A trip into any mainstream bookshop in Britain will reveal that so far as booksellers are concerned Italian history commences with the Renaissance. Naturally, one also finds many works on the Roman Empire, and particularly the Principate (i.e., 27 BCE–68 CE), but the best part of a thousand years of Italian life and experience are left uncovered. Beyond Britain and the commercial world of booksellers, however, a vibrant community of scholars has spent the last half-century or so engaging with and putting to bed old shibboleths of hordes, of decline and fall, of impulsive sword-and-sandal protagonists, and all the usual impedimenta associated with so-called “barbarians.” The centrality of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages to fundamental aspects of the modern world makes study and engagement of that time and period both important and compelling.

The Lombards have long formed part of that world. They allegedly embody the perfect exemplification of “barbarians”: crude, uncouth, violent and, usually, pagan. The great Italian historian of the eighteenth-century Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) summed up this view: “they were barbarians, and that’s that” (erano barbari e tanto basta). The debate that flowed throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries pivoted around the subject of Romans and barbarians. The questione longobarda pivoted around the (mainly Italian) debate about the contribution or role of the Lombards to Italian civilization and culture. How could the world of Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE), Cicero (106 BCE–43 BCE), and Sallust (86 BCE–ca. 35 BCE) fall prey to the ill-disciplined and the illiterate who, as Sidonius Apollinaris (ca. 430–81/90 CE) pointedly remarked, applied rancid butter to their hair? In this reading, the Lombards—the archetypical barbarians—simply by their irruption into Italy propelled most of the peninsula into a time of ruin, involution, and decay. There is, however, much more of value to consider. In recent discussions of the Early Medieval world, much work has been done to engage with a more positive evaluation of the centuries after Rome and, importantly, on the terms of the period itself.