The Downfall

For the year 774 the Annales Regni Francorum record:

The Liber Pontificalis, not known for a positive view of the Lombards, reported that the ira Dei (the anger of God) had ‘raged and stormed against all the Lombards’ and that Charlemagne, the excellentissimus Francorum rex (most excellent King of the Franks) ‘had subjected the entire kingdom of the Lombards to his power’ (… et suae potestati cunctum regem Langobardorum subiugavit). The siege of Pavia, within which the final Lombard king Desiderius (r. 757-774) had sheltered, and its surrender marked both the conclusion of Charlemagne's (r. 768-814) campaign in Italy and the end of an independent Lombard kingdom. This kingdom had maintained its survival for over two hundred years despite invasions of Avars, Franks, and Byzantines. Sixteen years later Charlemagne was to mark his hegemony in the West with his imperial coronation, which attached the regnum Langobardorum to a revived western Roman Empire that had comprehensively eclipsed Byzantine power in northern and central Italy.

Yet Charlemagne's success at this point was not the first attempt to forge a new political configuration that encompassed the whole Italian peninsula. Lombard kings such as Liutprand (r. 712-744), Aistulf (r. 749-756), and Desiderius had all attempted to create a kingdom that controlled all of Italy. An increasingly self-confident orthodox ideology, a notable element of the ‘New Kingship’ of Perctarit (r. 661-662 and 672-688), and Perctarit's son Cunincpert (688-700), allied with enhanced abilities and territorial ambitions of hegemony, failed to assuage implacable papal antipathy. It was this papal opposition that was to invoke Frankish intervention and the Lombard downfall.