Paul the Deacon
Paul the Deacon wrote the history of the Lombards after Charlemagne had ended their kingdom, at Charlemagne's court, and it is the only account of his people from the inside and nearly the only one at all. He was born about 720 at Cividale in Friuli into a noble Lombard family, was educated at the royal court at Pavia under King Ratchis, and was a teacher and poet at the court of Desiderius, the last king, whose daughter Adelperga he taught; for her he wrote a Roman history, extending Eutropius to the sixth century, which was the standard short history of Rome for the next five hundred years. When Charlemagne took Pavia in 774 and Desiderius went to a Frankish monastery, Paul was already or soon a monk at Monte Cassino. In 776 his brother Arichis joined the Friulian revolt against the Franks, was taken to Francia as a prisoner and his estates confiscated, and in 782 Paul went north to beg for him, in a poem addressed to the king. Charlemagne freed the brother and kept the poet. For four years he was one of the scholars at the palace with Alcuin and Theodulf, teaching Greek to the clergy who were to escort the king's daughter to Constantinople for a marriage that never happened. He compiled the homiliary of sermons for the year that the Frankish church used for centuries, writing the epitaphs of the royal family and a history of the bishops of Metz that gave the Carolingians a saintly ancestor. He went back to Monte Cassino about 787 and wrote there the History of the Lombards in six books, from the migration out of Scandinavia by way of the Elbe and Pannonia to the death of King Liutprand in 744, thirty years before the end, where he stopped. Whether he could not bear to write the end or did not live to is argued. It has Alboin drinking from his father-in-law's skull, Rosamund's revenge, the plague, and the Lombards as a people with a law and a past rather than the barbarians of the papal letters. He died at Monte Cassino about 799.
- Lived: 720 CE – 799 CE
- Nationality: Lombard
- Roles: historian, monk, poet
