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Incapable as you are of defending your Roman subjects, the maritime situation of the city may perhaps expose it to your depredation but we can remove to the distance of four-and-twenty stadia, to the first fortress of the Lombards, and then you may pursue the winds. Are you ignorant that the popes are the bond of union, the mediators of peace, between the East and West?
German ethnologists, of what we may call the ædicephalous school, already referred to, regard it as one of the tragedies of nature that the noble Nordic race, to which they think they belong, dies out when it penetrates southwards. In accordance with this law, the yellow-haired Achæans decayed in Greece, the Lombards in North Italy, the Vandals in Spain and Africa.
But the religious discontent of the Italians had already promoted the conquests of the Lombards, and the Romans themselves were accustomed to suspect the faith and to detest the government of their Byzantine tyrant. Justinian was neither steady nor consistent in the nice process of fixing his volatile opinions and those of his subjects.
That occupation of Narses in 552 is the date of Rome's extinction as the old secular imperial city. The year after his recal came the worst plague of all, and the most enduring. The Lombards did but repeat for the subjection of Italy to a fresh northern invasion what Narses had done to deliver it from Theodorick's older one in the preceding century.
The second expedition of Pepin was not less rapid and fortunate than the first: St. Peter was satisfied, Rome was again saved, and Astolphus was taught the lessons of justice and sincerity by the scourge of a foreign master. After this double chastisement, the Lombards languished about twenty years in a state of languor and decay.
Of which we find many instances, both in early times, as when by the intervention of Charles the Great she drove the Lombards, who had made themselves masters of nearly the whole country, out of Italy; and also in recent times, as when, with the help of France, she first stripped the Venetians of their territories, and then, with the help of the Swiss, expelled the French.
Then, passing to temporal matters, he caused to be brought and read over, in his private conferences with the Pope, the deed of territorial gift made by his father Pépin to Stephen II, and with his own lips dictated the confirmation of it, adding thereto a new gift of certain territories which he was in course of wresting by conquest from the Lombards.
Forthwith he arranged for the investment of the citadel where eighteen hundred Austrians held out: he then received the chief men of the city with easy Italian grace; and in the evening he gave a sumptuous ball, at which all the dignity, wealth, and beauty of the old Lombard capital shone resplendent. For a brief space all went well between the Lombards and their liberators.
And as ambition and manners had become less tinged with ferocity than they had been under the Merovingians, the sons of Carloman were not killed or shorn or even shut up in a monastery: they retired with their mother, Gerberge, to the court of Didier, King of the Lombards. "King Charles," says Eginhard, "took their departure patiently, regarding it as of no importance."
But there existed in different countries bands of people who opposed the doctrines and ecclesiastical tyranny of Rome and who claimed adherence to the simple, primitive faith of Christ as expressed in the gospel. Among these were the Cathari, Lombards, Albigenses, Waldenses, and Vaudois.
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