The Historians' History of the World 07

The pope disburdened his mind of his desire that the king would not further oppress the province of Ravenna by devastation and yet further that he would restore the towns taken from the Ravenna including the fortress of Cesena. The naïveté of such demands is certainly astonishing, but still more amazing are the unknown circumstances which induced Liutprand to concede so much. At first, it is true, he met them with a stout refusal. But what remained for him, if he would avoid the open conflict he dreaded with the church and its consequences, except submission, unless he sacrificed the security and peace of his realm, the result of years of activity in extending his foreign dominion? In spite of his promise given to the pope, Liutprand appears to have continued harassing the exarchate.

In January, 744, after a reign of thirty-one years and seven months, Liutprand concluded his eventful life. He was buried in the church of St. Adrian, where his father too had found his last resting-place. In the year 1173 his bones were removed to the church of St. Peter’s monastery, so often referred to as “Ecclesia di Ciel d’Oro,” a monastery which owed its existence to him.y

HODGKIN’S ESTIMATE OF LIUTPRAND

[712-744 A.D.]

In some respects the statesmanship of Liutprand seems to me to have been too highly praised. The one aim which he seems to have consistently and successfully pursued was the consolidation of the Lombard monarchy and the reduction of the great dukes into a condition of real subjection to his crown. He availed himself (and what Lombard king would not have done so?) of any opportunity which offered itself for cutting yet shorter the reduced and fragmentary territories which still called themselves parts of “the Roman Republic.” But both from policy and from his own devout temperament he was disinclined to do anything which might cause a rupture with the see of Rome, and the popes perceiving this, often induced him to abandon hardly earned conquests by appealing to “his devotion to St. Peter.”

I cannot better close this chapter than by quoting the character of Liutprand given us by the loving yet faithful hand of Paulus Diaconusp in the concluding words of that history, which has been our chief guide through two dark and troubled centuries:

“He was a man of great wisdom, prudent in counsel and a lover of peace, mighty in war, clement towards offenders, chaste, modest, one who prayed through the night-watches, generous in his almsgiving, ignorant it is true of literature, but a man who might be compared to the philosophers, a fosterer of his people, an augmenter of their laws.”b

For the present we must leave the fortunes of the Lombards to trace the origins and the rise of the Frankish people who now loom large across the horizons of Italy and to whom the papacy appeals for help against the powers that threaten its enormous and greedy ambition.a

FOOTNOTES

[114] [We may say here with Hodgkinb in using the word Lombards before its strict time, “it seems not worth while to encumber the text by the constant repetition of a long and somewhat uncouth race-name, but the reader is asked to remember that in strictness the form Langobardi should be preserved.” It is the 12th century before the words “Lombard” and “Lombardy” come into general use and then largely with a geographical reference to Northern Italy, rather than an historical reference to the Langobard conquerors of far more than Lombardy. The origin of the name “Langobard” has been discussed under the “Eastern Empire,” Chapter IV.]

[115] [Hodgkin,b however, says,“The war between King Tato and King Rodulph is narrated by Procopius as well as by Paulus and can be assigned without much risk of error to a definite date, 511 or 512.”]

[116] [The distaff story is told by Paulusp Diaconus, who wrote two centuries later and quoted a work a century earlier. Isidore of Seville,v however, who wrote only half a century after Narses’ recall, accuses him of calling in the Lombards. The story is none the less somewhat dubious.]

[117] [Hodgkinb

says of the Lombards: “They are the anarchists of the Völkerwanderung, whose delight is only in destruction, and who seem incapable of culture. Yet this is the race from which, in the fullness of time, under the transmuting power of the old Italian civilisation, were to spring Anselm and Lanfranc, Hildebrand and Dante Alighieri.”]

[118] [This custom of making a drinking cup of an enemy’s skull originally came from Asiatic Scythia, and was widely diffused in northern Europe: nowhere was it more religiously observed than in Scandinavia, the cradle of the Lombards. Their historian avers that he had seen the cup with his own eyes: Hoc ne cui videretur impossibile,—veritatem in Christo loquor—ego hoc poculum vidi in quodam die festo, etc. Paulus Diaconus,p lib. ii. cap. 28.