MAMMA MIA!!GERMAN ITALIANS!!! DAS IST VERRÜCKT!!

By Robert Armour

Many people in the United States know about tribes. The Greek tribes or Roman tribes. Unlike those famous tribes, there were a few small ones. One of those tribes were the Lombards. The Lombards existed with the Byzantine. They even had a conflict with each other. They had a hand full of rulers. They were great and played a positive impact on the kingdom, while others were not so great and even had a negative impact.

565-584 CE

The Lombards were a Germanic tribe that invaded Italy under their king, Alboin, almost a century after the fall of the Roman Empire. He ruled over the Lombards from 565 CE to 572 CE. Originally, the Lombards came from Pannonia. Pannonia is known today as modern Western Hungary, which had been a Roman province. Alboin took the north and was later murdered, more than likely with Byzantine connivance. Cleph, Alboin’s successor, led the Lombards until he was eventually murdered. For a decade, the Lombards broke up into local duchies with no king at all.

584-605 CE

The Byzantines seem to have been partially responsible for these events too. Around this time, they didn’t have the military capacity to drive the invaders away. It was easier for the Byzantines to divide the Lombards leadership and buy some of them into the Byzantines camps. For the rest of the century, many Lombard leaders were seen to have been fighting with Byzantines. In 584 CE, facing Frankish invasions from beyond the Alis, all of the Lombard dukes elected Authari king.

Therefore, giving him considerable lands. In the process, Agilalf managed to unify the duchies of the north into a single kingdom. The first decades of the Lombard kingdom did not favor the development of a coherent political system. King Authari ensured the survival of the Lombards from the Franks and the Byzantines. The last Frankish invasion, in 590 CE. Most likely resulted in some sort of supremacy. When the wars stopped in 605 CE, Italy was divided into several pieces with boundaries.

The largest divided pieces after the war with the Byzantines and Franks was the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy and Tuscany. By the 620s CE, its capital was Pavia, which remained the capital of the north until the 11th century. Other major centers were Cividale, the capital of the Duchy of Friuli. Friuli played an important role as the Italian frontier against the Avars. Avars was a powerful military confederation of Central Asian origin that had taken over Pannonia. The two great southern duchies of the Lombards was Spoleto in the central Apennines, Benevento in the mountains, and plains of the south. They are best considered independent states; they were not connected to the Lombard kingdom geographically and seem to have developed separately. The 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 660 CEs and the 730s–760s CE

590–616 CE

King Agilulf seems to have been a pagan in his own religion, which may have been an Arian Christian. There were many Arians among the Lombards, even most of the kings between 568 CE and 652 CE. However, Aligulf’s wife and son were Catholic. Catholics were common among the Lombards as a whole from at least the 590 CEs. Germanic peoples had often been Arians in the 5th and 6th centuries but the Lombards seem to have been less committed to Arianism than were the Goths or Vandals. They abandoned it without documented struggle in the mid-7th century. Even though the Lombards don’t, 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.

749–774 CE

Aistulf followed Liutprand’s policies to their logical conclusion. He conquered Ravenna in 751 CE, ending the exarchate. He ruled in Spoleto without a Duke. In 752 CE, he began to move onto Rome, demanding tribute from the pope, but times had changed for the Lombards. In the 740s CE, the popes had become close to the rising Carolingian dynasty in Francia. In 751 CE, its head, Pippin III, was recognized as the king of the Franks by Pope Zacharias. Stephen II was faced with Aistulf’s attacks and went to the Franks and sought their military support. In 754 CE and 756 CE, 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, making this pattern was to persist. Aistulf’s successor, Desiderius, allied himself by marriage with the Franks and kept control of the southern duchies. When he also threatened Rome in 772–773 CE, the Frankish king, Charlemagne, invaded and conquered the Lombard kingdom outright, which was 773–774 CE. Italy became absorbed into the Carolingian lands right down to the border of Benevento, which remained independent.

In conclusion, the Lombard kingdom was one of Italy’s kingdoms that had to fight for their freedom after stealing others' freedom. The Lombards were a very intriguing tribe. Their rule was almost two centuries (584-774 CE.) They were one of Italy’s biggest kingdoms as well. They lasted with good and bad kings and still had great years and terrible ones. They sadly met their end to Charlemagne, the empire of the Romans.

Work cited page

“Lombards and Byzantines.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/place/Italy/Lombards-and-Byzantines.

“Aistulf.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aistulf.

“Alboin.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Sept. 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alboin#/media/File:Assassination_of_Alboin.jpg.

Dea. “Portrait of Authari, King of the Longobards, Engraving by G Scotto,...” Getty Images, https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-authari-king-of-the-longobards-engraving-by-g-news-photo/1150983580.