Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"THE LOMBARDS OF ITALY suffered no inconveniences from the Arab invasions to the east. In fact, the eastern wars made it possible for the Lombard king Rothari, elected in 636, to throw off almost all remaining tendrils of Byzantine control. While the emperor was occupied fighting with the armies of Islam, Rothari busied himself with systematically wiping out the emperor’s claim on all Italian lands—except for the enclave at Ravenna and the walled city of Rome itself. These gains meant that it was time for the Lombards to mature away from their beginnings as conquering invaders, toward existence as a nation. The Lombards were partly worshippers of the old Germanic gods, partly Arian Christians, partly Catholic Christians. A shared religion could have provided them with cohesion, but Rothari, a man of vision, wanted to give them more than cohesion. He wanted to give them statehood; so in 643 he created a written law, something they had never had. . . . Rothari’s successor, Aripert, became the first Catholic king of Lombardy, moving the Italian kingdom closer to the political mainstream. In 661, when Aripert died, a brief war erupted between his sons."