Their own legends bring the tribe as worshippers of Odin from Scandinavia to the German shore of the Baltic, under the name of Winili, a name which was given to them in a loose way as late as the 12th century {e.g., by Ordericus Vitalis; cf. Zeuss, 57). By the Roman and Greek writers of the first two centuries of our era they are spoken of as occupying, with more or less extension at different times, the region which is now Hanover and the Altmark of Prussia. To the Romans they appeared a remarkable tribe: —“gens etiam Germana feritate ferocior,” says Velleius, who had fought against them under Tiberius; and Tacitus describes them as a race which, though few in numbers, more than held their own among numerous powerful neighbours by their daring and love of war. In the quarrels of the tribes they appear to have extended their borders; in Ptolemy’s account of Germany, in the 2d century, they fill a large space among the races of the northwest and north. But from the 2d century the name disappears, till it is found again at the end of the 5th century as that of a half Christian tribe on the northern banks of the Danube. How they got there, and what relation these Langobards bore to those who lived in the 1st and 2d centuries on the west bank of the Elbe, we learn little from the vague stories preserved by their traditions; but they are described (B. C., ii. 14, 15) by Procopius, a contemporary, as subject to one of the most ferocious of the tribes on the Danube, the Heruli, also a Teutonic tribe, by whose oppression they were driven in despair to a resistance, which ended in the utter defeat and overthrow of their tyrants. We know nothing of the way in which Christianity was introduced among them, probably only among some of their noble families; but they were Arians like their neighbours and predecessors in Italy, the Goths, and like them they brought with them into Italy a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons; but, while the Gothic Bible of Ulfilas is partially preserved, whatever religious literature the Langobards had in the shape of versions of the Scriptures or liturgical forms has utterly perished. They were among the Teutonic tribes which were generally on good terms with the empire, and were encouraged by it in their wars with their more barbarous neighbours. After defeating the Heruli and destroying their tribal organization, the Langobards attacked the Gepidae with equal success, scattering the tribe or incorporating its survivors in their own host. They thus became the most formidable of the Teutonic tribes of the Danube. They had alliances with the distant Saxons, probably a kindred stock, and with the Hunnish Avars of the Danube. Their kings belonged to a royal line, and made marriages with the kings of the Franks and the other German nations. Their wars led them westwards, and for forty years they are said to have occupied Pannonia, the region between the Danube and the valleys of the Drave and Save. Thus following the line of movement of the Goths, they resolved at last to strike for the great prize which the Goths had won and lost. Through the eastern passes, and the border land of Friuli, they invaded Italy. It is said that they were invited by Narses, the conqueror of the Goths, in revenge for his ill treatment by the masters whom he had served.

2. In 568 Alboin, king of the Langobards, with the women and children of the tribe and all their possessions, with Saxon allies, with the subject tribe of the Gepidae, and a mixed host of other barbarians, descended into Italy by the great plain at the head of the Adriatic. There was little resistance to them. The war which had ended in the downfall of the Goths had exhausted Italy; it was followed by famine and pestilence; and the Government at Constantinople, away in the East, made but faint efforts to retain the province which Belisarius and Narses had recovered for it. Except in a few fortified places, such as Ticinum or Pavia, the Italians did not venture to encounter the new invaders; and, though Alboin was not without generosity, the Lombards, wherever resisted, justified the opinion of their ferocity by the savage cruelty of the invasion. In 572, according to the tragic tale of the Lombard chronicler, a tale which recalls the story of Candaules in Herodotus, Alboin, the fierce conqueror, fell a victim to the revenge of his wife Rosamond, the daughter of the king of the Gepidae, whose skull Alboin had turned into a drinking cup, out of which he forced Rosamond to drink; but the Langobards had already shown themselves in ravaging bands all over Italy, and in the north had begun to take possession. Military chiefs, whom, after the Latin writers, we call “dukes,” corresponding to the German “Herzog,” were placed, or placed themselves, first in the border cities, like Friuli and Trent, which commanded the north-eastern passes, and then in other principal places in Italy; and this arrangement became characteristic of the Lombard settlement. The principal seat of the settlement was the rich plain watered by the Po and its affluents, which was in future to receive its name from them; but their power extended across the Apennines into Liguria and Tuscany, and then southwards to the outlying dukedoms of Spoleto and Benevento. The invaders failed to secure any maritime ports such as Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Salerno, Ravenna, or any territory that was conveniently commanded from the sea. Pavia, or, as it was called, Ticinum, the one place which had obstinately resisted Alboin, became the seat of their kings, as it had been one of the seats of the Gothic kingdom.

After the short and cruel reign of Cleph, the successor of Alboin, the Lombards (as we may begin for convenience sake to call them) tried for ten years the experiment of a national confederacy of their dukes, without any king at their head. It was the rule of some thirty-five or thirty-six petty tyrants, under whose oppression and private wars even the invaders suffered, while the Italians were remorselessly trodden under foot. With anarchy among themselves and so precarious a hold on the country, hated by the Italian population and by their natural leaders the Catholic clergy, threatened also by an alliance of the Greek empire with their natural and persistent rivals the Franks beyond the Alps, they resolved to sacrifice their turbulent independence to the usual necessities of the Teutonic invaders which led to the election of a king. In 584 they chose Authari, the grandson of Alboin, and endowed the royal domain with a half of their possessions. From this time till the fall of the Lombard power before the arms of their rivals the Franks under Charles the Great, the kingly rule continued. Authari, “the Longhaired,” with his Roman title of Flavius, marks the change from the war-king of an invading host to the permanent representative of the unity and law of the nation, and the increased power of the crown, by the possession of a great domain, to enforce its will. The independence of the dukes was surrendered to the king. The dukedoms in the neighbourhood of the seat of power were gradually absorbed, and their holders transformed into royal officers. Those of the northern marches, Trent and Friuli, with the important dukedom of Turin, retained longer the kind of independence which marchlands usually give where invasion is to be feared. The great dukedom of Benevento in the south, with its neighbour Spoleto, threatened at one time to be a separate principality, and even to the last resisted, with varying success, according to the personal characters of its dukes, the fu∩ claims of the royal authority at Pavia.

The kingdom of the Lombards lasted more than two hundred years, from Alboin (568) to the fall of Desiderius (774),—much longer than the preceding Teutonic kingdom of Theodoric and the Goths. But it differed from the other Teutonic conquests in Gaul, in Britain, in Spain. It was never complete in point of territory: there were always two, and almost to the last three, capitals—the Lombard one, Pavia, the Latin one, Rome, the Greek one,. Ravenna; and the Lombards never could get access to the sea. And it never was complete over the subject race: it profoundly affected the Italians of the north; in its turn it was entirely transformed by contact with them; but the Lombards never overcame the natural repulsion of the twσ races, and never amalgamated with the Italians till their power as a ruling race was crushed by the victory given to the Roman element by the restored empire of the Franks. The Langobards, German in their faults and in their strength, but coarser, at least at first, than the Germans whom the Italians had known, the Goths of Theodoric and Totila, found themselves continually in the presence of a subject population very different from anything which the other Teutonic conquerors met with among the provincials,—like them, exhausted, dispirited, unwarlike, but with the remains and memory of a great civilization round them, intelligent, subtle, sensitive, feeling themselves infinitely superior in experience and knowledge to the rough barbarians whom they could not fight, and capable of hatred such as only cultivated races can nourish. The Lombards who came into Italy with the most cruel incidents of conquest, and who, when they had occupied the lands and cities of Upper Italy, still went on sending forth furious bands to plunder and destroy where they did not care to stay, never were able to overcome the mingled fear and scorn and loathing of the Italians. They adapted themselves very quickly indeed to many Italian fashions. Within thirty years of the invasion, Authari took the fancy of decking himself with the imperial title of Flavius, even while his bands were leading Italian captives in leash like dogs under the walls of Rome, and under the eyes of Pope Gregory; and it was retained by his successor. They soon became Catholics; and then in all the usages of religion, in church building, in founding monasteries, in their veneration for relics, they vied with Italians. Authari’s queen, Theodelinda, solemnly placed the Lombard nation under the patronage of St John the Baptist, and at Monza she built in his honour the first Lombard church, and the royal palace near it. King Liutprand (712-744) bought the relics of St Augustine for a large sum to be placed in his church at Pavia. Their Teutonic speech disappeared; except in names and a few technical words all traces of it are lost. But to the last they had the unpardonable crime of being a ruling barbarian race or caste in Italy. To the end they are “nefandissimi,” execrable, loathsome, filthy. So wrote Gregory the Great when they first appeared. So wrote Pope Stephen IV., at the end of their rule, when stirring up the kings of the Franks to destroy them. Authari⅛ short reign (584-591) was one of renewed effort for conquest. It brought the Langobards face to face, not merely with the emperors at Constantinople, but with the first of the great statesmen popes, Gregory the Great (590-604). But Lombard conquest was bungling and wasteful. It was ever ready to lapse into mere plunder and warfare; and when they had spoiled a city they proceeded to tear down its walls and raze it to the ground. But Authari’s chief connexion with the fortunes of his people was an important, though an accidental one. The Lombard chronicler tells us a romantic tale of the way in which Authari sought his bride from Garibald, duke of the Bavarians, how he went incognito in the embassy to judge of her attractions, and how she recognized her disguised suitor. The bride was the Christian Theodelinda, and she became to the Langobards what Bertha was to the Anglo-Saxons, and Clotilda to the Franks. She became the mediator between the Lombards and the Catholic Church. Authari, who had brought her to Italy, died shortly after his marriage. But Theodelinda had so won on the Lombard chiefs that they bid her as queen choose the one among them whom she would have for her husband and for king. She chose Agilulf, duke of Turin (592-615). He was not a true Langobard, but a Thuringian. It was the beginning of peace between the Lombards and the Catholic clergy. Agilulf could not abandon his traditional Arianism, and he was a very uneasy neighbour, not only to the Greek exarch, but to Rome itself. But he was favourably disposed both to peace and to the Catholic Church. Gregory interfered to prevent a national conspiracy against the Langobards, like that of St Brice’s day in England against the Danes, or that later uprising against the French, the Sicilian Vespers. He was right both in point of humanity and of policy. The Arian and Catholic bishops went on for a time side by side; but the Lombard kings and clergy rapidly yielded to the religious influences around them, even while the national antipathies continued unabated and vehement. Gregory, who despaired of any serious effort on the part of the Greek emperors to expel the Lombards, endeavoured to promote peace between the Italians and Agilulf; and, in spite of the feeble hostility of the exarchs of Ravenna, the pope and the king of the Lombards became the two real powers in the north and centre of Italy. Agilulf was followed, after two unimportant reigns, by his son-in-law, the husband of Theodelinda’s daughter, King Rothari (636-652), the Lombard legislator, still an Arian though he favoured the Catholics. He was the first of their kings who did for the Lombards what was done by all the Teutonic conquerors as soon as they felt themselves a nation on Roman soil ,∙ he collected their customs under the name of laws,—and he did this, not in their own Teutonic dialect, but in Latin. The use of Latin implies the use of Latin scribes or notaries, and implies that the laws were a notice to the Italians of the usages and rules of their conquerors, which, so far as they applied, were to be not merely the personal law of the Lombards, but the law of the land, and binding on Lombards and Romans alike. But such rude legislation could not provide for all questions arising even in the shattered and decayed state of Roman civilization. It is probable that among themselves the Italians kept to their old usages and legal precedents where they were not overridden by the conquerors’ law, and by degrees a good many of the Roman civil arrangements made their way into thejLombard code, while all ecclesiastical ones, and they were a large class, were untouched by it.

The precise nature of the relations, legal and political, of the Lombards, as a conquering race, or a military caste, to the Italians is still a subject of controversy, owing to the prevailing mixture of clearness and obscurity in the documents of the time. There must have been, of course, much change of property; but appearances are conflicting as to the terms on which land generally was held by he old possessors or the new comers, and as to the relative legal position of the two. Savigny held that, making allowance for the anomalies and usurpation of conquest, the Roman population held the bulk of the land as they had held it before, and were governed by an uninternιpted and acknowledged exercise of Roman law in their old municipal organization. Later inquirers, Leo, Troya, and more recently Hegel, have found that the supposition does not tally with a whole series of facts, which point to a Lombard territorial law ignoring completely any parallel Roman and personal law, to a great restriction of full civil rights among the Romans, analogous to the condition of the rayah under the Turks, and to a reduction of the Roman occupiers to a class of half-free “aldii,” holding immovable tenancies under lords of superior race and privilege, and subject to the sacrifice either of the third part of their holdings or the third part of the produce. Probably something like this, with exceptions and anomalies, represents the state of things, at least at first; but it must be remembered that regular and consistent arrangements were very unlikely to have been thought of early in such a conquest as that of the Lombards, that the Romans suffered probably rather from the insolence of barbarians than from the rules of a constitutional settlement, and that a conquered race always and naturally exaggerates its own humiliations and grievances, and in this case has the chief telling of the story. It might also be expected that the tribal customs of Teutonic conquerors would be more modified in Italy than elsewhere, by the deeply-rooted traditions and customs of the old Roman rule. The Lombards were rough and harsh, and the Italians never ceased to hate them; but we know by experience how two portions of a population possessed of equal civil rights can hate one another, where they differ in blood and history. The Roman losses, both of property and rights, were likely to be great at first; how far they continued permanent during the two centuries of the Lombard kingdom, or how far the legal distinctions between Rome and Lombard gradually passed into desuetude, is a further question. The legislation of the Lombard kings, in form f a territorial and not a personal law, shows no signs of a disposition either to depress or to favour the Romans, but only the purpose to, maintain, in a rough fashion, strict order and discipline impartially among all their subjects.

From Rothari (oδ. 652) to Liutprand (712-744) the Lombard kings, succeeding one another in the irregular fashion of the time, sometimes by descent, sometimes by election, sometimes by conspiracy and violence, strove fitfully to enlarge their boundaries, and contended with the aristocracy of dukes inherent in the original organization of the nation, an element which, though much weakened, always embarrassed the power of the crown, and checked the unity of the nation. Their old enemies the Franks on the west, and the Slavs or Huns, ever ready to break in on the north-east, and sometimes called in by mutinous and traitorous dukes of Friuli and Trent, were constant and serious dangers. By the popes, who represented Italian interests, they were always looked upon with dislike and jealousy, even when they had become zealous Catholics, the founders of churches and monasteries; with the Greek empire there was chronic war. From time to time they made raids into the unsubdued parts of Italy, and added a city or two to their dominions. But there was no sustained effort for the complete subjugation of Italy till Liutprand, the most powerful of the line. He tried it, and failed. He broke up the independence of the great southern duchies, Benevento and Spoleto. For a time, in the heat of the dispute about images, he won the pope to his side against the Greeks....