[476 – 774] Ostrogothic and Lombard Rule

The year is 476. But the end of the Western Roman Empire doesn't arrive with a thunderclap; it comes as a quiet, weary sigh. In the marsh-ringed city of Ravenna, the new capital, a teenage boy named Romulus Augustulus, derisively nicknamed the "little emperor," is pensioned off. There is no grand battle for Rome, no city put to the torch. Instead, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer, commander of the Roman army, simply decides the charade is over. He sends the imperial regalia—the diadem and purple cloak—east to the true emperor in Constantinople, declaring that one emperor is enough for the world. For the people of Italy, shivering in the shell of a once-great power, it must have felt less like a fall and more like a final, inevitable crumbling. But this was not the end of the story for Italy, merely the turning of a dark and fascinating page. For a time, Odoacer ruled as king, a barbarian trying to maintain the Roman system. He kept the Senate, repaired the aqueducts, and ensured the grain dole continued to feed the poor of Rome. Yet across the Danube, another power was watching. Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, was a man forged in the crucible of this new world. Raised as a high-status hostage in Constantinople, he spoke Greek and Latin, understood the intricacies of Roman administration, and yet remained a warrior king to his core. With the Eastern Emperor’s blessing—or perhaps, his urging to take a problem off his hands—Theodoric led his entire people, an exodus of perhaps 100,000 Goths, on a grueling trek across the Alps into Italy in 489. What followed was a brutal, four-year war. Theodoric cornered Odoacer in the impregnable Ravenna. After a long siege, they agreed to rule jointly. The celebratory banquet, meant to seal the peace, became the setting for a shocking betrayal. Theodoric, it is said, raised his sword and cleaved Odoacer in two, from collarbone to hip, remarking with grim satisfaction, "I think the wretch had no bones in his body." With this bloody act, the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy was born. For three decades, Italy knew a fragile, prosperous peace under Theodoric’s rule. He established a brilliant, if precarious, system of dual government. The Goths, an Arian Christian minority, were the military caste, living under their own laws and leaders. The far more numerous Roman population, who were Chalcedonian Catholics, continued to live under Roman law, their civil society administered by Roman officials. It was a separation designed to preserve both peoples, but it bred a deep-seated mistrust. From Ravenna, Theodoric presided over a renaissance of sorts. He launched a massive building program, repairing public works and commissioning breathtaking new structures. If you visit Ravenna today, you can still feel his presence. Stand inside the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo and gaze at the mosaics. On one side, a procession of male martyrs; on the other, female virgins, all moving towards Christ and the Madonna. The figures are stiff and eternal, their eyes staring into a golden, heavenly infinity—a perfect blend of Roman technique and Germanic spiritual intensity. You can even visit his tomb, a colossal ten-sided structure capped with a single, massive 300-ton slab of Istrian stone, a monument to a barbarian king who dreamed in Roman marble. Life for an Italian farmer or a Roman aristocrat might not have felt so different. The fields were tilled, wine was made, and the old senatorial families still debated philosophy. But it was a peace built on the will of one man. As Theodoric aged, he grew paranoid. He suspected plots between the Roman elite and his rival in Constantinople, leading him to imprison and execute the brilliant philosopher Boethius, who wrote his masterpiece, *The Consolation of Philosophy*, while awaiting his death. The delicate balance was breaking. When Theodoric died in 526, his kingdom unraveled. The Eastern Roman Emperor, the ambitious Justinian I, saw his chance to reclaim the West. In 535, he launched the Gothic War, a conflict he believed would be swift. It became a generation-long nightmare. For nearly twenty years, the armies of the Goths and the Byzantines (Eastern Romans) fought up and down the peninsula. Rome was besieged and captured five times. Its population, once over a million, shrank to perhaps 30,000 souls hiding among the ruins. Aqueducts were cut, fields turned to wasteland, and entire cities became husks. By the time the war ended in 554, Italy was a shattered, depopulated land, nominally back in the Roman Empire, but bled white. The exhausted populace had little time to recover. In 568, a new, far more fearsome people descended from the Alps. They were the Lombards, a Germanic tribe whose name may have come from their famously long beards (*Langobarden*). Led by their king, Alboin, they were not like the Romanized Ostrogoths. They were seen as fiercer, less sophisticated, and their arrival was a brutal shock. A horrifying legend captures their perceived savagery: Alboin, having killed the king of a rival tribe in battle, had his skull fashioned into a drinking cup. He then married the king's daughter, Rosamund, and during a feast in Verona, forced her to drink from her own father’s skull. Her subsequent revenge, a palace coup that led to Alboin’s assassination, is the stuff of grim epic poetry. The Lombards did not create a unified kingdom. Their conquest was a violent patchwork. They seized the north, which to this day is called Lombardy. Powerful dukes established nearly independent states in the center and south, like Spoleto and Benevento. Byzantine Rome, Ravenna, and the southern coasts held out, but Italy was now fractured, a political reality that would define it for the next 1,300 years. Life under the Lombards was a harsh new beginning. The Roman senatorial class was largely wiped out or dispossessed. The complex system of Roman law was replaced by Germanic custom. In 643, King Rothari issued his Edict, a fascinating glimpse into the Lombard mind. It wasn't about abstract justice, but about maintaining order by setting a price on every crime. A man’s life had a *wergild*, or "man-price," a compensation paid to his family to prevent a blood feud. The value of an eye was calculated, the price for a broken arm was set in law. It was a practical, if brutal, social code. Their art was not in grand mosaics but in intricate metalwork: gold-leaf crosses, stylized animal figures on shields, and elaborate fibulae, or brooches, that fastened their rough linen and leather clothing. Over two centuries, the Lombards slowly changed. They converted from Arianism to Catholicism, began to speak the local Vulgar Latin, and started to build in stone, leaving behind beautiful, simple churches like the Tempietto Longobardo in Cividale del Friuli. But one enemy they could never subdue was the Papacy in Rome. The Popes, seeing themselves as the heirs of Roman authority, feared Lombard encroachment. They looked north, across the Alps, for a new protector. They found one in the Franks. When the Lombard king Aistulf threatened Rome in 754, Pope Stephen II made a desperate journey into Francia to appeal to their king, Pepin the Short. The Franks intervened, pushing the Lombards back. Two decades later, the Lombards tried again. This time, a new Frankish king, a man of towering ambition and physical presence, answered the Pope’s call. His name was Charles, soon to be known as Charlemagne. In 774, he besieged and captured the Lombard capital of Pavia, deposed their last king, and in a move of profound significance, declared himself King of the Franks *and* the Lombards. He placed upon his own head the ancient Iron Crown of Lombardy, said to contain a nail from the True Cross. The era of barbarian kings was over. A new power, the Carolingian Empire, had arrived, and its destiny, intertwined with that of the Papacy, would forge the next chapter in the unending, dramatic story of Italy.