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Paul the Deacon and the Ancient History of the Lombards

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Paul the Deacon and the Ancient History of the Lombards chapter 4 Paul the Deacon and the Ancient History of the Lombards Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum (hl), written in the late eighth cen- tury, is the last of the Latin prose histories to be examined in this monograph. Like the Gothic history of Jordanes, this text also incorporates what appears to be some kind of oral material possibly deriving from vernacular narratives; but Paul treats his barbarian heritage with much less apparent embarrassment than any of the histories examined so far, and, insofar as his history provides what is in my view the first and most successful synthesis of barbarian and Roman inheritances within the scope of a ‘national’ history, it is an appropriate point to end the examination of this form of narrative. This chapter begins with an overview of the historical background regarding the Lombards and the other narrative sources for their earlier history, followed by a second introduc- tory section surveying the life and works of Paul the Deacon, and providing a summary of the narrative of the hl. I then move on to a discussion of Paul’s account of Lombard origins and some of his legendary stories, with a view to establishing the nature of any putative oral tradition on which he might have drawn to compose these narratives. Following my analysis of the legendary material, I examine Paul’s treatment of religious and ethnic difference between Catholics and Arians or pagans, and between Romans and Lombards. I con- clude with some remarks on the function of the distant past in Paul’s history, and how it compares to the histories of the Goths and Franks examined above. The Early History of the Lombards: Background and Sources The earliest references to Lombards, from the first and second centuries ad, identify them as a people along the lower Elbe.1 After this the Lombards do not 1 The early sources mention “Langobardi”, normally as a sub-group of the Sueves: Strabo (Jones, ed. and trans 1917–33: vii.i,3); Velleius Paterculus (Watt, ed. 1988: ii.cvi,2); Tacitus’s Germania (Ogilvie and Winterbottom, eds. 1975: xl,1), and his Annales (Heubner, ed. 1983: ii. xlv,1; xi.xvii,3); Ptolemy (Stückelberger and Graßhoff, ed. and trans. 2006: ii.xi,9; 15; cf. also the “Λακκοβάρδοι” mentioned at ii.xi,17, identified, because of their location, by the editors as identical with the “Lugii” of Tacitus [Ogilvie and Winterbottom, eds. 1975: xliii,2], though from the name given they might equally well be Lombards); Cassius Dio (Cary and Foster, ed. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043058�6_005 <UN> 116 chapter 4 impinge on Roman consciousness and appear to have had little direct contact with the empire—and are thus absent in written sources—until the middle of the sixth century, when Procopius informs us that the Lombards (whom he identifies as Christian) had been at the borders of the empire in the late fifth century, and were later given parts of Noricum by Justinian and fought with the Romans against the Goths.2 It is difficult to construct a narrative history of the Lombards on the basis of contemporary sources until the end of the sixth century, far later than is the case for the Goths and the Franks.3 Although the Lombards appear to have had a less lengthy history of close contact with Rome by the time they set up an independent post-imperial king- dom than had the Goths and Franks before the establishment of their polities, if we can trust Procopius, the Lombards had occupied a Roman province for 40 years before moving into Italy in 568, and had had close contact with the empire for roughly a century; they appear to have had some familiarity already with both Christianity and some elements of Roman administrative culture.4 The Liber Pontificalis reports that the Lombards were invited by Narses to enter and settle in Italy in the aftermath of the Gothic wars.5 This informa- tion is repeated by a number of later sources, but its reliability, and the condi- tions of the settlement, are unclear. Whether or not there was an invitation, the Lombards did enter Italy; there certainly does not seem to have been any serious imperial effort to keep them out.6 A kingdom had been firmly estab- lished by 605, and was to last until the conquest of Lombard Italy by Charlemagne in 774; Italy remained, though, a region in which the empire and trans. 1914–27: lxxi.iii,1). For discussion of these sources, see Christie (1995): 1–14; Coumert (2007): 145–6; Everett (2003): 54–5; Priester (2004): 13–21. Note that Velleius Paterculus might not understand the Lombards to be a ‘Germanic’ people, as the latter are less ferocious, in his view, than the Lombards. 2 Dewing (ed. and trans. 1914–28): vi.xiv,9–10; vii.xxxiii,10–12; vii.xxxiv,34; 40. 3 Surveys of Lombard history up to c.600 are given in Christie (1995): 14–68 (based on archaeol- ogy and Paul the Deacon), and Jarnut (1982): 9–26 (essentially a summary of Paul and the ogl). On the evidentiary basis for this early history, cf. Everett (2003): 55–6; Halsall (2007): 398–9; Priester (2004): 21–33; Wickham (1981): 28–30. 4 On these issues, see Christie (1995): 31–68; Everett (2003): 56–65; Jarnut (1982): 30–2; Wickham (1981): 29–30. 5 Duchesne (ed. and trans. 1886–92): lxiii,3–4. 6 For the later sources, see Everett (2003): 65–7. The Liber Pontificalis is the earliest text to record an invitation by Narses, but this section of the work was probably only compiled in the 620s (Davis, trans. 2000: xiii). On the early period of Lombard rule in Italy, see Christie (1995): 73–91; Jarnut (1982): 33–46; Priester (2004): 34–58; Wickham (1981): 30–4. <UN>.
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