ABSTRACT
The religious history of the Lombards is not that of the conversion of the people from heresy to orthodoxy, but from heathenism to Catholicism, with the extinction of the minor element of Arianism in the seventh century they are, like the Franks, a largely heathen people who slowly and almost imperceptibly adopted the Catholic faith by individual acts of conversion. Lombard Arianism' appears even more elusive when we attempt to trace its demise. Christian missionaries worldwide have found that such intuitions of divinity tend to be transferred to the Christian God, at first frequently identified or equated by their target populations with the remote creator god of the latter's original religion. It is the story of the eventual absorption of a Lombard monarchy into the Catholic macrocosm and of the Lombard people's gradual transition from their original polytheistic beliefs, through entry-level' syncretism, to Catholic Christianity.
