Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/251

 THE FRANKISH STATE AND CHARLEMAGNE 211 sion of the Salic law from Charlemagne's time is in better Latin than the version from the reign of Clovis; and that Charlemagne himself is said to have spoken Latin and under- stood Greek, although he could scarcely write his name. But there is no record of his encouraging classical learning and literature for their own sake, nor of any great profi- ciency in either in his time. Alcuin, the bright light of his court and palace school, was hardly the equal of Cassiodorus and Isidore. Two reigns after Charlemagne, John of Ireland, known as Erigena, a remarkably original and fearless thinker for his time, became head of the palace school and trans- lated from the Greek the theological treatises falsely at- tributed to Dionysius the Areopagite who heard the Apostle Paul preach at Athens. It has been asserted that almost all the works of Latin literature extant to-day are preserved for us in manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but how far to attribute this to Charlemagne it is hard to say. If Charles the Great did little to encourage classical stud- ies, his contribution toward the development of modern literature is even more uncertain. He is said to Charlemagne have ordered that the national songs of the and modern Germans should be collected and that a Frankish grammar should be written, but no such works have come down to us. Our earliest considerable specimens of the growth of modern languages come from the time of his grandsons, two of whom when combining against a third ex- changed oaths of fidelity in languages which each other's troops could understand and which show us early stages in the development of the French and German languages. When literature in the modern languages, first really began, in the centuries after the break-up of his empire, it looked back on Charlemagne as one of the heroes of old along with Caesar and Alexander; and the ruler, Charles the Great, whose true historical importance was already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries no longer appreciated, was rele- gated to the realm of romance as Charlemagne. And in fact Charlemagne's reign in most respects looked