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The Lombards invade Italy

568 CE·Military & conflict·Italy·
568 CEDate
Military & conflictCategory
11Empires active
Date
568 CE
Category
Military & conflict
Region
Italy
Era
Post-Classical / Medieval
Significance

In 568, only fourteen years after Justinian's costly reconquest, the Lombards under King Alboin crossed the Alps into a depopulated and war-weary Italy, accompanied by Saxon and other allies.

They rapidly overran the north, taking Milan in 569 and, after a three-year siege, the city of Pavia, which became their capital around 572, while other groups pushed south to found the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. The invasion shattered the fragile unity Byzantium had imposed, fragmenting the peninsula into a patchwork of Lombard kingdoms and dukedoms alongside shrinking imperial enclaves coordinated from the Exarchate of Ravenna. This political division of Italy between Lombard and Byzantine (and later papal) power would endure for centuries and shaped the rise of an independent papacy as a territorial actor. The Lombard settlement permanently ended hopes of a restored Roman Italy and is conventionally taken to mark the close of late antiquity in the peninsula and the beginning of its medieval order.

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The wider story

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

Judith Herrin

Vivid, thematic popular history by a top Byzantinist.

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