Lombards. Not to be confused with the modern inhabitants of the region of Lombardy, Italy. The Lombards or Longobards were a Germanic people who ruled most of the Italian Peninsula from 568 to 774.
The Lombard historian Paul the Deacon wrote in the Historia Langobardorum that the Lombards descended from a small tribe called the Winnili, who dwelt in southern Scandinavia (Scadanan) before migrating to seek new lands. In the 1st century AD, they formed part of the Suebi, in northwestern Germany. By the end of the 5th century, they had moved into the area roughly coinciding with modern Austria and Slovakia north of the Danube river, where they subdued the Heruls and later fought frequent wars with the Gepids. The Lombard king Audoin defeated the Gepid leader Thurisind in 551 or 552; his successor Alboin eventually destroyed the Gepids in 567.
Following this victory, Alboin decided to lead his people to Italy, which had become severely depopulated and devastated after the long Gothic War (535–554) between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom there. The Lombards were joined by numerous Saxons, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians, and Ostrogoths, and their invasion of Italy was almost unopposed.
By late 569 they had conquered all north of Italy and the principal cities north of the Po River except Pavia, which fell in 572. At the same time, they occupied areas in central Italy and southern Italy. They established a Lombard Kingdom in north and central Italy, later named Regnum Italicum (“Kingdom of Italy”), which reached its zenith under the 8th-century ruler Liutprand. In 774, the Kingdom was conquered by the Frankish King Charlemagne and integrated into his Empire. Charlemagne, in an utterly novel decision, took the title “King of the Lombards”. Before then the Germanic kingdoms had frequently conquered each other, but none had adopted the title of King of another people. Charlemagne took part of the Lombard territory to create the Papal States.
However, Lombard nobles continued to rule southern parts of the Italian peninsula, well into the 11th century when they were conquered by the Normans and added to their County of Sicily. In this period, the southern part of Italy still under Longobardic domination was known by the name Langbarðaland (Land of the Lombards) in the Norse runestones. Their legacy is also apparent in the regional name Lombardy (in the north of Italy).
When they entered Italy, some Lombards retained their native form of paganism, while some were Arian Christians. Hence they did not enjoy good relations with the Early Christian Church. Gradually, they adopted Roman or Romanized titles, names, and traditions, and partially converted to orthodoxy (in the 7th century), though not without a long series of religious and ethnic conflicts.
By the time Paul the Deacon was writing, the Lombard language, dress and even hairstyles had nearly all disappeared in toto.
The whole Lombard territory was divided into 36 duchies, whose leaders settled in the main cities. The king ruled over them and administered the land through emissaries called gastaldi. This subdivision, however, together with the independent indocility of the duchies, deprived the kingdom of unity, making it weak even when compared to the Byzantines, especially since these had begun to recover from the initial invasion. This weakness became even more evident when the Lombards had to face the increasing power of the Franks. In response, the kings tried to centralize power over time, but they definitively lost control over Spoleto and Benevento in the attempt.
The Lombardy region in Italy, which includes the cities of Brescia, Bergamo, Milan, and the old capital Pavia, is a reminder of the presence of the Lombards.
CULTURE
Language. The Lombardic language is extinct. The Germanic language declined, beginning in the 7th century, but may have been in scattered use until as late as about the year 1000. Only fragments of the language have survived. In the absence of Lombardic texts, it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the language’s morphology and syntax. The genetic classification of the language depends entirely on phonology. Since there is evidence that Lombardic participated in, and indeed shows some of the earliest evidence for, the High German consonant shift, it is usually classified as an Upper German dialect.
The Italian language preserves a large number of Lombardic words, although it is not always easy to distinguish them from other Germanic borrowings such as those from Gothic or from Frankish. They often bear some resemblance to English words, as Lombardic was akin to Saxon. For instance, landa from land,guardia from wardan (warden), guerra from werra (war), ricco from rikki (rich), and guadare from wadjan (to wade).
From the Codice diplomatico longobardo, a collection of legal documents that makes reference to many Lombardic terms, we obtain several terms still in use in the Italian language: Barba (beard), marchio (mark), maniscalco (blacksmith), aia (courtyard), braida, borgo (village), fara (toponym), pizzo (toponym), sala (toponym), staffa (stirrup), stalla (stable), sculdascio, faida (feud), manigoldo (scoundrel), sgherro; fanone (baleen), stamberga (hovel); anca (hip), guancia (cheek), nocca (knuckle), schiena (back); gazza (magpie), martora (marten); gualdo, pozza (pool); verbs like bussare (to knock), piluccare (to peck), russare (to snore).
Social structure. With contact with other western Germanic populations, such as the Saxons and the Frisians, they learned a rigid social organization into castes, rarely present in other Germanic peoples.
The Lombard kings can be traced back as early as c. 380 and thus to the beginning of the Great Migration. Kingship developed amongst the Germanic peoples when the unity of a single military command was found necessary. The earliest government was a general assembly that selected canton chiefs and war leaders in times of conflict. All such figures were probably selected from a caste of nobility.
Religious history
Paganism. Initially, before the passage from Scandinavia to the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, the Lombards worshiped deities related to fertility and the earth and evolved to the cult of warlike gods.
In Italy, the Lombards were intensively Christianised, and the pressure to convert to Catholicism was great. A succession of Arian kings were militarily aggressive and presented a threat to the Papacy in Rome. By the end of the reign of Cunincpert , the Lombards were more or less completely Catholicised. Liutprand united the south of the peninsula with the north bringing together his Italo-Roman and Germanic subjects into one Catholic state.
Architecture. Few Lombard buildings have survived. Most have been lost, rebuilt, or renovated at some point, so they preserve little of their original Lombard structure.
