of Susa, which he had fortified. Here, at the Porta d' Italia, he expected Charles, who marched over Mont Cenis, while another corps took its way over the Great St Bernard. But, owing to this circuit, no battle seems to have taken place. Desiderius was obliged to retire to Pavia (Sept. 773) with the warriors who were still faithful to him, while Adalgis sought refuge with Carloman's children behind the fortified walls of Verona, but fled from here also after a time and went into exile at Constantinople. But except at Pavia and Verona Charles found no resistance whatever in the Lombard realm. Verona with Carloman's children surrendered even before Christmas to a detached troop under Charles himself, whereas the siege of Pavia was prolonged to the beginning of June 774, though famine and epidemics raged within the town.
After the capitulation Charles brought Desiderius and his wife to Gaul with the royal treasure, having received homage of the Lombards who had gathered at Pavia, leaving there a Frankish garrison. This was the end of the independent Lombard realm, and Charles dated his succession in this realm from the fall of the royal town of Pavia.
To be sure, the duchy of Benevento in the south had succeeded in keeping its independence throughout all these disasters, and the prince Arichis, Desiderius' son-in-law, considered himself the Lombard king's successor; but, important as this fact has proved for Italian history, the Lombard kingdom had always been rooted in the north. The occasion for its fall was given by the renewal of that combination between the remnants of the respublica, now represented by the pope, and the Franks, who had developed into a consolidated power; and the Lombard State had never been equal to these combined forces. A deeper reason lay in the structure of the Lombard State, which had not been able, even in the intervals of peace, to attain any organic unity. The small number of the Lombard people in connexion with their form of settlement, conditioned as it was by the state of affairs in the Roman Empire, had given too great importance from the first to the single local groups and their dukes. Kingship, which had been re-established in the distress of those times, exerted its uniting and centralising power very slowly, and a perfect union had never been accomplished. For the kingdom was founded on its royal domain, and the latter on new conquests of land, with which the king's followers had to be furnished. As was always the case in the medieval State in which agriculture was practised, the warriors who were rewarded in this way did not permanently attach themselves to the king, and thus formed a continual danger to the kingship. The king was continually forced to new conquests and then obliged to give them up again voluntarily, so that even the mightiest rulers made little lasting impression on the State, especially when the possibilities of donations
