Lombardy is named after the long beards of Germanic invaders
Italy's richest, most populous region takes its name from the Lombards, a Germanic people who swept into Italy in 568. Their name probably meant long beards, though some scholars link it to axes. For centuries afterwards, Lombard meant any northern Italian, and in London it came to mean a banker.
The Lombards made Pavia their capital and at their peak in the mid-eighth century controlled almost all of Italy except the lands around Rome, Venice and some Byzantine outposts in the south. Their rule ended in 774 when Charlemagne took Pavia and deposed Desiderius, the last Lombard king. Because they were relatively few, they blended into the Latin-speaking population, leaving traces in place names and law. The label Lombardy went on describing the whole of northern Italy until the fifteenth century.
The land had long been layered with cultures. Rock drawings in Valcamonica, left by the ancient Camuni, run to some 300,000 figures. Etruscans founded Mantua, Celts settled Milan, and Rome absorbed the region by the end of the second century BC; Virgil was born near Mantua and Pliny the Elder in Como. When the Western Empire moved its capital to Milan, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan there in 313, granting religious freedom across the empire.
Medieval prosperity from silk, wool and trade turned towns into self-governing communes. Allied as the Lombard League, usually under Milan's leadership, they beat Emperor Frederick I at Legnano, and the League ran its own government, an early European confederation. Renaissance Milan under the Visconti and Sforza families and Mantua under the Gonzagas drew artists such as Leonardo, whose Last Supper is there, and Mantegna. Lombard merchants carried banking north, which is why London has a Lombard Street.
Spanish, Austrian and French rulers followed, and the region was a hotbed of Italian unification, including the Five Days of Milan in 1848. At Solferino in 1859, Henry Dunant began the effort that created the Red Cross. Today Lombardy has about 10 million people, a fifth of Italy's economic output, 1,501 municipalities and 11 of the country's 58 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Source: Lombardy
