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BOOK VI
.
THE LOMBARD INVASION, 553-600
THE four invading nations whose history has been already related left no
enduring memorial of their presence in Italy. The Visigoth, the Hun, the
Vandal, the Ostrogoth failed to connect their names with even a single province
or a single city of the Imperial land. What these mighty nations had failed to
effect, an obscure and savage horde from Pannonia successfully accomplished.
Coming last of all across the ridges of the Alps, the Lombards found the
venerable Mother of empires exhausted by all her previous conflicts, and unable
to offer any longer even the passive resistance of despair. Hence it came to
pass that where others had but come in like a devouring flood and then vanished
away, the Lombard remained. Hence it has arisen that he has written his name
for ever on that marvel of the munificence of nature ‘The waveless plain of
Lombardy’.
Strange indeed is the contrast between the earlier and the later
fortunes of this people, between the misty marshes of the Elbe and the purple
Apennines of Italy, between the rude and lightly abandoned hut of the nomadic
Langobard and the unsurpassed loveliness of the towers of Verona. From the
warriors ‘fiercer than even the ordinary fierceness of the Germans', what a
change to the pale ‘Master of Sentences', Peter the Lombard, intent on the
endless distinctions which made up his system of philosophy. Nay, we may go a
step further, and by a kind of spiritual ancestry connect London itself with
the descendants of this strange and savage people. There is a street in London
bearing the Lombard's name, trodden daily by millions of hurrying footsteps, a
street the borders of which are more precious than if it were a river with
golden sands. From the solitary Elbe pastures, occasionally roamed over by some
savage Langobardic herdsman, there reaches a distinct historic chain of causes
and effects, which connects those desolate moorlands with the fullness and the
whirl of London's Lombard Street.
It was not however till the year 568 that the Lombards entered Italy.
Between the defeat of Teias at Monte Lettere and that
date, there intervened sixteen years of more or less trouble for Italy, the
history of which will be told in the first two chapters of this volume. It will
then be our duty to remount the stream of time through several centuries, in
order to trace the early history of the Lombards.
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