13 April 799 A.D. Death: Paul the Deacon Became History—a Church Historian
13 April 799 A.D. Death: Paul the Deacon Became History—a Church Historian Graves, Dan. “Paul the Deacon Became History.” Christianity.com. May 2007. http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/601-900/paul-the-deacon-became-history-11629756.html . Accessed 10 Apr 2015. Historians owe a lot to Paul the Deacon. Born into a noble Lombard family, Paul was given the best possible education for that largely unschooled day. He became a monk and used his learning to record the history and myths of his people, the Lombards. His book was one of the first German histories authored by a German, although even then it was written in Latin, the language of scholarship. Since most of its sources have vanished, our knowledge would be poorer without it. It was copied and recopied into the fifteenth century. Early in his life, Paul's skill as a writer caused a duchess to ask him to expand Eutropius' History of Rome. Paul added six books to it and this was widely copi...