438 Latini, Brunetto
See alsoDANDOLO, ENRICO; EPIROS;VILLEHARDOUIN,
GEOFFROI DE.
Further reading: Joseph Gill, Byzantium and the
Papacy, 1198–1400 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1979); Donald E. Queller and Thomas
Madden, eds., The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of
Constantinople, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Robert Lee Wolff, Studies in
the Latin Empire of Constantinople(London: Variorum,
1976).
Latini, Brunetto SeeBRUNETTOLATINI.
Latin language and literature Latin belongs to a
family of Italic INDO-EUROPEAN languages, which
included several other languages once spoken in the
Italian peninsula and now extinct (Faliscan, Oscan,
Umbrian, and Venetic). Latin for the Western Middle
Ages was an almost sacred language, that of the BIBLE,
the FATHERS OF THE CHURCH, and the Western Christian
liturgy. It was moreover the language of learned dis-
course lasting into the 18th and 19th centuries. For lit-
erary creation it had little competition until after 1100.
Actually not a corrupted, impoverished, or decadent
version of the old classical Latin nor merely a technical
jargon reserved only for scholarly initiates, medieval
Latin was a living and creative spoken language that was
widespread over Europe and even beyond the frontiers
of the former western Roman Empire. The history of
Latin in the Middle Ages went through three “renais-
sances” or revivals: that of the CAROLINGIANS, that of
the 12th century, and that of the humanists of the 15th
century. There were always many usages and forms of
this living language before 1500.
The collapse of the school system that followed the
fall of the Roman Empire over several centuries resulted
in a lowering of the complexity level of the language, or
at least changes in practice. Latin began to bear more
traces of the vulgar, or spoken, such as more simple ver-
bal forms, the inclusion of prepositions to eliminate com-
plex case endings, confusions over the gerundive and the
present participle, an incorrect use in classical grammar
of the reflexive pronoun, the substitution of quod,“that,”