In 1222, a notary from Piacenza, Johannes Codagnellus, told a very uplifting story. Many centuries ago, he wrote, Longobards (Longobardi) under their king Gisulf had invaded this part of Lombardy. But in a terrible battle, another people called the Lombards (Lombardi) succeeded in defeating the invaders and putting them to flight. In a northern Italian commune troubled by successive interventions of emperors from Germany, the public may have been pleased with such an example of self-assertion. They may not have been aware of the paradox implied in this way of ‘using the past’: in the sixth century, in this part of Italy the Roman Empire had succumbed to a ‘Germanic’ invasion by the Longobards, whose name was later turned into ‘Lombards’. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, ‘Germanic’ Roman emperors invaded a country defended by ‘Romanic’ Lombards. Johannes Codagnellus had to stretch his material considerably, but his solution to ‘double’ the Lombards makes perfect sense in this contradictory situation.

Nowadays, Lombard origins are being used against another kind of ‘Roman’ interference, to argue for a secession of Padania from the bureaucracy in Rome which governs Italy. Such modern ideological contexts make early medieval barbarian ‘histories’, like those of the Lombards, an uncomfortable topic, full of risks and misunderstandings, but also more relevant to the contemporary world than most topics in early medieval history. They are also a field of scholarly polemic. Two conflicting modes of interpretation have stirred numerous debates.