 Lombard, a Germanic language, made a large contribution to the formation of the Italian language in the sense that it hastened the population's detachment from vulgar Latin, causing it to take on autonomous forms known as Neo-Latin.Regarding the role played by the Lombards within the emerging Europe, Jarnut shows that, after the decline of the kingdom of the Visigoths and during the period of weakness of the kingdom of the Franks in the Merovingian era, Pavia was about to take a guiding role for the West after determining, by tearing a large part of Italy from the dominance of the "Basileus", the final boundary line between the Latin-German West and the Greek-Byzantine East.The rise of the Lombards in Europe was halted, however, by the growing power of the Frankish kingdom under Charlemagne, who inflicted decisive defeats on the last kings of the Lombards.