ged him
to spare the property of his church, and presently the whole province
of Venetia, with the exception of Padua, Mantua, and Monselice, was in
his hands. Those who could, doubtless fled away, for the most part to
that new settlement in the Venetian lagoons which was presently to
give birth to Venice and which had been founded by those who had fled
from Attila; but there were many who could not flee. These came under
the cruel yoke of the invader. Perhaps Alboin spent the winter in
Verona, perhaps in Friuli; wherever it was, he but prepared his
advance and still no one appeared to say him nay. By the end of 569
all Cisalpine Gaul with Liguria and Milan, except Pavia, the coast,
Cremona, Piacenza, and a few smaller places, were in his hands.
Indeed, in all that terrible flood of disasters we hear of but one
great city which offered even for a time a successful resistance. This
was Pavia, naturally so strongly defended by the Po and the Ticino.
Alboin established an army about it, and swore to massacre all its
inhabitants since it alone had dared to resist him. Pavia fell to the
Lombard, after a three years' siege, in 572; but Alboin was prevented
from carrying out his vow, and not long after Pavia became the capital
of the Lombard power in Italy.

Meantime, those three years, during which Pavia held her own, had not
been wasted by the barbarian. He crossed the Apennines, we may believe
as Totila had done, by the old deserted way to Fiesole, brought all
Tuscany under his yoke and a great part both of central and of
southern Italy, establishing there two "duchies" as the centres of his
power at Spoleto and Benevento. Then he returned to take Pavia, all
this time besieged, and in the same year, 572, it is probable that
Piacenza fell also, and Mantua. All Italy was in confusion, the system
of government re-established by Narses broken; the work of Justinian's
reconquest seemed all undone. That it was not wholly undone, that it
lived on and was at last re-established, we owe to two great facts:
the conversion of the Lombards to Catholicism by Gregory the Great and
the establishment of the exarchate, the entrenchment of Roman power
and civilisation in Ravenna. Let us consider these things.

The Lombards were barbarians and therefore pagans or Arians, but their
Arianism was of a different kind from that of the Huns, different even
from that of the Ostrogoths. Indeed, though the Lombards may be called
Arian, for indeed su