LOMBARDS. This corrupt appellation has been diffused in the The Lombards thirteenth century by the merchants and bankers, the Italian posterity of these savage warriors; but the original name of Langobards is expressive only of the peculiar length and fashion of their beards. I am not disposed either to question or to justify their Scandinavian origin; nor to pursue the migrations of the Lombards through unknown regions and marvellous adventures. About the time of Augustus and Trajan, a ray of historic light breaks on the darkness of their antiquities, and they are discovered, for the first time, between the Elbe and the Oder. Fierce beyond the example of the Germans, they delighted to propagate the tremendous belief that their heads were formed like the heads of dogs and that they drank the blood of their enemies whom they vanquished in battle. The smallness of their numbers was recruited by the adoption of their bravest slaves; and alone, amidst their powerful neighbours, they defended by arms their high-spirited independence. In the tempests of the North, which overwhelmed so many names and nations, this little bark of the Lombards still floated on the surface; they gradually descended towards the south and the Danube; and at the end of four hundred years they again appear with their ancient valour and renown. Their manners were not less ferocious. The assassination of a royal guest was executed in the presence, and by the command, of the king's daughter, who had been provoked by some words of insult and disappointed by his diminutive stature; and a tribute, the price of blood, was imposed on the Lombards, by his brother the king of the Heruli. Adversity revived a sense of moderation and justice, and the insolence of conquest was chastised by the signal defeat and irreparable dispersion of the Heruli, who were seated in the southern provinces of Poland. The victories of

7 Gens Germanâ feritate ferociore, says Velleius Paterculus of the Lombards (ii. 106). Langobardos paucitas nobilitat. Plurimis ac valentissimis nationibus cincti non per obsequium sed præliis et periclitando tuti sunt (Tacit. de Moribus German. c. 40). See likewise Strabo (1. vii. p. 446 [2, § 4]). The best geographers place them beyond the Elbe, in the bishopric of Magdeburg and the middle march of Brandenburg; and their situation will agree with the patriotic remark of the Count de Hertzberg, that most of the Barbarian conquerors issued from the same countries which still produce the armies of Prussia.

8 The Scandinavian origin of the Goths and Lombards, as stated by Paul Warnefrid, surnamed the deacon, is attacked by Cluverius (Germania Antiq. 1. iii. c. 26, p. 102, &c.), a native of Prussia, and defended by Grotius (Prolegom. ad Hist. Goth. p. 28, &c.), the Swedish ambassador.

2.

9 Two facts in the narrative of Paul Diaconus (1. i. c. 20) are expressive of national manners: 1. Dum ad tabulam luderet-while he played at draughts. Camporum viridantia lina. The cultivation of flax supposes property, commerce, agriculture, and manufactures.

The Sclavonians

the Lombards recommended them to the friendship of the emperors; and, at the solicitation of Justinian, they passed the Danube, to reduce, according to their treaty, the cities of Noricum and the fortresses of Pannonia. But the spirit of rapine soon tempted them beyond these ample limits; they wandered along the coast of the Hadriatic as far as Dyrrachium, and presumed, with familiar rudeness, to enter the towns and houses of their Roman allies and to seize the captives who had escaped from their audacious hands. These acts of hostility, the sallies, as it might be pretended, of some loose adventurers, were disowned by the nation and excused by the emperor; but the arms of the Lombards were more seriously engaged by a contest of thirty years, which was terminated only by the extirpation of the Gepida. The hostile nations often pleaded their cause before the throne of Constantinople; and the crafty Justinian, to whom the Barbarians were almost equally odious, pronounced a partial and ambiguous sentence, and dexterously protracted the war by slow and ineffectual succours. Their strength was formidable, since the Lombards, who sent into the field several myriads of soldiers, still claimed, as the weaker side, the protection of the Romans. Their spirit was intrepid; yet such is the uncertainty of courage that the two armies were suddenly struck with a panic; they fled from each other, and the rival kings remained with their guards in the midst of an empty plain. A short truce was obtained; but their mutual resentment again kindled; and the remembrance of their shame rendered the next encounter more desperate and bloody. Forty thousand of the Barbarians perished in the decisive battle, which broke the power of the Gepidæ, transferred the fears and wishes of Justinian, and first displayed the character of Alboin, the youthful prince of the Lombards, and the future conqueror of Italy.10

The wild people who dwelt or wandered in the plains of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, might be reduced, in the age of Justinian, under the two great families of the BULGARIANS 11 and

10 I have used, without undertaking to reconcile, the facts in Procopius (Goth. 1. ii. c. 14; 1. iii. c. 33, 34; l. iv. c. 18, 25), Paul Diaconus (de Gestis Langobard, 1. i. c. 1-23, in Muratori, Script. Rerum Italicarum, tom. i. p. 405-419), and Jornandes (de Success. Regnorum, p. 242). The patient reader may draw some light from Mascou (Hist. of the Germans, and Annotat. xxiii.) and de Buat (Hist. des Peuples, &c. tom. ix., x., xi.).

I adopt the appellation of Bulgarians, from Ennodius (in Panegyr. Theodorici, Opp. Sirmond. tom. i. p. 1598, 1599), Jornandes (de Rebus Geticis, c. 5, p. 194, et de Regn. Successione, p. 242), Theophanes (p. 185), and the Chronicles of Cassiodorius and Marcellinus. The name of Huns is too vague; the tribes of Cutturgurians and Utturgurians are too minute and too harsh. [See Appendix 15.]

the SCLAVONIANS. According to the Greek writers, the former, who touched the Euxine and the lake Mæotis, derived from the Huns their name or descent; and it is needless to renew the simple and well-known picture of Tartar manners. They were bold and dexterous archers, who drank the milk and feasted on the flesh of their fleet and indefatigable horses; whose flocks and herds followed, or rather guided, the motions of their roving camps; to whose inroads no country was remote or impervious, and who were practised in flight, though incapable of fear. The nation was divided into two powerful and hostile tribes, who pursued each other with fraternal hatred. They eagerly disputed the friendship or rather the gifts of the emperor; and the distinction which nature had fixed between the faithful dog and the rapacious wolf was applied by an ambassador who received only verbal instructions from the mouth of his illiterate prince.12 The Bulgarians, of whatsoever species, were equally attracted by Roman wealth: they assumed a vague dominion over the Sclavonian name, and their rapid marches could only be stopped by the Baltic sea or the extreme cold and poverty of the north. But the same race of Sclavonians appears to have maintained, in every age, the possession of the same countries. Their numerous tribes, however distant or adverse, used one common language (it was harsh and irregular), and were known by the resemblance of their form, which deviated from the swarthy Tartar, and approached without attaining the lofty stature and fair complexion of the German. Four thousand six hundred villages 13 In ninth were scattered over the provinces of Russia and Poland, and their huts were hastily built of rough timber, in a country deficient both in stone and iron. Erected, or rather concealed, in the depth of forests, on the banks of rivers, or the edge of morasses, we may not perhaps, without flattery, compare them to the architecture of the beaver; which they resembled in a double issue, to the land and water, for the escape of the savage inhabitant, an animal less cleanly, less diligent, and less social, than that marvellous quadruped. The fertility of the soil, rather

12 Procopius (Goth. 1. iv. c. 19). His verbal message (he owns himself an illiterate Barbarian) is delivered as an epistle. The style is savage, figurative, and original.

13 This sum is the result of a particular list, in a curious Ms. fragment of the year 550, found in the library of Milan. The obscure geography of the times provokes and exercises the patience of the count de Buat (tom. xi. p. 69-189). The French minister often loses himself in a wilderness which requires a Saxon and Polish guide. [This list, preserved in a Munich Ms., is a fragment of a Bavarian geographer of the ninth century. It includes some non-Slavonic peoples. It is printed by Schafarik, Slaw. Alterthümer, ii. p. 673.]

century]

Their inroads

than the labour of the natives, supplied the rustic plenty of the Sclavonians. Their sheep and horned cattle were large and numerous, and the fields which they sowed with millet and panic 14 afforded, in the place of bread, a coarse and less nutritive food. The incessant rapine of their neighbours compelled them to bury this treasure in the earth; but on the appearance of a stranger, it was freely imparted by a people whose unfavourable character is qualified by the epithets of chaste, patient, and hospitable. As their supreme God, they adored an invisible master of the thunder. The rivers and the nymphs obtained their subordinate honours, and the popular worship was expressed in vows and sacrifice. The Sclavonians disdained to obey a despot, a prince, or even a magistrate; but their experience was too narrow, their passions too headstrong, to compose a system of equal law or general defence. Some voluntary respect was yielded to age and valour; but each tribe or village existed as a separate republic, and all must be persuaded where none could be compelled. They fought on foot, almost naked, and, except an unwieldy shield, without any defensive armour; their weapons of offence were a bow, a quiver of small poisoned arrows, and a long rope, which they dexterously threw from a distance, and entangled their enemy in a running noose. In the field, the Sclavonian infantry was dangerous by their speed, agility, and hardiness; they swam, they dived, they remained under water, drawing their breath through a hollow cane; and a river or lake was often the scene of their unsuspected ambuscade. But these were the achievements of spies or stragglers; the military art was unknown to the Sclavonians; their name was obscure, and their conquests were inglorious.15

I have marked the faint and general outline of the Sclavonians and Bulgarians, without attempting to define their intermediate boundaries, which were not accurately known or respected by the Barbarians themselves. Their importance was measured by

14 Panicum milium. See Columella, 1. ii. c. 9, p. 430, edit. Gesner. Plin. Hist. Natur. xviii. 24, 25. The Sarmatians made a pap of millet, mingled with mares' milk or blood. In the wealth of modern husbandry, our millet feeds poultry, and not heroes. See the dictionaries of [Valmont-de-] Bomare [1768] and Miller.

15 For the name and nation, the situation and manners of the Sclavonians, see the original evidence of the vith century, in Procopius (Goth. 1. ii. c. 26, 1. iii. c, 14), and the emperor Mauritius or Maurice (Stratagemat. 1. ii. c. 5. apud Mascou, Annotat. xxxi. [p. 272 sqq. ed. Scheffer]). The stratagems of Maurice have been printed only, as I understand, at the end of Scheffer's edition of Arrian's Tactics, at Upsal, 1664 (Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. 1. iv. c. 8, tom. iii. p. 278), a scarce, and hitherto, to me, an inaccessible book. [The Strategikon is a work of the sixth century, but not by Maurice.]

their vicinity to the empire; and the level country of Moldavia and Walachia was occupied by the Antes,16 a Sclavonian tribe, which swelled the titles of Justinian with an epithet of conquest.17 Against the Antes he erected the fortifications of the lower Danube; and laboured to secure the alliance of a people seated in the direct channel of northern inundation, an interval of two hundred miles between the mountains of Transylvania and the Euxine sea. But the Antes wanted power and inclination to stem the fury of the torrent; and the light-armed Sclavonians, from an hundred tribes, pursued, with almost equal speed, the footsteps of the Bulgarian horse. The payment of one piece of gold for each soldier procured a safe and easy retreat through the country of the Gepida, who commanded the passage of the upper Danube.18 The hopes or fears of the Barbarians; their intestine union or discord; the accident of a frozen or shallow stream; the prospect of harvest or vintage; the prosperity or distress of the Romans; were the causes which produced the uniform repetition of annual visits, 19 tedious in the narrative and destructive in the event. The same year, and possibly the same month, in which Ravenna surrendered, was marked by an invasion of the Huns or Bulgarians, so dreadful that it almost effaced the memory of their past inroads. They spread from the suburbs of Constantinople to the Ionian gulf, destroyed thirty-two cities or castles, erazed Potidæa, which Athens had built and Philip had besieged, and repassed the Danube, dragging at their horses' heels one hundred and twenty thousand of the subjects of Justinian. In a subsequent inroad they pierced the wall of the Thracian Chersonesus, extirpated the habitations and the inhabitants, boldly traversed the Hellespont, and returned to their companions, laden with the spoils of Asia. Another party, which seemed a multitude in the eyes of the Romans, penetrated, without opposition, from the straits of Thermopyla to the isthmus of Corinth; and the last ruin of Greece has appeared an object too minute for the attention of

16 Antes eorum fortissimi. . . Taysis qui rapidus et vorticosus in Histri fluenta furens devolvitur (Jornandes, c. 5, p. 194, edit. Murator. Procopius, Goth. 1. iii. c. 14, et de Edific. 1. iv. c. 7). Yet the same Procopius mentions the Goths and Huns as neighbours, yetrovouvra, to the Danube (de Edific. 1. iv. c. 1).

17 The national title of Anticus, in the laws and inscriptions of Justinian, was adopted by his successors, and is justified by the pious Ludewig (in Vit. Justinian. p. 515). It had strangely puzzled the civilians of the middle age.

18 Procopius, Goth. 1. iv. c. 25.

19 An inroad of the Huns is connected, by Procopius, with a comet; perhaps that of 531 (Persic. 1. ii. c. 4). Agathias (1. v. p. 154, 155 [c. 11]) borrows from

his predecessor some early facts.