These names, applied to varying styles of writing, are without historical exactness. Roughly speaking, the first means the debased Roman used in Gaul and Western Germany from the sixth to the eighth century, the second was the script of the larger part of Italy (but chiefly the east and the south) between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, the third was the national hand of Spain and Languedoc during the eighth to the twelfth century. The names are based upon erroneous historical assumptions. The Frankish kings, supposed to be descended from Merowig, carried with them across the Rhine no graphic system whatever. They found in Gaul the identical styles of writing which were used in Italy, and such of their people as gave up the trade of warriors to assume that of clerics and councilors, were obliged to learn the arts of the Gauls. The circumstances under which the new kingdom was established as a permanent institution, were not such as to make the Franks a nation of penmen; and the influence of their bad taste in calligraphy could hardly have been felt till the beginning of the seventh century. Their Gallic underlings continued to write as before, but in the absence of enlightened patronage, the schools of art no longer produced good work, except in the monasteries of the Provincia Romana, where less deterioration took place than elsewhere. The Frankish monarchy was so widely extended throughout the territories stretching from the Loire to the Main, and along the whole course of the Rhine from south to north, even in "Merovingian" times, that the use of the word to designate a special style of writing is hardly desirable. It is probable enough that in the seventh century and the early part of the eighth a kind of uniformity existed in the writing used in all the region between Paris and Mentz, but it was nothing else than Roman uncials, semi-uncials, and minuscules written in more or less cramped and graceless fashion; varying only in the degree of badness according to the locality. It is Roman cacography with a Germanic stamp upon it. There was a decided improvement in it when the eighth century was in progress. The Lombardic hand is also a Roman hand as written by or for barbarians who lived nearer to the center of civilization than the Franks did. To justify its name it would be necessary to show that it originated and was practiced in the region we call Lombardy in the seventh century. There is, however, no trace of its existence before the ninth century, and very little show of its having been used to any extent in Cisalpine Gaul. Most of the surviving examples of its employment as a national or local script indicate Eastern and Southern Italy as its home during the ninth to the twelfth century; while most of the manuscripts produced in Lombardy and northern Italy during that time belong rather to the Carolingian type. In fact, the Carolingian minuscule, the Visigothic minuscule, and the Lombardic minuscule all show at their beginning so much similarity that we look for examples of the latter two sufficiently early to decide a doubt which arises which of the three was the fountain head of modern letters. The chief marks of distinction in the Lombardic through its whole career are the t shaped nearly like a, and the a shaped like cc. The Visigothic t is identical with the Lombardic; and in the a there is so little unlikeness that the form of the letter seems to be something halfway between u and cc. (It is equivalent to cc without their beaks or initial knobs.) The circumstance that two scripts so widely removed in place should retain common peculiarities, down to the very end of their severed existence, leads to a suspicion that the so-called Lombardic was probably a post-Ulfilan Ostrogothic. The peculiarities referred to, -and some others which need not be specialized, are also found in the " Merowing " writing of books produced west of the Rhine in the seventh century. Now as Carolingian writing is quite free from these peculiarities, we can safely conclude that the Lombardic and the Visigothic are both older than the time of Charles the Great. It is usually supposed by those who see the difficulty attaching to the use of the name Lombardic, that the mode of writing so styled was used in the kingdom of the Longbeards, but died out in its chief home after the conquest by the Franks, and only maintained a continued existence in the Neapolitan duchies held by princes of Lombardic origin. The suspicion hinted at above becomes stronger when we review these facts. The Lombards were a far rougher and more uncultivated race than the Goths, and found a Gothic-Roman script in use in Italy when they entered to destroy the kingdom of Theodoric. It was probably in Ravenna that the so-called Lombardic minuscule had its seat during the sixth century, side by side with the declining Gothic uncial of Wulfila. From Ravenna, its spread over the east and south of Italy would be much more easily effected than from Milan or Pa via; and its undeniable similarity to the Visigothic script of Spain leads to the belief that these two were the real Gothic writing of the early Middle Ages, as distinguished from the Moesian alphabet, which cannot have endured much longer than the reign of Theodoric himself. The hand which is called broken Lombard belongs to a later time. Its characteristic is an attempt to produce an ornamental wavy effect by suspending the weight of the pen-stroke in the middle of each descent, but the forms of the letters remain unchanged. It was a fashion of Neapolitan writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and seems to correspond in its own school with that tendency in the schools of northern countries which produced the angular "gothic" of the thirteenth. As has been remarked in another paragraph, the "Lombardic" flourished even in Italy, side by side with the pure Carolingian, which had become the most favored of all handwritings since the Empire of the West was renewed in the family of Charles the Great. The Carolingian, however, seems to have encroached to no more southerly point than Rome itself, leaving all the region beyond to its Lombardic rival.
Of the Visigothic, as of the Lombardic, it has to be said that, so far as extant specimens are concerned, it might well have been the offspring of 'the Carolingian, rather than an elder form of writing. Its kinship, however, to "Merowingian " and "Lombardic " is undeniable, and there is a very fair show of probability that the Visigoths had something to do with it, notwithstanding the fact that we only know it in examples later than the destruction of the Gothic monarchy in Spain. What the term Visigothic means we do not know. Most people think it meant West Gothic, and that is how it was interpreted by Jornandes, who, as an Italian Ostrogoth of the sixth century, ought to have been capable of understanding the sense of the word. It is, however, very uncertain; for Jornandes, though intelligent and well-informed, was not impeccable even as regards his Gothic kinsmen. Most of his knowledge was derived from his Latin education, and to him probably we owe a good many misconceptions, arising from his acceptance of various geographical names in Latin and Greek writers as referring to his own people and their kindred. Nothing which he has said has had a more enduring influence upon opinion than the statement that Scandinavia, the " vagina gentium," had bred all the barbaric tribes which overpowered the Roman empire. Of course, he knew nothing of Scandinavia beyond the vague facts that Goths, Heruli, Burgundians, Lombards, and Oimbri inhabited the southern shores of the Baltic, and that there was a vast land beyond that sea. Everything that descended from the north seemed to have come down from Scania, or Scandinavia. He did not know, as we do, that the climate of Scandinavia must have been at that time much more severe than now, and that the population of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark cannot have reached in the fourth and fifth centuries to anything like its present numbers. The movements of that age, which carried millions of warriors to Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Africa, represented a wave of emigration, caused by an overflow of population, beginning in the far East, on the confines of China, of which the typical originators, so far as Europe is concerned, were the Huns. No such overflow was possible from Scandinavia.
The Visigothic script had certainly not yet come into existence when the kingdom of Alaric had its capital at Toulouse in the fifth century. After the Franks had driven the Goths southward, and the monarchy was established in Spain (incorporating the Suabians, who had held a separate state in Portugal), we may suppose that the Visigothic hand was derived from that of the Ostrogoths, and used in the service of the Gothic monarchs until their dynasty was destroyed by the Saracenic conquest in 713. From that time onwards to the twelfth century it was employed in all the Christian lands of Spain, although, as in Italy, the Carolingian script began to be introduced in the ninth century. The two kinds of writing went on side by side, the Carolingian always gaining ground as time went on, until in the thirteenth century Spain fell into line with the other countries of Europe in adopting a sort of French "angular gothic."
Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, You Are Reading Chapter 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 chapters
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