Ravenna, A Study by Edward Hutton

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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.

It is unthinkable that the Italy of the sixth century was for a moment
in danger of losing its Faith, of being dechristianised. That, all
things considered, in the third fourth and fifth centuries there had
more than once been a real danger of the victory of some heresy, and
especially of that subtle Arianism, the forerunner of Mahometanism,
which all the invaders professed, and most of them so bitterly, we
know; as we know that with the hard won victory of the Catholic Faith
the whole of the future was safe; but that in the Italy of the sixth
century the Faith was in danger from a horde of semi-pagan barbarians
is not to be thought of. To this extent, and it is three parts at
least of the whole, the Lombard invasion was less perilous than those
which had come and passed away before it. Once more, the Catholic
church was to be victorious, but in a different fashion. It cast out
the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths from Italy,
for it could not convert them; the Lombards it converted and they
remained. It converted them because they were rather heathen than
Arian, and the victory was won by that great Gregory who, seeing our
forefathers in the Forum of Rome, and loving them for their bright
hair and open faces--_non Angli sed Angeli si Christiani_--sent S.
Austin to turn them too from their pagan rites and gather them into
the fold of Christ.

But there was something else beside the fact that the Lombards were
pagan, and therefore to be converted, which was a part of the
salvation of Italy.

It is possible that the Lombards might have been as Catholic as the
Franks and yet, barbarians as they were, have destroyed civilisation
in Italy, have broken the continuity of Europe, have obliterated all
our traditions, and altogether undone the great work of Justinian. It
is possible, but it is highly improbable; that it was impossible we
owe to Ravenna.

Ravenna was impregnable and her seaward gate was always open. During
all the years of the Lombard domination she was the citadel of the
empire in Italy, the seat of the prefect and the exarch, the imperial
representatives.

It must be grasped that even after the fall of Ticinum in 572, as the
Byzantine historian tells us, perhaps no one, and certainly no one in
Ravenna, regarded the invasion as anything but a passing evil like all
the other barbarian incursions. No one believed Italy to be
irrevocably lost; on the contrary, everyone was assured that the lost
provinces could soon be delivered again.

This may explain, though perhaps it cannot excuse, the passive
attitude of Longinus, the successor of Narses, who in Ravenna
represented the emperor in Italy, perhaps till the year 584. We know
nothing of any attempts he may have made to stem the barbarian flood,
and indeed the only incident in his career with which we are
acquainted is romantic rather than military or political. For when
Rosamond, the queen of the Lombards, murdered her husband Alboin in
his palace at Verona, because he had forced her to pledge him in a
goblet fashioned from the skull of her father, she fled away with her
stepdaughter Albswinda, the great Lombard spoil, and her two
accomplices, Helmichis her lover and Peredeus the chamberlain, and
came to seek shelter in Ravenna. It seems she had written to Longinus
and he, perhaps, hoping for some political advantage, and certainly
full of the tales of her beauty, sent a ship up the Po to bring her to
him with her two companions. When he saw her he found that rumour had
not lied, and longing for her, suggested that she should kill
Helmichis and marry himself. Whether from fear or ambition she did
this thing, and slew her lover with a cup of poison as he came from
the bath. But he, even as he drank understanding all, suddenly forced
the same cup upon her, and standing over her with a naked sword forced
her to drink; so that they both lay dead upon the pavement.

Albswinda and the Lombard treasure, the spoil of the cities of Italy,
were sent with Peredeus to Constantinople. And it may be that it was
in them Longinus hoped to find his political advantage; in this,
however, he was deceived. It is true that a pause in the Lombard
advance followed the death of Alboin, and that Cleph, his successor,
was soon murdered. But the pause in the advance, though, through it
all, Rome was blockaded, was due to the fact that Authari, the heir to
the Lombard throne, was but a boy. Nevertheless, this interval was
used by Constantinople to despatch Baduarius, the son-in-law of the
emperor Justin, to Italy with an army, but without success; and in
578, the year in which Justin died, the Lombards were bought off from
Rome with imperial gold, only to turn upon the very citadel of the
empire in Italy, Ravenna itself. In the year 579 Faroald, duke of
Spoleto, fell upon Classis, and took it and spoiled it.

This, however, was but an isolated effort, and though the Lombards
held Classis, they achieved little else in Italy till after Authari
was chosen king in 584.

In the following year Smaragdus, as we may think, was appointed to
succeed Longinus and apparently with new powers, and three years
later, in the very year that the heroic Insula Comacina was taken by
the Lombards, Classis was recovered for the empire.

The Lombards had then been ravaging Italy for twenty years, an
extraordinary change had come over the provinces that Justinian had so
hardly recovered, and this change is at once visible in the imperial
administration in Italy. The exarchate appears.

It has been maintained by many historians that the great reform of
which the establishment of the exarch and the exarchate is the result
was the work of that very great reformer Justinian. It was worthy of
him; but the Italy he knew and saved was not in need of any change in
her administrative divisions which, as I have said, remained under
Narses almost the same as they had been in the last days of the
Western empire.[1]

[Footnote 1: For what follows cf. Diehl, _Etudes sur l'administration
Byzantine dans l'Exarchat de Ravenne_ (1888).]

The transformation out of which the exarchate arose was slow and
obscure, not the work of a great creative mind, but of necessity. It
was the result of many causes which it is not difficult to name; they
were the progress of the Lombard conquest, the condition imposed upon
the unconquered parts of Italy by that conquest, and especially the
new necessity for defence imposed on the imperial power.

It is obvious that the result of the first ten years of that conquest
was a complete destruction of the limits of the old Roman provinces of
Italy. A new grouping of territories was not only necessary but was
already forming itself under the pressure of the conquest and its
terror. The regions which had escaped the barbarians were drawing
together without any regard for the ancient provincial divisions and
were grouping themselves about the cities, where the resistance, such
as it was, was concentrating itself, and where the imperial
administration had taken refuge.

If we confine ourselves for the moment to Italy north of the
Apennines, we shall find that in the old province of Liguria the vicar
of the prefect of the praetorium had fled from Milan to Genoa, and
that about that city the debris of the old province was slowly
re-assembling itself. In Venetia we shall find that the governor had
departed to Grado, and about this town as a centre the eastern part of
the old province was gathered. The western part of that province, cut
off from its capital, attached itself by force of circumstances to
what remained of Aemilia and of Flaminia, whose neighbour she was, and
these fragments of the ancient provinces all together grouped
themselves about, or found their centre in, Ravenna, the capital of
Flaminia and the residence of the prefect of Italy.

In these new groupings the great pre-occupation and the supreme
interest are defence--the defence of civilisation against the
barbarian.

Now, it was to regulate this new state of affairs that the exarchate
was created; or rather the exarchate was the official acknowledgment
of a state of affairs that the disastrous invasion of the Lombards had
brought about. The new order was established at the end of the reign
of Justin II. (565-578) under a new and supreme official. Without
doing away with the prefect of Italy the emperor placed over him as
supreme head of the new administration the exarch[1] who was both the
military commander-in-chief and the governor-general of Italy; and,
since the chief need of Italy was defence, without entirely
suppressing the civil administration, he placed at the head of each of
the re-organised provinces a certain military officer--the duke.

[Footnote 1: For the discussion of the derivation of the title
"Exarch," _see_ Diehl, _op. cit_. pp. 15-16.]

The earliest document that remains to us in which we find definite
mention of the exarch is the famous letter, dated October 4, 584, of
pope Pelagius II. to the deacon Gregory, his nuncio in Constantinople.
It is probable that the exarch at this time was Smaragdus, but it is
extremely improbable that he was the first to bear the new title. This
it would seem was a much nobler and more notable person.

It will be remembered that in the year 575 Baduarius, the son-in-law
of the emperor, had appeared in Italy at the head of an army, had been
beaten by the Lombards, and a little later had died, probably in
575.[1] This man was not only a great Byzantine official, but the
destined successor of Justin and one of the first personages of the
empire. It is obvious, if at such a moment he commanded the imperial
armies in Italy, he was supreme governor of the province And it seems
certain that it was to mark the amalgamation in him of the two
offices, military and civil, that the new title of exarch was
created.[2]

[Footnote 1: Migne, lxxii. 865; Joannes Biclarensis, _s.a_. 575; cf.
Hodgkin, _op. cit_. v. p. 195, and Diehl, _u.s_.]

[Footnote 2: "It is only an hypothesis," says M. Charles Diehl, the
originator of this theory, "but it explains how, between the prefect
Longinus (569-572) and the exarch Smaragdus (584) was produced in the
years 572-576 the administrative transformation out of which rose the
exarchate."]

At the same time as the central government took on a new form the
provincial administration was re-organised. Before the year 590, this
had been certainly achieved. Istria, as we have seen, was divided from
Venetia and formed a new and a special government. In Flaminia Rimini,
which till now had been a part of the same province as Ravenna, was
detached and became the capital of a new government in which a part of
the Picenum, Ancona, and Osimo were involved. While the exarchate
properly so called, that is the region of Ravenna from which Rimini
and Picenum were now separate, formed a new province under the direct
authority of the governors-general of Italy, that is to say, of the
exarch of Ravenna. By the year 590, then, we see Italy thus divided
into seven districts or governments: (1) the Duchy of Istria, (2) the
Duchy of Venetia, (3) the Exarchate to which Calabria is attached, (4)
the Duchy of Pentapolis, (5) the Duchy of Rome, (6) the Duchy of
Naples, (7) Liguria.

Geographically the exarchate of Ravenna was bounded on the north by
the Adige, the Tartaro, and the principal branch of the Po as far as
its confluence with the Panaro. Hadria and Gabellum were its most
northern towns in the hands of the imperialists. The western frontier
is more difficult to determine with exactitude; it may be said to have
run between Modena and Bologna. On the south the Marecchia divided the
exarchate from the duchy of Pentapolis whose capital was Rimini. The
Pentapolis consisted of Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, and Ancona
upon the sea and of the five inland cities of Urbino, Fossombrone,
Jesi, Cagli, and Gubbio; while the great towns of the exarchate were
set along the Via Aemilia and were Bologna, Imola (Forum Cornelii),
Faenza, Forli, Forlimpopoli, and Cesena.

Such then, before the year 590, was the new imperial administration in
the Italy formed by the Lombard invasion.

[Illustration: SKETCH MAP]

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.

Of these three powers those of Ravenna and Rome were, of course, by
far the more important; for indeed the conversion of the Lombards was,
rightly understood, but a part of the work of Gregory. Yet though both
were working for the same end they did not always propose to march by
the same road. In 592, for instance, the pope, seeing Naples the
capital of the little isolated duchy upon his southern flank very hard
pressed, proposed at all costs to relieve it; but the exarch Romanus,
perhaps seeing further, was not to be moved to the assistance of the
peasants of Campania from the all-important business of the defence of
central Italy and the Flaminian Way, the line of communication between
Ravenna and Rome. He proposed to let Naples look after itself and at
all costs to hold Perugia. Gregory, however, who claimed in an
indignant letter of this date (592) to be "far superior in place and
dignity" to the exarch, proceeded to save Naples by making a sort of
peace with the Lombard duchy of Spoleto. It is possible that this
peace saw the Lombard established in Perugia, which was the Roman key,
till now always in Roman hands, of the great line of communication
between Rome and Ravenna. However that may be, Gregory's peace not
only aroused great anger in Constantinople, but brought Romanus
quickly south with an army to re-occupy Perugia, Orte, Todi, Ameria,
and various other cities of Umbria. But Romanus had been right. His
movement southward alarmed Agilulf, who immediately left Pavia, and
crossing the Apennines, we may suppose,[1] as Totila had done,
threatened Rome itself. Then, however, he had to face something more
formidable than an imperial army. Upon the steps of S. Peter's church
stood the Vicegerent of God, great S. Gregory, who alone turned him
back and saved the city.

[Footnote 1: All that Paulus Diaconus, _Hist. Lang_. lib. iv. cap. 8,
says is: "Hac etiam tempestate Romanus Patricius et Exarchus Ravennae
Romam properavit. Qui dum Ravennam revertitur retenuit civitates, quae
a Langobardis tenebantur, quarum ista sunt nomma: Sutrium, Polimartium
Hortas, Tuder, Ameria, Perusia, Luceolis et alias quasdam civitates.
Quod factum cum regi Agilulfo nunciatum esset statim Ticino egressus
cum valido exercitu civitatem Perusium petiit ..."]

The truth of all this would appear to be that Gregory was really
working for peace. The Lombards were in a fair way to becoming
Catholic, and as such they were no longer really dangerous to Italy.
The real danger was, as the pope saw, the prolongation of a useless
war. Two years later, in 595, we find Gregory writing to the
"assessor" of the exarch enjoining peace. "Know then that Agilulf,
king of the Lombards, is not unwilling to make a general peace, if my
lord the patrician is of the same mood.... How necessary such a peace
is to all of us you know well. Act therefore with your usual wisdom,
that the most excellent exarch may be induced to come in to this
proposal without delay, and may not prove himself to be the one
obstacle to a peace so expedient for the state. If he will not
consent, Agilulf again promises to make a separate peace with us; but
we know that in that case several islands and other places will
necessarily be lost. Let the exarch then consider these points, and
hasten to make peace, that we may at least have a little interval in
which we may enjoy a moderate amount of rest, and with the Lord's help
may recruit the strength of the republic for future resistance."[1]

[Footnote 1: Gregory, _Ep_. v. 36 (34), trs. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. v. p.
382.]

It is obvious from this letter that the pope and the emperor no longer
understood one another, and it is not surprising that the one thought
the other a fool and told him so. Doubtless the emperor recalled the
long and finally successful war against the Ostrogoths, in which
Belisarius had always refused, not only terms of peace other than
unconditional surrender, but even to treat. That policy had been, at
least from the point of view of Constantinople, successful. From the
point of view of the papacy and of Italy, it had had a more doubtful
result, but the fact that the Ostrogoths were Arians had satisfied
perhaps both, and certainly the papacy, that a truce could not be
thought of.

From the imperial point of view things remained much the same in the
Lombard war as they had been in the war with the Ostrogoths. From the
papal and Italian point of view they were very different. To begin
with, the Lombards were fast accepting the Catholic Faith, and then if
Italy had suffered in the Ostrogothic wars, which were everywhere
eagerly contested by Constantinople, what was she suffering now when
the greater part of the country was open to a continual and an almost
unopposed attack? "You think me a fool," the pope wrote to the
emperor. In Ravenna the papal envoy was lampooned and laughed at. Then
in the end of 596 the exarch Romanus died.

Romanus was succeeded by Callinicus (Gallicinus) in whom the pope
found a more congenial and perhaps a more reasonable spirit. By 598 an
armistice had been officially concluded between the imperialists and
the Lombards, and at length in 599, after some foolish delays in which
it would appear that the pope was not without blame, a peace was
concluded. Gregory, however, for all his reluctance at the last, had
won his way. Henceforth it would be impossible to regard the Lombards
as mere invaders after the pattern of their predecessors, Visigoths,
Vandals, Huns, and Ostrogoths. They were, or would shortly be, a
Catholic people; they held a very great part of Italy; they had
entered into a treaty with the emperor not as _foederati_ but as
equals and conquerors. Gregory the Great had permanently established
the barbarians in Italy, and in his act, the act be it remembered of
the apostle of the English, of the apostle of the Lombards, we seem to
see the shadowy power that had been Leo's by the Mincio suddenly
appear, a new glory in the world. The new power in the West, the
papacy, which thus shines forth really for the first time in the acts
of Gregory, unlike the empire, whether Roman or Byzantine, will know
no frontiers, but will go into all the world and compel men to come in
as its divine commission ordained.

In Italy from the time of the peace with the Lombards (599) onwards
what we see is the decline of the imperial power of Constantinople and
the rise of the papacy. And this was brought about not only by the
circumstances in which Italy and the West found themselves, but also
by the character of the imperial government.

When Justin II. disappeared in 578, and made way for Tiberius II., he
was already a madman, and though Tiberius was renowned for his
virtues, he reigned but four years, and in 582 Maurice the Cappadocian
sat upon the throne of Justinian and ruled for twenty years not
unwisely, but, so far as Italy was concerned, without success. It was
he who was at last brought to make peace with the Lombards and thus
for the first time to acknowledge a barbarian state independent of the
empire in Italy. He and his children were all murdered in 602 by
Phocas, a centurion, whose shame and crimes and cruelties doubtless
did much to weaken the moral power of the empire face to face with the
papacy.

The peace of 599, the usurpation of Phocas in 602, and the death of
Gregory the Great in 604, close a great period and stamp the seventh
century in its very beginning with a new character.

That character is in a sense almost wholly disastrous. Those vague and
gloomy years, of which we know so little, are almost unrelieved in
their hopeless confusion. It is true that Italy had found a champion
in the papacy which would one day restore the empire in the West, as
Justinian himself had not been able to do; it is true that already
Arianism was defeated if not stamped out. But it is in the seventh
century that Mahometanism, the greater successor of the Arian heresy,
first appears; and it is in the seventh century that it first becomes
certain that East and West are philosophically and politically
different and irreconcilable. The whole period is full of disasters,
and is as we may think the darkest hour before the dawn.

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