3oo	LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY
nomic centre of gravity. These facts were the politically pertinent facts
when, in the fifth century, Italy slipped out of the Imperial Government's
control; yet present political realities counted for less in determining the
emotional reaction of Constantinople to the eclipse of the Imperial
Government's authority in Italy in this age than the historic role once
played by a Roman Italy in the creation of a Roman Empire in a past age
which had long since become ancient history. The de facto sovereignty of
barbarian war-lords in Italy was never recognized at Constantinople de
jure i and the work of financial, economic, and military reconstruction,
that a Constantinopolitan Imperial Government had gradually carried
out during the fifth century in the Central and Oriental provinces,1
had no sooner borne fruit in the accumulation of a reserve of public
resources than this reserve was squandered by the sixth-century
Constantinopolitan Emperor Justinian on the archaistic enterprise of
re-subjugating Italy to the direct rule of a Roman Imperial Govern-
ment.
This political objective was duly attained by Justinian at the cost of an
eighteen-years-long war (gerebatur a.d. 535-53). But, within five years of
the collapse of the last Gothic resistance to Roman arms on Italian soil in
a.d. 563,2 the laboriously reconquered Italian dominions of the Roman
Imperial Crown were lost again to yet another war-band of barbarian
invaders. The Lombard irruption into Italy, which broke upon her in
a.d. 568, did not come to a standstill until it had robbed the Empire of
the whole of Italy save for seven bridgeheads on the beaches3 and a line
of isolated inland fortresses,4 strung along the road between Ravenna
and Rome, which survived, like stepping-stones, amid an encompassing
flood of Lombard invasion that had swirled round their walls on its
torrential course from the Po Basin into the Abruzzi. This prompt re-
sumption of the march of History in reply to Justinian's archaistically
conceived counter-attack was even less surprising than the anticipation
of a post-Justinianean Alboin's exploit by his pre-Justinianean forerun-
ners Ricimer, Odovacer, and Theodoric; for Justinian's ephemeral con-
quest of Italy for a Constantinopolitan Roman Empire had been pur-
chased at the threefold price of ruining the Empire's revenue-producing
Oriental provinces, depopulating her military recruiting grounds in the
Danubian provinces, and alienating the 'liberated' Italians by first
devastating Italy in the act of exterminating the Ostrogoths and then
wringing revenue out of her for the treasury of a Transadriatic Imperial
Government to whose jurisdiction Italy had never been subject before
her annexation to it by Justinian himself. In these circumstances it would
have been a miracle if Justinian's conquest of Italy had had any enduring
effect. The *fate' of a post-Diocletianic Italy, unlike the 'fate' of a Modern
North America, was, in fact, as clear as day from first to last, and even a
* See IV. iv. 324-6.
2 The date of the capitulation of the Gothic garrisons of Brescia and Verona. The
garrison of Compsae had capitulated in a.d. 555.
s The Exarchate of Ravenna, together with the adjoining Pentapolis; the Ager
manus. together with the ariinmfno- mantim* city-state of Gaeta; the 'toe* and the
r-states Venice, Amalfi, and Naples.