pulation and its reattainment of intellectual
consciousness by the recovery of past traditions and the rejection
of foreign influence constitutes the history of Italy upon the close
of the Dark Ages.

[2] It will be remembered by students of early Italian history that
Benevento and Spoleto joined the Church in her war upon the Lombard
kingdom. Spoleto was broken up. Benevento survived as a Lombard
duchy till the Norman Conquest.

The kingdom of the Lombards endured two centuries, and left ineffaceable
marks upon Italy. A cordon of military cities was drawn round the old
Roman centers in Lombardy, Tuscany, and the Duchy of Spoleto. Pavia rose
against Milan, which had been a second Rome, Cividale against Aquileia,
Fiesole against Florence, Lucca against Pisa. The country was divided
into Duchies and Marches; military service was exacted from the
population, and the laws of the Lombards, _asininum jus, quoddam jus
quod faciebant reges per se_, as the jurists afterwards defined them,
were imposed upon the descendants of Roman civilization. Yet the
outlying cities of the sea-coast, as we have already seen, were
independent; and Rome remained to be the center of revolutionary ideas,
the rallying-point of a policy inimical to Lombard unity. Not long after
their settlement, the princes of the Lombard race took the fatal step of
joining the Catholic communion, whereby they strengthened the hands of
Rome and excluded themselves from tyrannizing in the last resort over
the growing independence of the Papal See. The causes of their
conversion from Arianism to orthodox Latin Christianity are buried in
obscurity. But it is probable that they were driven to this measure by
the rebelliousness of their great vassals and the necessity of resting
for support upon the indigenous populations they had subjugated. Rome,
profiting by the errors and the weakness of her antagonists, extended
her spiritual dominion by enforcing sacraments, ordeals, and appeals to
ecclesiastical tribunals, organized her hierarchy under Gregory the
Great, and lost no opportunity of enriching and aggrandizing her
bishoprics. In 718 she shook off the yoke of Byzantium by repelling the
heresies of Leo the Isaurian; and when this insurrection menaced her
with the domestic tyranny of the Lombard Kings, who possessed themselves
of Ravenna in 728, she called the Franks to her aid against the now
powerful realm. Stephen II. journeyed in 753 to