs of accusation were of two types: the oath made by means of the sacramentales, from three to twelve (turatores), and the duel, in the graver cases, between the parties. The Edict of Rothari seems to have had a territorial character, but the position that the Roman population had in it is still a matter of discussion.

The Lombard monarchy never succeeded in establishing a solid organization to eliminate the danger of provincial particularist tendencies, nor in creating for itself a wholly own military force capable of confining the dukes within a limited sphere of action and of making them disciplined executors of the central authority. In order to live in tranquillity, the kings had instead to resign themselves to allowing the dukes to seek to assert a precise autonomy in agreement with the local propertied class.

However scanty in information, the account of Paul the Deacon attests this dangerous prolongation of struggles between kings and dukes. In 653 Rodoald, son of Rothari, was succeeded by Aripert, son of the Bavarian Gundoald, brother of Queen Theodelinda. But at his death (661), the first-born Perctarit was opposed by his younger brother, Godepert; in the conflict the duke of Benevento, Grimoald, intervened; Godepert fell slain, Perctarit saved himself among the Avars, but in 671, on the death of Grimoald, he returned to the throne and secured the succession for his son Cunincpert, making him his colleague. But soon Cunincpert found himself faced with the rebellion of Alahis, duke of Brescia, and of the Lombard element of Austria. Cunincpert emerged victorious, but then had to fight against another rival, the duke of Friuli, Ansfrid. At his death (700), his son Liutpert reigned under the guardianship of the noble Ansprand: the duke of Turin, however, Ragimpert, rebelled, seized the throne and, dying, left it to his son Aripert. He in turn found himself faced with a coalition of dukes and, if he succeeded in eliminating Liutpert, he then had to yield before Ansprand, who seized power and left it almost immediately to his son Liutprand (712).

These persistent struggles were by now no longer linked to the religious question, because the Lombards, under Perctarit and under Cunincpert, had definitively passed over to Catholicism, and even in the Benevento area the last traces of idolatry had been destroyed by the preaching of Bishop Barbatus: in them there was only the proof of the incapacity of the Lombard noble element to exploit the favourable general political situation: after the war of Rothari, between the Kingdom and the Empire a true treaty of peace had come about, one does not know precisely when, possible now that the Catholic Lombards gave hope of becoming clients of the Empire; relations with the Franks too had become regularized.

The Kingdom of Liutprand (v.), a very long reign (712-44), although surrounded by a certain aura of greatness, nevertheless demonstrates the serious defects of the Lombard state constitution and the impossibility of remedying them. In an initial phase of his reign (c. 712-25) Liutprand does not appear to have had any concern other than to organize the State with the greatest possible centralization, replacing dukes with gastalds wherever possible. In his laws Liutprand emphasized the Catholic character, devoted to the Church of Rome; to demonstrate his deference to the Pope, he reconfirmed the restitution of the ecclesiastical patrimony of the Cottian Alps already decided by Aripert II. Likewise he declared himself respectful of the commitments undertaken with the imperial government; thus, moreover, his predecessors appear to have behaved even when the violent policy of Justinian II produced grave disturbances in the Exarchate of Ravenna. Even when Faroald II, duke of Spoleto, with a coup de main against Classe seemed to hint at the old program of conquest, the King ordered him to withdraw.

But Faroald had opened the question of the division of the peninsula between the Kingdom and the Empire. When the question of iconoclasm stirred up popular agitation in the Byzantine provinces and Pope Gregory II seemed to support resistance to the decrees of Emperor Leo III, the king of the Lombards, on the pretext of protecting the Pope and the Church, intervened in the disorder of the imperial zone and occupied various cities. The ease of this expansion filled the Roman Curia with fear, conscious as it was of the danger to itself of a possible elimination of Byzantine domination from Italy. Gregory II inaugurated the policy of halting the anti-imperial movement and remaining faithful, or at least loyal, toward Constantinople, forbidding the Lombard monarchy any attempt to penetrate into the Byzantine domains. King Liutprand now found himself faced with two oppositions: the papal-Roman autonomism masked as fidelity to the Empire, and the autonomism of the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento; the two movements, moreover, feeling equally threatened by the unifying aspirations of the monarchy of Pavia, were prepared to join forces. Gregory III and then Zachary remained faithful to this policy: on several occasions Liutprand attacked the Duchy of Rome and the Exarchate of Ravenna, but the papacy had assumed the protection of imperial rights and repeatedly the Popes intervened with the King to force him to withdraw. Liutprand's policy was continued after his death (744) by King Ratchis; in 749 the latter invaded the Roman Duchy, but Pope Zachary induced him to abandon the struggle. The consequence was a grave dissension among the Lombard leaders; Ratchis abdicated and retired to Montecassino; he was succeeded by his brother Aistulf (v.), leader of the more vigorous tendency among the Lombards; and indeed in 751 he occupied Ravenna and the Exarchate with the determination to withdraw no more, then moved against the Duchy of Rome. The Byzantine Empire, occupied in a bitter struggle with the caliphate, was certainly not in a position to confront the Lombard advance.

But the papacy now replaced the Empire in this policy of resistance to Lombard unitarianism. Hence the negotiations of Stephen II with the king of the Franks Pepin the Short (754) and the agreement whereby the Franks assumed, by the Treaties of Ponthion and Quierzy, the defense of the papacy. Pepin's two descents into Italy in 754 and 756 forced not only the King of the Lombards to withdraw from all the imperial domains, but also to acknowledge himself as subordinate to the King of the Franks, resuming the old obligations of dependence of Agilulf. The Lombard monarchy thus ceased to be independent and passed under the control of the Carolingian monarchy, which on the other hand asserted a superiority over Rome with the title of patrician; the Empire henceforth only theoretically retained its rights over the Exarchate and over Rome. Astolf and his successor Desiderius (v.) strove to give their relations with the Frankish monarchy a character of cordial friendship, and at a certain moment Desiderius flattered himself that he had succeeded when he gave one of his own daughters in marriage to Charlemagne, son of Pepin, and believed himself capable of resuming the policy of expansion in central Italy. But now, facing Desiderius, there was no longer the Byzantine Empire, but the Roman Curia. Strong in Frankish support and in the donation of Quierzy, the papacy stood as a factor of capital importance in Italian politics. Already in the very election of King Desiderius, Pope Stephen II had intervened as arbiter in Lombard disputes. Paul I in his turn had sought to wrest from the King of the Lombards the subjection of the two dukes of Spoleto and Benevento. The marriage between Charlemagne, king of the Franks, and the daughter of King Desiderius provoked the harshest protests from Stephen III. The correspondence of the popes with the Frankish court, from this moment at least, acquired a violent tone not only against King Desiderius but also against the entire Lombard people, which is called "a perfidious and stinking people that is not to be counted among the nations, but from which the race of lepers derives."

Desiderius, overestimating the security of his ties with the Frankish court, attempted in 771 to impose himself on Stephen III with the support of a Roman faction. It was a great error, because the Frankish court, if it did not intend to support the popes against the Lombards to the very end, could not even permit King Desiderius to impose his authority in Rome. In the same year 771 Charlemagne repudiated his Lombard bride, while the widow of his brother Carloman took refuge with Desiderius. The rupture with Charlemagne drove Desiderius to act energetically in the Exarchate and in the Duchy of Rome in order to confront the Frankish king with a fait accompli. His plan, however, failed: in 772 he did not dare to insist when the new pope Adrian I threatened him with excommunication; instead the Pope urged King Charlemagne to intervene in his defense. The Frankish expedition took place already in the summer of 773; the Lombard nation crumbled in the face of danger; the dukes took no interest in the common fate. Desiderius, left alone with his own forces to resist, shut himself up in Ticino, his son Adelchi in Verona. In May 774 King Desiderius capitulated and surrendered himself with his consort Ansa to the Frankish king, who in the first days of June assumed the title of king of the Lombards. Two years later some Lombard dukes attempted an insurrection against the foreign King, but the attempt failed and led to the replacement of the Lombard dukes by Frankish counts in the government of the Italian cities. The Lombard population was respected and retained possessions and offices until it slowly disappeared into the reborn Italian people.

Francesco Cognasso