Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/279

CHAP.XI "rapines. Me and my house, my family and kin, have they harassed with so many javelins of lies, so many spoliations, so many essays of wickedness, that neither tongue nor pen can avail to set them forth. May then these pages be to them an antapodosis, that is retribution, to make their wickedness naked before men living and unborn. None the less may it prove an antapodosis for the benefits conferred on me by holy and happy men.'"

Liutprand's narrative is breezy and interspersed with ribald tales. The writer meant to amuse his readers and himself. These literary qualities give picturesqueness to his well-known Embassy to Constantinople, where he was sent by Otto the Great, for purposes of peace and to ask the hand of the Byzantine princess for Otto II. The highly coloured ceremonial life of the Greek Court, the chicane and contemptuous treatment met with, the spirited words of Liutprand, and the rancour of this same thwarted envoy, all appear vividly in his report.

There were also many laymen occupied with Latin studies. Such a one was Gunzo of Novara, a curiously vain grammarian of the second half of the tenth century. According to his own story, the fame of his learning incited Otto the Great to implore his presence in Germany. So he condescended to cross the Alps, with all his books, perhaps in the year 965. On his way he stopped with the monks of St. Gall, themselves proud of their learning, and perhaps jealous of the southern scholar. As the weary Gunzo was lifted, half frozen, from his horse at the convent door, and the brethren stood about, a young monk caught at a slip in grammar, and made a skit on him—because, forsooth, he had used an accusative when it should have been an ablative.

Gunzo neither forgave nor forgot. Passing on to the rival congregation of Reichenau, he composed a long and angry epistle of pedantic excuse and satirical invective, addressed to his former hosts. In it he parades his wide knowledge of classic authors, justifies what the monks of St. Gall had presumed to mock as a ridiculous barbarism, and closes with a prayer for them in hexameters. His letter contains the interesting avowal, that, although the monk of