had been founded by those who had fled from Attila; but there were many who could not flee.  These came under the cruel yoke of the invader.  Perhaps Alboin spent the winter in Verona, perhaps in Friuli; wherever it was, he but prepared his advance and still no one appeared to say him nay.  By the end of 569 all Cisalpine Gaul with Liguria and Milan, except Pavia, the coast, Cremona, Piacenza, and a few smaller places, were in his hands.  Indeed, in all that terrible flood of disasters we hear of but one great city which offered even for a time a successful resistance.  This was Pavia, naturally so strongly defended by the Po and the Ticino.  Alboin established an army about it, and swore to massacre all its inhabitants since it alone had dared to resist him.  Pavia fell to the Lombard, after a three years’ siege, in 572; but Alboin was prevented from carrying out his vow, and not long after Pavia became the capital of the Lombard power in Italy.

Meantime, those three years, during which Pavia held her own, had not been wasted by the barbarian.  He crossed the Apennines, we may believe as Totila had done, by the old deserted way to Fiesole, brought all Tuscany under his yoke and a great part both of central and of southern Italy, establishing there two “duchies” as the centres of his power at Spoleto and Benevento.  Then he returned to take Pavia, all this time besieged, and in the same year, 572, it is probable that Piacenza fell also, and Mantua.  All Italy was in confusion, the system of government re-established by Narses broken; the work of Justinian’s reconquest seemed all undone.  That it was not wholly undone, that it lived on and was at last re-established, we owe to two great facts:  the conversion of the Lombards to Catholicism by Gregory the Great and the establishment of the exarchate, the entrenchment of Roman power and civilisation in Ravenna.  Let us consider these things.

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.  It is true that they sacked churches, slaughtered priests, and carried off the holy vessels everywhere as they came into Italy; but they did this, it would seem, not from a sectarian hatred of the Catholic Faith, but from mere heathenism.  As pagans, heathen or semi-heathen, they might be converted, and thus their advent was ultimately less dangerous to our civilisation than the conquest of the Ostrogoths threatened to be.  I do not mean to suggest that that advent was without danger.  It was of course full of dreadful peril, but that peril was chiefly material and not spiritual; it could destroy, but not create; moreover, since in the main it was pagan, it could only destroy material things.