of Italy. The Lombard duchies of the south were kept separate from the
parent state; with the result that their ruins were built long
afterwards into the fabric of a South Italian monarchy which was
irreconcilably hostile to the political heirs of the Lombard kings. In
many respects the Lombards showed capacity for governing a subject
population. They adopted the Latin language; they forsook Arianism for
Catholicism; they accommodated themselves to city life; they were
liberal patrons of Italian art and industry. Although they introduced a
strictly Teutonic form of administration, their rule compared not
unfavourably with the makeshift methods of Byzantine statesmanship. In
Imperial Italy we see the strange spectacle of a military despotism
tempered by the usurped privileges and jurisdictions of the great
proprietors, or by the ill-defined temporal pretensions of the bishops.
In Lombard Italy matters were at least no worse. The Lombards were
aliens; but so were the Greeks. The Greeks treated the Italians as
inferiors. But the Lombards intermarried freely with their subjects, and
the Lombard legislators (Rotharis, Luitprand) recognised no invidious
privileges of race.

(4) Northern Gaul remains to be considered. It was here that the
Frankish monarchy developed; and we deal last with the Franks because
they were destined to harvest the chief fruits of barbarian conquest and
colonisation. By the close of the eighth century Africa, Spain, and
Britain were the only western provinces of the Empire in which they had
failed to establish themselves as the sole or the dominant power; and
moreover they had penetrated by that time farther into Central Europe
than any Roman statesman, since Tiberius, had extended his schemes of
conquest. The expansion of the Franks was a slow process, interrupted by
periods of stagnation or relapse; and we can only trace it in the barest
outline.