Indeed the re-entry of Italy within
the empire was accompanied by no important change in the provincial
divisions of the peninsular because there was no necessity for it.
Narses, who ruled just eleven years in Ravenna, was never known by the
title of exarch. On the contrary, Procopius and Agathias call him
simply the general-in-chief of the Roman army [Greek: o Romaion
strataegos], and pope Pelagius calls him _Patricius et Dux in Italia_,
and others, among them Gregory the Great and Agnellus, simply
_Patricius_. But it is obvious that there was something new in the
official situation and that certain extraordinary powers were
conferred upon Narses. And it is the same with his successor Longinus.
All the texts that mention him, including the _Liber Pontificalis_,
call him _Praefectus_. But the transformation from which the exarchate
arose was more obscure and far more slow than any official reform of
Justinian's could have been. It is in part the result of the new
condition of the country, which Justinian had had to take into
account, but it is much more the result of the progress of the Lombard
conquest and the new necessities of defence, which not one of the
three great men who had restored Italy to the empire lived to see.
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