The whole energy of that age was
devoted to the final establishment of what for a thousand years was to
be the universal religion of Europe, the source of all her greatness
and the reason of her being. What was saved in those unhappy campaigns
was not Italy, but the soul of Europe.
Certainly it was not Italy. Materially the result of those eighteen
years of war, which began with the invasion of Italy by Belisarius in
536, reached their crisis in 540 with the capture of Ravenna, and were
finally decided by Narses in 552-554, was the ruin of Italy.
Exhausted, devastated, and unfilled, the prey, for half a generation,
of a fundamental war, Italy was materially ruined by Justinian's
Gothic campaigns, and so hopelessly that, when in 568 the Lombards
fell upon her, she was almost unable to defend herself, to offer any
resistance to what proved--and in part for this reason--the only
barbaric invasion which had upon her any enduring consequences.
Visigoths, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, all poured over her, and
presently, like winter floods, retreated and subsided, leaving nothing
to remind us of their fear and devastation; the Lombards remained.
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