ievement was in the first place due to three great
personalities: to Justinian who had succeeded in establishing the
imperial power with its capital at Ravenna, and whose work had such
life in it that, in spite of every adverse circumstance, it was able
to develop and to maintain itself during more than two hundred years
and uphold the imperial idea in Italy until the pope was able to
re-establish the empire in the West as a self-supporting state; to
Gregory the Great in whom we see personified the hope and strength of
the papacy and the Latin idea which it was to uphold and to glorify;
and to Theodelinda, that passionately Catholic Lombard queen, who was
able to lead her Lombards into the fold of the Roman church, and who
in her son Adalwald by her second husband Agilulf, whom she had raised
to the throne, presented the Lombard kingdom with its first Catholic
king, and had thus done her part to secure the future.

Of these three powers those of Ravenna and Rome were, of course, by
far the more important; for indeed the conversion of the Lombards was,
rightly understood, but a part of the work of Gregory. Yet though both
were working for the same end they did not always propose to march by
the same road. In 592, for instance, the pope, seeing Naples the
capital of the little isolated duchy upon his southern flank very hard
pressed, proposed at all costs to relieve it; but the exarch Romanus,
perhaps seeing further, was not to be moved to the assistance of the
peasants of Campania from the all-important business of the defence of
central Italy and the Flaminian Way, the line of communication between
Ravenna and Rome. He proposed to let Naples look after itself and at
all costs to hold Perugia. Gregory, however, who claimed in an
indignant letter of this date (592) to be "far superior in place and
dignity" to the exarch, proceeded to save Naples by making a sort of
peace with the Lombard duchy of Spoleto. It is possible that this
peace saw the Lombard established in Perugia, which was the Roman key,
till now always in Roman hands, of the great line of communication
between Rome and Ravenna. However that may be, Gregory's peace not
only aroused great anger in Constantinople, but brought Romanus
quickly south with an army to re-occupy Perugia, Orte, Todi, Ameria,
and various other cities of Umbria. But Romanus had been right. His
movement southward alarmed Agilulf, who immediately left Pavia, and
crossing the Apennines, we