Duchy of Benevento

The Duchy of Benevento (after 774, Principality of Benevento) was the southernmost Lombard duchy in the Italian peninsula, centered on Benevento, a city in Southern Italy. Being cut off from the rest of the Lombard possessions by the papal Duchy of Rome, Benevento was practically independent from the start. Only during the reigns of Grimoald I of Benevento and the kings from Liutprand on was the duchy closely tied to the kingdom. After the fall of the kingdom, however, alone of Lombard territories it remained as a rump state, and maintained its de facto independence for nearly three hundred years, though it was divided after 849.

Paul the Deacon refers to Benevento as the "Samnite Duchy" (Ducatum Samnitium) after the region of Samnium.

The circumstances of the creation of the duchy are disputed. According to some scholars, Lombards were present in southern Italy well before the complete conquest of the Po Valley: the duchy by these accounts would have been founded in 571. The Lombards may have entered later, around 590. Whatever the case, the first duke was Zotto, a leader of a band of soldiers who descended the coast of Campania. Though at first independent, Zotto was eventually made to submit to the royal authority of the north. His successor was Arechis, his nephew, and the principle of hereditary succession guided the Beneventan duchy to the end.

The Lombard duchies, part of the loosely knit Lombard kingdom, were essentially independent, in spite of their common roots and language, and law and religion similar to that of the north, and in spite of the Beneventan dukes' custom of taking to wife women from the royal family. A swathe of territory that owed allegiance to Rome or to Ravenna separated the dukes of Benevento from the kings at Pavia. Cultural autonomy followed naturally: a distinctive liturgical chant, the Beneventan chant, developed in the church of Benevento: it was not entirely superseded by Gregorian chant until the 11th century. A unique Beneventan script was also developed for writing Latin. The 8th-century writer Paul the Deacon arrived in Benevento in the retinue of a princess from Pavia, the duke's bride. Settled into the greatest of Beneventan monasteries, Monte Cassino, he wrote first a history of Rome and then a history of the Lombards, the main source for the history of the duchy to that time as well.

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