THE years of Lombard rule in Italy offer a contrast to those of the Ostrogoths. Both were Germanic invaders, both accounted by the provincials barbarians; but whereas the Ostrogoths settled as federates, under a king appreciative of Roman culture, and with a strong senatorial class anxious to co-operate and make the régime work: the Lombards came merely as enemy soldiery, settled unauthorized in such districts as they could conquer, and only came to value the Greco-Roman inheritance in the last century before their conquest by Charlemagne.
The horror of the Italian provincial and such bishops as Gregory the Great for the ‘foul and leprous Lombards’ was probably inspired by the original fighting fierceness of the Lombards (‘fierce with more than the ordinary fierceness of the Germans’) and by the long misery of a protracted and piecemeal conquest. The Lombards, a small Germanic tribe, had come originally from the Bar-dengau, near the mouth of the Elbe, had settled in Pannonia in the sixth century, wiped out the Gepids with Avar help in the years 565–567 (see p. 215), supplied some 5,000 troops to Narses for the reconquest of Italy, and, as cattle-raisers rather than agriculturalists, were ready for further tribal migration.
Of all the Germanic barbarians, they had progressed least in subjugating their tribes to monarchical rule. The king was only a war-leader, dispensable in times of peace. Society, half nomadic, and mainly pastoral, rested upon the clan and justice was still maintained by the primitive method of the blood feud. At no point in their wanderings had the Lombards had much contact with the Greeks or a settled civilization; they had penetrated to Hungary and fought the Mongol Avars there, and they had acquired some knowledge of Arian Christianity about the time of their contact with the Gepids, though many were still pagans when they entered Italy. They had duces as war-leaders of the clan (fara), a word which survived in some Lombard place names as did -engo, the equivalent of the tribal Anglo-Saxon -ing. These duces were, at the time of the invasion, united under the war-leader Alboin, as king, as they had been during the earlier period of migration for some 150 years.
As with most Germanic kingships, the Lombards had a royal family whose members were ‘throne-worthy’, from whom the folk could choose a king, raising him upon the buckler or shield, if need arose. Members of such a family had no hereditary right to rule, but their chance of selection was privileged. Among the Lombards the descendants of Leth, the Lethings, formed such a dynasty; in the pre-invasion period they held the throne during seven generations, and sixteen of the later kings were of the royal race or married into that house. The royal race, however, was not associated with any legend of divine descent, but only of descent from Leth, or Lethuc, who succeeded in making an elective monarchy into an hereditary one. The king who invaded Italy in 568 was not of the royal race, though representatives of the Lethings had survived. Theodelinda, the famous Lombard queen, was, on her mother’s side, a niece of the last Lething king, Waltari; and the strength of her position, and of her daughter Gundeberga, gave them great weight in carrying through the conversion of the Lombards from Arianism to Catholic Christianity. Their influence was due, however, not only to their royal descent, but to their immediate relationship to the duke of Bavaria, a powerful neighbouring ruler. While the hereditary principle counted for something in the Lombard succession, the ease with which candidates from other houses were elected shows that there was nothing approaching a divine right to rule within the membership of a particular family.
The Lombards who entered Italy in 568 under Alboin’s leadership were not numerous: they were accompanied by numbers of Saxon and Bulgar auxiliaries. They came by the head of the Adriatic, where Aquileia marked the coast both as port and, by contemporary term, patriarchate, with the old Roman limes running north to Forum Julii (the Lombard Friuli or Cividale). From Aquileia, a road ran to Padua, Mantua, Cremona and Pavia, along the line of the Po, while another road ran to Theoderic’s Verona and up the valley of the Adige to Trent and the Brenner. From Aquileia again a coast road ran south, crossing the mouths of the Po and its confluents, to Ravenna, there meeting the old Via Flaminia; the Via Flaminia had come across Italy from Rome, crossing the Apennines by the hill town of Spoleto. From Rome the old road ran south through the Campagna, skirting the Cas-sinese mount and monastery, to Benevento, perched up in a pass in the Apennines and commanding the passage both to the heel and toe of Italy. The Lombard piecemeal settlement was conditioned by strategic needs, and the lie of the old Roman roads.
Lombard rule in Italy lasted for about 200 years, from 568 to 774, and never succeeded in ousting the Greeks from the maritime regions and great seaports, while the subjugation of the Latin provincials was only completed in 680, by the truce concluded between Perctarit and Constans II, which gave Perctarit authority over Rome itself. The protracted struggle with the Greeks, intermarriage, and the final accession of the Lombards to Christianity explain the preponderance of Greek influence on the new settlers. Latin leadership in Italy, the remnants of the Latin senatorial class, had been destroyed in the Gothic wars; the provincials looked for defence, at least in the first part of the Lombard settlement, to imperial aid, and though the problem of the defence of the east Byzantine frontier was even more pressing on the emperors than the defence of Italy, such help was sometimes given. Greek forces were sometimes sent, though never in sufficient numbers, and Greek military officers led the citizen militias in the last periods of Lombard conquest. The old imperial culture and tradition that had opposed or sought to shape the Ostrogoths in Italy had been Latin; that which fought and influenced the Lombards was Greek. The stream of east Mediterranean and African refugees to Italy after the Arab conquests increased the Byzantine influence, particularly as regards ecclesiastical art and liturgy.
The chief source of our knowledge of Lombard origins and history, down to the reign of Liutprand, is the Historia Langobardorum of Paul the Deacon, himself a Lombard and one of the outstanding scholars patronized by Charles the Great. He had certain earlier written records to use in his history, and he was familiar with the old tales and heroic poetry of his people. He was educated at Lombard Pavia, lived for a time at the court of king Ratchis, and for a longer period at that of duke Arichis at Bene-vento. Already he had some scholarship and was engaged in historical study: he wrote a Historia Romana based on Eutropius. In 775 he entered Monte Cassino and became a monk, writing a commentary on the Benedictine rule, and studying the history of his own house.
About this time (he wrote later of the period of duke Ariulf of Benevento’s death, at the setting up of the duchy of Benevento), the coenobium of our blessed father Benedict, situated on Monte Cassino, was by night attacked by the Lombards. They plundered everything, but not a single monk did they take, according to the prophecy of the venerable father Benedict, which he had foreseen of old, and by which he said: ‘Scarcely have I been able to obtain from God, that the lives of all in this place should be spared to me.’ The monks fled to Rome from this place, taking with them the book of the holy rule, which the aforesaid father had composed, and certain other writings, and the weight and measure for the daily allowance of bread and wine, and whatever household furniture they could take with them. And after blessed Benedict Constantine and after him Simplicius, and after him Vitalis and lastly Bonitus ruled their congregation, under whom this destruction was accomplished.
In 782, when Paul was already a scholar of note, he went to the land of the Franks, to supplicate Charles’s pardon for his brother, implicated in a Lombard rebellion in 776. He was received with honour by Charles, and stayed for some years in the region of the Moselle, writing a Gesta episcoporum Mettensium. He returned to Monte Cassino in 786 and there wrote the Historia Langobardorum, continuing it to the death of Liutprand in 744. At Charles’s suggestion he wrote also a book of homilies. He died in 799.
The period of Lombard rule in Italy has three phases: that of the first conquests and ten years’ anarchy or kinglessness: the middle period of struggle for power between king and dukes: and the last century of Lombard rule, when relations between the Byzantine and Lombard states in Italy had become more or less settled, Byzantine churches were being built again, Byzantine art-forms copied and the Lombard conquerors were becoming fused with the Latin provincials in religion and society.
In the first phase, from 568 to 584, Alboin led the tribal farae to Aquileia, from which the Greek patriarch retired to the little island of Grado, just to the south. They took Friuli to the north and Verona in the Lombard plain; in 569 they took Milan and in 570 advanced into the Tuscan plain; in 572 they took Pavia. Each tribe settled under its dux in a Roman city and its surrounding territory, and by this territorial settlement the fara lost some of its old social importance. Some thirty-five of these tribal duces reigned almost independently of the king in their own regions. In the time of this first settlement, however, two Lombard leaders left the main body of settlers in Lombardy and led expeditions to the south, each including in his followers a group of tribes; Faroald founded a great super-duchy round Spoleto and Zotto one round Benevento. It was in the course of this foundation that Zotto plundered Monte Cassino. These two great duchies, unlike the lesser ones in the north, included several Roman towns and their territories: they were from the first cut off by distance and physical barriers from royal control.
In the Lombard settlements there was no system of ‘thirding’ or of conquerors hospitati on Roman landowners, as with the Ostrogoths. The Roman landowners had largely perished in the Gothic wars, and the Lombards assumed ownership of the lands they seized. The territories of the fisc passed largely to the king; but in all these cases of expropriation the peasants, the coloni, continued to till the land as before. The Lombards during their stay in the northern Balkans had never taken to agriculture, using their conquered peasants to till the land, giving them the half-free status of aldiones. They now regarded the Italian coloni as aldiones and gave them that status. Italian farms were now more largely used for cattle-raising, and the use of the great herds of pigs the Lombards had driven with them from Pannonia; but no great change occurred in the old methods of Italian agriculture. The land, except in certain regions of the Po valley, was unsuited to the use of the Germanic long plough.
As to the civil magistrates: the old curial ordo of the towns tended to lose power, under the direction of the Lombard dux, though Gregory I’s letters dealing with the election of bishops normally ordered that the ordo should be consulted. The Catholic clergy were also expropriated in favour of the Arians, or fled. As the patriarch of Aquileia had for long to reside in Grado, so archbishop Honoratus of Milan had to withdraw to Genoa when Alboin captured his city, and his successors continued to reside there.
Alboin ruled for only three years and six months after the invasion and was then assassinated. When he had conquered the Gepids, back in the Balkans, he had killed their king and married his daughter Rosamund. Paul the Deacon, familiar with Lombard heroic poetry, relates the story of the murder of Alboin through his wife’s vengeance for her father’s death.
When he had sat longer than was fitting at a banquet in Verona, he ordered the queen to drink from a cup made from the skull of king Cunimund his ally: he invited her ‘to drink merrily with her father’. And lest this tale should seem incredible, I say, to show that I speak the truth, that I have seen that cup on a certain feast day and prince Ratchis (at Milan) holding it in his hand and showing it to his guests. The queen therefore conceived a deep hatred in her heart, and plotted with Helmechis, his armour-bearer and foster-brother, to kill him.
Alboin was succeeded, not by Helmechis, but by Cleph, who ruled till he too was assassinated in 574. After this, the nobles decided that no king was necessary: and in the ten years that followed without any central rule the Byzantine cause recovered.
When the Lombards had escaped from the Avars into Italy, only needing henceforth to fight them in the march of Friuli, the Byzantine emperor was left to contend with them in the Balkans. In 570 the Byzantines, however, made a peace with the Avars, and in 575 sent Baduarius as exarch to lead an expedition to reconquer Italy; he landed near Naples and was killed in battle. The emperor Maurice (582–602) now installed an exarch permanently in Ravenna, with the title also of patrician: he was commander-in-chief and had a superiority over all civil magistrates. His forces were not, however, numerous, and could only hold the walled towns, civitates and castra. Maurice, further, bought the alliance of the Frankish Childebert, king of Austrasia, for 50,000 gold coins, and in 584, 585, 588 and 590 the Franks invaded Italy, without much success. The Byzantines, however, got back Classis, the port of Ravenna, taken by the duke of Spoleto, in 579.
The second phase of Lombard history begins with the decision of the Lombard nobles to restore the monarchy, and should be seen against the background of relative Byzantine success. In 584 the dukes recognized Authari, son of Cleph, as king, and the Byzantine reconquest was halted. In 590, the year of Gregory I’s election, Agilulf, duke of Turin, was elected king, and held the throne till his death in 616. His reign was important: for he married the Catholic princess Theodelinda, daughter of the Bavarian duke whose territory stretched down to meet his own at Trent; and he undertook and inspired the dukes to undertake fresh wars against the Byzantines. Arichis, duke of Benevento, threatened Naples; Ariulf of Spoleto marched against Rome in 592, and in 593 Agilulf himself took Perugia and besieged Rome. Pope Gregory made a truce with him, promising, as with Byzantine civil authority, a tribute of 500 pounds of gold a year: terms which the exarch refused to ratify.
For five years the civil war continued, till in 598 Maurice, in difficulties with the Slavs and Avars, sent a new exarch Callinicus, to make an armistice through Gregory’s mediations; Agilulf gave up Perugia and withdrew north. With the arrival of a new exarch, however, war began again, and to Lombard advantage; in 602 Padua was taken and Byzantine communications blocked between Ravenna and Istria; Mantua and Cremona fell, and soon Agilulf was again threatening Rome herself. He died, however, in 616.
After ten years’ rule by Theodelinda’s son Adaloald, the succession passed to a duke of Turin, and in 636 to another notable king, Rothari, duke of Brescia, whose long reign lasted till 652. He married Gundeberga, daughter of Theodelinda, issued a written code of law, and re-opened the offensive against the Byzantines. The imperial army was beaten near Modena, and Genoa fell in 652; a truce followed.
The next two reigns saw a period of Lombard consolidation, both religious and political. Aribert I (652–661) conciliated both the provincials and the Byzantines, and authorized the official conversion of the kingdom to Catholicism: the endowment and building of churches and monasteries, the re-assumption of Greco-Roman culture, could now begin. The old liberal arts began to be taught again in Milan. The next king, Grimoald, duke of Bene-vento (662–671) carried through a policy of subjecting the more independent duchies to himself: Spoleto, Friuli and Benevento now became an administrative part of the Lombard kingdom.
The Byzantine empire in the seventh century was too concerned to defend itself, first against the Persians and then against the Arabs, to be able to defend its possessions in Italy. In the reign of Heraclius (610–641) the tribute from Italy was not paid and an exarch was massacred. In Rome, and even in Naples, the defence and even the civil government of the ‘duchies’ was entrusted by the pope to officials of his own naming. Italy was becoming more cut off from Byzantium, and under the stress of opposition to the Monothelite policy of the emperors, increasingly hostile. Martin I (see p. 218) condemned the Monothelite position and died an exile in the Crimea in 657. When Constans II undertook a fresh expedition in 663 for the reconquest of Italy, it was defeated by Grimoald, who proceeded to drive the Greeks even from the heel of Italy, where they had for so long controlled the entrance to the Adriatic. Grimoald took Taranto, Brindisi and almost the whole of Calabria. Before Grimoald’s death, Constans II made further efforts to re-establish the Byzantine position; he made the last appearance of a Greek emperor in Rome in 665. He constituted the bishop of Ravenna a metropolitan to balance the effective power of the pope, and he sought to restrain the Arabs from landing in Sicily. When he was assassinated in 668, the Arabs attacked Sicily for the second time, and Constans’ successor was responsible for its defence. Possible danger from the Arabs might have led to cooperation between Lombards and Byzantines: but the Lombard kingdom in the north was slow to recognize the danger in the south from the Arabs.
King Grimoald was succeeded by Perctarit (671’688), who resumed the offensive against the Greeks. In 680 peace was formally made between Perctarit and the Greeks, on the basis of acknowledgment of the status quo, and renunciation by the Lombards of any further policy of conquest.
The third phase in Lombard history, that of victory and consolidation, is marked by the long reign of Liutprand (713–744). Just when there was possible danger to the popes that a strong Lombard king would seek to relegate the papacy to a position of mere equality with his own metropolitans of Milan and Ravenna, the military weakness of the Greeks (rather than the troubles over Iconoclasm) deprived the papacy of the possibility of balancing the emperor against the Lombards. Liutprand had military successes: he took Bologna in 728 and in 732 even entered, though he could not hold, Ravenna. In 739 he besieged Rome, and the Byzantines could send no military help to the pope, Gregory III. In these dangers, Gregory made an appeal for aid to the old ally of the Greeks against the Lombards, the Franks. He sent to Charles Martel, offering to transfer to him the allegiance he owed to the eastern emperor: but Charles Martel, who had received Lombard help against the Saracens, would send no aid. The immediate danger passed when Liutprand withdrew: but the papal appeal to the Franks was a portent.
Liutprand was succeeded in 744 by the weaker Ratchis, who ruled for five years and was succeeded by Aistulf (749–756). Aistulf proved a strong and vigorous king: he took Ravenna in 751 and permanently overthrew the exarchate; the great Greco-Roman stronghold in the north was lost, and the papal patrimony strung out along the Via Flaminia lay open to attack. Aistulf proceeded to seize the patrimony, and even to claim authority over the duchy of Rome.
It was in this acute danger that pope Stephen III, elected by the anti-Lombard party, negotiated with Pepin for an invitation to visit him and Frankish envoys to accompany him. In the autumn of 753 the Frankish duke Autchar and bishop Chrodegang of Metz, referendary to Pepin before his consecration (see p. 62), arrived at Rome with the invitation. Pope Stephen, with an imperial ambassador to accompany him, set out for Francia via Pavia; he sought from Aistulf the restoration of the exarchate, was refused, and accorded a reluctant permission to travel on to Pepin’s court. The Greek envoy returned to Rome and Stephen and his party in 753 crossed the Alps into Burgundy, where they were met by another duke and abbot Fulrad of Saint-Denis, the great royal abbey of the Merovingians adjoining Paris. Pepin and his two sons came to meet them on the feast of the Epiphany, 754, Pepin prostrating himself before the pope and leading his horse by the bridle, a ceremonial recognition of spiritual or secular superiority. For the rest of the winter Stephen stayed at Saint-Denis, and at Easter he met the king and his Frankish nobles at the royal villa of Quierzy and besought military help against the Lombards. At midsummer, 754, he crowned and anointed Pepin as king of the Franks, confirming the earlier coronation by Boniface in 751, and he crowned with him his two sons, Charles and Carloman, bestowing on Pepin the title of patrician of the Romans.
By what authority he did this is not quite clear, nor is the scope of the title. It is clear, however, that the rite of anointing, as when Samuel took a vial of oil and poured it upon the head of Saul, telling him that the Lord had anointed him to be captain of his inheritance, king instead of the old judges of Israel (1 Sam. X. i), was meant to consecrate a new departure and a new dynasty. It is clear further that, in the weakened condition of Byzantine rule in Italy, earlier popes than Stephen had appointed secular and military officers to the ‘duchies’: pope Honorius I (625–640) had provided for the government of Naples by appointing a magister militum and a notary, and other popes had been required by the emperor to undertake secular responsibilities in Rome and south Italy. Moreover, the title patrician was used at the date both by the recent exarchs at Ravenna and the duces of Rome; it is likely that Stephen’s conferment of the title ‘patrician of the Romans’ denoted the limited, contemporary use of patrician, rather than its larger, unlimited use as in the time of Theoderic, nearly three hundred years earlier. In any case, Stephen made Pepin the special protector of the Roman duchy and see. The title was henceforth always used in papal letters to the Frankish king and princes.
The results of this visit were in the end to prove fatal to the Lombard kingdom, and the immediate effect was an Italian expedition of Pepin in 754; the Frankish army escorted the pope back through the Mont Cenis to Lombardy. Aistulf was defeated before the arrival of the main force and retreated to Pavia, where he consented to an unfavourable peace. He acknowledged Pepin as overlord and promised to surrender Ravenna and his other conquests to the pope. Stephen then returned to Rome.
A fresh expedition of the Franks in 756 was needed to enforce the surrenders reluctantly agreed to by Aistulf; and this time the exarchate and the keys of the once captured towns of the patrimony were in effect delivered to Stephen. Moreover, when Aistulf was killed, when out hunting, it was by the aid of Stephen and Frankish influence that Desiderius, duke of Tuscany, was elected king, under oath to make further restitution of Lombard conquests. A policy of acquiescence in Frankish conquest and papal guidance, however, could not be popular with the Lombards; papal independence and Lombard predominance in the peninsula could scarcely be reconciled. Pope Stephen died a year after Desiderius’ election, in 757, but his brother Paul succeeded him as pope, and a strong anti-Lombard party persisted among the Roman clergy. Desiderius himself ruled uneasily and without restoring all the lands claimed by the papacy, from 756 till the subjugation of the Lombard kingdom by Charlemagne in 774.
Lombard society and institutions had assumed their characteristic Greco-Germanic forms in the reigns of Liutprand, Aistulf and Desiderius (from 713 till 774): before that period of reconciliation the civil wars had prevented the fusion of hostile populations and the local development of literature and the arts. The Lombard kings, still adding Flavius to the royal title, were now not only war-leaders, but guardians of the peace and justiciars. The official title of their court was the Byzantine sacrum palatium, and their writing office consisted of the usual notaries headed by a Lombard noble, the referendary; they had a mayor of the palace, like the Franks (see p. 300), a marshal and a sword-bearer. Their councillors, companions (comites), capable of being used as envoys or for local rule, were the Germanic gasindi (a parallel of the Anglo-Saxon gesiths), and, by this final period, they were using their local estate agents, rulers of their demesne, their praepositi or gastaldi, also in local government. The royal revenue came mainly from the landed demesnes, of which the most important groups were those round Pavia, Milan and Monza. No Roman direct tax was imposed, but Roman tolls and customs were still taken. Some gold and silver money was at first coined by the Lombard kings: but the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean, diminishing the supply of the precious metals, made currency scarce in the last century of Lombard rule.
Lombard society, as at first settled, was tribal: the centenarius of the early settlement seems to have been a military group leader. The different classes had their wergelds, as with the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian races, and the aldiones, bound to the soil by hereditary tenure, continued to till the land. There was no Lombard agriculture or industry, though Lombard craftsmen from the beginning produced brooches and metal work, and later began to undertake building and sculpture.
The primitive, Germanic nature of Lombard society is to be inferred from their law, which, even when coded by Rothari some eighty years after the settlement, still rested on Germanic foundations. In Rothari’s Edict (643) the chief still exercised a mundium or mund over his men, a kind of protective, personal jurisdiction not entailing military service. The Lombard kings strove to supersede the old blood feud, which was still legal as between different families, by a system of wers and bots. Nevertheless, Rothari’s Edict differs from the laws of Æthelberht of Kent as showing the influence of Roman law, and this became stronger under Grimoald and Liutprand, mainly through the use of written deeds. Liutprand allowed the disposition of land by gift at death, and in donations to churches and monasteries. The influence of Roman law was the stronger in that it was used by the provincials among themselves. In the fused society of the eighth century the Lombards adopted, with the law, the language, customs and clothes of the much more numerous Greco-Roman provincials.
Lombard art and architecture, similarly, was transformed slowly from the Germanic to the Byzantine, and, in the case of decoration and art-forms, a Byzantine not uninfluenced by more eastern elements, Syrian and Arabic. The northern animal-ornament was used by the Lombards in Italy, and the brooches of the grave-finds parallel those of the Visigoths, Franks and Anglo-Saxons: specimens are displayed for comparison with the Sutton Hoo ornaments and the Kingston brooch, for instance in the King Edward galleries of the British Museum. Many radiate brooches have been found, with kerbschnitt ornament and the stylized horse’s head at the end of the plate: the head becoming more and more stylized and subhuman. The heavy square-ended brooches, the equal armed brooches, and the S-shaped brooch with the biting animal ends are also paralleled by Anglo-Saxon finds: and the round brooches with cloisonné work and those decorated with large stones in raised settings also offer parallels to Anglo-Saxon round brooches, though their workmanship is clumsier. The buckles, shield bosses and swords compare with those of Sutton Hoo; but for the Lombard earrings, with their complex dropped pendants, and the gold crosses from the cemeteries of Nocera Umbra and Castel Trosino with their elaborate interlace, there are no Anglo-Saxon parallels.
The later Lombard art and art-forms survive rather in stone buildings and marble sculpture, capitals and altar slabs, than in metal work. Circular churches were indeed built from the early period of the Lombard conversion, but they were few in number: outstanding Lombard work is later. The round church of St Salvatore at Bagano was apparently built before 600, and seems to belong to the time of Theodelinda: its centralized plan and central dome show the persistence of Byzantine influence in spite of the crudity of the masonry. Basilican churches were also built between 600 and 774, as that of St Stephen at Pavia, with its nave and four aisles; that of St Peter of the Ciel d’Oro at Pavia had capitals of excellent work. Raised choirs were already used, as in the church of St Saviour at Ravenna, with its crypt beneath. But though these Lombard buildings were in plan similar to those of the Christian east and west, the ornament of sarcophagi, lintels and panelled spaces developed a rich, distinctive style. Not only did the Roman vine scroll and rosette ornament persist, but the early interlace and plant trail developed into the arabesque, under eastern influence: and the early Germanic animal ornament became the typical Lombard peacock, lambs and deer, and the fantastic lions, eagles, griffins, dolphins, hippocamps and other kinds of sea monsters. Winged griffins and birds with Sassanian collars show unmistakable east Mediterranean influence, while the stucco figures of Santa Maria in Valle, Cividale, with their stiff-folded drapery, are beautiful pieces of work in the strictly Byzantine style. Though the eighth century was one in which Rome and Constantinople were becoming politically farther and farther apart, Italy was now peculiarly subject to Mediterranean influence, through the crowd of Greek, Syrian and Armenian refugees who fled to her in consequence of the Arab conquests.
Paul the Deacon’s references to Lombard churches are of interest. He writes of one:
And about the same time queen Theodelinda dedicated the basilica of St John Baptist, which she had built in Modicia, which is about twelve miles from Milan, and she adorned it with many ornaments of gold and silver and endowed it with sufficient lands. Now in this place Theoderic, once king of the Goths, had built a summer palace, so that he might dwell more pleasantly and healthfully *here in the summer, because it was near to the Alps, Here too the aforesaid queen built herself a palace in which she had certain of the deeds of the Lombards depicted. It was clearly to be seen in this picture, how the Lombards at that time used to shave their hair, and what clothing they used. From the top of the head down to the nape they used to shave, but to have the hair round the face flowing long, and divided in the front of the forehead. They wore loose garments, generally of linen, even as the Anglo-Saxons are wont to have, and these are adorned with broad woven borders, stitched in various colours.
For the papacy, the Lombard period was one of danger finally surmounted. The conquering Lombards threatened the Italian hierarchy by devastating the civitates and sweeping away, often, both bishop and familia: many of the letters of pope Gregory I deal with the election of a new bishop or the re-establishment of a familia. Moreover, the hunger of the populace and the number of war captives called upon a paternal episcopate to feed, visit and redeem: and such calls were most clamant on the holder of Peter’s see, the papa (father) par excellence; Gregory I notably rose to the call. Making provision for such needs was strictly within the vocation of the Christian pater familias.
The second danger, that to papal independence, came from both Lombards and the eastern emperors, and this too was notably surmounted, though not without incurring future dangers from the Carolingian empire, and its medieval successors. From the Lombards, the danger was political and material; from the Byzantine empire, political and doctrinal. In the event, and through the Arab conquests of the two other Petrine sees Antioch and Alexandria, Rome came to hold a unique position in the church, in fact as well as in claim. Pope Leo I in the fifth century claimed for the see of Peter a magistral supremacy, a doctrinal authority, as clearly as did any medieval pope later: but the political position of Leo differed from that of the Caroline pope, Hadrian I, who recognized no political superiority in either Lombard king or eastern emperor. While it is true that under the protection and rule of Charlemagne himself, the pope was regarded and even treated almost as a Frankish metropolitan, as almost under the Germanic mund of the new emperor, and the gain to papal independence was masked: yet Charles’s undivided imperium passed to his warring successors, and Rome suffered no permanent Frankish dominance. The foundations of the political independence of the papacy were laid in the Lombard period, when the popes could balance the Lombards in the north against the Greeks in the east and south.
The main landmarks in the growth of papal independence were as follows:
The papacy of Gregory I (see p. 178), who carried through his policy of peace with the Lombards against Byzantine wishes, opposed the emperor Maurice on more than one occasion, but continued always to address him as his humble servant and subject.
The conversion of the Lombards from Arianism through the efforts of Theodelinda and Gundeberga and the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in Lombardy in the year 680; this subjected the whole of Italy again to the apostolic see. Though Celtic missionaries had aided in the conversion of Lombardy, St Columbanus founding the Lombard monastery of Bobbio at the beginning of the seventh century, by the help of a still Arian Agilulf, Celtic influence caused no hindrance to the acceptance of Catholic order, or the supremacy of the papacy. Lombard kings and dukes helped in the founding of monasteries other than Celtic: a duke of Benevento helped re-establish Monte Cassino and Liutprand and the duke of Spoleto founded the famous Lombard monastery of Farfa. In Lombardy as elsewhere at the time, the foundation of monasteries aided conversion, furthered the growth of written learning, the Greco-Roman arts, and the influence of the papacy, which since the days of Gregory I had become the protector of monks.
The Monothelite controversy, however, issued in a grave discomfiture for the papacy—nothing less than the formal condemnation of a pope on the explicit ground of heresy. Pope Honorius (who reigned from 625 to 638) in reply to a formal query from the patriarch Sergius (see p. 218) eliciting his judgment on the disputed doctrine, had solemnly responded in an unmistakably Monothelite sense. When in 680, during the pontificate of pope Agatho, the emperor Constantine IV summoned what became the Sixth Oecumenical Council, at Constantinople, the assembled bishops, in accepting a list of Monothelites to be condemned, sent by Agatho, added, with good reason, the name of Honorius, which he had discreetly forgotten to include. Modern apologists for Honorius have evolved a theory that the council condemned Honorius ‘not as a heretic, but as the supporter of heretics’, but the distinction is a purely fictitious one, and it would certainly have been quite incomprehensible to the men of the seventh century. Furthermore, pope Leo II, who confirmed the acts of the council, Agatho having died in the meantime, added a further denunciation of his unfortunate predecessor, explicitly accusing him of having defiled the hitherto spotless faith of the Roman see.
The papal struggle with the Iconoclast emperors, on the other hand, not only succeeded but led to the final emancipation of the popes from the imperial control: it was another landmark in the growth of papal power. In 726 the emperor Leo III forbade image-worship by an imperial edict, and in reaction Venetia and the Pentapolis rose against the exarch, expelled their local Byzantine dukes, and replaced them with elected dukes: all this without papal intervention. In 729 Gregory III, a strong opponent of Iconoclasm, became pope, the last to receive imperial confirmation; he excommunicated the Iconoclasts in a synod of 731. In return, the emperor Leo III removed the dioceses of Illyria, Crete (the Balkans), Sicily and Calabria from the papal jurisdiction and transferred them to that of the patriarch of Constantinople: he also confiscated papal patrimonies in those regions. The breach between pope and emperor seemed to be complete: in 739 Gregory III made his appeal for help to Charles Martel. Two years before the collapse of the Lombard kingdom the notable pope Hadrian I was elected, and he changed the official style for the dating of papal letters by the years of the reign of the Byzantine emperor, and since there was as yet no other, substituted the words: Regnante Domino nostro Iesu Christo. The way was cleared for the papal coronation and anointing of a new emperor: even as Samuel had anointed Saul, and Stephen III had anointed Pepin.
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