Sent for or not, King Alboin came; and with him all his army, and a mighty multitude, women, and children, and slaves; Bavarians, Gepidæ, Bulgars, Sarmatæ, Pannonians, Sueves, and Noricans; whose names (says Paul) remain unto this day in the names of the villages where they settled. With Alboin, too, came Saxons, twenty thousand of them at the least, with wife and child. And Sigebert king of the Franks put Suevic settlers into the lands which the Saxons had left.
Alboin gave up his own Hungarian land to his friends the Avars, on the condition that he should have them back if he had to return. But return he never did, he nor his Lombard host. This is the end. The last invasion of Italy. The sowing, once for all, of an Italian people. Fresh nations were still pressing down to the rear of the Alps, waiting for their turn to enter the Fairy Land—not knowing, perhaps, that nothing was left therein, but ashes and blood:—but their chance was over now: a people were going into Italy who could hold what they got.
On Easter Tuesday, in the year of grace 568, they came, seemingly by the old road; the path of Alaric and Dietrich and the rest; the pass from Carniola, through which the rail runs now from Laybach to Trieste. It must have been white, in those days, with the bones of nigh 200 years. And they found bisons, aurochsen, in the mountains, Paul says, and is not surprised thereat, because there are plenty of them in Hungary near by. An old man told him he had seen a skin in which fifteen men might lie side by side. None, you must know, are left now, save a very few in the Lithuanian forests. Paul goes out of his way to note this fact, and so shall I.
Alboin left a strong guard in Friuli, and Paul’s ancestor among them, under Gisulf his nephew, and Marphrais or master of the horse, who now became duke of Friuli and warden of the marches, bound to prevent the Avars following them into their new abode. Then the human deluge spread itself slowly over the Lombard plains. None fought with them, and none gainsaid; for all the land was waste. The plague of three years before, and the famine which followed it had, says Paul, reduced the world into primæval silence. The villages had no inhabitants but dogs; the sheep were pasturing without a shepherd; the wild birds swarmed unhurt about the fields. The corn was springing self-sown under the April sun, the vines sprouting unpruned, the lucerne fields unmown, when the great Lombard people flowed into that waste land, and gave to it their own undying name.
The scanty population, worn out with misery, fled to rocks and islands in the lakes, and to the seaport towns; but they seem to have found the Lombards merciful masters, and bowed their necks meekly to the inevitable yoke. The towns alone seem to have offered resistance. Pavia Alboin besieged three years, and could not take. He swore some wild oath of utter destruction to all within, and would have kept it. At last they capitulated. As Alboin rode in at St. John’s gate, his horse slipped up; and could not rise, though the grooms beat him with their lance-butts. A ghostly fear came on the Lombards. ‘Remember, lord king, thy cruel oath, and cancel it; for there are Christian folk in the city.’ Alboin cancelled his oath, and the horse rose at once. So Alboin spared the people of Pavia, and entered the palace of old Dietrich the Ostrogoth, as king of Italy, as far as the gates of Rome and Ravenna.
And what was his end? Such an end as he deserved; earned and worked out for himself. A great warrior, he had destroyed many nations, and won a fair land. A just and wise governor, he had settled North Italy on some rough feudal system, without bloodshed or cruelty. A passionate savage, he died as savages deserve to die. You recollect Rosamund his Gepid bride? In some mad drinking-bout (perhaps cherishing still his old hatred of her family) he sent her her father’s skull full of wine, and bade her drink before all. She drank, and had her revenge.
The story has become world-famous from its horror: but I suppose I must tell it you in its place.—How she went to Helmichis the shield-bearer, and he bade her get Peredeo the Kemper-man to do the deed: and how Peredeo intrigued with one of her bower-maidens, and how Rosamund did a deed of darkness, and deceived Peredeo; and then said to him, I am thy mistress; thou must slay thy master, or thy master thee. And how he, like Gyges in old Herodotus’s tale, preferred to survive; and how Rosamund bound the king’s sword to his bedstead as he slept his mid-day sleep, and Peredeo did the deed; and how Alboin leapt up, and fought with his footstool, but in vain. And how, after he was dead, Rosamund became Helmichis’ leman, as she had been Peredeo’s, and fled with him to Ravenna, with all the treasure and Alpswintha, Alboin’s daughter by the Frankish wife; and how Longinus the exarch persuaded her to poison Helmichis, and marry him; and how she gave Helmichis the poisoned cup as he came out of the bath, and he saw by the light of her wicked eyes that it was poison, and made her drink the rest; and so they both fell dead. And then how Peredeo and the treasure were sent to the Emperor at Constantinople; and how Peredeo slew a great lion in the theatre; and how Tiberius, when he saw that he was so mighty a man of his hands, bade put his eyes out; and how he hid two knives in his sleeves, and slew with them two great chamberlains of the Emperor; and so died, like Samson, says old Paul, having got good weregeld for the loss of his eyes—a man for either eye.
And old Narses died at Rome, at a great age; and they wrapt him in lead, and sent him to Byzant with all his wealth. But some say that while he was still alive, he hid his wealth in a great cistern, and slew all who knew of it save one old man, and swore him never to reveal the place. But after Narses’ death that old man went to Constantinople to Tiberius the Cæsar, and told him how he could not die with that secret on his mind; and so Tiberius got all the money, so much that it took many days to carry away, and gave it all to the poor, as was his wont.
A myth—a fable: but significant, as one more attempt to answer the question of all questions in a Teuton’s mind—What had become of the Nibelungen hoard? What had become of all the wealth of Rome?