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III. As king of the Lombards, and patrician of Rome, he reigned over the greatest part of Italy, a tract of a thousand miles from the Alps to the borders of Calabria. The duchy of Beneventum, a Lombard fief, had spread, at the expense of the Greeks, over the modern kingdom of Naples.
The Saracens besieged the cities of Beneventum and Capua: after a vain appeal to the successors of Charlemagne, the Lombards implored the clemency and aid of the Greek emperor. A fearless citizen dropped from the walls, passed the intrenchments, accomplished his commission, and fell into the hands of the Barbarians as he was returning with the welcome news.
The calm, thus wisely employed, did not last long. Charlemagne was soon aroused from his peaceful occupations to put down a revolt of Tassilo, Duke of Bavaria, as well as a meditated attack upon Italy by Adalgisus, the son of the deposed Lombard king, Desiderius, who was assisted underhand by the Greek empress, Irene, and had besides formed a secret alliance with the Duke of Beneventum.
In the progress of conquest, the same option could not be granted to the dukes of Brescia or Bergamo, of Pavia or Turin, of Spoleto or Beneventum; but each of these, and each of their colleagues, settled in his appointed district with a band of followers who resorted to his standard in war and his tribunal in peace.
At the thought that he might go to Beneventum and thence to Achæa, to swim in a life of luxury and wild excess, he had a feeling of emptiness. "To what end? What shall I gain from it?" These were the first questions which passed through his head.
Passing the Roman army, he marched over the Apennines into the heart of Italy towards Beneventum, took the open town of Telesia on the boundary between Samnium and Campania, and thence turned against Capua, which as the most important of all the Italian cities dependent on Rome, and the only one standing in some measure on a footing of equality with it, had for that very reason felt more severely than any other community the oppression of the Roman government.
Cardinal Damiano, in a letter to Pope Nicholas II., written about the year 1060 tells the story of how a priest, who had left his mother ill at Beneventum, went on his homeward way to Naples past the crater of Vesuvius, and heard issuing therefrom the voice of his mother in great agony. He afterward found that her death coincided exactly with the time at which he had heard her voice.
The consuls, hearing what was going on at Capua, arranged it so that one of them should lead an army into Campania; and Fulvius, to whose lot that province had fallen, setting out by night, entered the walls of Beneventum.
Manfred fell in battle against him at Beneventum, and with him all real chance of a Hohenstaufen recovery. Not three years after, young Conradin, in a desperate venture after his legitimate rights, was captured and put to death by Charles of Anjou. A temporary pacification of Western Christendom was the work of Gregory X.; his aim was a great crusade.
It was subsequently carried on to Beneventum, and finally to Brundusium. Apsus, a river of Macedonia, the Aspro. Caesar and Pompey encamp over against each other on the banks of that river, C. iii. 13 Apulia, a region of Italy, la Puglia. Pompey quarters there the legions sent by Caesar, C. i. 14
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