LONGOBARDI (Lombards). — They are considered as belonging to the group of the Eastern Germans. The origin of the name (Langobardi, not Longobardi as commonly used) is not clarified (from the long beard, as Paul the Deacon says, or from the long spears?); the name of Winnili which he also attributes to them means only warriors. Very little is also known about their language. Paul the Deacon, who at the end of the 8th century collected in his *Historia Langobardorum* as much information as he could find, gives a scarcely reliable account of their prehistory. Their provenance from Scandinavia is doubtful, perhaps asserted on the model of the Ostrogoths; uncertain are the lands in which the people would have successively settled (outside any chronological data). In reality, the Lombards first appear in history in the age of Augustus: in 5 A.D., Tiberius, after having subdued the Chauc, fought against the Lombards who inhabited the lower Elba. In the following years they appear in the coalition of peoples created by Marbod, then they separate from it and in 17 A.D. they fight with the Cherusci against him. Roman historiography shows great appreciation for the Lombards for their courage and pride: Velleius Paterculus says of 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 Lombards are no longer mentioned by Roman historical sources until the end of the 5th century, when they are found in Moravia far from their original seats.
Very probably, as had happened to other Germanic peoples, the Lombards had been caught up in the vortex of the Hunnic irruption and forced to move southward. When in 488 Odoacer overthrew the Rugian kingdom, the Lombards descended upon the Danube to occupy its lands; at the beginning of the 6th century they moved into the region between the Danube and the Tisza, in contact with the important people of the Gepids. Now the Lombards entered into the game of imperial diplomacy, which used them as servants to keep the Gepids and other barbarian peoples of the Danubian chessboard in check. The king of the Lombards, Wacho (c. 520–30), was in relations with the royal houses of various barbarian peoples, including 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, Noricum orientale, Savia, where the Lombards came into sharper conflict with the Gepids. For some years there was an understanding between the Lombard kings and the government of Constantinople: this sent subsidies and reinforcements to fight the Gepids, in exchange for which the Lombards sent reinforcements to Narses in Italy for the war against the Ostrogoths. Later the Gepids sought an understanding with the Emperor and the Lombards drew closer to the Franks; the young king Alboin married Clotsuinda, daughter of Clotaire I.
The situation on the Danube changed when around 560 the Avars clashed with the mass of the Gepids. Now the Lombards found natural allies in the barbarians who had come from the East against the Gepids, who were crushed. Their king Cunimund fell by the hand of the same king of the Lombards, Alboin, who took the royal family prisoner and forced the princess Rosamund to become his wife. The Lombards, however, found themselves at the mercy of the Avars and to escape this dangerous situation Alboin decided to transport his people into the Po Valley, behind the shelter of the Alps.
The departure of the Lombards 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 Lombards dragged along various other minor ethnic groups, either defeated or vassals (Gepids, Sarmatians, Noricans, Suebi); even some tribes of Saxons attracted by the hope of booty came to reinforce the people of Alboin. These barbarians, whose number is unknown, advanced without finding opposition to Cividale del Friuli (Forum Iulii), where they only appeared on 21 March 569. The imperial garrisons, too few and scattered, apparently did not resist and shut themselves up in castles and walled cities, leaving the invaders free to advance westward along the Via Postumia. A sad aura of terror immediately surrounded the name of the Lombards in Italy because of their massacres and destructions; the populations began to flee with their bishops toward the imperial centers. During their sojourn on the Danube the Lombards had adopted a form of Arian Christianity; many were still tied to old polytheistic cults and their anti-Catholic religious fanaticism influenced them considerably. On 3 September 569 Alboin occupied Milan, still desolate after the sack of 539; subsequently all of Liguria was occupied. Here and there some isolated strongholds of Byzantine domination remained, castles and fortified towns; Pavia also put up good resistance and was only occupied in 572, although it is not to be thought that Alboin remained besieging it for three years. The imperial governors, Narses and then Longinus, were unable to create an effective barrier on the line of the Po, nor on the Apennines; thus already in 569, it seems, bands of Lombards crossed the Po and began devastations in Tuscany. The imperial failure to stem the invasion fostered the legend that, to avenge himself on the imperial court, Narses had invited Alboin to descend into the peninsula.
The frenzy of conquest and the greed of plunder brought about a rapid disintegration of this people, whom the Romans had described as compact and disciplined. The military leaders who commanded the various colonies formed by *fare*, i.e., by gentilicial groups, increased in prestige and authority in the eyes of their followers the more successful their enterprises proved. The *fare* settled without any order or plan, wherever and however it was possible to satisfy their cupidities and violence. It is difficult, for example, to attribute the intolerance of the *fare* of Sigulf in Friuli to a political act of King Alboin rather than to a lust for conquest on the part of this Sigulf. The dispersion of the *fare*, while it benefited the various military leaders, worked to the detriment of the authority of the King; thus even the authority of the King over the dependent ethnic elements suffered a severe blow. It was this new situation that led to the crisis which in 572 struck the Lombards: the Gepids who had gathered around Verona, led by a certain Almechis, rebelled against the King, rallying around their queen Rosamund. Almechis and Rosamund killed Alboin and, moving on, seized the throne. The Lombards reacted against the attempt of the Gepids and proclaimed king one of their leaders, Cleph, son of Beleos, who, however, was killed by one of his retainers after little more than a year. Almechis and Rosamund, with all their partisans, Gepids and Lombards, separated from the main Lombard body and made their way to Ravenna, paying homage to the Emperor.
The subsequent disappearance of Alboin and Cleph was disastrous for the Lombard monarchical institution: Cleph’s son, Authari, could not, on account of his youth, be recognized as king. The Lombards, concerned with the necessity of extending their occupation into Tuscany, in the valley of the Tiber, and then further south into the Beneventan Apennines, took little heed of what was happening in Ticinum. The Lombard leaders in the cities they gradually conquered replaced the Byzantine dukes, assumed their title, and appropriated their functions and rights. Thus there arose in the Italian cities Lombard dukes: Paul the Deacon asserts that after the death of Cleph there were in Italy 35 dukes; but it is probable that the number was not stable, nor did every city have a duke.
At a certain point, the Lombard dukes had to consider the serious problem of consolidation; abandoning Italy for other regions or returning to Pannonia was out of the question. The poverty of the Italian region explains how, even in 569, bands of barbarians dared to cross the western Alps to plunder in the valley of the Rhône. Finding only slight resistance, their raids into Burgundy and Provence became constant for several years: in 575 the Lombards even threatened Marseilles.
But now the Merovingian king of Burgundy, Guntram, after driving them back, to forestall their return across the Alps, occupied permanently the valleys of the Dora Riparia (Susa) and the Dora Baltea (Aosta). Thus confined to the peninsula, the Lombards, who were still a pastoral people—it seems their wealth consisted in large herds of horses and swine—or who at most in Pannonia had practiced a rudimentary form of agriculture, were forced to begin a new economic phase. It is to this rural settlement that Paul the Deacon refers with those much-debated and enigmatic phrases: “Here Cleph slew many powerful Roman men, drove others away with the sword, and expelled others from Italy; concerning the period when the Lombards were under the dukes, he says: ‘In those days many nobles of the Romans were killed out of greed. The rest, divided among the hosts, were made tributary, having to pay the Lombards a third of their harvests.’” And for the reign of Authari he repeats, “The people, however, were heavily burdened by the Lombard hosts.” Thus there would have been the destruction in considerable numbers of the great Roman landowners; where the owners had either fled or been killed, noble Lombards would have taken their place in the estates; elsewhere barbarians would have settled in the country houses, forcing the peasants, according to Roman military law, to place at their disposal a third of their houses and produce.
However, no proof exists in the documents for this organization of the *terziariae* among the Lombards, and it is doubtful that Paul the Deacon had any. It is likely that he applied to the Lombards what he read in the writers of the 6th century concerning the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, etc. Although the settlement brought the *fare* into Italian lands and their gentilicial unity, later Lombard documentation shows that there were no collective assignments, but individual ones: the owners of land were fully entitled to the land they cultivated. The problem of the lands is connected with the problem of relations with the Roman citizens, new to the barbarians. Historians and jurists have long debated whether the Roman citizens were respected in their freedom or reduced to an inferior condition of *alibi*. German historians have usually followed the latter view, in contrast to the Italian tendency, defended with precision and acuteness by Schupfer. Certainly, the Lombards gradually came to adopt a regime of tolerance toward the Italians, but they did not attain to incorporating the Romans into their citizenship, which was based on birthright and military capacity. Authari, like Alboin, like Rothari, and like Liutprand, is *rex gentis Langobardorum*; the Romans are juridically outside, but not politically: they are within the *regnum Langobardorum*. The Italians enjoyed personal freedom to attend to their affairs, to buy, sell, and make wills, and religious freedom. Freedom as subjects, not as equals. But gradually, as the Lombards in the cities and countryside felt the need, for their own settlement, of the technical capacities of the Italians, the attitude of the conquerors changed, and while the principle of ethnic differentiation remained intact, relations between the two peoples assumed a character of mutual consideration. The later wars of conquest, from Rothari to Liutprand to Aistulf, no longer weighed heavily upon the populations.
The Lombard invasion had not overly concerned the government at Constantinople: indeed, in 569 the Avars resumed hostilities across the Danube and only suspended them after the Khagan Bayan bought peace with an annual tribute. Thus, in Constantinople, the Lombard incursion into Italy seemed only an episode in the thorny problem of relations with the Danube barbarians. But the settlement was viewed differently. Lacking military means for energetic action, the governors of Ravenna resorted to the work of seduction among the leaders. The split between Lombards and Gepids in 572 may already have been a consequence of Byzantine policy; after the death of Cleph, corruption in the duchies was resumed: the duchies, isolated and at odds with one another, could be more easily tempted by gold than by glory.
Some military attempts were made, but without result: around 575, BADOARIO, son-in-law of Justin II, was defeated and killed. The penetration into central Italy intensified the pleas for help from Italian cities; in 579, when Pelagius II succeeded Pope Benedict, Rome was completely blockaded. Emperor Maurice, to resolve the Lombard problem, turned to the Frankish kings, who viewed with displeasure the Lombards settling on their borders. King Childebert undertook to intervene in Italy against the barbarians on behalf 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 their cities and offered the Frankish king tribute and submission. Childebert preferred to accept Lombard proposals and withdrew without fighting, provoking protests from the Emperor, who felt cheated.
Paul the Deacon records for 584 the restoration of the Lombard monarchy in favor of Authari, son of Cleph, but it is not known how this occurred; difficult to accept is Paul the Deacon’s version that the dukes spontaneously, by common counsel, acclaimed Authari king and gave him half of their possessions to create a royal patrimony. It is more likely that this was an act of force by the young Authari, backed by some interested dukes: other dukes must have opposed him, such as that Droctulf the Swabian, who abandoned the Lombards and went over to the imperials, long resisting the king at Brescello. King Childebert’s interventions in Italy in agreement with the imperial government were repeated in 585, then in 588, and in 590. Authari repeatedly sought to reach 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 Theodolinda in marriage (589).
It was not the struggle with the Franks and the imperials that caused the political crisis that unsettled the Lombards in 590, but rather the internal situation: Authari died suddenly in 590, and Paul the Deacon speaks of poison; the Duke of Turin, Agilulf, seized the throne, married Theodolinda, and in this way was recognized by some dukes. Others, however, continued the struggle. To resist them, Agilulf sought to come to terms with the Frankish kings and with the Khagan of the Avars. The imperial exarchs of Ravenna, left alone to fight, were concerned to maintain communications with Rome through the Apennines.
In 598, a one-year truce was finally agreed between King Agilulf and the Exarch of Ravenna; it was renewed in 600 and again, after a resumption of hostilities, in 604, and then repeated year after year. Since the Empire neither wished nor was able to recognize the existence of the Lombard state, there could be no true peace, but both sides were convinced that the effort of war was now futile: thus the system of truces brought great relief, after so many years of war, to the Italian populations.
Meanwhile, the Lombards, being barbarians and almost primitive, had rapidly undergone the influence of the Italian Catholic environment. It seems that Authari was concerned about the numerous conversions of Lombards to Catholicism, seeing them as dangerous for national integrity. But under Agilulf, Queen Theodolinda, a Catholic, created at court an important center for Latin Catholic propaganda. Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) had great influence in this missionary work among the Lombards. While, by duty of his episcopal office, he had to collaborate with imperial civil and military officials in the defense of Rome against the invaders, he also understood the need to put an end to a sterile war in order to facilitate the conversion of the barbarians to the Catholic faith. Gregory corresponded with Queen Theodolinda and found her favorable to his plans for reconciliation between Agilulf and the imperial government. It is not certain that Agilulf abandoned Arianism, but his son by Theodolinda, Adaloald, was baptized into the Catholic faith on April 7, 603, in the basilica of St. John in Monza, built by the queen. The conversion of the Lombards, however, encountered setbacks. In the principal cities there were Arian bishops, and with them had to come to terms those Lombards who wished to defend the national tradition. Catholicization meant the triumph of Latin and the vernacular, the disappearance of the Lombard language and character. The struggle between Arianism and Catholicism colored the civil conflicts that throughout the seventh century characterized the succession of kings on the Lombard throne. To the Catholic Adaloald, who succeeded his father Agilulf in 616, some dukes rebelled for unknown reasons, led by the Duke of Turin, Aripert, who had married Gudeberga, Adaloald’s sister. In 636, Rothari, Duke of Brescia and an Arian, was proclaimed king; however, he married the Catholic widow of his predecessor. Paul the Deacon praises Rothari for his political wisdom but laments his adherence to heresy. Perhaps connected to this religious stance was, 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 promulgation of the Edict (November 22, 643), a written codification of Lombard customary law. Certainly, the Edict aimed to defend national tradition, but it also renewed and corrected customary law and no longer represented Lombard society in its original integrity, but only as the legislator saw it after the transformations that had occurred during the seventy-five years of their sojourn in Italy, under the influence of the Roman-dominated environment.
In the seventh century, the king was the supreme head of the Lombard people; he had absolute legislative powers and was the supreme military commander. Originally elective, the popular assembly could no longer convene because of the dispersal of the people across the peninsula; it became a mere formality, as only a few faithful—dukes or gastalds—proceeded, as was customary, to raise the king on their shields. Attempts to establish a dynasty were continuous, but they met with opposition not from the assembly’s will but from the arrogance of some dukes. Following the custom of the Ostrogothic kings, the Lombard king assumed the title of Flavius, as if to link himself ideologically with the Constantinian dynasty, and some goldsmiths used symbolic ornaments of Roman type for the Lombard kings. In the time of Rothari, the king had a capital as his predecessors had not: it was Ticinum (Pavia), chosen not for Gothic traditions but for its strategic position; there was the king’s palace, the court, and administration, where the king held his councilors (gasinds) and officials.
It is not easy to determine precisely what the provincial administration of the Lombard state was. Upon descending into Italy, the barbarians found a theoretically perfect provincial organization: the *provinciae*, within these the *civitates*, and the *pagi*. The Lombards let this system collapse of its own accord. They established dukes and gastalds in many centers, large or small, according to the contingencies of conquest. Generally, those called *duces* and also *iudices* settled in the principal cities, though not exclusively. As military leaders, the dukes inherited the financial, judicial, and administrative duties of the Byzantine officials. Special officials were the gastalds, entrusted with managing the royal patrimony and wielding broad powers of governance over the population of the district. The king, relying on them, tended to replace the gastalds with the dukes, whether autonomous or independent.
**LONGOBARDI** – Entrance wall of the Lombard temple with stuccoes – Cividale.
**LONGOBARDI** – Royal banquet. Miniature from the *Codex legum Langobardorum* (11th cent.) – Cava dei Tirreni, Abbey Library, cod. 4 (pl. 22), f. 68v.
The Lombard society comprised free and non-free men, as did Roman society, and thus the two societies were readily inclined to merge. Among the non-free were included the serfs of the land (rusticani), of the household (ministeriales), and the aldii, semi-free—free in person but bound to the land like Roman coloni. Above them stood the free or arimanni (exercitales); originally equal in their right to bear arms, by the 7th century differing landed wealth distinguished them into various ranks: from the landless to the nobiles, great figures in authority and wealth.
Moral and economic transformation had by then induced the Lombards to abandon their primitive barbarism of blood vengeance (faida), which had been obligatory down to the seventh generation, in favor of simple monetary composition proportional to the valuation of the slain person ("sicut adpraetatus fuerit, id est wuergild"). The death penalty remained restricted to a few cases: attacks on the king’s life, desertion, and treason. Theft and slave flight incurred severe penalties; detailed regulations governed rural offenses, revealing the Lombards’ concern for livestock and crops. Just as in criminal law the wergild distinguished the free from the slave, so in civil law those enjoying full civil rights were distinguished by the mundium from those subject to others. The holder of the mundium had legal representation over those under his mundium. In Lombard law, women were perpetually minors: from the mundium of the father they passed to that of a brother, husband, or, in the absence of relatives, the king. The presence of the mundiburdus was required for the drafting of the marriage contract (fabula), necessary for the stipulation of marriage; in it were established the meta (gift from the groom to the bride’s family), the faderfio (gift from the bride’s family to the bride), and after consummation the groom made a donation to his wife (morgengabe, morning gift). The right to donate and alienate property was exercised with reservation for the children; the act required symbolic ceremonies (gairethinx = warranty). Inheritance was likewise conditional: first came legitimate or illegitimate children; women inherited in the absence of males; kinship extended only to the seventh degree. Slaves could be manumitted and attain full civil rights; manumission took various forms and degrees. In judicial procedure, the plaintiff summoned the defendant before the king by sending him the wadia, a symbolic object confirming the regularity of the proceedings. Accusatory proof took two forms: the oath sworn through sacramentals by three to twelve iuratores, and, in graver cases, trial by combat between the parties. The Edict of Rothari appears to have had territorial force, though the position of the Roman population within it remains debated.
The Lombard monarchy never succeeded in establishing a solid organization capable of eliminating the danger of provincial particularist tendencies, nor in creating sufficient military strength to confine the dukes within a limited sphere of action and render them disciplined executors of central authority. To live in peace, the kings had instead to resign themselves to allowing the dukes to assert a distinct autonomy in agreement with the local propertied class.
Though scant in detail, Paul the Deacon’s account attests to the persistent peril of struggles between kings and dukes. In 653, Aripert, son of the Bavarian Gunduald and brother of Queen Theodelinda, succeeded Rothari’s son Rodoald. But upon Aripert’s death (661), his elder son Pertarito was opposed by his younger brother Godepert; the Duke of Benevento, Grimoald, intervened, Godepert was slain, and Pertarito fled to the Avars. In 671, after Grimoald’s death, Pertarito returned to the throne and secured the succession for his son Cunincpert, making him his colleague. Soon, however, Cunincpert faced rebellion from Alahis, Duke of Brescia, and the Lombard element in Austrasia. He emerged victorious but then had to contend with another rival, Ansfrid, Duke of Friuli. At his death (700), his son Liutbert ruled under the tutelage of the noble Ansprand; yet Ragimbert, Duke of Turin, rebelled, seized the throne, and on his death left it to his son Aripert. Aripert in turn confronted a coalition of dukes, eliminated Liutbert, but then yielded to Ansprand, who seized power and almost immediately passed it to his son Liutprand (712).
These persistent conflicts were no longer tied to religious issues, for under Pertarito and Cunincpert the Lombards had definitively converted to Catholicism, and even in the Beneventan region the last traces of idolatry had been destroyed by Bishop Barbatus. The struggles revealed only the inability of the Lombard nobility to exploit the favorable general political climate: after Rothari’s wars, a true peace treaty had been reached between the Kingdom and the Empire—its precise date uncertain—but now possible since Catholic Lombards might become clients of the Empire; relations with the Franks had also been regularized.
The reign of Liutprand (v.), extraordinarily long (712–44), is surrounded by a certain aura of grandeur, yet it demonstrates the grave defects of the Lombard state constitution and the impossibility of remedying them. In an early phase of his reign (c. 712–25), Liutprand seems to have had no other concern than to organize the state with maximum centralization, replacing dukes with gastalds wherever possible. Liutprand accentuated the Catholic character of his laws, showing devotion to the Church of Rome; to demonstrate his deference to the Pope, he confirmed the restitution of the ecclesiastical patrimony of the Cottian Alps, already decreed by Aripert II. Likewise, he declared himself respectful of commitments made to the imperial government; his predecessors appear to have acted similarly even when the violent policies of Justinian II caused serious disturbances in the Ravennate army. When Faroald II, Duke of Spoleto, by a coup seized Classe, seeming to revive 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 issue of iconoclasm provoked popular unrest in the Byzantine provinces and Pope Gregory II seemed to support resistance to the decrees of Emperor Leo III, the king of the Lombards, under the pretext of protecting the Pope and the Church, intervened in the disorders of the imperial zone and occupied several cities. The ease of this expansion filled the Roman Curia with alarm, aware of the danger to itself of a possible elimination of Byzantine rule from Italy. Gregory II inaugurated a policy of halting the anti-imperial movement and maintaining fidelity, or at least loyalty, to Constantinople, forbidding the Lombard monarchy from attempting to penetrate Byzantine territory. King Liutprand now found himself facing two oppositions: the papal-Roman autonomism, cloaked in loyalty to the Empire, and the autonomism of the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento. The two movements, feeling equally threatened by the unifying ambitions of the monarchy of Pavia, were disposed to ally themselves. Gregory III and then Zacharias maintained this policy: Liutprand repeatedly attacked the Duchy of Rome and the army of Ravenna, but the papacy had assumed the protection of imperial rights, and the popes repeatedly intervened with the king to force him to withdraw.
Liutprand’s policy was continued after his death (744) by King Rachis, who in 749 invaded the Duchy of Rome, but Pope Zacharias induced him to abandon the struggle. The consequence was a serious dissension among Lombard leaders; Rachis abdicated and retired to Monte Cassino; he was succeeded by his brother Aistulf (v.), leader of the more vigorous faction among the Lombards. Indeed, in 751 he occupied Ravenna and the Exarchate, resolved never to retreat, and then advanced against the Duchy of Rome. The Byzantine Empire, engaged in a bitter struggle with the caliphate, was certainly not in a position to counter the Lombard advance.
But now the papacy was substituting the Empire in this policy of resistance to Lombard unification. Hence the negotiations of Stephen II with the Frankish king Pepin the Short (754) and the agreement by which the Franks, through the Treaties of Ponthion and Quierzy, assumed the defense of the papacy. The two expeditions of Pepin into Italy in 754 and 756 not only forced the Lombard king to withdraw from all imperial territory but also to acknowledge himself as subordinate to the King of the Franks, resuming the old obligations of dependence that had been established under Agilulf. The Lombard monarchy thus ceased to be independent and passed under the control of the Carolingian monarchy, which in turn asserted a superiority over Rome by the title of patrician; the Empire now retained only a theoretical claim to its rights over the army and Rome. Aistulf and his successor Desiderius (v.) strove to give their relations with the Frankish monarchy a character of cordial friendship, and at one point Desiderius believed he had succeeded when he gave his daughter in marriage to Pepin’s son Charles and thought himself able to resume the policy of expansion into 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 turn, had sought to wrest from the Lombard king the subjection of the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento. The marriage between Charles, King of the Franks, and the daughter of King Desiderius provoked the bitterest protests from Stephen III. From this point onward, the correspondence of the popes with the Frankish court took on a violent tone not only against King Desiderius but also against the entire Lombard people, which is described as “a perfidious and most fetid race that is not to be numbered among the nations, but from which derives the race of lepers.”