Burgundy. Negotiations broke down in 1473, when
Charles demanded the title of king, but after Charles’s
death (1477), Frederick was able to bring about the mar-
riage of the duke’s heir, MARYof Burgundy, with his son,
the future Emperor MAXIMILIAN I, and thus secured the
great Burgundian inheritance for the house of Hapsburg.
Frederick spent his last years in retirement at Linz where
he indulged his passion for alchemy, astronomy, and
botany.
Frederick (III) the Wise (1463–1525) Elector of Saxony
(1486–1525)
An efficient ruler who urged constitutional reform in the
empire, Frederick welcomed to his court at Wittenberg
scholars and such great artists as DÜRER, MEIT, and
CRANACH. He befriended the humanist scholar George
SPALATIN and established the university of Wittenberg
(1502), where he chose Martin LUTHERas professor of phi-
losophy (1508). Frederick protected Luther, refusing to
implement the papal bull against him (1520) and shelter-
ing him at Wartburg castle after the imperial ban on him
(1521). In 1524 Frederick accepted Luther’s reformed
doctrines.
French language The romance language of France, also
spoken in parts of Belgium, Switzerland, eastern Canada,
and in other areas of the former French colonial empire,
for example in Africa and the Caribbean.
French developed from Vulgar Latin as spoken by
Roman settlers in Gaul (conquered by Julius Caesar,
58–51 BCE). Pre-Roman Gaul was inhabited mainly by
Celtic tribes, though there were Basques in Gascony and
Marseilles had been settled by Greek and Phoenician mer-
chants since about 600 BCE. (Provence had become a
Roman colony in the second century BCE.) Vulgar Latin re-
placed Gaulish (Celtic) after Caesar’s conquest; a few hun-
dred French words—chemin, for example—are of Gaulish
origin, but in vocabulary and structure the language is pri-
marily derived from Latin. Christianity, introduced in the
first century CE, spread rapidly, and a distinctive Gallo-
Roman society gradually emerged with its capital at Lug-
dunum (Lyons). There were incursions by Germanic
tribes from the third century CE. One of these, the Franks,
was led by Clovis (from 481), who defeated both the other
barbarian tribes and the Roman governor and established
the Merovingian dynasty at Paris, where it ruled until the
last Merovingian was overthrown in 751 by Pepin the
Short, father of Charlemagne. A few hundred words of
Frankish origin—guerre, honte (“shame”), riche, danser,
for example—survive in modern French; Old French con-
tained many more that are now no longer in use. By the
ninth century French (of which there were a number of
dialects) was significantly different from Latin. The earli-
est extant document in French, the Serments de Strasbourg
(842), transcribed by the chronicler Nithard (a grandson
of Charlemagne), contains the oaths sworn in French and
German by the sons of Louis I (Louis the German and
Charles the Bald) against their brother Lothaire. The ear-
liest literary text, the Séquence de Ste. Eulalie (c. 880), was
written down soon afterwards.
French evolved in quite different northern and south-
ern forms during the Middle Ages, the line of division ex-
tending roughly from the mouth of the Gironde to the
Alps. South of this divide, the language came to be known
as the langue d’oc (oc, “yes,” from Latin hoc); north of it, a
number of related dialects were called the langue d’oïl (oïl,
“yes,” from Latin hoc ille). From the 12th century the di-
alect of the Île-de-France—and of Paris, the ancient
Frankish capital—gradually came to be preferred over the
numerous other dialects (of Normandy, Anjou, Picardy,
Champagne, etc.) of the langue d’oïl. And in the 13th cen-
tury, the Albigensian crusade helped establish the langue
d’oïl in the south as well. Literature in the langue d’oc, such
as that of the Provençal troubadours, which was of major
importance in the Middle Ages, began to decline after this
time, though Provençal continued as a spoken language,
and a number of words borrowed from it persist in mod-
ern French vocabulary (asperge, bastide, béret, cadeau).
Old French (ninth to 13th centuries) and Provençal
retained two (nominative and oblique) of the six cases of
the Latin noun, but otherwise changes, typical of most
other romance languages, gradually occurred: indefinite
and definite articles developed from unus and ille; new an-
alytic constructions (as in the perfect tense of verbs and
the comparison of adjectives) replaced Latin synthetic
constructions; and complex changes took place in pro-
nunciation and semantics. In the Middle French period
(14th and 15th centuries), inflections were reduced to
their modern minimal levels, resulting in a more settled
word order, and the dialect of the Île-de-France became
dominant. In the early 16th century French, by royal de-
crees (1520, 1539), supplanted Latin as the dominant lan-
guage in the legal and official spheres. The authority of
CALVIN’s theological writings in French and translations of
the Bible made French acceptable as a medium of religious
discourse, while humanists and members of the PLÉIADE
explored its possibilities as a literary medium on a par
with the classical languages. These developments resulted
in a great expansion of the vocabulary, with learned bor-
rowings especially from Latin.
The following century was characterized by attempts
to control and refine the language, mainly promoted by
the Académie Française, which was founded by Cardinal
Richelieu in 1635. The task of compiling an authoritative
dictionary was undertaken by Claude Favre de Vaugelas
(1585–1650), as editor, and the poet Jean Chapelain
(1595–1674). Progress was slow, however, and the Dictio-
nnaire universel des arts et sciences (1690) by the Académi-
cien Antoine Furetière (1619–88) appeared first, the first
modern encyclopedic dictionary. The Académie’s Diction-119944 FFrreeddeerriicckk ((IIIIII)) tthhee WWiissee