Lombards

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lombards got their name, by one account, from a woman's clever trick at dawn. In a war against the Vandals, the Winnili were outnumbered, so the goddess Frea advised that all their women tie their hair in front of their faces like beards and stand beside their husbands. The god Godan saw them first at sunrise and asked, "Who are these long-beards?" That story, told in the oldest of three legendary accounts, gave a Germanic people the name Langobardi. They had once lived near present-day Hamburg, then on the Middle Danube, before they conquered most of the Italian Peninsula between 568 and 774 AD. Roman writers first noticed them on the Lower Elbe in the early first century. Centuries later, their southern lands in Italy were known to the Norse as Langbarðaland, the land of the Lombards. How does a small tribe surrounded by stronger neighbours end up giving its name to a region of northern Italy? What kept their nobles ruling the Italian south long after their kingdom in the north had fallen?

• 2. The Long-Beards

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  Strabo and Velleius Paterculus recorded the classical Latin and Greek forms of the name, Langobardi and Λαγκόβαρδοι. The standard explanation joins lang, meaning long, with bard, meaning beard, to make the Long-beards. Isidore of Seville wrote in the seventh century that it was commonly said the Langobards earned the name because they never cut their beards. Scholars generally accept this long-beard reading as linguistically and semantically sound. Competing theories carry less weight. One derives bard from barta, meaning axe. Another treats it as a synonym for fighters, parallel to the alternate ethnonym Winnili, which itself means the fighters. It is possible Winnili was the name the tribe used internally, while Langobardi began as a name outsiders applied. A rarer shortened form, Bardi, appears in later sources. Place-names such as Bardengau and Bardowick in northern Germany, near the first known homeland, may preserve the same element. Yet scholars note that Bard place-names are common across northern Germany and tend to attach to wet or muddy ground. Paul the Deacon, a Catholic monk who wrote his History between 787 and 796, found the pagan origin stories silly and laughable. A modern theory holds that the name comes from Langbarðr, one of the names of Odin.

• 3. Tales Of A Lost Homeland

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  Three early medieval texts tell where the Lombards came from, and they disagree. The oldest, the Origo Gentis Langobardorum, opens with the Winnili ruled by two brothers, Ibor and Aio, whose mother and advisor was named Gambara. The Origo and Paul the Deacon's History place the tribe's start on an island in the far north, spelled variously as Scadan, Scandanan, or Scadinavia. This seems to imitate the sixth-century origin of the Goths written by Jordanes. The Chronicon Gothanum, written later than the other two, appears to preserve some older material. It has the Lombards setting out from a river called Vindilicus at the far edge of Gaul, then moving to a place on the lower Elbe. The Origo reports a war with the Vandals, who tried to force tribute from other peoples. The young and brave Winnili refused, declaring, "It is better to maintain liberty by arms than to stain it by the payment of tribute." Paul the Deacon instead says one third of the Winnili had to leave the island because of over-population and a low-lying coast. In his telling, the Vandal war happened in a new homeland called Scoringa, perhaps on the Baltic coast or the Bardengau on the Elbe. The Chronicon, surprisingly, says the Langobardi later lived in Saxony at Patespruna, probably meant to be Paderborn.

• 4. Rome Takes Notice

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  Between AD 9 and 16, the Roman court historian Velleius Paterculus rode with an expedition as prefect of the cavalry and left the first near-contemporary record of the Lombards. He wrote that under Tiberius the power of the Langobardi was broken, calling them a race surpassing even the Germans in savagery. Strabo, writing around 20 AD, treated them as a branch of the Suebi and said they had been forced east of the Elbe by the Romans. Tacitus, writing about 100 AD in his Germania, stressed that the Langobardi were a distinctively small Suebian people in numbers, yet surrounded by the most powerful peoples. They kept safe, he wrote, by daring the perils of war. In the year 9 AD, when Arminius won the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, the Lombards and Semnones belonged to the kingdom of Marobod, the Marcomannic king allied with Rome. After war broke out between Arminius and Marobod in 17 AD, the Lombards and Semnones switched sides to Arminius, whom they saw as a champion of freedom. Arminius died in 21 AD. In 166 AD, Cassius Dio reported that 6,000 Lombards and Obii crossed the Danube and invaded Pannonia just before the Marcomannic Wars. The two tribes were defeated, and Ballomar, King of the Marcomanni, was sent as ambassador to make peace. They returned home, but it was a foretaste of the great war to come.

• 5. The Long March South

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  After roughly two centuries with no contemporary mention, the Lombards reappear near the Danube far to the south. The Historia Langobardorum codicis Gothani says the Saxons subjected them around 300, but that they rose up under their first king, Agelmund, who ruled for 30 years. In the second half of the fourth century, probably driven by bad harvests, they left their homes and began their migration. The route runs through places with strange names. They crossed into Mauringa only after their strongest man defeated the champion of the Assipitti, who had denied them passage. From Mauringa they reached Golanda, which one scholar, Ludwig Schmidt, equated with Gotland, meaning simply good land. Moving on through Anthaib and Banthaib, they came to Vurgundaib, believed to be the old lands of the Burgundes. There, Bulgars, probably Huns, stormed their camp and killed King Agelmund. Laimicho, still in his youth, was made king and avenged the slaughter. The Lombards were likely made subjects of the Huns, then rose up and defeated them with great slaughter, gaining booty and confidence as they became bolder in undertaking the toils of war. Their journey ended in Rugiland, which they reached after 487, when Odoacer defeated the kingdom of the Rugii near what is now Vienna.

• 6. War On The Danube

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  Under King Claffo, the Langobards held parts of modern Upper and Lower Austria and converted to Arian Christianity. In 505 the Herulians defeated them and forced them to pay tax and withdraw to Northern Bohemia. In 508, King Rodulf sent his brother to collect tribute, but the brother was stabbed by Rometrud, sister of King Tato. Rodulf led his forces against Tato, was ambushed, and was killed from a hill. In the 540s, Audoin led the Lombards back across the Danube into Pannonia, where Thurisind, King of the Gepids, tried to expel them. The Langobard and Roman armies joined and defeated the Gepids in 551. In that battle, Audoin's son Alboin killed Thurisind's son Turismod. Near Szólád in Pannonia, archaeologists have unearthed burial sites where Lombard men and women were buried together as families, unusual among Germanic peoples then. They also found traces of Mediterranean Greeks and a possible migrant from France. Around 560, Audoin was succeeded by Alboin, a young and energetic leader. In 566 Alboin married Rosamund, daughter of the Gepid king Cunimund, and made a pact with Khagan Bayan. The next year, the Lombards and the Avars destroyed the Gepid kingdom, and the nomads settled in Transylvania.

• 7. A Kingdom In Italy

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  In the spring of 568, fearing the aggressive Avars, Alboin led his people into Italy with their wives, children, and all their goods. Northeastern Italy lay severely depopulated by the long Gothic War of 535 to 554 between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom. The invasion was almost unopposed. At least 20,000 Saxon warriors, old allies, joined them, along with Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians, and Ostrogoths. Forum Iulii, now Cividale del Friuli, was the first important city to fall, in 569, and there Alboin created the first Lombard duchy under his nephew Gisulf. Milan, the main Roman centre of northern Italy, fell that summer. The Byzantine official Longinus, sent by Emperor Justin II, could defend only coastal cities the fleet could supply. Pavia held out three years before falling in 572 to become the kingdom's first capital. In the south, the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, the latter under Zotto, grew semi-independent and outlasted the northern kingdom into the twelfth century. The territory was divided into 36 duchies, governed for the king by emissaries called gastaldi, but the duchies' independence kept the kingdom weak. Alboin himself was murdered in Verona in 572 in a plot led by his wife Rosamund, who fled to Ravenna. His successor Cleph was also assassinated after a reign of 18 months, beginning a leaderless period known as the Rule of the Dukes.

• 8. Crown, Church, And The Franks

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  In 589, King Authari married Theodelinda, daughter of Garibald I of Bavaria. The Catholic Theodelinda was a friend of Pope Gregory I and pushed for Christianization, marrying again, in 591, the next king Agilulf. Rothari, regarded by many as the most energetic Lombard king, issued the Edictum Rothari, which set down his people's laws in Latin but did not bind the tributaries of the Lombards. The kingdom recovered under Liutprand, king from 712, who annexed the Exarchate of Ravenna and the duchy of Rome and helped Charles Martel drive back the Arabs. Desiderius, the last Lombard king, took Ravenna for good and entered Rome in 772, the first Lombard king to do so. When Pope Hadrian I called for help, the Frankish king Charlemagne defeated Desiderius at Susa and besieged him in Pavia. Desiderius surrendered in 774, and Charlemagne, in an utterly novel decision, took the title King of the Lombards. Before then Germanic kingdoms had conquered each other, but none had adopted the title of King of another people. In the south, Lombard nobles ruled on. Duke Arechis II of Benevento claimed his duchy was the kingdom's successor and took the title prínceps, prince. The Lombards there held land claimed by both the Carolingian and Byzantine empires. A genetic study published in 2018 found strong similarities between the Lombards of Italy and earlier Lombards of Central Europe, and a 2024 paper modelled them best from a Jutlandic Iron Age source. The history of the Langobards in Italy ended in 1077, when the Norman Robert Guiscard conquered the Principality of Salerno.