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Updated: May 25, 2025
We have seen a hero arise among them of the true old Teuton stamp, bearing worthily the name which his forefathers brought over the Alps with Alboin Garibald, the 'bold in war. May they succeed in the same noble struggle as that in which we succeeded, and returning, not in letter, but in spirit, to the old laws of Rothar and their free forefathers, become the leading race of a free and united Italy!
Such were Venice and Genoa, which preserved their freedom by their obscurity, till they became able to preserve it by their power. Other cities seem to have retained, under all the changing dynasties of invaders, under Odoacer and Theodoric, Narses and Alboin, the municipal institutions which had been conferred on them by the liberal policy of the Great Republic.
He quarreled much about the possession and division of the royal treasure, which was very great, but never once did he see within the chests. He was anything but a model husband, delighting in low company, flirting with every maid and peasant girl and by nature fiercer and much less refined than Alboin, whom I had found endurable, except when drunk.
Then the Gepidae call in Cutuguri, a Hunnic tribe, to help them; then, says Procopius, Aldwin, helped by Roman mercenaries, under Amalfrid the Goth, Theodoric's great nephew, and brother-in-law of Aldwin, has a great fight with the Gepidae. But Paul knows naught of all this: with him it is not Aldwin, but Alboin his son, who destroys the Gepidae.
Such repeated disappointments had chilled the spirit of the Avars, and their power would have dissolved away in the Sarmatian desert, if the alliance of Alboin, king of the Lombards, had not given a new object to their arms, and a lasting settlement to their wearied fortunes.
Alboin made Pavia his capital, and erected strong fortifications to keep out the Burgundians, Franks, and other nations which were troubling his new-gained dominions. This done, he settled down to the enjoyment of the conquest which he had so ably made and so skilfully defended.
The robust peasantry of Noricum and Pannonia had resumed the manners of Barbarians; and the names of the Gepidæ, Bulgarians, Sarmatians, and Bavarians, may be distinctly traced in the provinces of Italy. Of the Saxons, the old allies of the Lombards, twenty thousand warriors, with their wives and children, accepted the invitation of Alboin.
For when Rosamond, the queen of the Lombards, murdered her husband Alboin in his palace at Verona, because he had forced her to pledge him in a goblet fashioned from the skull of her father, she fled away with her stepdaughter Albswinda, the great Lombard spoil, and her two accomplices, Helmichis her lover and Peredeus the chamberlain, and came to seek shelter in Ravenna.
In the preceding years Italy had been desolated by pestilence and famine, and a disaffected people ascribed the calamities of nature to the guilt or folly of their rulers. Whatever might be the grounds of his security, Alboin neither expected nor encountered a Roman army in the field.
It was in the year 568 that Alboin, followed by the great multitude of adventurers he had gathered, and by the whole nation of the Longobardi, ascended the Julian Alps, and looked down from their summits on the smiling plains of northern Italy to which his success was thenceforward to give the name of Lombardy, the land of the Longobardi.
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