When we reach in Lombard history the period when the power of the native kings was first overthrown by foreign arms, we are no longer confronted by many of the problems which necessarily formed an important part of the earlier portions of our investigation. I mean the problems which arise in a state of society where the mass of individuals forming it is made up of two elements, a conquering, dominant one, and a conquered, subject one. During the two centuries elapsed since the Lombard barbarians conquered Italy, the two races, originally so different in their ideas and in their character, so opposed in their customs and in their nature, have been slowly but surely blending together, on the strength of common environment and by the necessities of mutual relations: so that by the last half of the eighth century, we can truly say that national differences, as such, have disappeared, and left behind them a single race, a combination but still a unity. We no longer have to deal with a double nationality, with the northern conquerors and their southern victims, with the oppressed and their oppressors. In considering the development of the institutional life of the people, we need no longer seek for differences, but may assume the easier task of tracing similarities. In a word, we no longer speak of Lombards and of Romans, but describe all that remains of both by the new word _Italians_. It is not within the scope of this enquiry to trace the various steps or indicate the various influences, the civilizing effect of the Church, the restraining power of the law, by which this complete amalgamation of two distinct races became an accomplished fact; we need only to note that the unity of the race was achieved. Even Macchiavelli recognizes this fact and, speaking of the time of the Carlovingian conquest, in the brief review of the history of all Italy which forms the first part of the first book of the "Florentine History," he truly says that, after two hundred and twenty-two years of occupation by the Lombards, "they retained nothing of the foreigner save the name."[10]