Military success had seemed to flow with the Samnites until 314 BCE.

Campania is on the verge of deserting Rome.

Peace is established between Rome and some Samnite towns.

The tide of the war turns in 311, when the Samnites are joined by Etruscan cities that have decided to join a showdown against Roman power.

However, the Samnites are unable to prevent the Romans from establishing fortified colonies around the edges of the Samnite state; these serve as bases for attack.

Tribes in the central Apennines, with Samnite encouragement, had withdrawn from their alliances with Rome, but Roman forces have subdued these tribes within a couple of years.

The Samnites lose the Battle of Bovianum in 305 and are forced, with their remaining allies, to conclude a peace with Rome in the following year.

The Samnites had joined forces with the Etruscans, Gauls, and Sabines in opposing Roman expansion a few years after concluding the peace.

In 298, the allies begin to raid Roman outposts, precipitating the Third Samnite War.

The exhausted Samnites finally conclude a peace in 290 BCE with the Romans, who allow their valorous opponents to become Roman allies, not subjects, as civitas sine suffragio.

The Romans are now the dominant power in Italy.

Sulla has by 82 BCE conducted an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Samnites, this most stubborn and persistent of Rome's adversaries, and forced the remnant to disperse.

So great is the destruction brought upon them that it is recorded that "the towns of Samnium have become villages, and most have vanished altogether.” (Strabo, Geography, Book V, Section 4.11.)

The Edictum Rothari of 64 gives the gastalds—Lombard officials in charge of some portion of the royal demesne (a gastaldia or castaldia) with civil, martial, and judicial powers—the civil authority in the cities and the reeves the like authority in the countryside.

Territories are delimited under the Lombard dominion by giudicati or "judgments" among the several gastaldi.

Another subdivision of the Bulgars disappears into service under the Lombards, who settle them in the Molise region of southern Italy in the deserted area of Bovianum (modern Boiano, or Bojano), the ancient Samnite capital, which becomes a seat of a gastaldate.