off to Ravenna.  But the imperialists got nothing by their treachery.  Agilulf at once moved against Padua and took it and rased it to the ground.  In the following year Monselice also fell to his arms, and though after the murder of the emperor Maurice in 602 the exarch Callinicus, the author of the abduction, fell, and Smaragdus was appointed by Phocas, the hostages were not returned, and in July 603, Agilulf, after a campaign of less than three months, had possessed himself of Cremona, Mantua, and Vulturina, and probably of most of those places which the imperialists had re-occupied in Cisalpine Gaul in 590.  Smaragdus was forced to make peace and to give up his hostages.  The peace he made, which left Agilulf in possession of all the cities he had taken, was to endure for eighteen months, but it seems to have been renewed from year to year, and when in 610 Phocas was assassinated and with the accession of Heraclius (610-641) Smaragdus was again recalled and Joannes appointed to Ravenna, the same policy seems to have been followed.

Joannes Lemigius Thrax, as Rubeus, the sixteenth-century historian of Ravenna, calls him, ruled in Ravenna from 611 to 615, and in the latter year was assassinated there apparently in the midst of a popular rising, though what this really was we do not know.  His successor, the eunuch Eleutherius (616-620), seems to have found the now fragmentary imperial state in Italy in utter confusion, and indeed on the verge of dissolution.  Naples had been usurped by a certain Joannes of Compsa, perhaps “a wealthy Samnite landowner,” who proclaimed himself lord there, and it is obvious that even in Ravenna there was grave discontent.  Eleutherius soon disposed of the usurper of Naples, but only to find himself faced by a renewal of the Lombard war, which he seems to have prevented by consenting to pay the yearly tribute which perhaps Gregory the Great had promised when he made a separate peace with the Lombard in 593, when Rome was practically in the hands of the barbarian.  It was obvious that the imperial cause was failing.  That the exarch thought so is obvious from the fact that in 619 he actually assumed the diadem and proclaimed himself emperor in Ravenna, and set out with an army along the Flaminian Way for Rome to get himself crowned by the pope Boniface V. But the eunuch was before his time; moreover, he was a defeated and not a victorious general.  At Luceoli upon the Flaminian Way, not far from Gualdo Tadino where Narses had broken Totila, in that glorious place his own soldiers slew him and sent his head to Heraclius.

Of his immediate successor we know nothing—­not even his name,[1] but in or about 625 Isaac the Armenian was appointed and he ruled, as his epitaph tells us, for eighteen years (625-644).  Isaac’s rule was not fortunate for the imperialists.  He is probably to be acquitted of the murder of Taso, Lombard duke of Tuscia, but it is certain that Rothari, the Lombard king in his time, “took all the cities of the Romans which are situated on the sea-coast from Luna in Tuscany to the boundary of the Franks; also he took and destroyed Opitergium, a city between Treviso and Friuli, and with the Romans of Ravenna he fought at the river of Aemilia which is called Scultenna (Panaro).  In this fight 8000 fell on the Roman side, the rest fleeing away."[2]