Towards the end of the 600s, the Byzantine Empire had plenty of issues on many fronts, but the Lombards in Italy wasn’t one of the worst.

In fact, things were rather quiet on the western front. From the death of king Grimuald in 671, until the reign of Liutprand, which started in 712, there were no major conflicts, even if there were regular squabbles along the various borders.

According to the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, the Exarchate and the Lombards entered into a peace treaty around 680, which lasted for over three decades. The treaty implied a formal recognition by Byzantium of the Kingdom of the Lombards.

Theophanes is, however, our only source for that treaty.

If this story is true, it offers a convincing reason for the lack of open conflict between the Exarchate and the Kingdom of the Lombards.

Internal strife

Constantinople and Ravenna used this period to thoroughly alienate the papacy and the people of the Exarchate. The empire demanded that the papacy always towed the imperial line, while taxation increased and the same empire failed to protect the Italian dominions effectively from the local Lombard dukes.

Byzantine coercion, repression and violence led to disobedience and outright rebellion, which was met with more violence, leading to an ever more strained relationship between the empire and the people living in the Byzantine territories in Italy.

The people of the Exarchate increasingly turned to the papacy for guidance and leadership, further undermining the authority of the empire, leading to more repression and violence.

Attack on Ravenna in 717

While the authority of the empire was weakening within the Exarchate, the peace with the Lombards mostly held.

It held, until the Arabs in the Levant tipped the balance.

In Constantinople, the second deposition of Justinian II in 711 was followed by a period of instability with a succession of short-reigned emperors, until Leo III — called the Isaurian — rose to power in 717.

The Umayyad Caliphate had for some years been pushing on the borders of the empire, on several sides, and in 717–718, a large Arab army and navy besieged Constantinople itself.

The Eastern Empire was fighting for its very survival.

In the Kingdom of the Lombards, Liutprand had become king in 712.

In 717, realising the weakness of the empire the Lombards struck on several fronts. For all they knew — with Constantinople under siege by the Caliphate — there might not even be an empire any more.

Consequently, the Duchy of Benevento moved on Naples and took Cumae, while the Duchy of Spoleto occupied Narni, severing the corridor between Rome and Ravenna, and king Liutprand himself attacked Ravenna.

From the Liber Pontificalis for Gregory II:

At that time, the castle of Narni was overrun by the Lombards. Indeed, the King of the Lombards Liutprand, advancing to Ravenna with a general movement, besieged it for days and, after taking the fortress of Classe, carried off many captives and took countless riches.

Duchesne (1886), vol. 1, p. 403.

Now, things didn’t go as bad for the empire as they could have, and the Caliphate had to lift the siege of Constantinople and retreat.

Neither did things go as well for the Lombards, as they had no doubt hoped. Liutprand failed to take Ravenna, but might have taken and sacked the harbour city of Classe, and the Byzantine duke of Naples retook control of Cumae.

Problematic sources

Liutprand might have taken and sacked Classe in or around 717, or it might have been almost a decade later.

The problem is that there are major issues about the dating of many of the events of this period, and that specific event is sometimes placed around 724–725, or even later.

For many of the events of the Exarchate in the 700s, we have very few sources, and they often don’t agree at all. It certainly doesn’t help that many of those sources were written decades, and often centuries, later.

On the side of the church, we have the Liber Pontificalis, which is often very biased and usually doesn’t give precise dates for events. There are numerous instances of “sometimes later such and such happened”, but that “sometimes later” could be a month or a decade.

Likewise, the Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, for the bishops of Ravenna, written in the 840s, suffers from many of the same problems. In some cases, there are glaring, and inexplicable, omissions.

We have the occasional papal letter, usually quoted in some later text, and while they are sometimes dated precisely, very often they’re not. The date of the letter can then at best be limited to the intersection of the reigns of the sender and the recipient, but in cases like with Gregory II and Gregory III, where two successive popes used the same name, the possible time span can easily be a decade or more.

On the Lombard side, the Historia Langobardorum continued up to the death of king Liutprand in 744, but the last part is very inconsistent, and leaves the impression of an unfinished draft.

Paul the Deacon was writing that chapter towards the end of his life, and there can be many good reasons for the drop in editing quality. We have no information about his state of health in his later years, and the monastery of Monte Cassino, where he lived, passed from Lombard to Frankish control at that time.

Furthermore, the Exarchate and the Lombards were on the periphery of the Byzantine world. While there is the occasional mention of the area in Byzantine sources, it is generally rather marginal. The Exarchate wasn’t where the empire fought its main battles at that time.

The Venetian sources are generally much later, at least a century and more often three, as in the case of John the Deacon and the Istoria Veneticorum from around the year 1000. Also, the political bias of John the Deacon led him diminish in importance — or simply leave out entirely — any Venetian interaction with the empire.

To make a long story short, many of the dates mentioned in the following are at best approximative, and many of the details are quite uncertain.

To return shortly to the siege of Ravenna and the sack of Classe, the Liber Pontificalis seems to place it early in the reign of Gregory II, who became pontiff in 715, while the Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis has it at the start of the reign of bishop John VI, around 726. The Historia Langobardorum doesn’t mention it at all.

Taxes and assassinations

Emperor Leo III, after the expensive war with the Caliphate, raised taxes throughout the empire, and also in the Exarchate in Italy.

However, most of the population in Byzantine Italy refused to pay, led by pope Gregory II.

The emperor sent a part of his bodyguard to assassinate the pontiff, but they failed, and once discovered, they fled.

Around 723, the emperor appointed a Paulus as exarch of Ravenna, with the order to get rid of the pope. He, too, tried to have the pope assassinated, but the plot was again discovered, and several of the would-be assassins were killed by the crowds.

From the Liber Pontificalis for Gregory II:

In those days, by order of the emperors, the patrician Paulus, who had been exarch, tried to kill the same pontiff because he hindered the imposition of taxes in the province and stripped churches of their resources, as had been done in other places, and to appoint another in his place.

Duchesne (1886), vol. 1, p. 403.

Finally, the Lombards from the Duchy of Spoleto came in defence of the pope, and blocked the road from Ravenna near the Ponte Salario, just north of Rome.

The Byzantine system of control in the Exarchate is clearly creaking, and the conflict is not simply between empire and Lombards, but now has a papacy doing its own thing.

In this case, the Lombards tipped the scales in a conflict between empire and papacy.

Iconoclasm

Then emperor Leo III issued the iconoclast edict, around 726, and demanded that Gregory II backed his policies.

The pope again refused, and called the people of the Exarchate to arms against the heresy.

Thus, after the orders had been sent, the emperor decreed that no image of any saint, martyr, or angel should be kept: for he declared all of them cursed. And if the pope complied, he would have the emperor’s favour; if he obstructed even this, he would fall from his position. Therefore, despising the profane order of the prince, the man armed himself against the emperor as if against an enemy, rejecting his heresy, and writing everywhere to warn Christians that it had arisen and been fulfilled.

Therefore, all the armies of the Pentapolis and of the Venetians moved, and resisted the command of the emperor, never agreeing to the death of the same pontiff, but rather engaging bravely for his greater defence, so that they subjected Paul the exarch, or whoever had directed him, and their accomplices to anathema; rejecting the order of the exarch, they all chose dukes for themselves throughout Italy; and thus they all sought the pontiff’s and their own immunity.

Duchesne (1886), vol. 1, p. 404.

This was open, armed rebellion against Constantinople.

The emperor sent reinforcements to Ravenna — probably because they had realised that the local troops weren’t reliable — but the Byzantines were defeated in a battle outside Ravenna, and Paul the Exarch was killed around the same time.

The Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis for archbishop John VI recounts the battle:

In the time of John, a general came again with a show of force to Ravenna, to lay it waste, thinking that he would escape as before. When the Ravennese learned of this, they went out to meet him in the manner of battle at the field of Coriandrum. Those who pretended to flee, turning their backs, upon reaching the wooden stadium, where a stone marker was fixed as a sign, returned, and began to fight the Greeks bravely; and there was no rest from the cutting everywhere, with the Greeks suffering great slaughter from the sword. The priests indeed, together with the bishop and elders, prostrate on the ground, clothed in sackcloth, sprinkled with ashes on their heads, implored Almighty God. The elders, covered with sacks, with unruly and dirty hair, with tearful eyes, cried out to heaven; likewise all who were left in the city, men and women alike, awaited the help of the Almighty. The rest, armoured with iron, taking up the weapons of youth, cut down the enemies without pause.

Then, as we heard from those who narrated it, it appeared between the two armies like the image of a great bull and it began to raise dust with its feet against the Greek army, and a voice soon sounded – from where it had come or to whom it belonged, no one knew – in the ears of all it exclaimed, saying: ‘Forward, Ravennese, fight bravely! Victory will be yours today.’

But the Pelasgians [Greeks], seeing one of their flaks broken, began to flee to their ships, thinking they would escape. Then the Melisenses, that is, the citizens of Ravenna, surrounded them with boats and vessels, and rushing upon the Byzantines, killed them all and threw their bodies into the Eridanus. And so it was that for 6 years no one ever ate fish of the Paterenum.

The people of the Exarchate, however, didn’t want to live under the Lombards, and soon after established peace under the empire.

Nevertheless, the Lombards used the occasion to grab a bunch of border fortresses and some minor towns in the Emilia region, and the in the Pentapolis.

They also occupied the fortress of Sutri, not distant from Rome. The pontiff convinced king Liutprand to return it “to the Romans”, but he returned it to the papacy, not to the exarchate. This donation was one of the first steps towards an independent Papal state.

According to the Liber Pontificalis, the Venetians participated in the rebellion, and the phrase “they all chose dukes for themselves throughout Italy” has been interpreted to mean that Venice too got a new duke, chosen locally in opposition to the empire.

In the narrative of John the Deacon, that doge was Marcellus, while in the Chronica extensa by Andrea Dandolo, it was Ursus, who, a wee bit contradictory, sported the Byzantine title of hypatos.

The only other source to mention the Venetians in this context, is Paul the Deacon, who, however, clearly based the story on the Liber Pontificalis.

Hildeprand in Ravenna

After the death of the exarch Paulus, once sentiments had calmed down a bit, sent another official to serve as exarch of Ravenna. He was the patrician Eutychius, a eunuch from the imperial administration.

A few years later, Hildeprand, nephew of king Liutprand, and Peredeo, the Lombard duke of Vicenza, attacked Ravenna, and took it. Eutychius was forced to flee the city, and went to Venetia.

Here he asked the Venetians for help, and they quickly gathered a fleet, sailed down to Ravenna, which they took in a surprise attack, capturing Hildeprand and killing Peredeo.

We have this story from Paul the Deacon, who is very terse:

Again when Hildeprand the nephew of the king and Peredeo the duke of Vicenza got possession of Ravenna, the Venetians suddenly attacked them. Hildeprand was taken by them and Peredeo fell fighting manfully.

Historia Langobardorum, VI.49.

John the Deacon, who wrote centuries later, added a copy of a papal letter, in which a pope Gregory — and we don’t know if it was Gregory II, who ruled until 731 or Gregory III, until 741 — asked the Patriarch of Grado to get the Venetians to help the exarch.

This papal letter is traditionally dated to sometimes between 726 and 735, but John the Deacon conflated the event with a later Byzantine-Lombard conflict in the early 740s, while Andrea Dandolo — writing in the 1340s — made it contemporary with the iconoclasm rebellion in the late 720s.

The confusion over the dating of events goes way back.

No sources tell us of the fate of Hildeprand, but he was likely held for ransom and returned to the Lombards safe and sound.

In 737, during a severe illness of king Liutprand, Hildeprand was acclaimed king of the Lombards in Pavia, but Liutprand recovered. To defuse the potentially explosive situation, he made Hildeprand co-ruler.

The ephemeral Lombard conquest of Ravenna almost certainly took place before this, as the capture of a king of the Lombards by the Venetians would no doubt have received wider coverage in the various sources, and, in particular, in the Venetian chronicles.

This is as much as we know of this event, but we can take away from the story is, that the Exarchate was much weakened at this time.

That a secondary Lombard force could take the capital in a surprise attack, is not a testament to Byzantine strength and preparation. The fact that it was a secondary force, and not the main Lombard army, which was elsewhere, was probably also the reason why the Venetians could reverse the course of events.

The exarch had to appeal to the pope for help. That would either be the same pontiff, whom he had previously tried to have assassinated, and who in turn had anathematised him, or his immediate successor, as they were both named Gregory.

Again, this is not a sign of strength of the empire in Italy.

Liutprand’s last attempt

In late 741 or early 742 — and for once, we have a fairly precise date — Liutprand was at it again.

The main Lombard army was harrying the territories of the Exarchate, in Emilia, in the Pentapolis and in Romagna, the heartland around Ravenna. Unable to stop it, the exarch Eutychius and archbishop John VI of Ravenna pleaded for help with the newly elected pontiff Zachary.

Zachary left Rome, travelled to the Pentapolis, where he met with the exarch and the archbishop, and then onwards through war-torn lands to the river Po, and by boat to Pavia, the capital of the Kingdom of the Lombards. Here, he succeeded in convincing Liutprand to stop the war and return the forts and towns he had taken.

Pope Zachary literally risked his own life to help the Exarchate. The rulers of Ravenna, the exarch and the archbishop, were little more than supplicants.

Unsurprisingly, these events are described in great detail in the Liber Pontificalis for Gregory II, but are entirely left out of the Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis for bishop John VI.

Practically all our sources are selective in this fashion.

The fall of Ravenna

King Liutprand died in 744, before the agreement with pope Zachary was fully implemented. Hildeprand succeeded him, but he was deposed within the year in favour of king Ratchis. He, in turn, ruled from 744 to 749, when he retired to a monastery and left the kingdom to his brother, Aistulf.

Hildeprand and Ratchis didn’t do much to upset the fragile peace, but when Aistulf became king of the Lombards in 749, he immediately embarked on a campaign to eliminate the Exarchate in northern Italy.

The Exarchate didn’t have sufficient forces to withstand the onslaught, and nobody came to help. In 750, Aistulf took Comacchio and Ferrara at the mouth of the Po river, and in 751, he took the Istrian peninsula and then the capital of Ravenna, and the following year, he occupied the entire Pentapolis.

He did not take Venetia, and he didn’t even try.

In an official charter — called the largitio Astolfina, which we only know through the later Pactum Lotharii from 840 — he confirmed the borders between the Duchy of the Venetians and the Kingdom of the Lombards, as they had been established in the first years of the reign of Liutprand, around 712–713.

And about the boundaries of Cittanova we decree that they must remain as they are, like in the settlement made at the time of king Liutprand between the duke Paulicius and the magister militum Marcellus, according to the concession made to you inhabitants of Cittanova by Aistulf.

Pactum Lotharii, chapter 26, from Cessi (1940), p. 107.

That was in effect a recognition of the Duchy of the Venetians as an entity separate and distinct from the Exarchate.

Some sources even seem to indicate that the Venetians helped the Lombards against the Exarchate. For example, in the Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis for archbishop Sergius (744-769) the entire conquest of the Exarchate by Aistulf is covered by just one enigmatic sentence:

This city was harassed by the Lombards and the Venetians.

Holder-Egger (1878), p. 378.

There is no further explanation, no follow-up, just those few words.

The only source we have for the fate of the last exarch Eutychius — who had fled to Venetia earlier — is from a chronicle from southern Italy, the Chronicon Salernitanum, which noted:

During this time, Eutychius, a Roman patrician, surrendered himself to Aistulf who simultaneously conquered in battle Comacchio, Ferrara and Istria.

With King Aistulf on the throne in the palace of the exarch in Ravenna — which we know because he issued a charter there — the Exarchate was all but gone.

After the Exarchate

The reaction of the empire to the fall of Ravenna was meek and inconsequential. There were no resources for any kind of push-back, and besides a few attempts by diplomacy — which all failed — the empire did nothing.

With one player effectively out of the game, only the papacy in Rome was left to counter the Lombards, but Aistulf, having occupied Ravenna and the surrounding duchies, immediately set his eyes on the Byzantine duchy of Rome.

Unfortunately, pope Zachary — who had proven to be a skilled and courageous diplomat confronted with Liutprand — died in March 752. He was succeeded by Stephen II, of a local Roman aristocratic family.

Also, Aistulf wasn’t Liutprand. When Liutprand had struck a deal with Zachary, he had mostly kept it. Aistulf, on the other hand, made deals to placate his enemies, and broke them immediately afterwards.

The Liber Pontificalis for Stephen II is scathing:

Indeed, at that time, while a great persecution by the Lombard king Aistulf had arisen in this Roman city, and in the cities subject to it, and the violent cruelty of the same king was imminent, immediately the most blessed pope, … sending [emissaries] … with many gifts to the same Lombard king Aistulf to arrange peace and confirm treaties.

But indeed the same arrogant king of the Lombards, an old enemy, having invaded by cunning, tore apart the very treaties of peace after almost four months; falling into the crime of perjury, he broke them; inflicting many insults already upon the most holy man as well as upon the entire Roman people, directing various threats at him. For certainly, desiring, contrary to God, to invade this whole province, he was attempting to impose a burdensome tribute upon the inhabitants of this Roman city; specifically, for each head, he began to exact a single solidus of gold from each and indignantly claimed to subjugate this Roman city, and the fortresses subject to it, under his jurisdiction.

Duchesne (1886), vol. 1, p. 441.

Faced with such a dire situation, Stephen II did what Constantinople had done many times before: he sought help from the Franks.

One of the last acts of pope Zachary had been to sanction the deposition of the last Merovingian king of the Franks, by Pepin the Short, then Master of the Palace, that is, head of the royal household.

In late 753, Pope Stephen II travelled to Francia looking for help. Here, in January 754, he officially crowned Pepin as King of France, made him a patrician of the duchy of Rome, and, in return, asked for Pepin’s help against Aistulf and the Lombards.

Pepin kept his word, took his army into Italy, defeated Aistulf, and made him promise to cede the territories of the Exarchate.

Once the Frankish army had left, Aistulf acted as if no such promise had been made, and continued to harry the borderlands of the Duchy of Rome.

Pepin therefore returned to Italy in 756, defeated Aistulf a second time, and forced him to pay reparations and hand over the territories of the Exarchate to Pepin himself.

Pepin then, in an act called the Donation of Pepin, ceded to the papacy all the territories, which Aistulf had taken from the Exarchate. They included the Romagna with Ravenna, the Pentapolis and several other cities and fortresses in the Apennines.

At a ceremony in Rome, Pepin symbolically placed the document upon the sepulchre of St Peter.

Constantinople objected, but had no power to intervene.

These events were a pivotal point in the history of the papacy. This is where the Papal State appears, based on the territories donated by Pepin, and henceforth, the papacy relied on the Franks for protection.

The Byzantine papacy had become the Frankish papacy.

The end of the Lombards

Pepin did not depose Aistulf after the second defeat, but the Lombard king died shortly after.

Initially, his brother Ratchis returned from his monastery to be king again, but then the Lombard aristocracy chose Desiderius as their king.

In Francia, Pepin died in 768 and was succeeded by his son Charles, later Charles the Great, Charlemagne.

The relations between the Papacy and the Franks on one side, and the Kingdom of the Lombards on the other, kept creaking, and in 773, Charlemagne invaded the Lombard kingdom, and besieged the capital Pavia, which he took the following year.

He then deposed the captured king Desiderius, and made himself king of the Lombards. Later, he renamed it the Kingdom of Italy.

Consequently, from 774, there were only two powers left in the northern half of the Italian peninsula.

The Papacy of Rome was now a state — the Papal State — with a territory stretching across the peninsula, coast to coast, from Rome to Ravenna, until the Po estuary.

Everything north of the Papal State was the Frankish Kingdom of Italy, ruled by Charlemagne, and later by his son Pepin.

Everything, except the lagoons of Venetia Maritima, from Grado to Cavarzere. The Duchy of the Venetians — the dogado — was formally still Byzantine, but in practice there was rarely anybody at the other end to hold the leash.

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