of Austria did not subdue the marshland of Mantua and Padua, nor follow the fugitive inhabitants of Venetia into the islands where Venice and Grado were just beginning to grow up in the security of the lagoons. All over Italy Lombard and Roman districts were hopelessly confused, and, save that the Po valley was wholly Lombard, and Bruttium and Calabria wholly Roman, there was no part of the land that was not shared between the invader and the old Imperial Government. Coming into a country already desolate and well-nigh dispeopled, and bringing with them the customs of primitive Germany, untinctured with any Roman intermixture, the Lombards established a polity even less centralised than that of the Visigoths, and infinitely below the standard of government which Theodoric had once set up in Italy eighty years before. [Sidenote: The Lombard Monarchy.] When the nation once more chose a king, his power was hopelessly circumscribed by the authority of the great hereditary dukes. Spoleto and Benevento hardly paid even a nominal homage to the king who reigned at Pavia. Only when he presented himself with a large army in central Italy could he hope to win attention for his orders. Even in the valley of the Po, and in Tuscany, his power was very imperfect. The authority of the royal name had been fatally injured by the extinction, with Alboin, of the ancient kingly house of the Lethings. The Lombard monarchs, like their Visigothic contemporaries in Spain, only held their crown when once they had been elected, by the right of the sword. In a short history of two hundred years the Lombard kingdom saw nine successive races of kings mount the throne. All represented old ducal families. The rulers of Turin, Brescia, Benevento, Friuli, and Istria all, at one time or another, won the royal crown, besides two or three kings who were not even Lombards by birth, but strangers from the neighbouring land of Bavaria. In the wasted regions of northern Italy, it would seem that the Lombards formed for some time the large majority of the population. Unlike the Goths in Spain, or the Franks in central Gaul, they did not merely consist of a few scattered families lost among the masses of the old inhabitants. There is a greater breach in the old Roman traditions of municipal and social life in the valley of the Po than in most of the other lands of the Western Empire. In the seventh century Lombardy must have preserved less traces of its ancient imperial organisation than Spain, Gaul, or Burgundy, and must have presented a much more primitive and Teutonic aspect. This is as we should expect, from the fact that the Lombards came from the very back of Germany, and first met with the influence of the older world of Rome when they moved into Italy. [Illustration: ITALY IN A.D. 590. ]