Lombard Kingdom

The kingless decade

Drafted from Deacon, History of the Langobards (1907)formation

Everything anybody knows about how the Lombards got to Italy was written down two centuries later by a monk descended from one of them, and he was honest enough to say when he was repeating a story rather than a record.

Paul the Deacon puts the crossing in 568. Alboin had just destroyed the Gepid kingdom on the middle Danube, killing its king Cunimund in the battle and — Paul says this flatly, in the middle of an otherwise dry campaign narrative — making a drinking cup out of his skull. He carried off Cunimund's daughter Rosemund and married her, to his own injury, as afterwards appeared. Four years later she had him killed.

There was almost nothing in Italy to stop the army that followed him. Justinian's war against the Ostrogoths had finished fifteen years earlier and had taken eighteen years to finish; what it left behind was a peninsula with no field army in it. The Po valley went quickly. Pavia held out for three years and then became the capital.

The dukes

Alboin's successor Cleph was killed by a servant of his own household after a year and a half.

And then the Lombards did not replace him. Paul says they had no king for ten years and were under dukes — Zaban at Pavia, Wallari at Bergamo, Alichis at Brescia, Euin at Trent, Gisulf at Cividale, and there were thirty other dukes besides these in their own cities. Three other chronicles say twelve years rather than ten, and there is no way to settle it.

What ended it was an invasion. The emperor Maurice paid the Frankish king fifty thousand solidi to come into Italy and drive the Lombards out, and the dukes, facing a Frankish army and a Byzantine subsidy at the same time, agreed by common consent that Cleph's son Authari should be king. To pay for the restored crown they gave up half their own possessions.

That is the founding transaction, and it fixed the shape of the kingdom for two hundred years. The crown existed because the dukes had decided it was cheaper than the alternative, and they had shown they could do without one. Spoleto and Benevento in the south stayed effectively independent for the whole period and occasionally fought the king. No Lombard king ever held all of Italy.

The golden age that was not

Paul's account of the years after the restoration is worth quoting because of what it is doing.

There was no violence, no ambuscades were laid, no one constrained another unjustly, no one took spoils, there were no thefts, no robberies, every one proceeded whither he pleased, safe and without fear.

The footnote printed under that sentence, crediting a German commentator, disposes of it in one line: this description of the golden age is not borne out by the facts. It is not: the same book has Roman landowners killed or driven out under Cleph, the subject population parcelled out among Lombard "guests", and a war with the Franks running through the decade in question.

The passage is a Lombard who had spent years at the court of the king who ended the Lombard kingdom, describing the moment his people first made themselves a state. It is not evidence about the 580s. It is evidence about the 780s, and about what a conquered people's historian wanted his conquerors to read.

The queen chooses

Drafted from Deacon, History of the Langobards (1907)expansion

Authari took a second name when the dukes made him king. He was called Flavius, and Paul the Deacon says that all the kings of the Lombards afterwards used it.

It was not a Lombard name. It was the family name of Vespasian and Titus, worn by a long line of emperors after them and by Odoacer and by the Visigothic kings of Spain, and taking it was a claim: a barbarian king raised by an assembly of armed men in a Roman province, announcing in one word that he stood where the emperors had stood. The Lombards had been in Italy less than twenty years and had spent ten of them without a king at all.

Lumello

Authari died in 590 after a reign of about six years. He left a Bavarian widow, Theudelinda, and no settled successor, and what the Lombards did next is the strangest constitutional act on the record.

They kept the queen. Paul says she pleased them greatly, so they allowed her to remain in her royal dignity and advised her to choose for herself whomsoever she might wish from all the Lombards — such a one, namely, as could profitably manage the kingdom. She took counsel with the prudent and chose Agilulf, duke of Turin.

Paul tells the meeting as a scene. She sent for him and went out to meet him at Lumello; she had wine brought, drank first, and handed him the cup; he took it and kissed her hand; and the queen said, smiling and blushing, that he should not kiss the hand of a woman whose lips he ought to be kissing, and raised him up, and then explained about the marriage and the crown.

The footnote is merciless. All of this has to have happened within about two months of her first husband's death, which as the commentators observe detracts considerably from the charm of an otherwise delightful saga. The likeliest reconstruction is that Agilulf seized the throne and married Theudelinda afterwards, to attach a legitimate descent to a title he had taken by force.

Both versions describe the same underlying fact, which is why the story was worth inventing. Theudelinda's grandfather had been a Lombard king; her descendants reigned for five generations; and for a decade the person through whom the kingship passed was a woman. The saga made that dignified. It did not make it up.

Gregory's correspondent

Agilulf campaigned hard — Paul has him taking Perugia and marching on Rome, and Pope Gregory the Great so alarmed at his approach that he broke off his commentary on Ezekiel and said so in a homily. From the walls Gregory watched Roman captives being driven out of the countryside roped together at the neck.

What ended that war was not a battle. Gregory had been writing to Theudelinda for years, and she pressed her husband, and in 598 or 599 the king made a firm peace with the pope. Gregory's letter of thanks survives:

We have learned from the report of our son, the abbot Probus, that your Excellency has devoted yourself, as you are wont, zealously and benevolently, to making peace.

The Lombards had come into Italy Arian, and the correspondence is the beginning of their leaving it. Paul notes without comment that Pavia had two bishops in these years, an Arian one with his own baptistery at the church of St Eusebius and a Catholic one in the Catholic church, in the same city — and that the Arian one eventually converted and governed the Catholic church there.

The wall at Monza

Theudelinda built a church of St John the Baptist at Monza, twelve miles above Milan, on a site where Theoderic the Ostrogoth had put a summer palace because it was cool and near the Alps. Beside it she built a palace of her own, and had it painted with the deeds of the Lombards.

Paul saw it, and the paragraph in which he describes it is the reason anyone knows what these people looked like:

They shaved the neck, and left it bare up to the back of the head, having their hair hanging down on the face as far as the mouth and parting it on either side by a part in the forehead.

Loose garments, mostly linen, with broad woven borders in several colours; shoes open nearly to the tip of the big toe and fastened with interlacing latchets; trousers and shaggy leggings only later. A queen commissioned a wall painting to tell her subjects who they were, and two centuries afterwards a monk stood in front of it and wrote down the haircut.

The treasurer

Drafted from Great, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volumes XII-XIII (1895)expansion

Almost everything known about the Lombard conquest was written by Lombards, two centuries after the fact. One substantial archive survives from the other side of it, written while it was happening, and it belongs to the man who had to live with it: the bishop of Rome from 590 to 604 left something over eight hundred letters, and a great many of them are about Lombards standing outside his walls.

They are not history. They are correspondence — Gregory writing to generals, exarchs, bishops and the emperor about grain, hostages, ransoms, unpaid soldiers and the terms of a truce, in the ordinary irritable voice of a man doing a job he did not expect to be doing.

Running a war

The duke of Spoleto at this period was Ariulf, and the letters show Gregory handling him as a head of government would.

To two commanders of imperial troops, on the news that Ariulf was close: we gave thanks to God for your safety, we were afraid the soldiers we sent might fall into his hands, our own commander here has prepared himself against him, and if the enemy advances this way, do what you can in his rear.

To the same two, a little later: Ariulf has sent us this letter, which we forward to you. Read it, find out whether the people of Suana have kept the loyalty they promised, take adequate hostages from them, bind them again by oaths, restore the pledge you took from them, and bring them to a right mind by your discourses. But if you establish that they have already treated with Ariulf about surrendering, or given him hostages, then — after wholesome deliberation, lest your souls or mine be burdened with respect to our oaths — do whatever you judge to be to the advantage of the republic.

That is a bishop authorising his correspondents to break an oath if the military situation requires it, and worrying in writing about whose soul carries the cost.

To the bishop of Ravenna, explaining why he had not written: when Ariulf came to the Roman city and killed some and mutilated others, I was affected with such great sadness as to fall into a colic sickness. Then the complaint underneath it. The imperial commander in Italy both evades fighting the enemy and forbids us to make peace with him; the soldiery has been removed from the city of Rome; the troops who remain have not been paid and are with difficulty induced to guard the walls. How shall the city subsist, left destitute as it is by all, if it has not peace?

He made the peace himself, on his own responsibility, and was blamed for it.

The letter to the emperor

The reprimand came back from Constantinople in the form of a compliment. The emperor's orders had described Gregory as simple, and he understood exactly what was meant.

The Piety of my Lords in their most serene commands, while set on refuting me on certain matters, in sparing me has by no means spared me. For by the use therein of the term simplicity they politely call me silly.

He works through the scriptural senses of simplicity for a paragraph, doves and serpents, and then concedes the charge in the only way that lets him make his point:

I therefore, who am denounced in the most serene commands of my Lords as simple without the addition of prudence, as having been deceived by the cunning of Ariulph, am plainly and undoubtedly called silly; which I also myself acknowledge to be the case. For, though your Piety were silent, the facts cry out. For, if I had not been silly, I should by no means have come to endure what I suffer in this place among the swords of the Lombards.

Then the substance. He is also accused of lying about Ariulf's willingness to come to terms; he has long been aware that the emperor believes Nordulf before him and Leo before him. He would pass over contempt and ridicule of himself in silence if the captivity of his land were not increasing daily — but from his being charged with falsehood it follows that Italy is led captive under the Lombard yoke, his representations are not believed, and the strength of the enemy grows hugely. Believe facts rather than words, he tells the emperor, and think anything bad you like about me.

What the Church was paying

The line that explains the next two centuries of Italian history is in another letter, dropped in among complaints about a bishop's title and an irregular ordination in Dalmatia.

It is now seven years, Gregory writes, that we have been living in this city among the swords of the Lombards. How much is expended on them daily by this Church, so that we may be able to live among them, is not to be told. Then the comparison, which he clearly thought was the clinching one: as in the region of Ravenna your Piety maintains a treasurer to meet the daily expenses of the first army of Italy, so I also in this city am your treasurer for such purposes. And this Church, which already spends unceasingly on clergy, monasteries, the poor and the people, is spending on the Lombards as well.

A Roman bishop is telling a Roman emperor that the see of Peter has become the paymaster of central Italy — negotiating with the enemy, garrisoning the walls, ransoming captives and buying the invaders off out of church revenue — because the empire has stopped sending anything but reprimands.

Elsewhere he describes what he could see from those walls while the corn was running short: Romans led away with ropes round their necks, like dogs, to be sold in France. He had been delivering a course of homilies on Ezekiel when the siege began and abandoned it, and told his congregation why. Let no one blame me if I cease my speaking, since, as you all see, our tribulations have increased; we are surrounded on all sides by swords.

The thing that was made

The Lombard kingdom did not intend to create the papal state. It intended to take Italy, and it never quite managed either.

What it did was destroy the alternative. By the time Gregory died there was no imperial administration in central Italy capable of defending Rome, and the only institution left that could raise money, hire soldiers, treat with a Lombard duke and be obeyed was the bishopric — which had acquired all of those functions in fourteen years of letters, complaining the whole way that they were not its job. A hundred and fifty years later a pope with exactly those capabilities, and by then the habit of using them, would send across the Alps for a Frankish army.

The Edict

Drafted from Deacon, History of the Langobards (1907)peak

On 22 November 643 King Rothari published three hundred and eighty-eight chapters of law. Paul the Deacon's sentence about it is one line: the king collected in a series of writings the laws of the Lombards, which they had been keeping in memory only and by custom, and directed the code to be called the Edict.

A later chronicle is blunter about what changed. By Rothari, it says, law and justice began among the Lombards, and the judges first went through them in writing; before that, lawsuits were decided by custom, discretion and usage.

The tariff

Most of the Edict is a price list for injuries.

Every tooth is named and costs its own figure. So are the fingers and the toes. Bodily injuries are catalogued down that level of detail, with a separate scale for what is owed when the injured party is an aldius — half-free, and generally understood to be where the conquered Roman population sat — or a household slave, in which case the money is owed to the owner. Above all of it stands the wergild, the price of a man's life, graded by rank.

There is a category for simply getting in someone's way. To place yourself in the path of a free man, without doing him any bodily harm, costs twenty solidi. To do the same to a free woman or a girl costs nine hundred.

The purpose of a schedule that exhaustive is to make the feud unnecessary by putting a price on every injury that could start one. It is a document written by people who expected the alternative to be killing.

Whose law

The Edict binds Lombards. It mentions Romans as such exactly once, in a clause fixing what is owed for an offence against another man's bondwoman, where a Roman woman is priced lower than a slave of Germanic origin.

Elsewhere it gives itself away by implication. One law speaks of any free woman living according to the law of the Lombards, which means there were women who were not; foreigners settling in the country were to live by Lombard law unless the king granted them leave to live by some other. Roman law was not abolished in Lombard Italy and was not officially recognised either. It went on underneath, as custom, governing the private affairs of the people who had been there first — and the fact that nobody recorded its disappearance is one of the better arguments that it never disappeared.

Law here follows the person and not the ground. Two men standing in the same street in Pavia could be under different law, and which one applied to a child depended on the father.

The spear

Property was given away in front of witnesses, at a thing — an assembly of at least a few free men, the survivor of the old Germanic folk-moot. The verb for it in the Latin of the Edict is thingare, to thing something away, and the act itself is the gairethinx, the spear-donation. Rothari's law requires that a man who wants to thing away his property do it not secretly but before free men.

The word is the whole institution in miniature: a Germanic assembly, a spear, a Latin verb ending, and a king in a former Roman province writing it into a statute.

The seventy-seventh year

Rothari dated the Edict, and the way he dated it is the most deliberate thing in the book.

Not by the emperor's regnal year, which is how a document produced anywhere in the Roman world would have been dated. Not by the indiction. He counted from the year the Lombards came into Italy, and made it the seventy-seventh.

That is a people declaring in a legal formula that its own arrival is the event from which time is measured. Paul, writing in the eighth century, uses the prologue to that Edict as his evidence for what happened in the sixth — and tells a reader who doubts one of his stories to go and look it up there. The code was the Lombards' account of themselves, and the history of the people was written out of it.

An increaser of the law

Drafted from Deacon, History of the Langobards (1907)peak

Liutprand reigned thirty-one years and seven months and died in his bed, which no Lombard king before him had managed on that scale. Paul the Deacon, who was born a few years before it ended and grew up in the country it governed, gives him the longest character sketch in the book:

a man of much wisdom, very religious and a lover of peace, shrewd in counsel, powerful in war, merciful to offenders, chaste, modest, prayerful in the night-watches, generous in charities, ignorant of letters indeed, yet worthy to be likened to philosophers, a supporter of his people, an increaser of the law.

The last phrase is the one that matters, and it is not a compliment about character.

The first of March

For fifteen of his thirty-one years, on the first day of March, Liutprand issued laws.

They were framed on the advice of his judges. They were no longer put to the assembly of free men that had given Rothari's Edict its authority a century earlier, and the king's justification for issuing them without it was that his own heart was in the hand of God. The Latin they are written in is bad enough to be difficult to read.

What is in them describes a different country from the one Rothari legislated for. The hunting and falconry provisions are gone. In their place are rules for enforcing contracts and foreclosing mortgages. The composition for murder — the tariff the Edict was built on — is replaced by outright confiscation of the killer's property, and where the property does not cover it, the killer himself is handed over to the dead man's heirs as a slave. There are laws against the king's own agents oppressing people, and heavy penalties for judges who sit on a case.

There is also a law about scribes, and it is the quiet one. Anyone drawing up a deed, whether according to the laws of the Lombards or those of the Romans, must not draw it contrary to these statutes. The kingdom's own legislation now takes for granted that a substantial part of the population is living under another law, and legislates over the top of it anyway.

What he could not change

The most revealing sentence Liutprand left is an admission of defeat.

Trial by combat was in the Edict and he restricted it, and he explained why he was not abolishing it:

We are uncertain about the judgment of God, and we have heard of many persons unjustly losing their cause by wager of battle, but on account of the custom of our nation of the Lombards we cannot change the law itself.

A king who says in a statute that a procedure of his own legal system produces unjust results, and that he lacks the power to remove it, is telling you exactly how far a Lombard king's authority ran. It ran over mortgages and it stopped at custom.

The last act

Liutprand spent his reign pushing at the two things that stood between the kingdom and the whole peninsula: the semi-independent southern duchies, and the Byzantine exarchate at Ravenna. He brought Spoleto and Benevento to heel. He took territory around Ravenna. He came to Rome.

And there, at the end, he stopped. He met the pope, was entreated to desist, and agreed to give back the country districts around Ravenna and two-thirds of the territory of Cesena, and to hold a truce while his envoys went to Constantinople to settle a final treaty. It was one of his last public acts, and it undid the work of the reign.

Nobody knows why. He was old and near death; his successor was not the man to finish what he had started; the pope was persuasive. What is on the record is that the strongest king the Lombards ever had reached the point where Italy was within his grasp, and handed part of it back.

His successors did not make the same choice, and it was the choice that killed the kingdom.

The invitation

Drafted from Einhard, Life of Charlemagne (1880)contraction

Aistulf did what Liutprand had drawn back from. In 751 he took Ravenna, ended the Byzantine exarchate, and removed the last imperial power from northern Italy.

It looks like the moment the kingdom finally wins the peninsula. It is the moment it loses it. The papacy had spent two centuries with an imperial protector at Ravenna and a Lombard army on its northern side; with Ravenna gone there was no protector, and Pope Stephen went looking for another one on the far side of the Alps.

What the Franks thought of it

Einhard, writing about Charlemagne's Italian war two generations later, pauses to note how unpopular the first one had been.

Pepin had undertaken the Lombard war at Stephen's request, and he had undertaken it under great difficulties: certain leading Franks, the men he habitually took counsel from, opposed the plan so vehemently that they declared openly they would leave the king and go home.

That is worth sitting with. The alliance that ended the Lombard kingdom, gave the papacy a territorial state, and set up everything that followed in Italy was not obvious to the people asked to fight it. It was a war on behalf of a churchman in another country, across the highest mountains in Europe, against a kingdom that had done the Franks no injury. Pepin went anyway.

The terms

The first war was short. Einhard says Pepin besieged Aistulf for a few days in Pavia and compelled him to give hostages, to restore to the Romans the cities and castles he had taken, and to swear that he would not attempt to seize them again.

Every clause of that is a description of the trap the kingdom was now in. The Lombards had spent two hundred years unable to take the whole of Italy because an empire held part of it. They had finally removed the empire, and discovered that what replaced it was a bishop with the power to summon an army from Gaul — and that the cities they had taken were now, by treaty and on oath, somebody else's.

Aistulf broke the oath, as everyone involved had presumably expected. Pepin came back and imposed the terms again. The territory went to the pope, which is where the papal state comes from, and the Lombard kingdom was left holding northern Italy on sufferance from a power it could not reach.

Desiderius, who took the crown in 756, spent eighteen years trying to work his way out of that position by diplomacy — including marrying a daughter to the Frankish king. Einhard mentions the marriage twice and never explains why it ended. It lasted about a year, and after it ended there was nothing left between Pavia and the Alps.

774

Drafted from Einhard, Life of Charlemagne (1880)end

Einhard declines to describe the crossing.

At this point I should describe Charles's difficult passage over the Alps into Italy, and the hardships that the Franks endured in climbing the trackless mountain-ridges, the heaven-aspiring cliffs and ragged peaks, if it were not my purpose in this work to record the manner of his life rather than the incidents of the wars that he waged.

Having refused to describe it, he has described it. It is the single most Einhardian sentence in the biography, and it is the last thing the Lombard kingdom gets before the summary of its destruction.

The siege

The first war, Pepin's, had lasted a few days. This one did not. Einhard's account is that Charles did not cease, after declaring war, until he had exhausted King Desiderius by a long siege and forced him to surrender at discretion; drove his son Adalgis — the last hope of the Lombards — not only from his kingdom but from all Italy; restored to the Romans everything they had lost; put down the duke of Friuli, who was plotting revolution; reduced all Italy to his power, and set his own son Pepin as king over it.

Desiderius was taken to Francia and banished for life. Adalgis went to Constantinople and spent the rest of his life trying to get an imperial army to put him back, and never did.

A change of family

The kingdom was not dissolved, and the distinction is not pedantic.

Charlemagne became king of the Lombards and added the title to his own. The regnum Langobardorum went on being an administrative entity with its own law and its own officers. The duchies went on. Lombard counts and gastalds went on doing what they had been doing. What changed in 774 was which family held the crown — and the proof is in the settlement itself, since a conqueror who intended to abolish a kingdom does not install his son as its king.

Einhard's own framing gives the point away without meaning to. The Lombard war appears in his sixth chapter, between Aquitaine and Saxony, and it takes a page. The Saxons get thirty-two years and the longest chapter in the book, because the Saxons had to be destroyed as a people before they could be governed. Italy had a working state in it, and Charlemagne took the state.

There is one more thing Einhard supplies without dwelling on it, and it is the real reason the armies met. When Charlemagne's brother Carloman died in 771, his widow took her sons to Italy and put herself under the protection of Desiderius — without reason, says Einhard, despite her husband's brother. Charlemagne had by then married a daughter of Desiderius, at his mother's insistence, and repudiated her at the end of a year for a reason Einhard says nobody knows.

So the kingdom fell partly over a marriage that lasted twelve months and a sister-in-law who chose the wrong protector. Einhard is writing to praise a dynasty, and he puts both facts on the page anyway, in the section about the family rather than the section about the war, where a reader is least likely to put them together.

The deacon

Drafted from Deacon, History of the Langobards (1907)afterlife

The kingdom's memorial was written by a man who went to the court of the king who destroyed it, to beg for his brother's life.

Paul was born in Friuli somewhere around 720, into a family that had come into Italy with Alboin. He was educated at a Lombard court, learned Greek, and by the 760s was attached to Arichis, duke of Benevento, and his wife Adelperga, who was a daughter of Desiderius — the king Charlemagne would depose. Paul wrote Adelperga an acrostic poem whose initial letters spell Adelperga Pia. When she complained that the Roman history he had given her to read was too short, he wrote her a longer one. For most of his working life he was a client of the last Lombard royal house.

Benevento

In 774 the kingdom ended and the southern duchy did not.

Benevento had been effectively its own country for two centuries and it was never taken. In the same year the northern kingdom fell, Arichis stopped calling himself duke and started calling himself prince. That is the whole of the Lombard state's continuation: one southern principality, the title upgraded in the year of the disaster, going on issuing Lombard law and calling itself Lombard long after there was no king in Pavia.

The letter from the Moselle

Paul's brother Arichis — named for the grandfather, not the duke — was taken prisoner after a Lombard rising in Friuli against the Franks, and his property was confiscated and his family reduced to beggary. Paul went north to ask Charlemagne for him.

He was kept there. The letters he sent back to Monte Cassino are the letters of a man who cannot leave:

I am kept here for a while only by a feeling of pity, only by the injunctions of love, only by the demand of the soul, and what is still more than all this, by the quiet power of our lord, the king.

He asks the abbot to write with news, and for the names of the brothers who have died, for I hear that many of them have died. He signs off with three lines of verse noting the date and that the letter was sent from the shore of the glassy Moselle.

The prisoners were eventually released. And then something odd happened, which is that Paul and the king began exchanging joke poems. Charlemagne, or a court poet writing as him, teases Paul with three questions: will he wear heavy chains, or lie in a dungeon, or go and convert the king of the Northmen? Paul answers that the Northmen have no Latin and will seem to him like shaggy goats and he to them like a dumb beast, but he has no fear, because if they know he comes under Charlemagne's name they will not dare lift a finger — and if their king refuses baptism, Paul will drag him to the foot of the throne with his hands tied behind his back, and Thor and Woden will not help him.

That is a Lombard whose people had just been conquered, whose brother had just been a hostage, writing comic verse for the conqueror. It is also what a change of dynasty rather than a destruction actually looks like from underneath: the kingdom continued, and its educated men went to work for the new management.

The ash tree

Paul went home to Monte Cassino and wrote the history of his people, and he put his own family into Book IV.

His great-grandfather Lopichis was one of five brothers carried off by the Avars in a raid on Friuli. Four stayed in captivity. Lopichis, grown, escaped, and set out west through the mountains with no idea of the way. A wolf appeared and went in front of him, looking back, and he took it for a guide from heaven. His bread ran out; starving, he tried to shoot the wolf to eat it and it slipped away; he lay down on the ground expecting to die, and dreamed of a man telling him to walk in the direction opposite to the way his feet were pointing, for there is Italy which you are seeking. He woke and walked that way. An old Slav woman took him in and fed him a little at a time, so that feeding him properly would not kill him.

He reached the house he had been born in. It had no roof and was full of brambles and thorns. When he had cut them down he found a large ash tree growing inside the walls, and hung his quiver on it. Relatives helped him rebuild. He never got back any of his father's property, because the people holding it had held it too long.

That is what a Lombard historian chose to put on the record about his own descent: not a hero, but a returned prisoner reclaiming a ruin and losing the lawsuit.

What did not get written

Paul died before the book was finished. It stops in 744, at Liutprand's death, thirty years short of the year it was written in the shadow of. He never wrote the fall.

Two other things of his outlasted it. He compiled the collection of homilies Charlemagne had asked the empire's churches to use. And a hymn to John the Baptist — the protecting saint of the Lombards — was attributed to him, on authority his editors call doubtful; each of its lines begins a step higher than the last, and a monk at Arezzo three centuries later took the first syllable of each line and made it the name of a note: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.

Whether or not the hymn is his, the kingdom that had no letters worth the name in Rothari's day produced the man who was plausibly credited with it, and the history of the Lombards exists because he sat down and wrote it after there were no more Lombard kings to write it for.