A.D. 400.
A.D. 406.
A.D. 476-490.
With continental Italy the elements of admixture, until the time of Odoacer, were due to the barbarian legions in the service of Rome, rather than to the inroads of any barbarian conquerors; since Alaric, with his Visigoths, Radagaisus, with his medley of Slavono-Germans, Genseric with his Vandals, and Attila with his Huns, made but ephemeral impressions. Of the army, however, of Radagaisus, a large proportion was sold as slaves. Odoacer’s conquest was somewhat more permanent; whilst the elements he introduced are uncertain. Reasons, however, may be given for referring the Skiri, at least, and possibly the Heruli and Rugii to the same stock as the Huns and Bulgarians—the Turk, a stock from which few grafts were transplanted to Italy; though a Bulgarian colony in Samnium was existing in the time of the Lombards, and possibly a few other similar offsets besides.
A.D. 490-553.
The Gothic conquest, however, was not only permanent, but it was the first of three from the same stock. Themselves, probably, of mixed blood, having taken it up during their various settlements on the Lower and Middle Danube, from the Slavonians and Turks of the countries with which they came in contact, the Ostrogoths, to the amount of not less than two hundred thousand, settled in the most favoured parts of the country, and, dominant as they were amongst a population of serfs, must have played much the same part in Italy as the Normans did in England. And when Italy is recovered by Narses and Belisarius, more than one hundred and fifty years after, they are only ejected from power—not bodily put out of the land.
As has been stated already, they were only the first of three—we may say of four—hordes of invaders, each of which was more or less Germanic; for the Lombard dominion rapidly succeeded the Ostrogoth, and, besides this, partial invasions of Bavarians, Suabians, and Alemanni were, for a time, successful. But the Lombards ruled over all Italy with the exception of the Exarchate of Ravenna, till the conquest by Charlemagne, and over the present kingdom of Naples, under the name of the Duchy of Beneventum, until the Norman Conquest. Of all the Germanic elements, the Lombard is possibly the greatest. But it was no pure strain.
A.D. 774.
The infusion of Slavonic and Turk blood amongst the followers of Alboin was considerable.
For Calabrian and Apulian Italy the history is nearly the same as that of Sicily.