The invasion of the Lombards in 568 set in motion another migration. A part of the people of the Byzantine province of Venetia fled the Lombards, and headed for the areas which remained under the control of Constantinople.
A century later, the only territories not controlled by the Lombards were the lagoons from Grado in the north to Cavarzere in the south. This area was initially called Venetia Maritima, and later, the Duchy of the Venetians, or in Venetian: the dogado.
Links
History Walks
- Early Venice
- The Historia Langobardorum by Paul the Deacon
- The Lombard Invasion
- Did Narses invite the Lombards?
- Main sources for early Venice
- Kings of the Lombards
Transcript
Episode 30 — Venetia Maritima
With the invasion in 568, large parts of the Byzantine Ducatus Venetiarum — the ancient Venetia — were occupied by the Lombards.
Not the entire province, though.
The Lombard migration appears to have mostly followed the main Roman roads between the Roman cities, at a distance from the more swampy coastal areas adjacent to the lagoons.
Consequently, the cities first occupied by the invaders were along those roads, while other towns, either closer to the lagoons or easy to pass by, were left alone.
The route of the Lombards went from Forum Iulii — now Cividale del Friuli — to Aquileia — the seat of the patriarch of Roman and Byzantine Venetia et Histria — and onwards to Treviso, Ceneda — which is now Vittorio Veneto — and then inland towards Vicenza and Verona.
The following year, the Lombards proceeded into the Roman province of Liguria — much of which is now called Lombardy after the same Lombards, who later made it the centre of their kingdom.
The remains of Venetia
Following the route from Friuli to Lombardy, the bulk of the Lombard migration bypassed important parts of Venetia et Histria.
The peninsula of Istria — now in Croatia — remained Byzantine.
Likewise, the entire coastal part of Venetia was left alone, all the way down to the Po river.
The city of Opitergium — modern-day Oderzo — was not attacked. It is now a small town of 20,000 inhabitants, but at the time it was the centre of Byzantine administration in Venetia and an important bishopric.
Over a century earlier, in 452, the Huns under their ruler Attila had invaded Italy. The city of Aquileia was then the capital of Venetia et Histria, and it resisted the Huns valiantly, but was taken. Consequently, Attila had the city sacked and burned to the ground.
Aquileia remained the centre of the Church in the old province, with the seat of the patriarch, but civil administration was divided, with Histria governed from Forum Iulii and Venetia from Opitergium.
Therefore, at the time of the Lombard invasion, the Byzantine Dux Venetiarum resided in Opitergium.
The ancient Roman city of Patavium — modern-day Padua — was left behind as the Lombards moved on, and so was Monselice further south, and Mantua on a strategic crossing of the Po river.
These cities formed an initial Byzantine defensive line in the area.
The continued conquest
For the next several decades, the Lombard conquest of northern and central Italy continued, but they didn’t move on that defensive line in Venetia.
In broad strokes, in the 570s, they moved from the north-east to the north-west — current Lombardy and Piedmont — and then down the Po valley, having crossed the river upstream.
Part of the Lombards moved into Tuscany, while others moved down the Via Emilia — the ancient Roman road across the southern side of the Po valley. Here they took Parma, Modena, Bologna, Imola and many other important cities.
The Byzantines, seeing the Lombards close in on both Rome and Ravenna, but unable to stop them, called on the Franks to help.
During the 580s, Frankish kings invaded Italy twice, but without much success.
Alboin, the Lombard king, who had led the initial invasion, was assassinated by his own, instigated by his wife, in 572, and his successor died a few years later, after which came a ten-year period without a king.
The continued Lombard conquest was therefore often the local Lombard dukes trying to expand their territories, without a grand plan.
The invaders
When they arrived in Italy, the Lombards weren’t just an army on the march.
They were an entire people, with men, women, children, slaves, animals and all their belongings loaded on carts and carried by beasts of burden.
We don’t know exactly how many they were, but something in the range from 150 to 200,000.
Paul the Deacon mentioned the Saxons, as a non-dominant subgroup of the invaders, being 50,000.
The Lombards must have been many more than that, and then there were others in the train too, such as Gepids, Ostrogoth stragglers and whatnot.
It was a military invasion, yes, but it was also a migration of an entire people, searching for fertile lands to occupy.
When they crossed the border in 568, the train must have been tens of kilometres long. Luckily for them, the Romans had built good roads.
A wounded country
Byzantium was an empire, a superpower of its time. Why couldn’t the Byzantines stop the Lombards?
The main reason was that the Italian peninsula was worn down by decades of war and plague.
Paul the Deacon was very explicit.
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.
He also left a vivid description of the effects of the plague.
After the lapse of a year indeed there began to appear in the groins of men and in other rather delicate places, a swelling of the glands, after the manner of a nut or a date, presently followed by an unbearable fever, so that upon the third day the man died. But if any one should pass over the third day he had a hope of living.
Those who’ve listened to episode 17 on the plague should recognise the description.
This sounds exactly like bubonic plague, and recent research into the DNA of victims of these epidemics has confirmed that the Justinian plague was indeed bubonic or black plague.
The effects of the pestilence was much like in the Middle Ages. Still from Paul the Deacon.
For as common report had it that those who fled would avoid the plague, the dwellings were left deserted by their inhabitants, and the dogs only kept house. The flocks remained alone in the pastures with no shepherd at hand. You might see villas or fortified places lately filled with crowds of men, and on the next day, all had departed and everything was in utter silence.
Sons fled, leaving the corpses of their parents unburied; parents forgetful of their duty abandoned their children in raging fever. If by chance long-standing affection constrained any one to bury his near relative, he remained himself unburied, and while he was performing the funeral rites he perished; while he offered obsequies to the dead, his own corpse remained without obsequies.
You might see the world brought back to its ancient silence : no voice in the field ; no whistling of shepherds ; no lying in wait of wild beasts among the cattle; no harm to domestic fowls.
The crops, outliving the time of the harvest, awaited the reaper untouched; the vineyard with its fallen leaves and its shining grapes remained undisturbed while winter came on ; a trumpet as of warriors resounded through the hours of the night and day ; something like the murmur of an army was heard by many ; there were no footsteps of passers by, no murderer was seen, yet the corpses of the dead were more than the eyes could discern ; pastoral places had been turned into a sepulchre for men, and human habitations had become places of refuge for wild beasts.
All this in Byzantine Italy, under the rule of Narses in the 560s, but it never touched the Lombards or their allies.
And these evils happened to the Romans only and within Italy alone, up to the boundaries of the nations of the Alamanni and the Bavarians.
For the Byzantine patrician Narses and his successors, they had far fewer men to call to arms, and far fewer resources to feed them and keep them mobilised.
The Exarchate of Ravenna
The work Narses had done to create a Byzantine prefecture of Italy was mostly for nothing, due to the Lombards and their swift conquest of half the peninsula.
The Byzantine organisation of Italy got the rather unusual form of the Exarchate of Ravenna, which was officially created in 584.
The Exarchate was largely a military organisation, intended to defend the territories. The Exarch was a kind of vice-emperor for Byzantine Italy, and had wide-ranging powers, both to wage war and make peace.
In surviving documents, almost all men were considered soldiers. Men were designated as miles, soldiers, organised into numeri and bandi.
The titles Dux — where the Venetian Doge originated — and Magister Militum appear to have been used almost interchangeably, for a leader with a military command over a designated territory.
By the 590s, the main Byzantine possessions were in the south, where the Lombards didn’t arrive, so Puglia (the heel of Italy), Calabria (the toe), the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica were firmly under Byzantine control.
On the western side of the peninsula, the areas around Naples and Rome remained Byzantine, while on the eastern side, the capital of Ravenna was flanked by the Pentapolis (the five cities) on the south, and the coastal parts of Venetia north of the Po estuary.
The defensive line
From 590 or 591, the king of the Lombards was Agilulf. He saw off the Frankish threat, made peace with the Pope in Rome, fought of Avars and Slavs from the east, and also established a ceasefire with the Exarchate.
However, the ceasefire was broken in 599, when troops from the Exarchate captured the daughter of Agilulf, with her husband, in Parma.
Since Parma was formally taken by the Lombards in the early 570s, it is a sign of how fluid the borders were between the various dominions.
King Agilulf reacted by attacking the remaining Byzantine strongholds in Venetia, which fell one after another.
In 601, Padua was taken and thoroughly sacked. Paul the Deacon described it this way.
Up to this time the city of Patavium had rebelled against the Langobards, the soldiers resisting very bravely. But at last when fire was thrown into it, it was all consumed by the devouring flames and was razed to the ground by command of king Agilulf. The soldiers, however, who were in it were allowed to return to Ravenna.
For these quotes from the Historia Langobardorum, I rely on the translation by William Dudley Foulke from 1906, but Foulke got one word wrong here.
Paul the Deacon used the verb rebellavit, which can mean that the city rebelled, but it can also mean that it “waged war again”, literally to ‘re-war’.
Foulke translated it in the first meaning, while Paul the Deacon no doubt intended the other.
Why am I so sure of that?
Because Padua could not rebel against the Lombards, as the invaders hadn’t conquered the city yet. Furthermore, the soldiers defending it weren’t Lombards, but Romans, as Paul made clear. They couldn’t return to Ravenna if they were Lombards.
The year after the conquest of Padua, in 602, Monselice fell to the Lombards, and the following year, in 603, Mantua likewise.
Following these setbacks, and with a change of emperor in Constantinople, and a change of exarch in Ravenna, in 605 a peace deal was struck.
All this coincided with the start of the Byzantine–Sasanian Wars, which lasted almost three decades and brought both empires to the brink of collapse. Consequently, Constantinople had few resources to throw at the Lombards, and settled for a co-existence of some kind.
Venetia Maritima
The loss of the important cities of Padua, Monselice and Mantua left Byzantine Venetia even further reduced, with Opitergium, Concordia and Altinus as the only major cities still under the control of the Exarchate.
Venetia was reduced to just the coastal parts, the Venetia Maritima.
The fall of Concordia, in 616, left Opitergium isolated.
The next major blows came during the reign of king Rothari, who ruled the Lombards from 636 to 652.
Sometimes between 639 and 641, Rothari took and sacked the former Byzantine administrative centre of Opitergium, but apparently he didn’t keep it.
Altinus, on the edge of the Venetian lagoon, was likewise taken and sacked at the same time.
What exactly happened in Opitergium around 640 is not clear from the sources. The confusion arises because Paul the Deacon wrote that king Grimuald, who ruled the Lombards from 662 to 671, took and destroyed the city again in 667.
Either the Byzantines retook the city sometimes after 641, but no sources report such an event, or the attack on the city by Rothari was more a raid than a conquest.
What is certain, is that after 667, with the definitive Byzantine loss of Opitergium, there were no longer any mainland cities held by the Exarchate.
The only remaining Byzantine territories were the lagoons from Grado to Cavarzere, an area of approximately 130 by 15km, of mostly mud and marsh.
Refugees
So, we’ve been talking about warfare over half of the Italian peninsula, and cities being taken and sometimes destroyed.
It’s all very high-level, but those cities and territories were inhabited by real living persons, most of whom were just trying to get on with their lives the best they could.
Even before the arrival of the Lombards, that wasn’t very good. Decades of wars between the Byzantines and the Goths, with several waves of bubonic plague for good order, had left many of the survivors struggling.
Life was hard, and with the invasion, it got harder.
The common story goes that the Venetians fled the mainland cities in front of the marauding Lombards, which leads to images of poor destitute refugees fleeing their destroyed and burned down homes with what little they could carry, to head for the safer marshes and start a new life entirely from scratch.
This might very well have happened in some cases, but the Lombards didn’t move to Italy to destroy it. They migrated to benefit from the riches of the peninsula, which they wouldn’t if they destroyed those same riches.
What the Lombards wanted, was to take over a rich and functioning society, as they had seen it when they served in Narses’ army in the 550s, and keep it rich and functioning for their own profit.
If the Lombards largely failed in that project, it wasn’t because they destroyed the riches of the land, but because those riches were already largely gone due to wars and plague, before the Lombards arrived.
The ideal situation for the Lombard invaders was what happened in Treviso in 568, during the first thrust into Venetia. As the Lombard train approached Treviso, crossing the river Piave, the bishop came out to meet the Lombard king Alboin, who in return for submission of the city, re-confirmed all the privileges and rights of the church of Treviso.
Treviso surrendered, and wasn’t destroyed. The head of the church submitted, and wasn’t despoiled of everything.
Even in the later phases of the Lombard-Byzantine conflict, few cities were destroyed on purpose.
Paul the Deacon reported that Padua was burned down, but that was a means to take the city, not for wanton destruction. Furthermore, he didn’t report of any retaliation against the defenders. On the contrary, the Roman soldiers were allowed to leave, which makes it very unlikely that the inhabitants got a harsher deal.
Opitergium — modern Oderzo — was sacked and destroyed twice, and abandoned by its inhabitants. The reason for this was probably, that it was the administrative capital of Byzantine Venetia, so it was a symbolic act of eradicating Roman rule in the area, so show that the empire was gone for good. Apparently, many had already left the city before its first destruction around 640.
Smaller towns, like Concordia and Altinus, were abandoned, even if we haven’t any reports of destruction or pillaging.
Who fled, and why?
The question remains of who fled the Lombards, who clearly weren’t the murderous ferocious barbarians they’re sometimes depicted as, and why they fled.
Most of the lower classes — which our sources hardly ever mention — had little choice but to remain where they were. Their very existence and survival was bound to the land they farmed or depended on.
Already during the initial invasion, some bishops fled their cities for safer Byzantine territories.
The bishop of Milan fled to Genoa, as the Lombards approached, and in Venetia, the archbishop or patriarch of Aquileia moved to Grado, taking with him all the treasure of the See of Aquileia, and declaring the city of Grado to be New Aquileia.
It is unlikely that there’s a single reason why some bishops fled.
Fear of looting and pillaging might have been a factor. The patriarch of Aquileia hauled all their treasure, relics and valuables, to Grado to keep it safe.
The Lombards were mostly Arians, and some might not have converted to Christianity yet, while the Byzantine world was Orthodox. That difference might have induced some Orthodox church leaders to fear for the worst, and act accordingly.
Also, bishops were part of the power structure of Byzantine society. They were part of the ruling elite in the late Roman world, and when one power structure was about to replace another, it is rarely a good sign for the people who constituted the old system.
In fact, both the patriarch of Aquileia and the bishop of Milan ran for Byzantine controlled territories.
The leniency, which Alboin showed the bishop of Treviso, might have been to avoid more bishops running for Byzantine lands, as the patriarch of Aquileia had done shortly before.
Treviso was a bit further down the route of the Lombards from Aquileia.
In the following decades, as more and more of the remaining cities of Byzantine Venetia fell to the Lombards, more people moved to the safer — and Byzantine controlled — lagoons.
The first Venetian chronicler, John the Deacon, recounted how numerous bishoprics moved the see from the mainland to the lagoons.
He mentioned Grado — New Aquileia — first.
Then the bishop of Concordia moved to Caorle, and obtained the permission of the Pope to formally move the diocese. Pope Adeodatus I reigned from 615 to 618, so the move happened around the time of the Lombard conquest of Concordia.
Then we have Civitas Nova Heracliana — Eraclea — where the bishop of Opitergium moved. Pope Severinus, who only reigned for 66 days in 640, sanctioned the move, so it must have happened in 640 or shortly before.
Under the same Pope Severinus, the bishop of Altinus, fearing the “fury of the Lombards”, moved to Torcello. The church of Torcello is slightly earlier, and dates from the 630. It is the oldest extant building in the Venetian lagoon. The church of Sant’Eufemia in Grado is older.
John the Deacon didn’t mention refugees from Padua, and noted that Rivoalto — which was the medieval name for Venice the city — was settled later. In fact, the settlements in what is now Venice didn’t get their own bishop until 774, which is much later.
Couplets of cities
In this account of bishops fleeing the Lombards, we have several couplets of cities, one on the mainland, one in the lagoons of the time.
Such pairs of cities were nothing odd.
Ancient Athens, situated on an inland hilltop, had its harbour at Piraeus on the coast, but they were two distinct settlements in a symbiotic relationship.
Likewise, ancient Rome, a day’s journey up the river, had its harbour at Ostia in the estuary of the Tiber, just around the first bend of the river.
In Venetia, the important cities near the coast were generally located where the main Roman roads crossed the main rivers. They were therefore often ten to forty kilometres inland from the lagoons or from the sea, and they were all paired with a harbour city close to the estuary of the local river.
This is how we get the pairings of Aquileia-Grado, Concordia-Caorle, Opitergium-Heraclia, Altinus-Torcello, and much later, an imaginary Padua-Rivoalto.
Consequently, the cities in the lagoons where the bishops — and supposedly with them many others — went, were not new cities. They had been there for ages. They were probably there at the time of Cassiodorus (see episode 27) and even earlier because they were the settlements which provided the mother-city up the river with access to the sea.
We are therefore not talking about huddles of destitute refugees limping down the road from the smoking ruins of the burned down cities with all their meagre remaining belongings in a bundle over their shoulders.
They simply moved, in good order, along well-trodden — or more likely, well-rowed — routes between two settlements which had always existed in a symbiotic relationship. They were siblings, and as the larger was lost to the Lombards, those who needed to, and could, moved to the smaller settlement, in the lagoon.
The pair of cities were already there, as separate parts of a single economic and social unit.
The mainland city had an agricultural hinterland, and engaged in trade along the Roman roads and up and down the river. The lagoon settlement connected that economic reality with the sea and long-distance trade around the empire.
As the mainland cities were destroyed or occupied by the Lombards, the bond between the two was broken, leading to change, but eventually, both recalibrated and continued along different paths, as they ended up in different polities.
An important take-away here is, that the Byzantine-Venetian social, political and religious order didn’t break down. Society did not collapse, even if it was shaken and reduced.
Yet, this is where the paths taken by the mainland cities and by the lagoon settlements divide, not to rejoin until the 1400s, under Venetian dominance.
The mainland, divided into duchies and city states, became part of the Kingdom of the Lombards, which then morphed into the Carolingian Kingdom of Italy, and finally became part of the Holy Roman Empire, centred in Germany.
The lagoon settlements, from Grado to Cavarzere, remained part of the Roman-Byzantine world, centred in Constantinople, and became the Dogado — the Duchy of the Venetians — and later, the Serenissima — the Most Serene Republic of Venice.
The birth of Venice
Therefore, if we want to point to a time and place where Venice was born, this period in the first half of the 600s is probably it.
That was the fork in the road.
The displacement of the Byzantine elite of Venetia from the mainland cities to the coastal areas, and then into the lagoons themselves, was the push that started the process that led to the Republic of Venice and the city we know today.
Bibliography
- Iohannes : Diaconus Venetus and Luigi Andrea Berto. Istoria Veneticorum. Bologna Zanichelli, 1999. 🔗
- Cessi, Roberto. _Origo civitatum Italie seu Venetiarum : (Chronicon Altinate et Chronicon Gradense) in Fonti per la storia d'Italia / pubblicate dall'Istituto storico italiano ; 73. Roma : Tipografia del Senato, 1933.
- Cessi, Roberto. Documenti relativi alla storia di Venezia anteriori al Mille. Padova : Gregoriana, 1940-1942. 🔗
- Gasparri, Stefano and Sauro Gelichi. Le isole del rifugio : Venezia prima di Venezia. Bari Laterza, 2024.
- Paulus : Diaconus and William Dudley Foulke (translator). History of the Langobards. New York Longmans, Green & Co., 1907. [more] 🔗
- Paulus : Diaconus, Antonio Zanella (translator) and Bruno Luiselli. Storia dei longobardi. Milano BUR, 2000 (6th ed.). [more]
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