The Lombards, Longobards or Langobards (Latin: Langobardi) were a Germanic people who conquered most of the Italian Peninsula between 568 and 774 AD. They had previously settled in the Middle Danube in the 5th century, near what is now Austria, Slovenia and Hungary. Still earlier they lived further north, near present day Hamburg. Roman-era historians in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD mention the Lombards as one of the Suebian peoples, and report them living on the Lower Elbe in the early 1st century. Their legacy is apparent in Lombardy, northern Italy, the region deriving its name from them.
Apart from a single mention in the Cosmographia of Julius Honorius, there are no contemporary accounts of the Lombards in the 3rd or 4th century. They reappear in historical records living near the Danube river in the late 5th century. Legendary accounts of the Lombard migration are found in several early medieval texts, the oldest being the Origo Gentis Langobardorum (Origin of the Lombard People). There are two other notable later adaptions, the Chronicon Gothanum and the more scholarly History of the Lombards by Paul the Deacon, written between 787 and 796 AD, which contain more information. All three describe the Lombards as a people who moved to the Danube from somewhere near the North Sea. The details, however, differ until they enter "Rugiland" soon after Odoacer's defeat in 487/488 AD of the Rugii, who had a kingdom near what is now Vienna.
In the Danube region, the Lombards came into conflict with other barbarian kingdoms, starting with the Heruls, neighbours of the Rugii, and culminating with their defeat of the Gepids. The Lombard king Audoin settled his people further south in Pannonia, in modern-day Hungary, and defeated the Gepid leader Thurisind in 551 or 552 AD. Audoin's successor Alboin eventually destroyed the Gepid kingdom in 567 AD. Near Szólád, archaeologists have unearthed burial sites of Lombard men and women being buried together as families, unusual among Germanic peoples at the time.
Following Alboin's victory over the Gepids, he led his people into northeastern Italy, which had become severely depopulated and devastated by the long Gothic War (535–554) between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom. The Lombards were joined by numerous Saxons, Suebi, Sarmatians, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians and Ostrogoths, and their invasion of Italy was almost unopposed. By late 569 AD, they had conquered all of northern Italy and the principal cities north of the Po River except Pavia, which fell in 572 AD. At the same time, they occupied areas in central and southern Italy. They established a Lombard Kingdom in north and central Italy, which reached its zenith under the 8th century ruler Liutprand. In 774 AD, the kingdom was conquered by the Frankish king Charlemagne and integrated into the Frankish Empire. Lombard nobles, however, continued to rule the southern parts of the Italian Peninsula well into the 11th century, when they were conquered by the Normans and came under the County of Sicily.
Name
The classical Latin and Greek forms of the name (Latin: Langobardi and Ancient Greek: Λαγκόβαρδοι) were first recorded by Strabo and Velleius Paterculus.
The standard explanation derives the name from Proto-Germanic: *lang- "long" and *bard- "beard," meaning "the Long-beards". Isidore of Seville stated in the 7th century that it was commonly said that the Langobards got their name because they never cut their beards. The three surviving origin stories agree about the basic meaning. The Origo and the History of Paul the Deacon connect it to a trick played by the ancestors of the Langobards, when their women pretended to be men with beards. The Chronicon Gothanum, on the other hand, skips this episode and says the name of the Langobards simply arose "by the voice of the common people" (ad vulgorum vocem), because of their long and uncut beards. Scholars generally accept this "long-beard" interpretation as linguistically and semantically sound.
Other explanations exist, but have had less support, including deriving -bard- from a weapon (barta "axe") or treating it as a synonym for "fighters" parallel to the alternate ethnonym Winnili ("the fighters"). It is possible that Winnili was the name the tribe used internally, while Langobardi began as a name used by outsiders.
Later sources sometimes also used a rare shortened form Bardi. Place-names like Bardengau and Bardowick in northern Germany, near the first known homeland of the Langobardi, possibly preserve this same element. On the other hand, scholars have also noted that this type of Bard placename is common throughout northern Germany, and apparently associated with wet or muddy areas.
A modern theory suggests that the name "Langobard" comes from Langbarðr, a name of Odin. Priester states that when the Winnili changed their name to "Lombards", they also changed their old agricultural fertility cult to a cult of Odin, thus creating a conscious tribal tradition. Fröhlich inverts the order of events in Priester and states that with the Odin cult, the Lombards grew their beards in resemblance of the Odin of tradition and their new name reflected this.
Legendary origins
All three of the legendary accounts state that the Langobards were originally called Winnili, and they begin with the Winnili being ruled by two brothers, Ibor and Aio (or Agio), whose mother and advisor is named Gambara. In 1970, Ernesto Sestan proposed that the Winnili might be the Vinoviloth, one of the tribes in Scandza (Scandinavia) mentioned by Jordanes in De origine actibusque Getarum in the 6th century CE.
The Origo and the History of Paul the Deacon have them first living on an island in the far north which the various manuscripts of these works spell in different ways: Scadan, Scandanan, Scadanan, or Scadinavia. Paul specifically mentions that he equated the island to "Scatinavia" mentioned by the Roman author Pliny the Elder. The Codex Gothanus, in contrast, says that the Lombards set out from a river called Vindilicus at the far edge of Gaul, then moved to "Scatenauga", which was a place on the lower Elbe, consistent with the location of the first century Langobardi described by Roman authors. The 7th-century writer Fredegar similarly says that the Langobardi came from Scathanavia, but only says this is "between the Danube and the Ocean" without calling it an island.
The account in Paul and the Origo appears to be an imitation of the 6th-century origin of the Goths written by Jordanes. The Codex Gothanus was written later than the other two records, but it appears to preserve some older material. The Vindilicus however appears to come from a mistaken reading of the earlier collection of etymologies by Isidore of Seville, who says it was a river where the Vandals originated, in a sentence which comes immediately after a comment about the etymology of the name of the Langobards. The Codex therefore apparently combined two distinct entries of Isidore.
The oldest of the three versions, the Origo, reports a war between the Winnili and the Vandals, who were attempting to force other peoples to pay tribute. In this version, the Winnili did not move from their home island until after they won this war, and after they changed their name to the Langobardi. The Origo gives no reason for leaving. A different sequence of events is given in Paul the Deacon's History, which says that a third of its inhabitants departed in search of new lands because of over-population and a low-lying coast. In this version the war with the Vandals happened in the new homeland called Scoringa, which is not mentioned in the other two sources. It was here that they also changed their tribal name according to Paul, but afterwards they decided to move again, this time because of famine. Scoringa was perhaps a coastal shoreline region.
In the Vandal war reported by the Origo and History, the Winnili were young and brave and refused to pay tribute, saying that it "is better to maintain liberty by arms than to stain it by the payment of tribute". The Vandals prepared for war and consulted Godan (the god Odin), who answered that he would give victory to those whom he would see first at sunrise. The Winnili were fewer in number and Gambara sought help from Frea (the goddess Frigg), who advised that all Winnili women should tie their hair in front of their faces like beards and march in line with their husbands. At sunrise, Frea turned her husband's bed so that he was facing east, and woke him. So Godan spotted the Winnili first and asked, "Who are these long-beards?," and Frea replied, "My lord, thou hast given them the name, now give them also the victory." From that moment onwards, the Winnili were known as the Longbeards (Latinised as Langobardi, Italianised as Longobardi, and Anglicised as Langobards or Lombards).
When Paul the Deacon wrote the Historia between 787 and 796 he was a Catholic monk and devoted Christian. He thought the pagan stories of his people "silly" and "laughable". Paul explained that the name "Langobard" came from the length of their beards.
History
First century: Lower Elbe
The first mention of the Lombards in a near contemporary record occurred between AD 9 and 16, by the Roman court historian Velleius Paterculus, who accompanied a Roman expedition as prefect of the cavalry. Paterculus says that under Tiberius the "power of the Langobardi was broken, a race (gens) surpassing even the Germans in savagery". Strabo, writing in about 20 AD, treats them as a branch of the Suebi, and indicates that they had previously lived west of the Elbe, but were now forced by Romans to stay on the eastern side.
Tacitus, writing in about 100 AD in his Germania, emphasised that the Langobardi were a distinctively small Suebian people, in terms of numbers, but surrounded by the most powerful peoples. They kept safe, according to him, "by daring the perils of war". Beyond the Langobardi were the Nerthus-worshipping tribes whose land of rivers and forest stretched to the sea and the remote parts of Germania.
In his Annals, Tacitus also noted the involvement of the Langobardi in the conflicts of the time. 9 AD when Arminius and his allies won the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, the Lombards and Semnones were part of the kingdom of Marobod, the King of the Marcomanni, who was allied with Rome. However, after the outbreak of war between Arminius and Marobod in 17 AD the Lombards and Semnones switched to the alliance of Arminius. They detested Marobod's title of king, and saw Arminius as a champion of freedom. In the battle the two sides eventually fought, Tacitus believed that the Cherusci and Langobardi were fighting for ancient renown or newly won freedom, while the other side for the increase of their dominion. Arminius died in 21 AD. In 47 AD, the Cherusci were assigned a new leader by Rome, Italicus, and this was controversial. Both his supporters and detractors appealed to neighbouring tribe. When he was eventually dethroned, the Langobardi restored him.
In terms of archaeological evidence, the lands of the lower Elbe fall into the zone of the Jastorf Culture and became Elbe-Germanic, differing from the lands between Rhine, Weser, and the North Sea. Archaeologists have identified the probable core region of the Langobard settlements in zone south of Hamburg, separated from the coastal Chauci to the west by the moorlands of the Oste river, and to the south was the sparsely populated Lüneburg Heath. To the east their borders are hard to define, though they may have reached as far as the Ilmenau, or Drawehn, or even Höhbeck. On the north of the Elbe, cemeteries in the districts of Hagenow, Ludwigslust, and the fringe of the district of Schwerin up to Lake Schwerin are considered Langobardic. This whole area was continuously inhabited until the late early Roman period, when parts of the population began to shift. The burial sites are crematorial and are usually dated from the sixth century BC through the third century AD, so a settlement breakoff seems unlikely, although only a limited number of habitation sites have so far been investigated. The German archaeologist Willi Wegewitz observed a decline in archaeological finds during the first half of the 1st century BC, followed, from approximately 30 BC onwards, by the emergence of weapon burials. Wegewitz interprets these as evidence for the arrival of a new population, possibly the Lombards themselves. Archaeological finds show that the Lombards were an agricultural people.
Second century
In the mid-second century, surviving descriptions of Europe based on the work of geographer Claudius Ptolemy appears to describe the Langobardi in two distinct places, probably because the text is partly based upon several different earlier sources.
- Uniquely, the "Suebi Langobardi" (Σύηβοι οἱ Λαγγοβάρδοι); were described as living close to the Rhine: south of the Bructeri and Sugambri, north of the Tencteri. To their east stretching northwards to the central Elbe are the Suebi Angili. These locations for the Langobards and Angles are far to the west of any other classical reports. This has been interpreted as an editorial error by Gudmund Schütte, in his analysis of Ptolemy.
- The "Laccobardi" (Λακκοβάρδοι) were however placed between the Lower Weser and Lower Elbe, just inland of the Chauci on the coast, together with the Angrivarii and the Dulgubnii, all roughly in the locations where earlier Roman sources had placed them.
Difficult to evaluate, the Historia Langobardorum codicis Gothani mentions Patespruna in Saxony, probably Paderborn, as one of the places the early Langobardi lived.
Far to the south of the Lower Elbe, in 166 AD Cassius Dio reported that just before the Marcomannic Wars, 6,000 Lombards and Obii (sometimes thought to be Ubii) crossed the Danube and invaded Pannonia. The two tribes were defeated, but the non-Roman nations of the region were concerned about the possible Roman reaction. They sent Ballomar, King of the Marcomanni, as ambassador to Aelius Bassus, who was then administering Pannonia. Peace was made and the two tribes returned to their homes. However, this was seen as a foretaste of the great war which subsequently broke out.