The internal organization of a barbarian kingdom: the Lombards in Italy

What is it about?

When the Lombards invaded Italy in 568, they needed obviously to take the military control of the territory against the Byzantine army and the hostility of the local people. However, contrary to what some historians have argued, in this article I try to prove that the organization of the Lombard kingdom in the final century of its life as an independent kingdom (prior to the Frankish conquest in 774) was not only conditioned by military problems, as argued by the so-called arimannic theory. This theory postulated the existence of a particular type of military settlements, the arimanniae, that were colonies of “true” Lombard warriors (arimanni), stationed in the fiscal lands by the king all over the kingdom, in areas of strategic importance in terms of protection and defence. On the contrary, we need to reject the idea that the Lombard settlement had a military character throughout its history. Even more so do we need to reject the idea, connected to the first, that there was a Lombard settlement separate from the ‘Roman’ settlement. The Lombard kingdom in the 8th century was a territorial state, where there was no ethnic division between Lombards and Romans. All freemen were potentially summoned to the royal army, armed differently according to their personal wealth.

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