Discourse on the Longobards

The Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia was first published in 1822, along with the Adelchi, and second redaction was published in Opere varie, in 1847. Manzoni wrote his historiographic investigation into the Longobard rule in Italy between September and November 1821, after completing the first draft of the Adelchi, which he had started in November 1820 (he completed the second draft in October 1822). Consistently backing up his reconstruction with the available historical evidence, Manzoni adamantly claims that between the Latins and the Longobards there was no form of unification on the level of civic and military institutions, and that on the contrary the vanquished Latin population was reduced to slavery on account of the harshness of the barbarian regime. His thesis went against a longstanding historiographic tradition (which included Machiavelli, Muratori, Giannone and Gibbon) according to which “Italians” and Longobards merged into a single people under a common political unity. Manzoni’s interpretation of Italian medieval history of the sixth to eighth centuries had been influenced by French liberal historiography, already familiar to him via the Idéologues he frequented at the Maisonnette, and especially (thanks to Fauriel’s mediation) by the writings of Augustin Thierry (in 1820, after Manzoni’s return to Paris, Thierry published his Lettres sur l’histoire de France in the Courrier Français). After studying the relations between the Gallic peoples and the French invaders, Manzoni perceived a clearcut division in medieval Europe between barbarian conquerors and vanquished natives. His ideas on the Longobards mark a watershed between an initial, patriotic view in the Adelchi, whose protagonist dreams of a merge between Franks and Latins for national deliverance which, as shown in his essay, was historically unfounded, and the new draft of his tragedy which is much more faithful to the actual social and historical conditions of the Latin peoples (“a dispersed people without a name”).