The task was not easy, for the Italians, as we have noticed, did not love the Greeks, while the Goths fought bravely for independence. At length, in the year 555, after nineteen campaigns, Narses, an Armenian who was at the head of Justinian’s forces, succeeded in crushing the Barbarians and established his rule at Ravenna, from which city, under the title of _Exarch_, he controlled the whole peninsula. [Sidenote: Lombard Invasion] Narses’ triumph had been in a great measure due to a German tribe, ‘The Lombards’, whose hosts he had enrolled under the imperial banner. These Lombards, _Longobardi_ or ‘Long Beards’ as the name originally stood, had migrated from the banks of the Elbe to the basin of the Danube, and there, looking about them for a warlike outlet for their energies, were quite as willing to invade Italy at Justinian’s command as to go on any other campaign that promised to be profitable. Narses, as soon as he was assured of success, paid them liberally for their services and sent them back to their own people; but the Lombards had learned to love the sunny climate and the vines growing out of doors, and were soon discontented with their bleaker homeland. They waited therefore until Narses, whom they knew and feared, was dead; and then, under the leadership of Alboin, their king, crossed over the Alps and invaded North Italy. They did not come in such tremendous strength as the Ostrogoths in the past, nor were the imperial troops powerless to stand against them: indeed, the two forces were so balanced that, while the Lombards succeeded in establishing themselves in the province of Lombardy, to which they gave their name, with Pavia as its capital, the representatives of the Emperor still held the coast-line on both sides, also Ravenna, Naples, Rome, and other principal towns. This Lombard inroad, the last of the great Barbarian invasions of Italy, was by far the most important in its effects. For one thing, two hundred years were to pass before the power of the new settlers was seriously shaken; and therefore, even the fact that they were pagans and imposed their own laws ruthlessly on the Italians could not keep the races from gradually intermingling. In time the higher civilization conquered, and the fair-haired Teutons learned to worship the Christian God, forgot their own tongue, and adopted the customs and habits they saw around them. The Italians, on their part, in the course of their struggles with the Lombards became trained in the art of war they had almost forgotten. By the eighth century the fusion was complete.