LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Lombards
built 647 days ago
The Lombards were one of the East German nations. Their original home was on the banks of the Elbe River in northern Germany. From there they migrated south and east to the Danube River, where they were converted to the Arian form of Christianity. In 568 A.D. they followed the track of earlier Germanic invaders from the Balkans down into northern Italy, and a small group went off in a different direction to the eastern parts of Dalmatia. Meeting with little opposition, for the country had been ravaged by war and plague, they occupied the great plain between the Alps and the Apennines, ever since called Lombardy. It was a thorough conquest.
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To the Lombards the conquest was the destruction of their legal and social supremacy. Henceforth they were equally with the Italians the subjects of the Frank kings. The Carolingian kings expressly recognized the Roman law, and allowed all who would be counted Romans to "profess" it. But Latin influences were not strong enough to extinguish the Lombard name and destroy altogether the recollections and habits of the Lombard rule; Lombard law was still recognized, and survived in the schools of Pavia. Lombardy remained the name of the finest province of Italy, and for a time was the name for Italy itself But what was specially Lombard could not stand in the long run against the Italian atmosphere which surrounded it. Generation after generation passed more and more into real Italians. Antipathies, indeed, survived, and men even in the 10th century called each other Roman or Langobard as terms of reproach. But the altered name of Lombard ... denoted henceforth some of the proudest of Italians; and, though the Lombard speech had utterly perished their most common names still kept up the remembrance that their fathers had come from beyond the Alps.
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After their migration into Pannonia, the Lombards had contact with the Iranian Sarmatians. From these people they borrowed a long-lived custom once of religious symbolism. A long pole surmounted by the figure of a bird, usually a dove, derived from the standards used in battle, was placed by the family in the ground the home of a man who had died far afield in war and who could not be brought home for funeral and burial. Usually the bird was oriented so as to point in the direction of the suspected site of the warrior's death.
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The Lombards, a barbarous idolatrous nation which swarmed out of Scandinavia and Pomerania, settled first in the counties now called Austria and Bavaria; and a few years after, about the middle of the sixth century, broke into the north of Italy. In their ravages about the year 597, they attempted to compel forty husbandmen, whom they had made captives, to eat meats which had been offered to idols. The faithful servants of Christ constantly refusing to comply, were all massacred. Such meats might, in some circumstances, have been eaten without sin, but not when this was exacted out of a motive of superstition. The same barbarians endeavored to oblige another company of captives to adore the head of a goat, which was their favorite idol, and about which they walked, singing, and bending their knees before it; but the Christians chose rather to die than purchase their lives by offending God. They are said to have been about four hundred in number.
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The last Lombard to rule as king of the Lombards was Desiderius , duke of Toscana , who managed to conquer in a definitive way Ravenna , ending the Byzantine presence in Central Italy. He decided the reopen struggles against the Pope, who was supporting the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento against him, and entered Rome in 772 , the first Lombard king to do so. But when Pope Hadrian I called for help from the powerful king Charlemagne , he was defeated at Susa and sieged in Pavia , while his son Adelchi had ... to open the gates of Verona to Frank troops. Desiderius surrendered in 774 and Charlemagne , in an utterly novel decision took the title "King of the Lombards" as well. 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 .
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Under Emperor Augustus, the Lombards were still established on the lower Elbe (Bardengau) and were defeated (5 C.E.) by the Romans. Their history for the next 400 years is confused. They were members of the Hunnic Empire and were probably Arians. They were given land by Justinian in Noricum and Pannonia, and they aided (553) the imperial attacks on the Ostrogoths. The Lombards took part in Belisarius's conquest, and soon they began to move south toward Italy.
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Lombards