Lombards and Byzantines
In 568–569 a different Germanic tribe, the Lombards, invaded Italy under their king, Alboin (c. 565–572). They came from Pannonia (modern western Hungary), which had itself been a Roman province. Exactly how Romanized they were is a matter of dispute, but they certainly did not have the political coherence of the Ostrogoths, and they never conquered the whole of Italy. Alboin took the north but was soon murdered, probably with Byzantine connivance. His successor, Cleph (572–574), was murdered as well, and for a decade (574–584) the Lombards broke up into local duchies with no king at all. The Byzantines seem to have been partially responsible for this too; at that time they did not have the military capacity to drive the invaders back, and it was easier for them to divide the Lombard leadership and buy some of them into the Byzantine camp. For the rest of the century, even after the reestablishment of Lombard kingship under Authari (584–590) and then Agilulf (590–616), nearly as many Lombard leaders seem to have been fighting with the Byzantines as against them. In 584, in the face of Frankish invasions from beyond the Alps, the Lombard dukes met and elected Authari king, ceding him considerable lands; in the process, Agilulf managed to unify the duchies of the north into a single kingdom. But the confusion of the first decades of the Lombard kingdom did not favour the development of a coherent political system, and, when the wars stopped in 605, Italy was divided into several pieces with boundaries that were in some cases to survive for centuries.
The largest of these pieces was the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy and Tuscany. By the 620s its capital was at Pavia, which remained the capital of the north until the 11th century; other major centres were Verona, Milan, Turin (Torino), Lucca, and Cividale, the capital of the duchy of Friuli. Friuli played an important role as the Italian frontier against the Avars, a powerful military confederation of Central Asian origin that had taken over Pannonia. The two great southern duchies of the Lombards, Spoleto in the central Apennines and Benevento in the mountains and plains of the south, are best considered independent states; they were not connected to the Lombard kingdom geographically and seem to have developed separately, as territories conquered in the 6th century by Lombard detachments originally in some sense under Byzantine control. They were part of the same political structure as the north only for brief periods, most notably the 660s and the 730s–760s.
Byzantine Italy was nominally a single unit, but it too in reality fell into several separate pieces. Its political centre was Ravenna, which was ruled by a military leader appointed from Constantinople and called exarch from about 590. Exarchs were changed quite frequently, probably because military figures far from the centre of the empire who developed a local following might revolt (as happened in 619 and 651) or else turn themselves into autonomous rulers. But the impermanence of the exarchs made it easier for their local subordinates to gain some measure of autonomy. The duke of Naples, the largest city of the south, was effectively independent by the 8th century, as was the duke of the newly formed lagoon city of Venice. The most important of these local rulers, however, was the pope, the bishop of Rome, for Rome remained the largest city of Italy and its bishop, in theory the spiritual head of the whole of Latin Christendom, had considerable status. Rome had dukes too, but they did not have the local support the popes had, and they remain shadowy figures. The popes, on the other hand, had a political position that in practice equaled that of the exarchs and lasted a great deal longer. In the far south, Sicily remained administratively separate from Ravenna, as did Sardinia, which followed its own path under increasingly independent “judges” in almost total obscurity until the Pisan and Genoese invasions of the 11th and 12th centuries. The Lombards of Benevento took Apulia (now Puglia) from the Byzantines, except for Otranto at its southern tip, in the late 7th century; southern Calabria remained under Byzantine control and was Greek-speaking by the 10th century.
The Lombard kingdom, 584–774
King Authari ensured the survival of the Lombards, threatened as they were by both the Byzantines and the Franks. The last Frankish invasion, in 590, probably resulted in some sort of Frankish supremacy; the Lombards payed tribute, at least for a time, and sent detachments to fight in the Frankish army as late as the 620s. King Agilulf reorganized the kingdom and suppressed several dukes with pretensions to autonomy. He also concluded a treaty with the Byzantines in 605 that established permanent borders with the exarchate, which scarcely changed over the next century (the only major exception being the Lombard conquest of the Ligurian coast in the early 640s). Agilulf also seems to have reorganized the central government with the help of Roman administrators, and indeed he imitated or reestablished some late Roman and Byzantine court rituals; he did not, however, exact the land tax and must have lived mostly off his substantial royal estates.
Agilulf seems to have been a pagan in his personal religion, though he may have been an Arian Christian; there were certainly many Arians among the Lombards, including most of the kings between 568 and 652. His wife and son were, however, Catholic, and Catholics were common among the Lombards as a whole from at least the 590s as well. Germanic peoples had often been Arians in the 5th and 6th centuries (the Ostrogoths were, for example), but the Lombards seem to have been less committed to Arianism than were the Goths or the Vandals, and they abandoned it without documented struggle in the mid-7th century. Although the Lombards do not in any case seem to have been religious fanatics, it may well have been Agilulf who laid the basis for a peaceful conversion of his people to Catholicism, owing to his careful cultivation of links to Catholic figures such as Pope Gregory I (despite his wars with Rome) or to the Irish missionary Columban, who founded the monastery of Bobbio, near Pavia, about 612.
For the political history of the Lombards, scholars rely primarily on one source, Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, written in the 790s. For the reigns of Agilulf and his predecessors, Paul’s information is in part contemporary, for it is based on a lost historical work by Secundus of Non, one of the Romans at Agilulf’s court. Secundus’s work, however, seems to have ended after 616, and Paul’s knowledge—and thus posterity’s—becomes much more fragmentary. Paul says little, for example, about Rothari (636–652) except that he was militarily successful (it was he who conquered Liguria) and, most importantly, that he was the first king to set out Lombard custom, in his Edict of 643, a substantial law code that survives independently. It is evident, however, that the basic institutions of the kingdom were by then fairly stable. Between 616 and 712 the Bavarian dynasty—the family of Agilulf’s wife, Theodelinda—dominated the succession; kings who were not members of this family, such as Rothari and Grimoald of Benevento (662–671), married into it. Grimoald was the only southern duke to claim the throne of Pavia; like Rothari, he fought the Byzantines and made laws. Male-line Bavarian kings such as Perctarit (661–662, 672–688) and his son Cunipert (680–700) preferred peace and seem to have developed the ceremonial role of the royal court. This contrast may have represented a real political difference, but, if so, it was only a difference of emphasis. Every king accepted the cornerstones of the Lombard political tradition: Agilulf’s Romanized court and Rothari’s Lombard law.
Coups dominated the Lombard political succession, like that of the Visigoths in Spain, and between 700 and 712 these became particularly savage, resulting in the end of the Bavarian dynasty. Liutprand (712–744) reestablished peace; he is generally regarded as the most successful Lombard king. He issued a series of laws, as a conscious and well-organized updating of Rothari’s Edict, which introduced a fair amount of Roman law into the Lombard system. He also waged war on the Byzantine exarchate and the southern duchies alike. The duchies of Spoleto and Benevento had, as noted, maintained their independence and their separate political traditions. Liutprand conquered the southern duchies in the 730s, setting up his own dukes in both; by his death, Spoleto (though not Benevento) was stably in Pavia’s orbit. He also took about half the land controlled by the exarch and occupied Ravenna itself, temporarily, in 743. His attitude toward Rome is less clear; he took some papal territory but never threatened the city itself. During Liutprand’s reign the Lombard king, for the first time since 568, was militarily dominant in the peninsula. He seems, however, to have still accepted the right of the exarch and the pope to an independent existence.
Aistulf (749–756) followed Liutprand’s policies to their logical conclusion: he conquered Ravenna in 751, ending the exarchate; he ruled in Spoleto without a duke from 751 to 756; and in 752 he began to move on Rome, demanding tribute from the pope. But times had changed for the Lombards. In the 740s the popes had become close to the rising Carolingian dynasty in Francia, and in 751 its head, Pippin III, was recognized as king of the Franks by Pope Zacharias (741–752). Faced with Aistulf’s attacks, Zacharias’s successor, Stephen II (752–757), went to the Franks and sought their military support. In 754 and again in 756, Pippin invaded Italy and defeated Aistulf; he took Ravenna from the Lombard king and gave it directly to the pope, notwithstanding protests both from Byzantium and from the inhabitants of Ravenna itself. This pattern was to persist. Aistulf’s successor, Desiderius (757–774), allied himself by marriage with the Franks and kept control of the southern duchies. But when he too threatened Rome in 772–773, the Frankish king, Charlemagne, invaded and this time conquered the Lombard kingdom outright (773–774). Italy became absorbed into the Carolingian lands right down to the border of Benevento, which remained independent.
Popes and exarchs, 590–800
The Byzantine lands in Italy were, in theory, only provinces of the empire of Constantinople and to that extent do not have much of an independent political history. Although Ravenna often found itself politically opposed to Constantinople, few exarchs made a permanent impression. The most consistent local political tradition was probably that of the archbishops of Ravenna, who were rich and powerful and, like their counterparts in Rome, had a considerable role in the civil administration.
It was in this context that the popes gradually increased their secular authority. The exarchs did relatively little to defend Rome, which was largely cut off from Ravenna by the Lombard states; the papal city thus had to develop its own political institutions. In the late 6th century, responsibility for feeding the population of Rome and, by the 590s, for defending it from the Lombards (both of Pavia and Spoleto) slowly shifted from the fast-disintegrating Roman Senate to the popes, who themselves still tended to come from senatorial families. Gregory I (the Great; 590–604) was the most important of these, and, thanks to his own extensive theological writings and collection of letters, his papacy is by far the best-documented of this period. In the course of the 7th century, his successors slowly detached themselves from the power of the exarchs, and by about 700 they could successfully defy any attempt from Ravenna to remove them. This also meant that they had gained autonomy from the more distant authority of the Byzantine emperor, with whom they were also often in religious disagreement. Pope Martin I could in 653 still be arrested for such disagreement (he died in exile in the East in 655), but not his successors. This autonomy became particularly important in the 730s, because Emperor Leo III (717–741) was an iconoclast (i.e., opposed to religious images, or icons), and the popes were firmly opposed to iconoclasm. The emperor confiscated papal rights in southern Italy and Sicily from Rome for the popes’ defiance, but he could not remove a pope. From then on, however, the Byzantine army no longer helped the popes, who were increasingly reliant on their lands in the Campagna (now part of Lazio) around Rome for food and military support. It was in this context that the popes began to look to the Franks for help against the Lombards. But the popes were also, in the face of nothing but hostility from Byzantium, beginning to think for the first time in terms of their own practical independence.
This came to fruition when the popes gained control over Ravenna itself after 756. By 774, when Charlemagne conquered northern and central Italy, Pope Adrian I (772–795) had extensive territorial designs in the peninsula. Yet these came to nothing, and indeed Adrian and Pope Leo III (795–816) found Charlemagne a far more intrusive patron than the Byzantines had ever been. But the popes kept control of the Campagna, and the belt of papal lands between Rome and Ravenna remained intact as well; the Papal States, as reconstituted by the late-medieval popes, reproduced almost exactly the boundaries of the former exarchate.
Ethnic identity and government
Lombard Italy
The Ostrogothic kingdom used so many Roman governmental institutions that it can best be understood as a virtual continuation of the late Roman imperial system. Lombard rule marked much more of a break, without doubt. But exactly how much the Lombard states owed to the Roman past and how much to Germanic traditions is an ongoing debate. The basic notion of the kingdom as a political system was a Germanic concept in large part, for the legitimacy of the king rested on his direct relationship with the free Lombard people in arms—the exercitales, or arimanni, who formed the basis of the Lombard army. This concept did not leave much room for Romans, who indeed largely disappear from the evidence, even when documents increase again in the 8th century; it is likely that any Romans who wished to remain politically important in the Lombard kingdom had to become “Lombardized.” It is even in dispute, for that matter, how many such Romans there were. Paul the Deacon, for instance, claimed that the Roman aristocracy were largely killed in the first generation of the Lombard invasion. But this was certainly an exaggeration, because the Lombards adopted too many customs from the Romans for the latter to have been reduced entirely to subjection. Some Roman aristocratic families must have survived among the Lombards, as is suggested, for example, by the name of a royal protégé and founder of a monastery in Pavia in 714: Senator, son of Albinus.
The Lombards seem to have settled largely in the region to the north of the Po River, the area with the majority of Lombard place-names and Germanic-style archaeological finds (mostly from cemetery sites). But even there Lombards must have been a minority, and they must have been even more so farther south. There were probably few concentrations of Germanic settlers entirely immune to Roman cultural influence. The Lombard language seems to have disappeared by the 8th century, leaving few loanwords in the Italian language. The impression conveyed is of a gradual Romanization of the society and culture of the Lombards within the framework of their continuing political dominance. When the Franks invaded, Lombards and Romans moved together still more as a conquered, by now “Italian,” people: the regnum Langobardorum (“kingdom of the Lombards”) of the Lombard period was called the regnum Italiae (“kingdom of Italy”) from the 9th century onward.
The evidence of Lombard law reinforces this pattern. Rothari’s Edict and Liutprand’s laws look much like the legislation of the Franks and of other Germanic peoples; they deal, for example, with the carefully calculated compensations for various crimes of violence that aimed to replace violent feuds or at least to make easier the resolution of feuding. These ideas were certainly foreign to traditional Roman law. When Liutprand in 731 restricted the scope of the judicial duel, for he suspected that it was unjust, he explicitly recognized that it could not be abandoned altogether, as it was part of Lombard custom. Within this Lombard frame, however, the content of law was often in practice heavily Roman. Lombard land law, for example, was almost entirely late Roman, except for the rules for inheritance.
The administrative system of the Lombard state was even more Roman than its laws. This is not very surprising, for Roman models offered far more power to rulers than did any Germanic tradition of government. The Lombards, like other Germanic invaders, took what they could from their new subjects and used Roman administrators where they could find them. Their system, as it is visible in documents from the 8th century, seems to have been more coherent than that of most other Romano-Germanic kingdoms. It was based on a central government in Pavia with numerous permanent administrators (such as the referendarii, who organized the writing of royal charters) and legal experts; there is evidence of legal appeals to judges in Pavia, and some of them were settled by the king himself.
Locally, cities provided the basis of government, which was another Roman tradition. In the kingdom, either a duke or a gastald governed each city and its territory; the difference seems to have been principally one of status. In the southern duchies, local rulers were all gastalds. These officials were in charge of the local law courts, led the city army, and administered the royal lands in the city’s territory. (These three duties more or less exhausted the functions of government in the early Middle Ages.) Such responsibilities were typical everywhere in the post-Roman world; in Lombard Italy, however, the local power of dukes and gastalds seems to have maintained a more official character than in, say, Francia, with less development of private, or family, power and more royal intervention in local political processes. The Lombard kingdom also differed from Francia in the relatively limited political importance of its bishops and other churchmen; the kings of Pavia used church institutions as an element to bolster their power less than did any other rulers in the West (including the Byzantines in Italy). This may well show that secular institutions were strong enough for kings to rule through them without ecclesiastical help; if so, the reason must have been the survival of a relatively complex social and political life in the cities themselves. Eighth-century documents, particularly for Lucca, show a network of medium-level aristocratic families based in cities, who tended to furnish both counts and bishops for their localities and whose genealogies can sometimes be traced for centuries to come. The stability of city-based regional governments was probably the essential foundation for the political coherence of the Lombard kingdom itself.
Byzantine Italy
Byzantine Italy was different from the Lombard lands in obvious and crucial respects. It was not independent; it was not ruled by an incoming, ethnically distinct group; and it gave more political space to the church. Perhaps above all, it still exacted the land tax and thus could afford a salaried army and a far more complex administrative system than the Lombards ever had. But in some respects it had a very similar development. The local power of the army and the constant need for defense led to the formation of a militarized landed aristocracy and indeed to a military identity for free landowners at all levels and thus to social patterns that were not at all unlike those in the Lombard states. For that matter, the foreign origin (Greek or Armenian) of many newly landed army leaders made the ethnic mix in the Byzantine lands almost as visible as in the lands of their Germanic neighbours. The civilian aristocracy of the Roman Empire vanished; Roman landowners who wished to maintain political influence had to become militarized and “Byzantinized,” at least if they did not attach themselves to the bureaucratic network around the popes and the archbishops of Ravenna.
Even the church became increasingly militarized; by the 9th century the bishop and the duke of Naples were sometimes the same person. The dominance of local military aristocracies in ecclesiastical politics appeared most clearly in the civil wars in Rome in the late 760s, the first period of effective papal independence and one in which rival families fought it out for the papal office. Roman politics was to take on this internecine character again when popes became politically independent; the next sequences of violence occurred in the years around 900 and in the early 11th century.
Similarities between Lombard and Byzantine states
The Lombard states and the Byzantine provinces in Italy thus resembled each other more than either did the Roman Empire of the 5th century. The Lombard kings had a far less complex administrative system than had existed before 550, based as it was on royal landowning rather than the complex tax-raising mechanisms of the Roman world. One example of this is that they usually minted only a high-value gold currency rather than the gold, silver, and bronze coins normal under the empire; their state did not need as complex a financial system as the Romans had had. But the complexity of public life could more easily survive in Lombard Italy than farther north in Germanic Europe, owing above all to the vitality of Italian city society: in this sense, the Lombards looked far more Roman than did the Franks or, still less, the Anglo-Saxons. This city society must have been fairly similar on both sides of the Lombard-Byzantine frontier, in Ravenna as in Pavia, in Rimini or Naples as in Lucca or Verona. And, as the Byzantines developed local military aristocracies resembling those of the Lombards, so the cultural traditions of the two parts of the peninsula tended to move in the same direction. They were never identical, however; major Byzantine cities seem to have been larger than Lombard ones, and the Byzantine political system remained the more complex and articulated of the two to the end.