The Lombard invasion of Byzantine Italy in 568 was a pivotal event in Venetian history. The invasion and the conquests that followed, led to an increased importance of the lagoon settlements, to a slow demise of Byzantine control in north-east Italy, to the establishment of a semi-independent church in the lagoons, and ultimately to Venetian statehood.
Links
History Wallks
External
- History of the Langobards by Paul the Deacon, translated by William Dudley Foulke (1906)
- Liber Pontificalis, translated by Louise Ropes Loomis (1916)
Transcript
Episode 29 — The Lombard Invasion
So, who were the Lombards — or the Longobardi or Langobardi, literally the long-bearded people — and how and why did they end up in Italy?
To answer these questions, we need to back up a bit, at least to where we left off in episode 27 about the letter of Cassiodorus to the maritime people, from 537, and maybe a bit more.
To recapitulate, the last western Roman emperor was deposed in 476 by Odoacer, who in turn was replaced in 493 by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoth.
The Ostrogoth established a kingdom in Italy, and initially the Eastern Roman Empire let it pass. However, in 535, they invaded, led by Belisarius, in what became known as the Gothic Wars.
The first phase of the Gothic wars ended with Byzantine victory in 540, when Belisarius took Ravenna and captured king Witiges.
This was where the chronological part of episode 27 ended.
It was only the first phase, though. The Ostrogoths soon regrouped around a new able king, Totila, who took most of the peninsula back again.
The Byzantine response was to send an army over from the Balkans, under the leadership of Narses.
Narses was a high-ranking court eunuch — this was a thing at the time — with the title of patrician. He was also around 70 years old at the time.
He was a skilled commander, but he might have been chosen because his age and condition meant he couldn’t pose much of a threat to the power balance in Constantinople.
The Byzantine troops arrived in 551, passing through Pannonia, where the Lombards had settled a few years earlier.
There can be little doubt that Narses knew, or at least met, Alduin, king of the Lombards.
Within a few years, Narses had defeated the last Ostrogoth kings, and nominally taken the Italian peninsula back for the empire.
Some Frankish kings, however, saw an opportunity, and invaded from the west, but they too were defeated by Narses.
In 554, Narses was in Rome, seeing to the restoration of the former imperial capital, while Byzantine forces were mopping up pockets of resistance.
Emperor Justinian sent over the Pragmatic Sanctions, an imperial decree re-establishing imperial legal and administrative control over the peninsula.
Narses is sometimes referred to as the first Exarch of Byzantine Italy, even if the Exarchate of Ravenna was only formally established after the death of Narses.
According to Paul the Deacon, Narses had asked Alduin of the Lombards to supply a contingent of troops for the wars, which Alduin did.
Paul the Deacon ascribed this to the next king Alboin, son of Alduin, but the chronology doesn’t add up.
Despite Paul’s error, the Lombard participation in the second phase of the Gothic Wars is certain, and there were Lombard troops in the Byzantine army at the Battle of Taginae against Totila in 552.
At the eve of the Lombard invasion in 568, the situation in Italy was therefore one of mostly Byzantine control of, if not all, at least most of the Italian peninsula.
The invitation
So why did the Lombards invade Italy?
They had settled in Pannonia by agreement with the empire, just a few decades earlier.
They were foederati — a non-Roman people, living within the empire by agreement, and supplying troops to the empire on request.
Paul the Deacon recounts a story, which might not be very likely, but it became very popular and a staple of most later Venetian chronicles.
Whether the story is true or not, it did become part of the Venetian narrative of why and how Venice came about, and it is therefore interesting.
The story is as follows, based on Paul the Deacon’s version, with a few excursions to other sources.
Narses had been appointed by Justinian the Great, who had started the Gothic Wars in 535.
Justinian died in 565 and was succeeded by his nephew Justin II, whose wife Sophia became empress.
While Justinian had let Narses rule Italy as he pleased, Justin and Sophia resented his wealth and power. They claimed to have received a petition from Italy, which accused Narses of being an unjust ruler.
The petition was, according to the Historia Langobardorum by Paul the Deacon (chapter III.5):
It would be advantageous for the Romans to serve the Goths rather than the Greeks wherever the eunuch Narses rules and oppresses us with bondage, and of these things our most devout emperor is ignorant: Either free us from his hand or surely we will betray the city of Rome and ourselves to the heathens.
The Ostrogoths were Arians — not orthodox Christians — which is why they’re called heathens here.
When confronted with this complaint, Narses simply replied:
If I have wronged the Romans, I will suffer.
This — still according to Paul the Deacon — angered the emperor so much that he sent the prefect Longinus to Italy to replace Narses.
When Narses heard of this, he was alarmed, and the more so because the empress Sophia sent him a rather nasty message.
Her letter said on his return to Constantinople, he would be assigned to the groups of women making yarn and weaving in the palace, in the sense that as a eunuch, he was more woman than man.
This was a message to a highly accomplished general, who was in his 70s or 80s.
Another source reports that she sent him a golden spindle and the message that in the future he would rule over wool-workers and not over nations.
In any case, that in turn got Narses angry, and he replied that he would weave her such as web as she would never see the end of it.
Paul the Deacon described his reaction this way:
Therefore, greatly racked by hate and fear, he withdrew to Naples, a city of Campania, and soon sent messengers to the nation of the Langobards, urging them to abandon the barren fields of Pannonia and come and take possession of Italy, teeming with every sort of riches. At the same time he sent many kinds of fruits and samples of other things with which Italy is well supplied, whereby to attract their minds to come.
So, according to this story, Narses invited the Lombards to Italy because he fell out of favour with the emperor, and in particular, with the empress.
This is not something Paul the Deacon made up, as the story can be traced back to shortly after the Lombard invasion.
The Frankish so-called Chronicle of Fredegar, which ends in 642 or 658, recounts the story, but without the detail of sending gifts from Italy to the Lombards.
Likewise, Isidore of Seville, whose chronicle ends in 615, has the simpler story without the gifts.
The origin of these accounts is probably the Liber Pontificalis — the Book of the Popes — for John III (who ruled 561-574), a text which most likely dates to the 580s.
Then the Romans, inspired by malice, sent an accusation to Justinian and Sophia, saying: “It were better for the Romans to serve the Goths than the Greeks, for Narses, the eunuch, governs us and reduces us to slavery; and our most devout prince is ignorant of it. Either free us from his hand or we and the city of Rome will serve the Gentiles.”
When Narses heard this he said: “If I have done evil to the Romans may evil fall on me!”
Then Narses departed from Rome and went to Campania and wrote to the tribe of the Lombards that they might come and possess Italy.
But when Pope John learned that the Romans had sent an accusation against Narses to the emperor he went hastily to Naples. And Pope John began to entreat Narses to return to Rome.
Then Narses said: “Tell me, most holy Father, what evil have I done to the Romans? I shall go back to the feet of him that sent me and all Italy shall know how I have toiled for her with all my strength.”
Pope John answered and said: “I myself shall go to him sooner than you shall leave this land.”
And Narses returned to Rome with the most holy pope John.
This translation is by Louise Ropes Loomis, 1916.
So we get very close — a few decades after the alleged events — but other almost contemporaneous chroniclers don’t report on the treason.
Both Marius Aventicensis, who died in 596, and Gregory of Tours, who died in 594, wrote about the Lombard invasion of Italy, but make no mention of an invitation from Narses.
Add to that, that the whole story of the treason of Narses is contradicted by the very same sources that reported it.
Paul the Deacon later wrote, corresponding to a year between 571 and 573:
Narses indeed returned from Campania to Rome and there not long afterwards, departed from this life, and his body, placed in a leaden casket, was carried with all his riches to Constantinople.
The Liber Pontificalis has this, after the meeting between Narses and pope John III:
But Narses entered Rome and after a long time he died. And his body was laid in a leaden coffin and was carried with all his riches to Constantinople.
This would hardly have taken place, if Narses had betrayed the empire and the emperor.
Furthermore, we know from Byzantine sources that the emperor took active part in the funeral of Narses in Constantinople, and that Narses was buried with all honours in a monastery he himself had founded there.
Would that have happened to a traitor, who had abandoned all of Italy to another people?
What this story does tell us, is that Narses had enemies in Italy, which can hardly be a surprise, given how successful, rich and powerful he had become.
The likely reason for such a complaint from the Romans to the emperor, was that Italy was in a miserable state, after decades of war and bubonic plague, yet imperial taxation didn’t relent because war and reconstruction are also expensive.
We have no way of knowing if Narses enriched himself unduly during his reign — legends of hidden treasure circulated after his death — but if his wealth ended up in Constantinople, the emperor was unlikely to be dissatisfied.
Whatever the details, Narses doesn’t appear to have been in disgrace with the imperial court at the time of this death.
Then there’s the perspective of the later Lombards.
Paul the Deacon — a later Lombard scholar and patriot — recounted the tale — and embellished it — because it was very handy from a Lombard point of view.
If the Lombards moved to Italy due to an invitation from the official Roman ruler of Italy, they had done the right and honourable thing in responding to the invitation.
In this narrative, they would be the loyal foederati, who did as their imperial overlords asked of them. Under Alduin, they had been asked to settle in Pannonia, and they had done so. Under his son Alboin, they were asked to move to Italy, and they did so.
Such a story comes across so much better than an unprovoked attack on a peaceful neighbour and subsequent land-grab.
In any case, the Lombards hardly needed those gifts of fruit and produce to be convinced that Italy was rich and fertile. Many of them had been in Italy fifteen years earlier, serving in the army of Narses against the Ostrogoth king Totila, in the early 550s.
They already knew Italy and its riches. They also knew that those riches were there for the taking, in a country wounded and depopulated by protracted wars and repeated plagues.
The people
These were times of large migrations of entire tribes around much of Europe
The Lombards had themselves moved into Pannonia just a few decades earlier. A few decades are living memory, so they knew exactly how to do it. Most of them had already done at least one major migration in their lifetime.
Italy is large, and Alboin must have known that the Lombards were too few, so he sent for the Saxons to join them. There’s a bit of uncertainty as to where they were settled at the time, but probably somewhere in southern Germany.
Paul the Deacon says the Saxons were twenty thousand men, with women and children, so most likely around fifty thousands, but as always, mediaeval numbers must always be taken with a few grains of salt.
Another people who joined the migration into Italy, albeit not exactly voluntarily, were the Gepids. They, too, had been settled by the empire in the northern Balkans, but in a war with the Lombards under Alboin, just a few years earlier, they had been utterly defeated.
In the war against the Gepids, the Lombards had been allied with the Avars (which Paul the Deacon called Huns), who lived on the opposite side of the Gepids.
The lands of the Gepids were taken over by the Avars. Many of the surviving Gepids were reduced into slavery either by the Lombards or by the Avars, or followed along the victorious Lombards because they had nothing left to stay for.
Alboin took for his wife a princess of the Gepids, after having killed her father in battle. He would pay dearly for that decision later.
The people invading Italy were therefore a rather mixed group, made up of several tribes. There were at least Lombards, Saxons and some Gepids in the group.
If, for a second, we accept the numbers of Paul the Deacon, and assume the Lombards were the largest group, as they retained leadership uncontested, we’re talking of well over a hundred thousand persons: men, women and children.
Departure
Once everything and everybody was ready, the Lombards handed over their homes and lands to the Avars.
They had struck a deal that the Avars, who had already occupied the lands of the Gepids, would also take Pannonia, on the condition that, if the endeavour should fail and the Lombards return, they would return in possession of their former homes and lands.
The group left Pannonia on the day after Easter.
They came out of it [Pannonia] in the month of April in the first indiction on the day after holy Easter, whose festival that year, according to the method of calculation, fell upon the calends (the first) of April, when five hundred and sixty-eight years had already elapsed from the incarnation of our Lord.
Alboin led his people to the border of the Byzantine province of Venetia et Histria. There, they scaled a mountain and looked across the land that they were going to take.
Paul the Deacon described this process of leaving Pannonia and entering Italy in great detail, and he did that for a reason.
He was a proud Lombard, who wrote shortly after the fall of the Lombard Kingdom, which was created with these events.
He was, therefore, recounting parts of the Lombard national narrative, the creation myth of his people and country, at a time when that creation was in grave peril.
The Duchy of Friuli
The Lombards and their companions entered Italy without any opposition.
The first city they encountered was Forum Iulii — modern-day Cividale del Friuli.
These are the words of Paul the Deacon:
When Alboin without any hindrance had thence entered the territories of Venetia, which is the first province of Italy — that is, the limits of the city or rather of the fortress of Forum Julii (Cividale) — he began to consider to whom he should especially commit the first of the provinces that he had taken.
This was an important question because just as the Lombards had to pass Forum Iulii, so would any other invader. They had to secure that city to protect their back.
Alboin understood this perfectly well, as Paul the Deacon explained:
For indeed all Italy (which extends toward the south, or rather toward the southeast), is encompassed by the waves of the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic seas, yet from the west and north it is so shut in by the range of Alps that there is no entrance to it except through narrow passes and over the lofty summits of the mountains. Yet from the eastern side by which it is joined to Pannonia it has an approach which lies open more broadly and is quite level.
It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of all invasions into Italy arrived from the north-east.
Before the Lombards, the Visigoths, the Huns and the Ostrogoths had used that road in the 400s, Narses with his army in the mid-500s and now the Lombards.
Alboin entrusted his nephew Gisulf with guarding the rear, and he was given as many people and horses and the authority needed to become the first Duke of Friuli.
The Duchy of Friuli would remain an important part of the future Kingdom of the Lombards, but over time many more duchies would be established.
The name Friuli, which is now used for the Italian region, is but a contraction of the Roman name Forum Iulii.
Venetia
According to Paul the Deacon, Narses died at this time, but his successor Longinus was probably already in Italy.
The train of people, horses and carts continued along the road, as before, unopposed.
From the Byzantine world, there was no reaction.
When the Lombards arrived at the river Piave, which is about 100km from Forum Iulii, they finally met somebody.
Felix, the bishop of Treviso, had come to meet Alboin, who — as Paul the Deacon recounts — generously granted him all the lands and properties which the church of Treviso already possessed.
Granting the bishop of Treviso everything he already had might not seem much, but it was important.
Alboin could have taken everything. He could have killed the bishop right there.
At this time the Lombards were still Arians, not orthodox Christians, and there might have been parts of the group, which still held the ancient Germanic beliefs.
Such a sign of respect of the established church was important, and might have made the further progress of the Lombards easier.
On the other side, it must have taken quite a bit of courage for the bishop to head out of the fortified city and confront the invaders unarmed. He could easily have become an saint that day, but he didn’t.
Treviso later became a Lombard duchy.
Continuing, still unopposed, Alboin took possession of many of the major fortified cities of Byzantine Venetia, including Verona and Vicenza, but not Padua, Monselice and Mantua.
Paul the Deacon doesn’t offer any explanation as to why Alboin didn’t take Padua, Monselice and Mantua, so we’re left at guessing.
My impression is that he tried to move as fast as possible while the Byzantines were unprepared, occupying the cities which surrendered quickly, while leaving the others for later.
Alboin probably expected some kind of Byzantine counter-attack, and the more fortified cities he held, the better he could defend his conquest, even if there were some pockets behind the lines.
He also had plenty of people and horses, while Italy was tired and weary from decades of war and plague. He could therefore dominate the countryside to a larger extent than the Byzantines were capable of.
In late 569, Alboin moved on, towards Liguria, which then included large parts of what we now call Lombardy.
It almost goes without saying, that the name Lombardy only came into use after the Lombards established their capital in Pavia, south of Milan. It means the land of the Lombards.
The city of Pavia was where the Lombards first met determined resistance. According to Paul the Deacon, the siege of the city lasted for over three years.
Alboin, enraged by the opposition, had sworn to put everybody in the city to the sword.
However, as he passed the city gate after their surrender, his horse fell to the ground and couldn’t get up again. Seeing this as a bad omen, he rescinded his vow to kill everybody, and the horse got back up.
During the years of the siege of Pavia, Lombard troops took Tuscany, but didn’t try to move on Rome or Ravenna.
Paul the Deacon explains the lack of resistance with plague and famine:
The Romans had then no courage to resist because the pestilence which occurred at the time of Narses had destroyed very many in Liguria and Venetia, and after the year of plenty of which we spoke, a great famine attacked and devastated all Italy.
In these early years of Lombard rule in Northern Italy, the capital was in Verona, and it was here that Alboin, in 572, met an unfortunate end at the hand of his wife.
Further conquest
The Lombard expansion in Italy continued for almost two centuries, until the definitive fall of Ravenna in 751, and the end of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna.
However, not every town in Venetia was taken and held by the Lombards during the initial invasion. Parts of Venetia remained under Byzantine rule for over a century, until the territory was reduced to just the lagoon areas along the coast, the so-called Venetia Marittima.
The two Venetie
Paul the Deacon, writing in the late-700s about the late 500s, needed to explain Venetia to his readers because the Venetia of the 500s was not the same as the Venetia of the 700s.
For Venetia is composed not only of the few islands which we now call Venice, but its boundary stretches from the borders of Pannonia to the river Adda.
The first Venetia was the Roman, and later Byzantine, province of Venetia et Histria
This Venetia was large, covering the modern Italian regions of Friuli, Veneto, and parts of Lombardy. The borders of Pannonia were at Forum Iulii where the Lombards entered, and the river Adda passes the Como Lake in Lombardy, flows between Milan and Bergamo, and joins the Po river near Cremona.
These were natural borders conditioned by geography, and almost a thousand years later, these would be almost the same borders as of the Venetian Stato di Terra Ferma — the Venetian mainland dominion — which the Serenissima established in the first half of the 1400s.
Back to Paul the Deacon:
The city of Aquileia was the capital of this Venetia, in place of which is now Forum Julii (Cividale) so called because Julius Caesar had established there a market for business.
During the invasion of the Huns in 452, led by Attila, the city of Aquileia was razed to the ground.
Following that devastation, the government of the Histria part of the province moved to Forum Iulii, which also became the main Lombard stronghold in the area.
Government of the Venetia part moved to Opitergium (modern-day Oderzo), where the Byzantine Dux under the Exarchate resided for a while.
As the presence of the Lombards became more intrusive in the 600s, and Opitergium was sacked, the seat of the Dux was moved to an easier defendable settlement in a lagoon area around the estuary of the Piave, north of modern-day Venice, where the lagoon has since silted up.
The city was renamed Civitas Nova Heracleiana (modern-day Eraclea) in 628, and in 638, the bishop of Opitergium moved the seat of the bishopric there.
Heracleia was also the seat of the first Venetian doges. It was therefore the first capital of the dogado — Venetian for duchy — the proto-state of the Venetians, which became the Republic of Venice.
The name Heracleia refers to the Roman emperor Heraclius, who ruled from 610 to 641. The choice of name was a declaration of allegiance to the empire, and the lagoon remained under Constantinople, as the mainland was gradually lost.
Heracleia, and other similar lagoon settlements, are what Paul the Deacon refers to with the words “the few islands which we now call Venice”.
This movement of the Veneti people from the mainland into the lagoons will be the topic of one of the next episodes.
Just as the bishop of Opitergium moved to Heracleia, the Patriarch of Aquileia moved to Grado, and the bishop of Altino to Torcello.
The Roman-Byzantine church organisation left the mainland, now under Lombard (that is, Arian or non-Christian) control, and moved into the Venetia Marittima under Byzantine jurisdiction.
As the Lombards soon appointed their bishops in the vacated sees, this led to a schism, and to a separate Venetian church.
A separate Venetian church organisation might not sound like a big thing, but it was.
The right of investiture of the Patriarch of Grado resided with the Doge of the Venetians, which allowed the later Venetian state — whenever it was convenient — to claim ecclesiastical independence of both Rome and Constantinople.
This topic, too, is worthy of a later episode, as is the related topic of the relics of St Mark, and how that brought the origin of the apostolic succession of the Patriarchs of Grado all the way back to St Peter himself.
Bibliography
- Hodgkin, Thomas. Italy and her invaders, 553–600, Volume V, 2nd ed. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1916.
- Loomis, Louise Ropes. The book of the popes (Liber pontificalis). New York, Columbia University Press, 1916. 🔗
- Paulus : Diaconus and William Dudley Foulke (translator). History of the Langobards. New York Longmans, Green & Co., 1907. 🔗
- Paulus : Diaconus, Antonio Zanella (translator) and Bruno Luiselli. Storia dei longobardi. Milano BUR, 2000 (6th ed.).
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