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Now we have sufficient reason to believe that Thuringians and Rugians abode for a while in Bohemia and parts of Bavaria, and Lombards in Moravia, and that these gentry, hearing of loot to be had in plenty farther south, left their temporary homes, crossed the Danube and made themselves unpopular elsewhere, leaving the lands of Bohemia and Moravia to anyone who cared to take them.
On the other hand, the Pope, who hated the Grecian Empire, and equally feared the success of the Lombards, saw with joy this new star arise in the North, and gave it the sanction of his authority. Presently after be called it to his assistance. Pepin passed the Alps, relieved the Pope, and invested him with the dominion of a large country in the best part of Italy.
It was he who was at last brought to make peace with the Lombards and thus for the first time to acknowledge a barbarian state independent of the empire in Italy. He and his children were all murdered in 602 by Phocas, a centurion, whose shame and crimes and cruelties doubtless did much to weaken the moral power of the empire face to face with the papacy.
But the cause of Arianism was gradually suppressed by the weight of truth, of interest, and of example; and the controversy, which Egypt had derived from the Platonic school, was terminated, after a war of three hundred years, by the final conversion of the Lombards of Italy.
"At last, in a few months," thought Popinot, as he watched du Tillet going towards the Rue des Lombards, where his cabriolet was waiting, "thanks to this extraordinary affair, I shall have my Cesarine. My poor little wife shall not wear herself out any longer. A look from Madame Cesar was enough! What secret is there between her and that brigand? The whole thing is extraordinary."
In the second they were vanquished in a bloody battle, with more loss and dishonor than they had sustained since the foundation of their monarchy. Impatient for revenge, they returned a third time with accumulated force, and Autharis yielded to the fury of the torrent. The troops and treasures of the Lombards were distributed in the walled towns between the Alps and the Apennine.
The Pope acknowledges, of course, a certain allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople, and therefore to his representative, the Exarch of Ravenna: that is to say, he meets them with flattery when they are working on his side; with wrath when they oppose him. He intrigues with them, too, whenever he can safely do so, against the Lombards.
Narses especially had awakened the greed of the Lombards by the sight of Italy's fair lands. Scarcely had he ceased to govern Rome, in 567, when the effect of this became visible.
To weld into one great whole the various tribes of Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Lombards, Burgundians, and others, still in their turbulent youth, and still composing one great Teutonic family; to enforce the mutual adhesion of naturally coherent masses, all of one lineage, one language, one history, and which were only beginning to exhibit their tendencies to insulation, to acquiesce in a variety of local laws and customs, while an iron will was to concentrate a vast, but homogeneous, people into a single nation; to raise up from the grave of corrupt and buried Rome a fresh, vigorous, German, Christian empire; this was a reasonable and manly thought.
The Lombards were barbarians and therefore pagans or Arians, but their Arianism was of a different kind from that of the Huns, different even from that of the Ostrogoths. Indeed, though the Lombards may be called Arian, for indeed such Christianity as they possessed was wholly Arian, they were but little removed from mere heathenism.
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