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ROF= Ring of fire journey
ITL= Italy Journey
Thursday November 12, 2015
ITL Rome 4B The Lombard invasion
The Lombards were a Germanic tribe around Hungary and migrated south to warmer climate invading Italy and conquering Rome and established the Lombard kingdom in 560.
The Lombards being an athletic sports minded family formed a professional national football league and got into coaching and were very successful coaching the Rome Bay Packers. Vince Lombard coached a record 105 wins, 35 lost, 6 tied and has a trophy named for him to this day.
They are credited with developing the forward pass to compliment their running game.
They coached up until the were sacked by The Vandals in 774.
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from Wikipedia:
Caesar, who would rule part of the roman territory on behalf of his Augustus and who would become, at the end, the new emperor.[34]
After the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian in 305 and many dynastic conflicts, this system collapsed, and the new ruler,Constantine, centralized power again and, with the Edict of Milan in 313, gave freedom of worship for Christians, pledging himself to give stability to the new religion. He built several churches, gave the civil power of Rome to Pope Sylvester I and founded in the eastern part a new capital city; Constantinople.[35]
Christianity became the official religion of the empire, thanks to an edict issued in 380 by Theodosius, who was the last emperor of a unified empire: after his death, in fact, his sons, Arcadius and Honorius, divided the empire into a western and an eastern part. The capital of the western Roman Empire became Ravenna.[35]
Rome, which had lost its central role in the administration of the empire, was sacked in 410 by the Visigoths led by Alaric I,[36] but also embellished by the construction of sacred buildings by the popes (with the collaboration of the emperors). The city, impoverished and depopulated, suffered a new looting in 455, byGenseric, king of the Vandals.[37] The weak emperors of the fifth century could not stop the decay, until the deposition of Romulus Augustus on 22 August 476 marked the end of the Western Roman Empire and, for many historians, the beginning of the Middle Ages.[35]
Middle Ages
The Bishop of Rome, called the Pope, was important since the early days of Christianity because of the martyrdom of both the apostles Peter and Paul there. The Bishops of Rome were also seen (and still are seen by Catholics) as the successors of Peter; he being the first Bishop of Rome. The city thus became of increasing importance as the centre of the Catholic Church. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, Rome was first under the control of Odoacer and then became part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom before returning to East Roman control after the Gothic War, which devastated the city. Its population declined from more than a million in 210 AD to 500,000 in 273[38] to 35,000 after the Gothic War,[39]reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens.[40]
After the Lombard invasion of Italy, the city remained nominally Byzantine, but in reality the popes pursued a policy of equilibrium between the Byzantines, the Franks and the Lombards.[41] In 729, the Lombard king Liutprand donated to the church the north Latium town of Sutri, starting the temporal power of the church.[41] In 756, Pepin the Short, after having defeated the Lombards, gave to the Pope temporal jurisdiction over the Roman Duchy and the Exarchate of Ravenna, thus creating the Papal States.[41] Since this period three powers tried to rule the city: the pope, the nobility, together with the chiefs of militias, the judges, the Senate and the populace; and the Frankish king, as king of the Lombards, patricius and Emperor.[41] These three parties (theocratic, republican and imperial) were a characteristic of Roman life during the entire Middle Ages.[41] On the Christmas night of 800, Charlemagne was crowned in Rome as emperor of the Holy Roman Empireby Pope Leo III: on that occasion the city hosted for the first time the two powers whose struggle for the universal power was to be a constant of the Middle Ages.[41]
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The Lombards are also credited with developing the concept of Special Teams notably the Punt Return team.
You never drink twice from the same stream.
