Lombard king agrees an eighteen-month truce, days after storming Mantua

ROME, September 603 AD — A truce was agreed this month with Agilulf, king of the Lombards: thirty days at first, and then eighteen months, to run until April 1, 605 AD. It closes a campaign that cost the empire the cities of the Po valley in three weeks, and it was struck not at Rome but at Ravenna, by the emperor’s governor in Italy. Pope St. Gregory, who has spent his thirteen years in office trying to reach exactly this, was not at the table. He has not been able to get up from his couch in years.

What the two sides want of each other is why there is a truce and not a peace. Agilulf wants his kingdom in Italy recognised, and the emperor at Constantinople will not recognise it; the empire wants its cities back, and the Lombards will not give up anything they hold. Between them stands the exarch, the emperor’s viceroy at Ravenna, who commands what imperial troops there are in Italy and who alone has the legal standing to treat with the enemy.

So a Lombard truce is not a settlement. It is a dated armistice, haggled out through the exarch’s office, with prisoners as the counters and money on the table. The money comes out of the revenues of the Church’s estates, above all in Sicily. Pope St. Gregory has used them to buy grain and hand it out, to keep poor priests and nuns, and to ransom citizens carried off by the Lombards. The same revenues have bought armistices and truces. In July 592 AD he made one with the Lombard duke of Spoleto against the exarch’s wishes, and the Church paid for it. Pope St. Gregory described himself in a letter as “the paymaster of the Lombards.”

The exarchs did not thank him for it. The exarch Romanus worked to stop a peace being made at all, on the reasoning that money Rome paid to buy off the Lombards would only hire more Lombard soldiers to trouble Ravenna instead. In May 595 AD the Pope wrote to a friend there that he would make peace with Agilulf without the exarch’s consent if he had to. Word of the threat was carried to Constantinople, and in June the emperor Maurice wrote back accusing him of treachery and folly. The official negotiation then took four more years. The articles were signed in 599 AD, to the Pope’s great joy, and the fighting stopped until 601 AD.

The empire restarted it. In the spring of 601 AD the exarch Callinicus attacked Parma without provocation and carried Agilulf’s own daughter and her husband off to Ravenna as prisoners, calculating that the king would buy them back with better terms. Agilulf made an alliance with the khagan of the Avars instead. He took Padua and destroyed it, devastated Istria and forced the surrender of the fortress of Monselice. Then he beat Callinicus in the field under the walls of Ravenna.

The reckoning came this summer. In July Agilulf marched out of Milan and sat down before Cremona, which fell to him on August 21. On September 13 he opened breaches in the walls of Mantua with battering rams and took the city by storm. The imperial garrison at the fortress of Vulturina did not wait for him: it surrendered before a blow was struck and ran for Ravenna.

By then both the exarch who had restarted the war and the emperor who had rebuked the Pope for seeking peace were gone. The emperor Maurice had been murdered in November and Phocas had taken the throne. Callinicus had been recalled, and Smaragdus, a soldier who had governed at Ravenna once before, was sent back in his place. Smaragdus soon saw that he could not cope with the Lombards with the forces he had. He gave the king’s daughter up at once — she died in childbirth almost immediately after her release — and agreed the thirty days, and then the eighteen months.

Four years ago Pope St. Gregory had put the case to Donellus, the paymaster of the imperial forces at Ravenna: “You are aware that unless peace is really restored, no human aid, nothing at all short of the power of God’s majesty, can avail us here.” By 601 AD, with the cities falling one after another, he was writing about his own condition. “It is long since I have been able to leave my couch,” he told a bishop. “At one time I am tormented with the pain of gout, at another time a fiery agony spreads throughout my whole body. For me to live is punishment, and I look longingly for death, which I believe to be the only possible remedy for my sufferings.”

His other route to Agilulf has always been the king’s wife. Queen Theodelinda is a Catholic, alone among the rulers of the Germanic peoples, and Pope St. Gregory has worked through her for a settlement since the first years of the war. At Easter this year her infant son Adaloald, the king’s only son, was baptised by the Catholic rite in the church of St. John the Baptist at Monza. Pope Benedict XVI, weighing these years long afterwards, credits the queen’s part in the settlement now agreed: “Theodolinda, little by little was able to guide the King to Catholicism, thus preparing the way to peace.”