Thus gloriously came to an end, after enduring sixty years, the Gothic power in Italy, and thus, like a meteor, brightest before it is quenched, the Gothic name fades from history. The Visigoths retained their supremacy in Spain until 711, when Roderick, their last king, was slain by the Saracens, but the Ostrogoths, after this campaign of Narses, are never heard of again as a people. Between Hermann and Charlemagne, there is no leader so great as Theodoric, but his empire died with him. He became the hero of the earliest German songs; his name and character were celebrated among tribes who had forgotten his history, and his tomb is one of the few monuments left to us from those ages of battle, migration and change. The Ostrogoths were scattered and their traces lost. Some, no doubt, remained in Italy, and became mixed with the native population; others joined the people which were nearest to them in blood and habits; and some took refuge among the fastnesses of the Alps. It is supposed that the Tyrolese, for instance, may be among their descendants. [Sidenote: 565. NARSES SUMMONS THE LONGOBARDS.] The apparent success of Justinian in bringing Italy again under the sway of the Eastern Empire was also only a flash, before its final extinction. The Ostrogoths were avenged by one of their kindred races. Narses remained in Ravenna as vicegerent of the Empire: his government was stern and harsh, but he restored order to the country, and his authority became so great as to excite the jealousy of Justinian. After the latter's death, in 565, it became evident that a plot was formed at Constantinople to treat Narses as his great cotemporary, Belisarius, had been treated. He determined to resist, and, in order to make his position stronger, summoned the Longobards (Long-Beards) to his aid. This tribe, in the time of Cæsar, occupied a part of Northern Germany, near the mouth of the Elbe. About the end of the fourth century we find them on the north bank of the Danube, between Bohemia and Hungary. The history of their wanderings during the intervening period is unknown. During the reign of Theodoric they overcame their Germanic neighbors, the Heruli, to whom they had been partially subject: then followed a fierce struggle with the Gepidæ, another Germanic tribe, which terminated in the year 560 with the defeat and destruction of the latter. Their king, Kunimund, fell by the hand of Alboin, king of the Longobards, who had a drinking-cup made of his skull. The Longobards, though victorious, found themselves surrounded by new neighbors, who were much worse than the old. The Avars, who are supposed to have been a branch of the Huns, pressed and harassed them on the East; the Slavonic tribes of the north descended into Bohemia; and they found themselves alone between races who were savages in comparison with their own. [Sidenote: 568.]