CHRONfCI.KS, ///.S7YMYA-.V, .IfKMofRS. 457 



from the empire of the East, was perpetuated, with most of its essential 

 qualities, in a mass of historical works written in (iivt-k, clown to the capture 

 of Constantinople by Mahomet II. ; but the Latin language, on the contrary, 

 had been subjected to the inevitable mixture of the national idioms of all the 

 barbaric peoples which had collected in different parts of the Roman empire. 

 The Latin language, though more and more corrupted and changed, continued 

 none the less to be the official language of the clergy and of the higher civil 

 administration. Nothing but Latin was spoken at the court of Odoacer, King 

 of the Ileruli, and at the court of Theodoric, King of the Goths. Thus books 

 of political rather than of religious history continued to be written in Latin. 

 It was in this semi-barbarous tongue that the Western historians of the sixth 

 and seventh centuries compiled their Chronicles, while the Greek historians 

 were publishing excellent Histories after the style of Folybius and Dion 

 Cassius: Agathias the Scholastic, the History of the Reign of Justinian; 

 Procopius of Cacsarea, secretary to Belisarius, the History of his Time ; 

 Thcophylactus Simocatta, the History of the Emperor Maurice, &c. 



The Latin Chronicles, composed during this dreary epoch of the Middle 

 Ages, are none the less valuable and interesting. The most ancient of them 

 relates to France, or rather to the part of Gaul occupied by the Franks : that, 

 of Marius of Autun, Bishop of Avenche, in Helvetia. It begins with the 

 reign of Avitus in 455, and terminates in 581 : written in a clear and simple 

 style, it relates more especially to the reign of Gontran, King of Burgundy, 

 and contains some accurate information as to the geography of Gaul. It had 

 been written to serve as a sequel to the Abridgment of the Universal History 

 compiled by Prosper of Aquitaine, and is in consequence dry and concise, like 

 most Chronicles of the time. Cassiodorus, the minister of King Theodoric, 

 gave freer scope to his rhetoric in a voluminous History of the Goths, of 

 which we possess only an excellent abridgment (" De Gothorum Origine et 

 Rebus Gestis ") by Jornandes, Bishop of Ravenna, who also composed a short 

 Universal History. St. Isidore, Bishop of Seville, who died in 636, also wrote 

 a Chronicle from the time of Adam, and a History of the Goths, the Vandals, 

 the Suevi, and the Visigoths, amidst whom he had passed his life. 



The most ancient and valuable record of French history is the great work 

 of Gregory of Tours, who in his " Histoire Ecclesiastique des Francs " gave 

 a faithful description of the events in which he took part. Born in 

 Auvergne, of a patrician family which had produced several senators and 



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