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But in doing so she breathed a silent prayer, and resolved that the unpardonable insult should be washed out in Alboin's blood. If she had ever loved her lord, she felt now for him only the bitterness of hate. She had a friend in the court on whom she could depend, Helmichis, the armor-bearer of the king.

After Alboin's death the Lombards were for ten years under dukes, and evil times came, every man doing what was right in his own eyes; enlarging their frontier by killing the Roman landholders, and making the survivors give them up a portion of their lands, as Odoacer first, and the Ostrogoths next, had done.

And how, after he was dead, Rosamund became Helmichis' leman, as she had been Peredeo's, and fled with him to Ravenna, with all the treasure and Alpswintha, Alboin's daughter by the Frankish wife; and how Longinus the exarch persuaded her to poison Helmichis, and marry him; and how she gave Helmichis the poisoned cup as he came out of the bath, and he saw by the light of her wicked eyes that it was poison, and made her drink the rest; and so they both fell dead.

Their virtuous and loyal life within the boundaries of Alboin's conquests of which Paulus Diaconus says, that violence and treachery were unknown that no one oppressed, no one plundered that the traveller went where he would in perfect safety all this would be hid from the Pope by the plain fact, that they were continually enlarging their frontier toward Rome; that they had founded two half-independent Dukedoms of Beneventum and Spoleto, that Autharis had swept over South Italy, and ridden his horse into the sea at Reggio, to strike with his lance a column in the waves, and cry, 'Here ends the Lombard kingdom.

They broke the country up into unequal blocks; for while the inland regions of the north obeyed Pavia, while the great duchies of Spoleto in the center and of Benevento in the south owned the nominal sway of Alboin's successors, Venice and the Riviera, Pisa and the maritime republics of Apulia and Calabria, Ravenna and the islands, repelled their sovereignty.

"In a short while the fighting ceased around the gates. Alboin, King of Lombardy, riding up. I ordered the bridge lowered and the gates raised, when he rode unopposed into the court yard. "Those were fierce, wild days. A feast in celebration of the victory and of Alboin's coronation as King of Pannonia was held in the castle and a week later I was forcibly made wife of the victorious king.