Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The Lombards (...) were a Germanic people who ruled most of the Italian Peninsula from 568 to 774. . . . Following this victory, Alboin decided to lead his people to Italy, which had become severely depopulated and devastated after the long Gothic War (535–554) between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom there. In contrast with the Goths and the Vandals, the Lombards left Scandinavia and descended south through Germany, Austria and Slovenia . . . The Lombards would have consequently remained a predominantly Germanic tribe by the time they invaded Italy. The Lombards were joined by numerous Saxons, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians, and Ostrogoths, and their invasion of Italy was almost unopposed. By late 569 they had conquered all of northern Italy and the principal cities north of the Po River . . . At the same time, they occupied areas in central Italy and southern Italy. . . . In 774, the Kingdom was conquered by the Frankish King Charlemagne . . . However, Lombard nobles continued to rule southern parts of the Italian peninsula well into the 11th century, when they were conquered by the Normans and added to their County of Sicily."