Kingdom of The Lombards - Historiographical Views

Historiographical Views

The age of the Lombard kingdom was, especially in Italy, devalued as a long reign of barbarism in the midst of the "dark ages". A period of confusion and dispersion, marked by the abandoned ruins of a glorious past and still in search of new identity; see, for example, the verses of Manzoni's Adelchi:

From the mossy atria, from the crumbling Forum,
from the woods, from the flaming strident forges,
from the furrows wet with slave sweat,
a dispersed mob suddenly awoke. Dagli atri muscosi, dai Fori cadenti,
dai boschi, dall'arse fucine stridenti,
dai solchi bagnati di servo sudor,
un volgo disperso repente si desta. —Alessandro Manzoni, Adelchi, Choir Third Act.

Sergio Rovagnati defines the continuing negative prejudice against the Lombards "a sort of damnatio memoriae", common to that given often to all the protagonists of the barbarian invasions. The most recent historiographical guidelines, however, have largely reassessed the lombard era of the history of Italy. The German historian Jörg Jarnut pointed out all the elements that constitute the historical importance of the Lombard kingdom. The historical bipartition of Italy that has, for centuries, directed the North towards the Central-Western Europe and the south, instead, to the Mediterranean area dates back to the separation between Langobardia Major and Langobardia Minor, while Lombard law conditioned for long time the Italian legal system, so as not to be completely abandoned even after the rediscovery of Roman law, between the 11th and 12th centuries. Lombard, a Germanic language, made a large contribution to the formation of the Italian language, which precisely in the centuries of the Lombard kingdom matured in its detachment from vulgar Latin to take on autonomous forms.

Regarding the role played by the Lombards within the emerging Europe, Jarnut shows that, after the decline of the kingdom of the Visigoths and during the period of weakness of the kingdom of the Franks in the Merovingian era, Pavia was about to take a guiding role for the West after determining, by tearing a large part of Italy from the dominance of the Basileus, the final boundary line between the Latin-German West and the Greek-Byzantine East; breaking sharply the rise of the Lombards in Europe intervened, however, the strengthening of the Frankish kingdom under Charlemagne, who inflicted decisive defeats on the last kings of the Lombards. The military defeat, however, did not correspond to a disappearance of the Lombard element: Claudio Azzara states that "the same Carolingian Italy is configured, in fact, as a Lombard Italy, in the constituent elements of society and culture".