The Historians' History of the World 07

Hard as was the rule of these “guests,” they took only a third of the produce of the country, while the Visigoths had taken two-thirds, and the Burgundians nearly as much. Then the 26,000 Saxons, weary of the presumption of their Lombard allies, decided to evacuate Italy for Gaul. On their first visit to Dauphiné, the Roman general Mummolus drove them back with slaughter. About a year later the Saxons tried again at harvest time. Mummolus allowed them to pass through only on payment of a heavy toll. The Saxons went back to their old home; but the Swabians had moved in, and being driven to bay, slew almost all the host.

The Lombards had soon drifted round Rome; and in 574, under Cleph, had the city besieged. The emperor Justin sent a corn fleet to save the city from starvation; and in 575 sent an army under his son-in-law Braduarius, who lost both the battle and his life.

Still in 579 the popes are crying eastward for help. In 578 the new emperor, Tiberius II, sent money to buy a little respite. Meanwhile, between 568 and 575, the Lombards had five times gone raiding into Gaul. Twice the brave Mummolus threw them back. In 584 the Austrasians, bribed by the emperor Maurice, invaded Italy under their young leader Childebert, and the Lombards were forced to pay them to leave the country. This convinced the Lombards that their ducal oligarchy was a failure; and they made a king of Cleph’s son Authari, giving him the prenomen of Flavius, which thereafter all the Lombard kings retained.a

Under the standard of their new king, the conquerors of Italy withstood three successive invasions, one of which was led by Childebert himself, the last of the Merovingian race who descended from the Alps. The first expedition was defeated by the jealous animosity of the Franks and Alamanni. In the second they were vanquished in a bloody battle, with more loss and dishonour than they had sustained since the foundation of their monarchy. Impatient for revenge, they returned a third time with accumulated force, and Authari yielded to the fury of the torrent. The troops and treasures of the Lombards were distributed in the walled towns between the Alps and the Apennine. A nation, less sensible of danger than of fatigue and delay, soon murmured against the folly of their twenty commanders; and the hot vapours of an Italian sun infected with disease those tramontane bodies which had already suffered the vicissitudes of intemperance and famine. The powers that were inadequate to the conquest were more than sufficient for the desolation of the country; nor could the trembling natives distinguish between their enemies and their deliverers. If the junction of the Merovingian and imperial forces had been effected in the neighbourhood of Milan, perhaps they might have subverted the throne of the Lombards; but the Franks awaited six days the signal of a flaming village, and the arms of the Greeks were idly employed in the reduction of Modena and Parma, which were torn from them after the retreat of their transalpine allies. The victorious Authari asserted his claim to the dominion of Italy. At the foot of the Rætian Alps, he subdued the resistance, and rifled the hidden treasures, of a sequestered island in the lake of Comum. At the extreme point of Calabria he touched with his spear a column on the seashore of Rhegium, proclaiming that ancient landmark to stand the immovable boundary of his kingdom.

EXTENT OF LOMBARD SWAY

[568-774 A.D.]