Italian realm.  From the moment that Rome was separated from the authority of the Italian Kings, there existed two powers in the Peninsula—­the one secular, monarchical, with the military strength of the barbarians imposed upon its ancient municipal organization; the other ecclesiastical, pontifical, relying on the undefined ambitions of S. Peter’s See and the unconquered instincts of the Roman people scattered through the still surviving cities.[1] Justinian, bent upon asserting his rights as the successor of the Caesars, wrested Italy from the hands of the Goths; but scarcely was this revolution effected when Narses, the successor of Belisarius, called a new nation of barbarians to support his policy in Italy.  Narses died before the advent of the Lombards; but they descended, in forces far more formidable than the Goths, and established a second kingdom at Pavia.  Under the Lombard domination Rome was left untouched.  Venice, with her population gathered from the ruins of the neighboring Roman cities, remained in quasi-subjection to the Empire of the East.  Ravenna became a Greek garrison, ruling the Exarchate and Pentapolis under the name of the Byzantine Emperors.  The western coast escaped the Lombard domination; for Genoa grew slowly into power upon her narrow cornice between hills and sea, while Pisa defied the barbarians intrenched in military stations at Fiesole and Lucca.  In like manner the islands, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, were detached from the Lombard Kingdom; and the maritime cities of Southern Italy, Bari, Naples, Amalfi, and Gaeta asserted independence under the shadow of the Greek ascendency.  What the Lombards achieved in their conquest, and what they failed to accomplish, decided the future of Italy.  They broke the country up into unequal blocks; for while the inland regions of the north obeyed Pavia, while the great duchies of Spoleto in the center and of Benevento in the south owned the nominal sway of Alboin’s successors,[2] Venice and the Riviera, Pisa and the maritime republics of Apulia and Calabria, Ravenna and the islands, repelled their sovereignty.  Rome remained inviolable beneath the aegis of her ancient prestige, and the decadent Empire of the East was too inert to check the freedom of the towns which recognized its titular supremacy.

[1] When I apply the term Roman here and elsewhere to the inhabitants of the Italian towns, I wish to indicate the indigenous Italic populations molded by Roman rule into homogeneity.  The resurgence of this population and its reattainment of intellectual consciousness by the recovery of past traditions and the rejection of foreign influence constitutes the history of Italy upon the close of the Dark Ages.

[2] It will be remembered by students of early Italian history that Benevento and Spoleto joined the Church in her war upon the Lombard kingdom.  Spoleto was broken up.  Benevento survived as a Lombard duchy till the Norman Conquest.