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Theudebert was, in fact, well able to take care of himself, and soon showed that he was as unscrupulous and enterprising, if not quite so bloodthirsty, as his father and uncles. Yet he was, for a Meroving, not an unfavourable specimen of a monarch, and the chroniclers tell us that he ruled his kingdom with justice, venerated the clergy, built churches, and gave much alms to the poor. That as a politician he was shifty and treacherous was soon to be shown by his dealings with Italy. |Theudebert invades Italy, 535.| In 535 the emperor Justinian, on the eve of his invasion of the Ostrogothic kingdom, bribed the three Frankish monarchs, by a gift of 50,000 solidi, to attack Italy from the rear. Uncles and nephew alike were ready to take the money and join in the plunder of the peninsula. But in the next year the Gothic king Witiges, eager to free himself from a second war, offered to cede Provence and Rhaetia to the Franks if they would make peace with him, and grant him the aid of their arms. The three kings gladly agreed, and lent him an auxiliary force of 10,000 men, who joined the Goths in recovering Milan. Theudebert and Childebert are said to have cheated Chlothar of his third of the gains, the former having got the money and the latter the land which Witiges made over.