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Nov 21, 2023 · In Italy, major ethnic groups other than Italians include Romanians, Maghrebis, Arabs, and Albanians. There are small populations of other ethnic groups as well. As of 2023, the...
- Overview
- Lombard Italy
- Byzantine Italy
- Similarities between Lombard and Byzantine states
The Ostrogothic kingdom used so many Roman governmental institutions that it can best be understood as a virtual continuation of the late Roman imperial system. Lombard rule marked much more of a break, without doubt. But exactly how much the Lombard states owed to the Roman past and how much to Germanic traditions is an ongoing debate. The basic notion of the kingdom as a political system was a Germanic concept in large part, for the legitimacy of the king rested on his direct relationship with the free Lombard people in arms—the exercitales, or arimanni, who formed the basis of the Lombard army. This concept did not leave much room for Romans, who indeed largely disappear from the evidence, even when documents increase again in the 8th century; it is likely that any Romans who wished to remain politically important in the Lombard kingdom had to become “Lombardized.” It is even in dispute, for that matter, how many such Romans there were. Paul the Deacon, for instance, claimed that the Roman aristocracy were largely killed in the first generation of the Lombard invasion. But this was certainly an exaggeration, because the Lombards adopted too many customs from the Romans for the latter to have been reduced entirely to subjection. Some Roman aristocratic families must have survived among the Lombards, as is suggested, for example, by the name of a royal protégé and founder of a monastery in Pavia in 714: Senator, son of Albinus.
The Lombards seem to have settled largely in the region to the north of the Po River, the area with the majority of Lombard place-names and Germanic-style archaeological finds (mostly from cemetery sites). But even there Lombards must have been a minority, and they must have been even more so farther south. There were probably few concentrations of Germanic settlers entirely immune to Roman cultural influence. The Lombard language seems to have disappeared by the 8th century, leaving few loanwords in the Italian language. The impression conveyed is of a gradual Romanization of the society and culture of the Lombards within the framework of their continuing political dominance. When the Franks invaded, Lombards and Romans moved together still more as a conquered, by now “Italian,” people: the regnum Langobardorum (“kingdom of the Lombards”) of the Lombard period was called the regnum Italiae (“kingdom of Italy”) from the 9th century onward.
The evidence of Lombard law reinforces this pattern. Rothari’s Edict and Liutprand’s laws look much like the legislation of the Franks and of other Germanic peoples; they deal, for example, with the carefully calculated compensations for various crimes of violence that aimed to replace violent feuds or at least to make easier the resolution of feuding. These ideas were certainly foreign to traditional Roman law. When Liutprand in 731 restricted the scope of the judicial duel, for he suspected that it was unjust, he explicitly recognized that it could not be abandoned altogether, as it was part of Lombard custom. Within this Lombard frame, however, the content of law was often in practice heavily Roman. Lombard land law, for example, was almost entirely late Roman, except for the rules for inheritance.
The administrative system of the Lombard state was even more Roman than its laws. This is not very surprising, for Roman models offered far more power to rulers than did any Germanic tradition of government. The Lombards, like other Germanic invaders, took what they could from their new subjects and used Roman administrators where they could find them. Their system, as it is visible in documents from the 8th century, seems to have been more coherent than that of most other Romano-Germanic kingdoms. It was based on a central government in Pavia with numerous permanent administrators (such as the referendarii, who organized the writing of royal charters) and legal experts; there is evidence of legal appeals to judges in Pavia, and some of them were settled by the king himself.
The Ostrogothic kingdom used so many Roman governmental institutions that it can best be understood as a virtual continuation of the late Roman imperial system. Lombard rule marked much more of a break, without doubt. But exactly how much the Lombard states owed to the Roman past and how much to Germanic traditions is an ongoing debate. The basic notion of the kingdom as a political system was a Germanic concept in large part, for the legitimacy of the king rested on his direct relationship with the free Lombard people in arms—the exercitales, or arimanni, who formed the basis of the Lombard army. This concept did not leave much room for Romans, who indeed largely disappear from the evidence, even when documents increase again in the 8th century; it is likely that any Romans who wished to remain politically important in the Lombard kingdom had to become “Lombardized.” It is even in dispute, for that matter, how many such Romans there were. Paul the Deacon, for instance, claimed that the Roman aristocracy were largely killed in the first generation of the Lombard invasion. But this was certainly an exaggeration, because the Lombards adopted too many customs from the Romans for the latter to have been reduced entirely to subjection. Some Roman aristocratic families must have survived among the Lombards, as is suggested, for example, by the name of a royal protégé and founder of a monastery in Pavia in 714: Senator, son of Albinus.
The Lombards seem to have settled largely in the region to the north of the Po River, the area with the majority of Lombard place-names and Germanic-style archaeological finds (mostly from cemetery sites). But even there Lombards must have been a minority, and they must have been even more so farther south. There were probably few concentrations of Germanic settlers entirely immune to Roman cultural influence. The Lombard language seems to have disappeared by the 8th century, leaving few loanwords in the Italian language. The impression conveyed is of a gradual Romanization of the society and culture of the Lombards within the framework of their continuing political dominance. When the Franks invaded, Lombards and Romans moved together still more as a conquered, by now “Italian,” people: the regnum Langobardorum (“kingdom of the Lombards”) of the Lombard period was called the regnum Italiae (“kingdom of Italy”) from the 9th century onward.
The evidence of Lombard law reinforces this pattern. Rothari’s Edict and Liutprand’s laws look much like the legislation of the Franks and of other Germanic peoples; they deal, for example, with the carefully calculated compensations for various crimes of violence that aimed to replace violent feuds or at least to make easier the resolution of feuding. These ideas were certainly foreign to traditional Roman law. When Liutprand in 731 restricted the scope of the judicial duel, for he suspected that it was unjust, he explicitly recognized that it could not be abandoned altogether, as it was part of Lombard custom. Within this Lombard frame, however, the content of law was often in practice heavily Roman. Lombard land law, for example, was almost entirely late Roman, except for the rules for inheritance.
The administrative system of the Lombard state was even more Roman than its laws. This is not very surprising, for Roman models offered far more power to rulers than did any Germanic tradition of government. The Lombards, like other Germanic invaders, took what they could from their new subjects and used Roman administrators where they could find them. Their system, as it is visible in documents from the 8th century, seems to have been more coherent than that of most other Romano-Germanic kingdoms. It was based on a central government in Pavia with numerous permanent administrators (such as the referendarii, who organized the writing of royal charters) and legal experts; there is evidence of legal appeals to judges in Pavia, and some of them were settled by the king himself.
Byzantine Italy was different from the Lombard lands in obvious and crucial respects. It was not independent; it was not ruled by an incoming, ethnically distinct group; and it gave more political space to the church. Perhaps above all, it still exacted the land tax and thus could afford a salaried army and a far more complex administrative system than the Lombards ever had. But in some respects it had a very similar development. The local power of the army and the constant need for defense led to the formation of a militarized landed aristocracy and indeed to a military identity for free landowners at all levels and thus to social patterns that were not at all unlike those in the Lombard states. For that matter, the foreign origin (Greek or Armenian) of many newly landed army leaders made the ethnic mix in the Byzantine lands almost as visible as in the lands of their Germanic neighbours. The civilian aristocracy of the Roman Empire vanished; Roman landowners who wished to maintain political influence had to become militarized and “Byzantinized,” at least if they did not attach themselves to the bureaucratic network around the popes and the archbishops of Ravenna.
Even the church became increasingly militarized; by the 9th century the bishop and the duke of Naples were sometimes the same person. The dominance of local military aristocracies in ecclesiastical politics appeared most clearly in the civil wars in Rome in the late 760s, the first period of effective papal independence and one in which rival families fought it out for the papal office. Roman politics was to take on this internecine character again when popes became politically independent; the next sequences of violence occurred in the years around 900 and in the early 11th century.
The Lombard states and the Byzantine provinces in Italy thus resembled each other more than either did the Roman Empire of the 5th century. The Lombard kings had a far less complex administrative system than had existed before 550, based as it was on royal landowning rather than the complex tax-raising mechanisms of the Roman world. One example of ...
Home Geography & Travel Countries of the World. The people of Italy. Ethnic groups. ancient Italic peoples. Distribution of peoples of ancient Italy c. 500 bce. Italians cannot be typified by any one physical characteristic, a fact that may be explained by the past domination of parts of the peninsula by different peoples.
Demographic features of the population of Italy include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects. At the beginning of 2022, Italy had an estimated population of 58,9 million.
- 6.7 births/1,000 population (2022)
- -0.54% (2022)
- 12.1 deaths/1,000 population (2022)
- 58,784,069 (30 June 2023)
4 days ago · That empire was rarely secure, not only because of the unwillingness of conquered peoples to stay conquered but also because of power struggles between competing Roman political factions, military leaders, families, ethnic groups, and religions.
The majority of the people are ethnically Italian, but there are other ethnic groups in the population, including French–Italians and Slovene–Italians in the north and Albanian–Italian and Greek–Italians in the south.
List of Italians. v. t. e. Italians ( Italian: italiani, Italian: [itaˈljaːni]) are a genetically and culturally diverse ethnic group native to the Italian geographical region. [47] . Italians can be considered an ethnic group because they share a common core of culture, history, ancestry, and usage of Italian language.