Meanwhile the Lombards crowned as king, in the room of Alboin, Clepho, one of the mightiest of their dukes, though not of the royal blood; for Alboin had no son, and was the last of the Lethings. Clepho completed the conquest of all northern Italy, as far as the southern limits of Tuscany and the gates of Ravenna. [Sidenote: Anarchy, 573-83.] But ere he had reigned a year he was slain by one of his own slaves, whom he had wronged. After he was dead the Lombards chose no more kings to reign over them for ten years, but each tribe went forth conquering and plundering under its own elective duke. It is said that no less than thirty-five of these chiefs were ranging over Italy at the same time (573-83). Nothing can show better the survival of primitive Teutonic ideas among the Lombards than this period of anarchy. They had not yet learned to look upon the king as a necessary part of the constitution of the tribe, but, like the Germans of the first century, regarded him as a war-chief, to be followed in time of peril alone. The Goths or the Franks, who had advanced to a further stage, could not have borne to live kingless for ten whole years. Strangely enough, the loss of their supreme head seems to have detracted in no wise from the warlike vigour of the Lombards. In the ten kingless years they went on subduing the land, and pushed their incursions farther to the west and south. Three dukes of Neustria crossed the Alps and harried Provence, then in the hands of king Guntram the Frank, the peaceful brother of the warlike Sigibert and the wicked Chilperich. They took many cities, and were only driven out of the land, after much fighting, by Mummolus, the great Gallo-Roman general, who served king Guntram so well; but for him, Provence might have become part of Lombardy. Meanwhile other Lombard dukes were pressing southward down the Italian peninsula. They did not act on any combined plan of invasion, but each passed on with his war-band, leaving to right and to left many cities held by Imperialist garrisons, till he found a place of settlement that pleased his eye. Hence it came to pass that Lombard duchies and Roman cities were curiously intermixed. In central Italy, Faroald, the first duke of Spoleto, left Ravenna and Ancona to the north, and established himself in the central valley of the Tiber, with Imperialist garrisons all around him. Zotto, the first duke of Benevento, passed even farther to the south, and founded a realm in the Samnite valleys, which was almost entirely out of touch with the other Lombard states. It was hemmed in to east and west by the Roman garrisons of Rome, Naples, and Calabria. The dukes of Lucca and Chiusi, who held the bulk of Tuscany, did not push their limits down to the Tiber, but stopped short at the Ciminian hills, leaving a considerable district north of Rome in the hands of the Imperialists. Even in northern Italy the dukes of Neustria left Genoa and the Ligurian coast alone, and those