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In the year after the recapture of Classis from the Lombards, that is to say, in 589, the exarch Smaragdus was recalled.  He had apparently become insane and had been guilty of extraordinary violence towards the patriarch of Aquileia and three other bishops whom he dragged to Ravenna.  His successor was Romanus who held office till 597.  In the same year, 589, Authari was married at Pavia to Theodelinda, who was to be so potent an instrument in the conversion of the Lombards and therefore in the salvation of Italy.  And in the following year, 590, pope Pelagius II. died, and Gregory the Great was chosen to succeed him.

With the advent of the new exarch a brighter prospect seemed for a moment to open for Italy.  In the first year of Romanus’s appointment the imperialists regained the greater part of the cities of the plain; they re-occupied Modena, Reggio, Parma, Piacenza, Altinum, and Mantua.  But the strength of the Latin position in Italy lay, and continued to lie, in the two great imperial cities, Ravenna and Rome.  Little by little this position had crystallised and now a new state appeared, a state which in one way or another was to endure till our day and which our fathers knew as the States of the Church.  With the two cities of Ravenna and Rome as nuclei, this state formed itself in the very heart of Italy along the Via Flaminia which connected them.  It cut, and effectually, the Lombard kingdom in two, and isolated the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento from the real Lombard power in Cisalpine Gaul, with its great capital at Pavia; and indestructible as it was, it absolutely insured the final success of the Catholic Faith, the Latin nationality, and the imperial power, the three necessities for the resurrection of Europe.

This achievement was in the first place due to three great personalities:  to Justinian who had succeeded in establishing the imperial power with its capital at Ravenna, and whose work had such life in it that, in spite of every adverse circumstance, it was able to develop and to maintain itself during more than two hundred years and uphold the imperial idea in Italy until the pope was able to re-establish the empire in the West as a self-supporting state; to Gregory the Great in whom we see personified the hope and strength of the papacy and the Latin idea which it was to uphold and to glorify; and to Theodelinda, that passionately Catholic Lombard queen, who was able to lead her Lombards into the fold of the Roman church, and who in her son Adalwald by her second husband Agilulf, whom she had raised to the throne, presented the Lombard kingdom with its first Catholic king, and had thus done her part to secure the future.