>>17796845 (OP)>In reality Northern Italians are less NW European than Iberians even.Due to later watering out of germanic heritage from the time of Romes sacking.
One of my tribal ancestors of the Rugii ruled the Po Valley for some time, and when they lost to Odoacer, their peoples merged with the remnants of the Heruli and Scirii to form the Bavarii around where the Rugii had an outpost already around 100ad. The graves of southern norway is full of mercenaries whom served the Romans as well as of those whom served in the sack of Italy. The truth is that Caesar, Augustus & Juba II became anti-east after realizing the frontier germanics were not worth defeating because they were content with serving as mercenaries anyways, unlike the gauls and celts whom operated at a much stronger family-based pride as opposed to individual-of-nation type of pride seen in germanics.
When the western romans started to budge for the eastern churches of christianity, the masculine warculture which had slowly been integrating germanic mercenaries became even more unified in their opposition to the east. This is the real reason why the Council of Nicaea decided to outlaw the form of christianity most prevalent/lenient towards germanic views, because they were already planning the church-backed invasion of the West by pre-emptively outlawing "non-eastern" beliefs like Arianist christianity. Of course the outlawing of Arius was nothing more than wargames waged by the lingering roman mindset of the Constantinople upper class. They wanted to centralize the faith in their coming battle against the germanophilic western roman empire.