After the Gothic wars, significant areas of the Italian peninsula were taken by the newly arrived Lombards. Chapter 5 discusses how convincing Lombard leaders, vacillating between Nicene and Christian Christianity, to embrace one of the available versions of the Christian faith became the goal of the representatives of various sides and how the Lombard religious ambiguity created a special environment in which different doctrines could coexist and compete.

In recent years research on the early medieval north-eastern Italy has made important advances in the study of archaeological finds from the entire Adriatic area but also in the field of critical analysis of the early Venetian duchy’s relations with the Lombard (and later Italian) kingdom and Byzantine Italy. This study focuses on the second subject, starting from the arrival of the Lombards in 569, which established the conditions for the birth of Venice. From the sixth to the ninth century, Venice was a Byzantine duchy embedded in a dense network of political, social and economic relations which extended across the whole northern Adriatic. The formation of Venetian society and the city itself, its institutions and political identity were profoundly influenced by social and institutional developments on the Italian mainland. Simultaneously Byzantine, Adriatic and Italian in character, Venice developed in delicate equilibrium with all these different social components.

Apulia had formed a part of Longobardia minor until the ninth century. With the exception of the outer South-East, which the Greeks had reached from Sicily, it was a region of Lombard law, Latin language, and Roman rites, of which only the central part was heavily populated. The division of Longobardia minor between the empire and the principalities took place gradually. In 969–70, the theme became the catepanate of Italy. The gastalds were replaced by tourmarchoi; the empire sent officers of the tagmata and other troops. It created new towns in Basilicata. Finally, in the years 1010–20, the catepan Basil Boioannes founded the towns of Capitanata to protect the frontier with the principality of Benevento. In the central region the Byzantine fiscal system was implemented before the end of the tenth century.

Before c.600, Western European military forces were recognisably descended from the last western Roman armies, as can quickly be demonstrated. Late Roman troops had sometimes been paid via the delegation of fiscal revenues and, as earlier, received allotments of land on retirement.1 Their hereditary service,2 furthermore, exempted them from certain taxes. In the fourth and fifth centuries a series of military identities evolved, based around oppositions to traditional civic Roman ideals. These turned on ideas of barbarism, enhanced by possibly increased recruitment beyond the frontiers and greater opportunities for non-Roman soldiers to rise to higher command.3 As the territory effectively governed from Ravenna, the imperial capital, shrank during the fifth century, and with it the available taxation and recruiting bases, the enlistment, and political pre-eminence, of warriors from outside the empire grew further.4

Surveys political events in the second half of the eighth century as Rome, in the face of continued Lombard attacks, shifts its political ties from the emperor in Constantinople to the Franks, culminating with the coronation of the Frankish king Charlemagne as Roman ‘emperor’ in December 800

A survey of the political and economic challenges facing the papacy in the first four decades of the eighth century, including theological disputes with the emperors in Byzantium and the increasing hostility of the Lombard kings, in addition to a discussion of how these are reflected in ‘material culture’ as revealed by archaeology.