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Then comes another saga, how they met the Assipitti, of whom, whether they were Tacitus's Usipetes, of the Lower Rhine, or Asabiden, the remnant of the Asen, who went not to Scandinavia with Odin, we know not, and need not know; and how the Assipitti would not let them pass; and how they told the Lombards that they had dogheaded men in their tribe who drank men's blood, which Mr.
The scanty population, worn out with misery, fled to rocks and islands in the lakes, and to the seaport towns; but they seem to have found the Lombards merciful masters, and bowed their necks meekly to the inevitable yoke. The towns alone seem to have offered resistance. Pavia Alboin besieged three years, and could not take.
He swore some wild oath of utter destruction to all within, and would have kept it. At last they capitulated. As Alboin rode in at St. John's gate, his horse slipped up; and could not rise, though the grooms beat him with their lance-butts. A ghostly fear came on the Lombards.
That result is various: sometimes the over-civilized and degenerate people is swept from the face of the earth, as the Roman populations in Africa by the Vandals; sometimes it is reduced to servitude, as the Egyptians by the Ptolemies, or the Greeks by the Turks; sometimes it is absorbed or included in new political combinations, as the northern Italians by the Lombards and Franks; sometimes it remains unmolested on its own territory, and lives by the momentum, or the repute, or the habit, or the tradition of its former civilization.
Charlemagne was, besides, on his own account, on bad terms with the king of the Lombards, whose daughter, Desiree, he had married, and afterwards repudiated and sent home to her father, in order to marry Hildegarde, a Suabian by nation. Didier, in dudgeon, had given an asylum to Carloman's widow and sons, on whose intrigues Charlemagne kept a watchful eye.
The possession of that fine country was hotly disputed between the Greek Emperor and the Lombards, and it suffered infinitely by that contention. Germany, the parent of so many nations, was exhausted by the swarms she had sent abroad.
At the March parade held at Braine, in the spring of 754, the Franks approved of the war against the Lombards; and at the end of the summer Pépin and his army descended into Italy by Mount Cenis, the Lombards trying in vain to stop them as they debouched into the valley of Suza.
It was the resting-place for the Lombards and other Italians, the great entrepot for their merchandise. It now became, in addition, the great marketplace for English wool, and the woollen fabrics of all the Netherlands, as well as for the drugs and spices of the East. It had, however, by no means reached its apogee, but was to culminate with Venice, and to sink with her decline.
One of them, strangely enough, is that of the very Astulf against whom the Pope fulminated so loudly the letter from St. Peter which I read you. Moreover, it must be said in all fairness the Lombards despised the Romans exceedingly. So did all the Teutons.
It was the resting-place for the Lombards and other Italians, the great entrepot for their merchandise. It now became, in addition, the great marketplace for English wool, and the woollen fabrics of all the Netherlands, as well as for the drugs and spices of the East. It had, however, by no means reached its apogee, but was to culminate with Venice, and to sink with her decline.
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