Kingdom of the Lombards

So he didn't think about it, and thus didn't do it.

A trip from the Lombard Kingdom in the north of modern-day Italy to Syria was about 1,200 miles by sea, and they made it in roughly 10 days, which the scholars say is really fast for an army in the tens of thousands.

Regardless, when they got there, Ortnet admitted that some of the time he spent questing and dreaming of questing over the winter should probably have been spent planning.

Really, they were like 50 or 60,000 guys hanging out in ships within view of a heavily fortified harbor.

But the Lombard war was a political one, waged less even for the conquest of Italy than for its indirect results.

The ill-compacted and turbulent kingdom of the Lombards, with its almost independent dukedoms, Tuscany, Spoleto, Benevento, Friuli, Trent, had usually been in later times an inoffensive neighbor to the Franks, but often, though it had ceased to be Aryan, a troublesome one to the popes.

We have seen how a pope prevailed on Pippin to undertake the defense, as it was called, of the church, and how Pippin had answered the appeal and had transferred some of the fairest provinces of the Lombard kingdoms to the popes.

But the quarrel still went on.

Letter after letter from the popes, Stephen III, 753-757, Hadrian I, 772-795, brought the most lamentable complaints of Lombard injustice and oppression.

For over three centuries there was no emperor at Rome, until there arose in the West a giant whose power qualified him to fill with dignity the ancient throne of the Caesars.

Pippin, king of the Franks, had defended the Pope of Rome against the Lombards and had bestowed certain rich lands on the spiritual power.

In 768 Charlemagne succeeded Pippin and extended his sway over many of the nations that had once acknowledged Rome as their master, converting reluctant pagans by the argument of the sword.

In 800 this conqueror of the heathen appeared in Rome to rescue the Pope from a hostile faction of the populace.

He accordingly addressed a conciliatory letter to his Holiness which averted the threatened storm.

The Emperor's journey into the north was prompted by the most peaceful motives, if any matter connected with the crusade can be termed peaceful.

At any rate, he meditated no aggressive action against the Lombards.

He had resolved to hold a great diet at Cremona as a last preparation for the crusade that must start in the following August 1227.

For over three centuries there was no emperor at Rome, until there arose in the West a giant whose power qualified him to fill with dignity the ancient throne of the Caesars.

Pippin, king of the Franks, had defended the Pope of Rome against the Lombards and had bestowed certain rich lands on the spiritual power.

In seven sixty-eight, Charlemagne succeeded Pippin and extended his sway over many of the nations that had once acknowledged Rome as their master, converting reluctant pagans by the argument of the sword.

In eight hundred, this conqueror of the heathen appeared in Rome to rescue the Pope from a hostile faction of the populace.

He accordingly addressed a conciliatory letter to his holiness which averted the threatened storm.

The emperor's journey into the north was prompted by the most peaceful motives, if any matter connected with the crusade can be termed peaceful.

At any rate he meditated no aggressive action against the Lombards.

He had resolved to hold a great diet at Cremona as a last preparation for the crusade that must start in the following August 1227.

Yet to Otto's contemporaries the full importance of the event remained hidden.

To them it probably seemed natural enough that the illustrious ruler of Germany should follow in the steps of his most famous predecessor and like a second Charles the Great cross the Alps to win the Lombard kingdom, to defend and reform the papacy, and to revive the Western Empire.

Otto's first Italian campaign had given him the Lombard kingdom of the north.

His second had made him master of Rome, the very heart and center of Italy.

His third expedition in 966 brought him into connection with the Greek lands in the south of the peninsula.

He sought refuge in Bavaria and for a time made himself duke of that country, 749.

Expelled from thence by Pippin, he betook himself first to Aquitaine and then to the king of the Lombards, but was met at Morienne by Count Theodwin, who was guarding the passes of the Alps in the Frankish interest.

A skirmish followed in which many Frankish nobles fell, Griffo himself and Theodwin among them, 753.

There was no further obstacle raised by any member of the Arnulfing family to the sole dominion of Pippin.

It lasted but five years, but they were years full of import for the destinies of Europe.

In order to concentrate our attention on the transformation of the Arnulfing mayors of the palace into Frankish kings, I have hitherto said as little as possible about the affairs of Italy, but this silence can be kept no longer, now that a Roman pope is about to cross the Alps and ask for Frankish aid to enable him to smite his foes.

The Lombards had invaded Italy in the year 568, and for nearly two centuries from that time, there had been waged a kind of triangular contest, which to compare great things with small, was like the litigation which might go on in an English parish between an absentee landlord, a big nonconformist farmer, and a cultured but acquisitive parson.

The emperor was the great absentee.

He sought refuge in Bavaria and for a time made himself duke of that country, 749.

Expelled from thence by Pippin, he betook himself first to Aquitaine and then to the king of the Lombards, but was met at Maurienne by Count Theodwin, who was guarding the passes of the Alps in the Frankish interest.

A skirmish followed in which many Frankish nobles fell, Griffo himself and Theodwin among them, 753.

There was no further obstacle raised by any member of the Arnulfing family to the sole dominion of Pippin.

His pontificate was short, it lasted but five years, but they were years full of import for the destinies of Europe.

In order to concentrate our attention on the transformation of the Arnulfing mayors of the palace into Frankish kings, I have hitherto said as little as possible about the affairs of Italy, but this silence can be kept no longer, now that a Roman pope is about to cross the Alps and ask for Frankish aid to enable him to smite his foes.

The Lombards had invaded Italy in the year 568, and for nearly two centuries from that time there had been waged a kind of triangular contest which to compare great things with small was like the litigation which might go on in an English parish between an absentee landlord, a big non-conformist farmer, and a cultured but acquisitive parson.

The emperor was the great absentee.

For those who could navigate the waterways, they were the quickest and most efficient way to get around the coastal areas.

After the Lombards invade the north of Italy in the late 560s, greater numbers of people retreat from the mainland and establish a series of 15 or so scattered communities around the lagoon area.

Even though the islands are only a few miles offshore, the Lombards don't have the naval technology to conquer them, or, as far as we can tell, any interest in trying.

The foundation stone of the Church on Torcello, one of the earliest island settlements, tells us that it was built in the late 630s, and there was already a functioning local government structure in the area under the leadership of the Byzantine exarch, or governor of Ravenna.

So the Venetian community first comes into being as one of the Italian outposts of the Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople.

Although that date, again, is probably a later myth based on a misreading of one treaty and a lot of imagination.

But only two or three decades later, by the late 720s, we have the first proper evidence of Venetians definitely choosing their own rulers.

In 751, the last vestige of Byzantine power in northern Italy is swept away when the Lombards capture the old capital of Ravenna.

The line of the Western emperors had long since come to an end in 476.

Italy was nominally subject to the emperors at Constantinople, but the exarchate of Ravenna, where their vice-regents had ruled since the days of Justinian, was crumbling away beneath the pressure of the Lombards, who held all Italy in their hands except the extreme south and some small bits of territory round Rome, Venice, and Naples.

Although the Lombards had been settled in the country for nearly two hundred years and had become Christians, they were still a rude, half-barbarous people, and an implacable hostility existed between them and the papal see.

Rome lay between the Lombard kingdom on the north, of which the capital was Pavia, and the great Lombard duchies of Benevento and Spoleto on the south.

When the dukes were in rebellion, 739, Rome had aided them, and the Lombard king Liutprand threatened to take vengeance on the city by annexing it to his dominions.

The assent of Pope Zacharias was asked and obtained.

Childeric III, last of the Merovingian phantom kings, was quietly transferred from his palace to a cloister, and Pippin, having been proclaimed king at Soissons, was anointed at Mainz, 752, by the St. Libanaface, the English apostle of Germany.

Two years later Pope Stephen II visited the court of Pippin to crave for aid against the Lombards and ratify the act of his predecessor by anointing Pippin and his two sons, Charles and Carloman, with his own hands at St. Denis.