Lombard control has spread from the north to Tuscany and Umbria by 572, although much of southern and eastern Italy remains in imperial hands.

Alboin had forced Rosamund, the daughter of the Gepid king Cunimund whom Alboin had killed in battle with his own hand, to marry him after the death of his first wife.

Alboin is murdered, probably with connivance on the part of Constantinople, at Verona on June 28, 572; assassinated by a combination of several Gepid and Lombard warriors, according to tradition, at the behest of Rosamund after he had forced her to follow the Lombard custom of drinking from the skull of her slain father.

The Lombard warriors however, force Rosamund and her accomplices to flee to imperial protection in …

…Ravenna.

Cleph, who is acclaimed the new king of the Lombards later in this year, extends the Lombard kingdom by completely conquering Tuscany and closing on Ravenna.

The Lombards have made several raids against the Franks in Gaul in 569, 571, and 574.

The kingdom of the Lombards, called by Romans Regnum Langobardorum and by the Lombards themselves simply Langbardaland, is in need of a uniform law, in order to make a single nation of the Germanic peoples (Lombards, Gepids, and Heruli) that had entered Italy under Alboin.

The laws, however, do not secure their political unity.

The territorial splits of the duchies, caused by individual factions, restrain the attempted consolidations of the king.

Cleph reigns for eighteen months before meeting the same fate as his predecessor, and in 574 the Lombards break up into local duchies, with no king at all.

The Lombard monarchy ceases to exist, and various dukes divide the Lombard territories.

Constantinople seems to have been partially responsible for this too; the empire does not have the military capacity to drive the invaders back, and it is easier for the Greeks to divide the Lombard leadership and buy some of them into the imperial camp.

Faroald and Zotto had in 570 conquered lands of the central and southern Apennines to create …

…the Lombard Duchy of Spoleto, which is ruled by Faroald, and …

…the Duchy of Benevento, which is ruled by Zotto.

As these duchies are geographically cut off from the kingdom in the north by the imperial territories that range from Adriatic to Tyrrhenian Seas—the Rome-to-Ravenna corridor kept open by the Empire—this exacerbates the problem of Lombard unity.