Pavia

Dating back to pre-Roman times, the town of Pavia, then known as Ticinum, was a municipality and an important military site (a castrum) under the Roman Empire. It was said by Pliny the Elder to have been founded by the Laevi and Marici, two Ligurian tribes, while Ptolemy attributes it to the Insubres. The Roman city most likely began as a small military camp, built by the consul Publius Cornelius Scipio in 218 BC to guard a wooden bridge he had built over the river Ticinum, on his way to search for Hannibal, who was rumoured to have managed to lead an army over the Alps and into Italy.
The forces of Rome and Carthage ran into each other soon thereafter, and the Romans suffered the first of many crushing defeats at the hands of Hannibal, with the consul himself almost losing his life. The bridge was destroyed, but the fortified camp, which at the time was the most forward Roman military outpost in the Po Valley, somehow survived the long Second Punic War, and gradually evolved into a garrison town.

Its importance grew with the extension of the Via Aemilia from Ariminum (Rimini) to the Po River (187 BC), which it crossed at Placentia (Piacenza) and there forked, one branch going to Mediolanum (Milan) and the other to Ticinum, and thence to Laumellum where it divided once more, one branch going to Vercellae - and thence to Eporedia and Augusta Praetoria - and the other to Valentia - and thence to Augusta Taurinorum (Turin).

It was at Pavia in 476 AD that the reign of Romulus Augustulus (r. 475-476), the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire ended and Roman rule ceased in Italy. Romulus Augustulus, while considered the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire was actually a usurper of the imperial throne; his father Flavius Orestes having dethroned the previous emperor, Julius Nepos, and raised the young Romulus Augustulus to the imperial throne at Ravenna in 475. Though being the emperor, Romulus Augustulus was simply the mouthpiece for his father Orestes, who was the person who actually exercised power and governed Italy during Romulus Augustulus’s short reign. Ten months after Romulus Augustulus’s reign began, Orestes’s soldiers under the command of one of his officers named Odoacer, rebelled and killed Orestes in the city of Pavia in 476. The rioting that took place as part of Odoacer’s uprising against Orestes sparked fires that burnt much of Pavia to the point that Odoacer as the new king of Italy, had to suspend the taxes for the city for five years so that it could finance its recovery. Without his father Romulus Augustulus was powerless. Instead of killing Romulus Augustulus, Odoacer pensioned him off at 6,000 solidi a year before declaring the end of the Western Roman Empire and himself king of the new Kingdom of Italy.

Odoacer’s reign as king of Italy did not last long, because in 488 the Ostrogothic peoples led by their king Theoderic invaded Italy and waged war against Odoacer. After fighting for 5 years Theoderic defeated Odoacer and on March 15, 493 assassinated Odoacer at a banquet meant to negotiate a peace between the two rulers. With the establishment of the Ostrogoth kingdom based in northern Italy, Theoderic began his vast program of public building. Pavia was among several cities that Theodoric chose to restore and expand. He began the construction of the vast palace complex that would eventually become the residence of Lombard monarchs several decades later. Theoderic also commissioned the building of the Roman-styled amphitheatre and bath complex in Pavia; in the 7th century these would be among the few still functioning bath complexes in Europe outside of the Eastern Roman Empire. Near the end of Theoderic’s reign the Christian philosopher Boethius was imprisoned in one of Pavia’s churches from 522 to 525 before his execution for treason. It was during Boethius’s captivity in Pavia that he wrote his seminal work the Consolation of Philosophy.

Pavia played an important role in the war between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogoths that began in 535. After the Eastern Roman general Belisarius’s victory over the Ostrogothic leader Wittigis in 540 and the loss of most of the Ostrogoth lands in Italy, Pavia was among the last centres of Ostrogothic resistance that continued the war and opposed Eastern Roman rule. After the capitulation of the Ostrogothic leadership in 540 more than a thousand men remained garrisoned in Pavia and Verona dedicated to opposing Eastern Roman rule. The resilience of Ostrogoth strongholds like Pavia against invading forces allowed pockets of Ostrogothic rule to limp along until finally being defeated in 561.

Pavia and the peninsula of Italy didn’t remain long under the rule of the Eastern Roman Empire for in 568 a new people invaded Italy. This new invading people in 568 were the Lombards (otherwise called the Longobards). In their invasion of Italy in 568, the Lombards were led by their king Alboin (r. 560-572), who would become the first Lombard king of Italy. Alboin captured much of northern Italy in 568 but his progress was halted in 569 by the fortified city of Pavia. Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards written more than a hundred years after the Siege of Ticinum provides one of the few records of this period: “The city of Ticinum (Pavia) at this time held out bravely, withstanding a siege more than three years, while the army of the Langobards remained close at hand on the western side. Meanwhile Alboin, after driving out the soldiers, took possession of everything as far as Tuscany except Rome and Ravenna and some other fortified places which were situated on the shore of the sea.” The Siege of Ticinum finally ended with the Lombards capturing the city of Pavia in 572. Pavia’s strategic location and the Ostrogoth palaces located within it would make Pavia by the 620s the main capital of the Lombards’ Kingdom of Pavia and the main residence for the Lombard rulers.