The Lombards, a tribe from along the Elbe River in central Germany, held lands on the Italian Peninsula for two centuries, from 572 to 774 C. E., longer than any of the other GERMANICS. Their name, also written as Langobards or Longobards, is derived either from “long halberds,” a type of axe, or “long beards.”
ORIGINS
It is theorized that the Lombards emerged as a tribe from the Lower Oder River (the boundary between modern Germany and Poland near the Baltic Sea). Conflicts with Vandals living to the east may have led to their tribal formation and migration. By the first century C. E. they had settled along the middle Elbe River in central Germany, near the Chauci and Cherusci, the latter of whom they absorbed. The Saxons, who absorbed the Chauci, eventually lived to their north.
LANGUAGE
The Lombards originally spoke a dialect of German ancestral to what is known as Low German, typical of the tribes of northern Germany. Probably sometime in the fifth century the Lombards adopted the dialects of the Germanic peoples of southern Germany— known as High German.
HISTORY
The Lombards (known at this time as Langobardi) were allied with other Elbe River tribes, among them the Marcomanni and Quadi. With the Marcomanni they were among the first Germanic tribes to attempt to migrate into the Roman Empire, following by a few years the first recorded Germanic incursion by the Chatti in 160 c. e. The Lombards participated with them in raids to the south, crossing the Danube into transdanubian Hungary, among the actions that provoked the Marcommanic Wars of 166-180 between Germanics and Romans. They attempted to invade the province of Pannonia (modern Hungary and surrounding areas) but were repelled.
By 300 they were situated farther south, east of the Upper Elbe; meanwhile their southern neighbors, the BuRGuNDii, were moving west across the Elbe toward the Rhine and Gaul. The Lombards did not take part in the general westward movement of a number of Germanic tribes at this time.
In the 480s with new territorial competition among European peoples caused by the onslaught of the Huns, the Lombards sought out new homes, especially to the south in northern Austria, where they entered into conflict with other peoples on the move, a complex mix of competing tribes that had been dominated first by the Goths, then by the Huns. Among the strongest of these tribes were the Heruli, former allies of the Goths, then of the Huns after they were subdued by them, and the Gepids, the Huns’ chief Germanic allies until the death of Attila.
After the defeat of the Rugii, a Germanic tribe who had been allied with the Gepids when they turned against the Huns, by the Heruli and sCiRi, the tribe of the powerful leader Odoacer in 487, the Lombards moved into their territory in Noricum (roughly mod-
Lombards 495
Movement of the Lombards Southward in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries C. E.
Ern Austria), perhaps displaced by the growing power of the Thuringi to the northwest. In about 505 the Heruli forced them to move—it is thought to the east onto the Hungarian plain between the Danube and the Tisza (Theiss)— and pay tribute. Three years later the Lombards rose up and defeated the Heruli. The Lombards were thus emerging from the seething mass of tribes as among the most powerful.
In 526-527 the Lombards invaded Pan-nonia, becoming a dominant force in the region. Their king at this time, Wacho, maintained friendly diplomatic relations with the Eastern Roman Empire and with the Franks through royal marriages.
In 547 the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, as a counterbalance to the Gepids, who also held lands in Pannonia, granted the Lombards more lands in Pannonia and Noricum. Many of the Gepids were soon driven out of Pannonia and dispersed. In 552 the Lombards aided the Byzantines in their last campaign against the Ostrogoths in Italy This acquainted the Lombards with the attractions of this region, of interest because their territory in Pannonia was under increasing pressure from the Avars, steppe people out of Asia with an expanding empire from the east.
In 567 the Lombards under Alboin, their ruler since 565, with the help of the Avars, who were allies of the Byzantines at the time, defeated the remaining Gepids under Kunimund in a battle somewhere between the Danube and the Tisza. After their victory they departed Noricum, as a result of an agreement with the Avars and Byzantines.
Between 568 and 572 Alboin, recognizing that his people’s hold on Pannonia would be increasingly contested by their erstwhile allies the Avars, determined that Italy held a more promising future for them. Accordingly he led a large army consisting of the Lombards and allies from among the Gepids and other Germanic tribes, Sarmatians, and even Bulgars, across the Alps in an invasion of Italy. The power vacuum these groups left behind them in Pannonia and the northern Balkans was soon filled by Avars and Slavs, respectively Italy at this time was under the control of the Byzantines since the defeat of the Italian kingdom of the Ostrogoths in 552.
Alboin’s army swept through Italy, meeting limited resistance from the Byzantine forces. Within a year they controlled many of the northern cities and much of the fertile Po valley. With limited siege skills the Lombards did not
Try to capture walled Italian cities, such as Rome, Naples, or Ravenna, instead plundering the remaining rich estates of the Italian countryside. Their behavior in Italy contrasted sharply with that of the Ostrogoths in the previous century. They were not federates of the empire but invaders, and for some 30 years they made no attempt to establish a stable government using Roman institutions or any others, instead dissolving into war bands under duces (chiefs), some 36 in all, who raided freely Their central monarchy was destroyed when Alboin and his successor, Clyph, were murdered only a Baltic Sea
Few years after the invasion. The duchies of Spoleto and Benevento had complete independence. Legend has it that the daughter of the king Kunimund, Rosamund, was forced to marry Alboin and drink from the skull of her slain father and in revenge arranged the murder of Alboin. In 584 the Lombards united again under Clyph’s son, Authari, to strengthen themselves against the papacy, the Byzantines, and the Franks.
By the end of the Lombards’ long looting spree the Roman landed order had been largely destroyed, with former Roman estates now held by Lombards. Pope Gregory the Great called them “unspeakable” for burning churches. The Lombard kingdom in Italy was far more Germanic in character than Theodoric’s Ostrogothic one.
The Lombard-held territory consisted of northern and central Italy and part of southern Italy, with Pavia on the Ticino River, a tributary of the Po River, as its capital. Their holdings in the north included inland Liguria (formerly known as Cisalpine Gaul) and Venetia; in central Italy, Tuscany and a stretch of land along the Apennines that became the Duchy of Spoleto; and the present-day province of Campania, which became the Duchy of Benevento. The east coast of the peninsula remained imperial holdings for the most part. The Lombards continued their expansion of their control over territory in the seventh century under the united monarchy.
For nearly two centuries the Lombards were a primary force on the Italian Peninsula, with shifting territories. Effective rulers included King Rothari, who captured Genoa in about 641. He is also known for issuing a Lombard code of criminal and civil law based on Germanic principles in 643. The next century King Liutprand gained control of Spoleto and Benevento, thus consolidating the Lombard kingdom.
However by the eighth century their dominance in Italy attracted the attention of the greatest Germanic power of the day, the Franks. Lombard pressures on the city of Rome and the church gave the rising Frankish Carolingian family an opportunity to gain the gratitude of the papacy and its help in their dynastic ambitions.
When King Aistulf finally captured Ravenna in 751 and threatened Rome, his actions led Popes Zacharias and Stephen II to seek the help of the Franks under their de facto but not yet de jure ruler, Pepin III. Pepin defeated the Lombards and gave control of Ravenna to the pope (the Donation of Pepin). In return for this and other aid Pepin obtained the pope’s permission to depose the Frankish king and establish his own royal dynasty.
King Desiderius renewed the Lombard threat against Rome, however. In 773 Pope Adrian I, fearing the fall of Rome to the Lombards, again requested help from the Franks, now led by Charlemagne. The Franks defeated the Lombards and captured Pavia the next year. Charlemagne received the “iron crown” of the Lombard kingship on his own head, proclaiming himself the new king of the Lombards (a highly unusual proclamation when one Germanic king conquered another). Desiderius was taken to France as a prisoner, and died in captivity. Lombard lands were reorganized as the Papal States, all but the duchy of Benevento, which remained in Lombard hands until conquered by the Normans in the 11th century.
Those Lombards who remained near the Elbe River were absorbed by the Saxons.
CULTURE (see also Germanics) Government and Society
Place-names and Lombard cemeteries on the Italian Peninsula indicate the location of their settlements; places where cemeteries are near hilltop strongholds, such as Nocera Umbra and Castel Trosino in the duchy of Spoleto, were contested territory, obtained probably in land taking in the seventh century. The region was of strategic importance since it lay near the road linking Rome and Ravenna. Nocera Umbra contains the graves of several high-ranking warriors. Castel Trosino has evidence of contemporary Roman and Byzantine influence on jewelry, even in the seventh century, an indication that the community was more mixed.
Several cities in northern Italy were important in the Lombard polity. A cemetery outside Cividale in the northeast contains the graves of Lombard men and women who by their age must have been part of the original invasion of 568. There were noble burials within the walls of Cividale, including one within a church.
It is often difficult to assess archaeologically relations between invaders and invaded in a territory; many of the latter often fall to the lowest levels of society and leave little in the way of material remains, while both invaders and invaded usually exchange cultural influences after a very short period, so that distinguishing them by their possessions—weapon or jewelry styles and the like—becomes problematic. The written records in Lombard Italy show little participation in affairs by the indigenous population, but it is thought they were neither exterminated nor expelled. Evidence for this hypothesis is derived from craft articles, which show a mingling of influences, and also loanwords from the Lombard language to Italian—the Lombards seem to have given up their own language by the end of the seventh century. The Lombard loanwords are of ordinary, day-to-day objects and things. The evidence suggests that they integrated rapidly into what remained of Roman society
The chief historian of the Lombards was the eighth-century Paul the Deacon, who had served as a councilor to Desiderius and had become a member of Charlemagne’s palace school. From his work Historia Langobardorum (History of the Lombards) of the late eighth century we derive information about the Lombards in Italy. A Lombardian law code survives from the same period (the law code of Rothari).
The Lombards adopted some of the military techniques of the steppe horsemen. They never developed a navy, however, and were therefore at a disadvantage in capturing port cities.
Sometime in the fifth century most Lombards converted to Arian Christianity.
In about the mid-seventh century (after the reign of King Rothari, the last Arian king) the Lombards converted to Roman Catholicism and adopted Latin as their primary language. A noble Lombard family was buried in the Church of San Stephano around the year 600.
Equipped armies, while the fighting forces of the Lombards had not progressed much beyond the mob of independent war bands of the Germanic past. In a sense the Franks were a Roman legacy nurtured in a backwater of the empire, who were able to defeat the Lombard holders of an Italian homeland mostly bereft of the last vestiges of Roman civilization. The region held by the Lombards in northern Italy, Liguria, now bears the name Lombardy. The iron crown of the Lombard kings is kept at Monza in Lombardy The name of the modern town of Bardowick near Luneburg, Germany, is also derived from the tribal name.
Further Reading
Istvan Bona. The Dawn of the Dark Ages: The Gepids and the Lombards in the Carpathian Basin (Budapest, Hungary: Corvina, 1976).
Neil Christie. The Lombards: The Ancient Longobards (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
Raymond De Roover. Money, Banking and Credit in Medieval Bruges: Italian Merchant Bankers, Lombards and Money Changers: A Study in the Origins of Banking: The Emergence of International Business, 1200-1800 (London: Routledge, 2000). Katherine Fischer Drew. The Lombard Laws (Sources of Medieval History) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973).
Nicholas Everett. Literacy in Lombard Italy, c. 568-774 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
William Dudley Foulke. History of the Lombards: Paul the Deacon (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
J. T. Hallenbeck. Pavia and Rome: The Lombard Monarchy and the Papacy in the Eighth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982).
Dick Harrison. The Early State and the Towns: Forms of Integration in Lombard Italy (Lund, Sweden: Lund Studies in International History, 1993).
The Lombards’ tenure in Italy lasted longer than that of any of the Germanic peoples. However, the lack of sophistication of their political organization, as compared to that of the Goths or Franks, meant that their rule was based on armed might alone and could not last. They made little attempt to take advantage of Roman institutions, instead mostly sweeping them away. For these reasons they became vulnerable to the armed might of the Franks, much stronger than their own because the Franks’ more evolved political system, in part influenced by the Romans, helped them to assemble large, disciplined, well-provisioned, and well-
Longones See Lingones.
World History
