In the country between the Elbe and the Oder, about the time of Augustus, a tribe had settled, of a singularly savage aspect, and, by the exaggerations of national terror, described as having the "heads of dogs," as lapping the blood of the slain in battle, and exhibiting at once the ferocity of the animal and the daring of the man. On the summons of Justinian, they instantly plucked up their spears and standards from the graves of the Heruli, whom they had slaughtered in Poland, crossed the Danube with the whole force of their warriors, and finally, after a long and bloody war, extinguished the Gepidæ in a battle in which forty thousand of the enemy were slain round their king. The conqueror, with characteristic savageness, made a drinking-cup of the skull of the fallen monarch, and in it pledged his chieftains to their future fame.
This victory at last had taught the imperial court the hazards of its policy; but the deed was done, and Italy lay open to a race whose strange aspect, ferocity of habit, and invincible courage, had already wrought the Italians to the highest pitch of terror.
Among the effeminacies of Italy, the classic arrangement of the hair and beard seem to have held a foremost place. But, in their new invaders, the nation saw a host of athletic warriors, indifferent to every thing but arms, wearing their locks wild as nature had made them, and with visages and manners which almost justified the popular report, that they had the heads of dogs, and lapped up the blood of their enemies. From this length and looseness of hair they had their name. Savage as they were, they exhibited something of that spirit which from time to time tinges barbarism with romance. Alboin, the prince of the Longobards, young, handsome, and a hero, resolved to possess at once the two great objects of the passions, love and glory. To accomplish the first, he seized on Rosamunda, the beautiful daughter of the fallen monarch; and for the second he made a royal banquet, and, covering the tables with the fruits and wines of Italy, demanded of his chieftains whether the land which produced such things was not worth their swords? We may justly conceive that he was answered with acclamation. Their trumpets were heard through every tribe of the North, and the multitude were instantly in arms under a leader whose name was a pledge of possession. His vanguard scaled the Julian Alps. All the roving warriors of Gaul and Germany, with a column of twenty thousand Saxons, instantly joined the Lombard banner. Italy, exhausted by a long continuance of disease and famine, and now accustomed to yield, had lain at the mercy of the first invader, and Alboin, with his sword in the sheath, marched through a fugitive population, and finished his bloodless triumph within the impregnable ramparts and patrician palaces of Verona. From the Trentine hills to the gates of Ravenna and Rome, all was the easy prize of Lombard victory.
It is singular to hear, at the interval of more than a thousand years, the same names of the cities which then became the possession of the invaders, and to see the warlike movements of the present hour following the track of the warriors of the sixth century. Alboin conquered Milan by fear, and Pavia by famine; but the bold barbarian disdained to reside in a city, however splendid, which had yielded without a battle, and he fixed the Lombard throne in Pavia, which had earned his respect by a siege of three years.
It is a striking illustration of the superiority of institutions to climate, that the Lombard, even in Italy, continued the same bold, restless, and resistless man of iron, which he had been in the barren plains of Prussia, or on the stormy shores of the Baltic. With all the luxuries of Italy to soften him, and even with all the fervours of an Italian sun to subdue him into indolence, he was still the warrior, the hunter, and the falconer. Leaving tillage to the degraded caste of the Italian, he trained horses for war and the chase, in the famous pastures bordering the Adriatic. He sent to his native Scandinavia for the most powerful falcons; he trained the hound, that could tear down alike the stag and the wolf; and prepared himself hourly by the chase through the forests, which were now rapidly covering the depopulated plains of Italy, for the hardships and enterprises of actual war. The favourite distinctions of the Lombard noble were the hawk on the wrist and the falchion by the side.
We now give a rapid sketch of the subsequent periods.
From the tenth century, when Germany assumed the form of a settled state, its connexion with Italy was always exhibited in the shape of mastery. The modern Italian character is evidently not made for eminence in war. The hardships of German life, contrasted with the easy indolence of Italy, have always given the Northern ploughman the superiority over the vine-dresser of the South; and from the time when Charlemagne first moved his men of mail over the Alps, Italy has been a fair and feeble prize for German vigour and German intrepidity.
On the general dissolution of the empire of Charlemagne, Italy naturally followed the fate of all vassal kingdoms. At the close of the ninth century its provinces had been made a common field of battle to the multitude of dukes, counts, and captains of banditti, who suddenly started into a brief celebrity as spoilers of the great German empire. A terrible period of almost a century of intestine war followed, which covered the land with corpses, and made Northern Italy but one capacious scene of blood and desolation. At length, a German conqueror, Otho of Saxony, fortunately came, as of old, crushed all rivalry, drove the peasantry from the field, commanded the nobles to do him homage, and by the combined operation of the sceptre and the sword, partially compelled his fierce feudatories to learn the arts of peace. Still, perhaps, there was not upon the earth a more disturbed district than Lombardy. In the lapse of centuries, it had grown opulent, notwithstanding its spoilers. The native talent of the Italian, his commercial connexion with Egypt and the East, and his literary intercourse with the fugitives from Constantinople, and the eagerness of the Western nations, even at that early period, to obtain the produce of Italian looms and pencils, gave the nation wealth, and with it constitutional power. This power resulted in the formation of small commonwealths, which, though frequently at war with each other, often exhibited a lustre and spirit worthy of the vivid days of antique Italy.
The feudal system, the natural product of barbarian victory, by which the land had been divided among the conquerors, was strongly opposed by the commercial cities; and the most successful of all resistance, that of popular interests, rapidly broke down the system. The first struggle was by the class of the inferior nobles against the great proprietors. The close of the eleventh century found the principle of resistance advancing, and the populace now mingled in the contest.
The dissension was increased by the papal violences against the married clergy in the middle of the century. This dispute gave rise to one of the most important changes in the Romish discipline, and one of the longest contests between the Pope and the people. The Church of Milan, dating its liturgy from the times of the memorable Bishop Ambrose, had continued almost wholly independent of the discipline and the authority of Rome. By its especial rule, the priest who was married before his ordination retained his wife; but, if unmarried, he was not suffered to marry afterwards. This unfortunate compromise with superstition naturally produced the loss of the original right. The Jewish priesthood had been married under the direct sanction of a code confessedly divine. Peter, and apparently others of the apostles, were married; and there is no mention of any remonstrance on the part of our Lord against this most essential of all relationships. St Paul's wish "that the disciples should remain unmarried" in the time of a threatened persecution, was evidently limited to the persecution; and instead of denying the common right of the Christian clergy to marry, he expressly insists on his personal right to marry if he should so please, as well as any other of the brethren. The recommendation not to marry at the time was also addressed not to the peculiar teachers of Christianity, but to the whole body of the Christians—a generalisation which of itself shows that it was merely for the period; as it must be wholly irrational to suppose that the gospel desired the final extinction of marriage among all mankind.