While Alboin was founding the new kingdom of Lombardy, the cities which at first resisted began to drop into his hands. Verona fell early, but Pavia made a long defence. So desperately did it hold out against the host left to blockade it that the king swore, in his wrath, to slay every living thing within its walls. But when, after three years, the starving citizens threw open their gates, he relented of his hard vow, ‘because there was much Christian folk in that city,’ and made Pavia his capital and royal stronghold. In the next year, however, he came to his end. The Lombard chronicler, Paul the Deacon, repeating some familiar Lombard saga, tells the grim tale of his death thus:—‘King Alboin sat over long at the wine in his city of Verona, so that he grew boisterous, and he sent for the cup which he had made from the skull of king Cunimund, his father-in-law, and forced his queen, Rosamund, to drink from it, bidding her drink joyfully with her father. Then the queen conceived a deep grief and anger in her heart, and questioned with herself how she might avenge her father by slaying her husband. So she strove to persuade Helmichis, the king’s armour-bearer, who was also his foster-brother, to slay his lord. And Helmichis would not, but counselled her to win Peredeo, the strongest champion of the Lombards, to do the deed. [Sidenote: Murder of Alboin.] Then Rosamund sold her honour to Peredeo, and became his mistress, and said to him, “Now hast thou done a thing for which either thou must kill Alboin, or he thee.” So he unwillingly consented to the deed, and at mid-day, when all the palace lay asleep, Rosamund bound the king’s sword so tightly to the bed-head that it could not be drawn, and then bid Peredeo go in and slay her husband. When Alboin heard an armed man enter, he sprang from his couch, and strove to draw his sword without avail. For some space he fought hard for his life with a stool that he caught up, but what could the best of warriors do without arms against an armed champion? He was slain like a weakling, and, after passing unharmed through so many battles, died by the counsel of one woman, and she his own wife. So the Lombards took up his body, with much weeping, and buried it beneath the great flight of steps over against the palace, where it lay till my own days.’ (May 572.) Helmichis strove in vain to make himself king in his master’s room, but the Lombards would have none of him, and he was forced to fly with Rosamund and the murderer Peredeo, to take shelter with the Romans at Ravenna. There all three of them came to evil ends, ‘for the hand of Heaven was upon them for doing such a foul deed.’