This blow seems to have crushed the vitality of Milan. For centuries she remained in a weak and depressed condition. During the Lombard domination, which swept away the brief authority of the Eastern Empire established by the arms of Narses, her pre-eminence in North Italy was usurped by Pavia, which Alboin and his successors chose as the capital of their new realm, now first called _Lombardy_. The broken palaces of the once imperial metropolis no longer sheltered sovereigns. The Lombard kings delegated their authority in the city to a governor, whom they called _Duke_—whence the name _Cordusio_, still used in the centre of the city, a corruption of Corte Ducis, the palace or judgment-hall of the Duke—and only approached from time to time to hold a Diet within the vast melancholy area of her deserted circus. Even the successors of St. Barnabas and St. Ambrose abandoned her, and transferred the See to Genoa, where it remained till the next century, diminished in power and prestige by its exile from the city of the Ambrosian tradition, while the Roman Pontiffs, throughout the two centuries of Lombard supremacy, were quietly increasing their influence and making good that claim to supreme spiritual authority before which the Ambrosian Church was in the end to succumb. The return of the episcopal See to Milan indicates some degree of revival in the city. But two hundred years more were to pass before her Church resumed its old importance, and Milan her rightful rank in North Italy. Under Charlemagne, who conquered Desiderio in 774, and created a so-called Kingdom of Italy, Milan held only the third place among the metropolitan Sees, yielding precedence after Rome to Ravenna. The Frankish king, whose great scheme of a restored Roman Empire included a united Latin Church under the Pope as supreme head, not only exalted the spiritual authority of Rome over the other Sees, but even endeavoured to suppress the peculiarities of the Ambrosian liturgy and force Milan into uniformity with the rest of the Latin Church. He is said to have descended upon the city and seized all the liturgical books, burning some and carrying others away into Germany. But even his will was helpless against the cherished custom of centuries. Some religious men, so the chronicler declares, succeeded in hiding copies of the books, and as soon as the Emperor had disappeared, they were unearthed and the old rites resumed as before.