Exarch

Because, you know, you guys remember from the plague episode and all the other stuff, after Jacinian's reign, there's a lot going on.

And the Exarch of Ravenna in particular, if you look at... maps of the Byzantine Empire from around this time, and you look at what Ravenna, the Exarch, controls.

It's Ravenna, Rome, in this little chain going from Ravenna to Rome, which kind of forms the basis of a lot of the papal states later on.

But they're always underfunded.

Even as Roman influence faded in northern Italy and the former imperial possessions asserted their independence, the Venetians mostly remained loyal allies of Constantinople.

In the early 730s, when Ravenna first fell to the Lombards, it was the Venetian navy that helped the Exarch to recapture the imperial capital in northern Italy.

When Charlemagne tried to take control of the whole of the northern Adriatic in the early 800s, the Venetians were caught in the middle, but ultimately they held out against the Franks.

By the 840s, the Venetians and the Eastern Romans were conducting joint naval operations, acting on a roughly equal footing, even if they weren't always successful.

Roman soldiers taught their old terrible lessons not merely to the Vandals of Africa and the Goths of Italy, but to the invading Alamanni from Germany and the warlike Franks from Gaul in 556.

In Italy at least for fourteen years from 553 to 567, till after Justinian and Belisarius were dead, the authority of the Roman Empire exercised by Narses under the name of the Exarch of Italy, or as it is sometimes called of Ravenna, was once more established and obeyed.

And though neither the limits of the Exarchate nor the power of the Exarch were afterwards what they had been under the first Exarch Narses, the name which continued for nearly two centuries designated the last remaining territory, with the exception of the great Mediterranean islands and for a time of some portions of Spain, which the Roman emperors could claim as their own in the West.

The conquests of Justinian's generals were brilliant and barren triumphs.

They were the last efforts of the Empire in the West, and there was not enough in the conditions of its society and government, apart from the accidental and personal qualifications of its rulers and generals, to sustain them.