d especially Paul Warnefrid,
(l iii. c. 13--34,) who had read the more ancient histories of Secundus
and Gregory of Tours. Baronius produces some letters of the popes, &c.;
and the times are measured by the accurate scale of Pagi and Muratori.]

During a period of two hundred years, Italy was unequally divided
between the kingdom of the Lombards and the exarchate of Ravenna.
The offices and professions, which the jealousy of Constantine had
separated, were united by the indulgence of Justinian; and eighteen
successive exarchs were invested, in the decline of the empire, with the
full remains of civil, of military, and even of ecclesiastical, power.
Their immediate jurisdiction, which was afterwards consecrated as the
patrimony of St. Peter, extended over the modern Romagna, the marshes or
valleys of Ferrara and Commachio, [34] five maritime cities from Rimini
to Ancona, and a second inland Pentapolis, between the Adriatic coast
and the hills of the Apennine. Three subordinate provinces, of Rome,
of Venice, and of Naples, which were divided by hostile lands from the
palace of Ravenna, acknowledged, both in peace and war, the supremacy
of the exarch. The duchy of Rome appears to have included the Tuscan,
Sabine, and Latin conquests, of the first four hundred years of the
city, and the limits may be distinctly traced along the coast, from
Civita Vecchia to Terracina, and with the course of the Tyber from
Ameria and Narni to the port of Ostia. The numerous islands from
Grado to Chiozza composed the infant dominion of Venice: but the more
accessible towns on the Continent were overthrown by the Lombards, who
beheld with impotent fury a new capital rising from the waves. The power
of the dukes of Naples was circumscribed by the bay and the adjacent
isles, by the hostile territory of Capua, and by the Roman colony
of Amalphi, [35] whose industrious citizens, by the invention of the
mariner's compass, have unveiled the face of the globe. The three
islands of Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily, still adhered to the empire;
and the acquisition of the farther Calabria removed the landmark of
Autharis from the shore of Rhegium to the Isthmus of Consentia. In
Sardinia, the savage mountaineers preserved the liberty and religion of
their ancestors; and the husbandmen of Sicily were chained to their
rich and cultivated soil. Rome was oppressed by the iron sceptre of the
exarchs, and a Greek, perhaps a eunuch, insulted with impunity the ruins