Paul

, the Deacon, or Paulus Diaconus, so called because he had been a deacon of the church of Friuli, though some call him by his father’s name Warmafridcs, and others, from the profession he took up in his latter | years Paulus Monachus, was originally a Lombard, born in the city of Friuli, in the eighth century, and educated in the court of the Lombard kings at Pavia. After Desiderius, the last king of the Lombards, was taken prisoner by Charlemagne, and carried to France, tired of the tumult of the public world, he retired from the busy scenes he had been engaged in, and became a monk in the famous monastery of Monte Casino, where he wrote his history of the Lombards, in six books, from their first origin down to the reign of Luitprandus, who was their eighteenth king that reigned in Italy, and died in the year 743. He was an eye-witness of many of the transactions he relates; and as he was a Lombard, we may suppose him well informed of the affairs of his own nation, and had read the history of the Lombards, written in the same century in which they began to reign in Italy, by Secundus Tridentinus, originally a Lombard, but a native of the city of Trent, who flourished, according to Baronius, in the year 615; but his history is now lost. He often quotes his authority, and though he sometimes falls into trivial mistakes, about foreign affairs, and such as happened long before his time, as Grotius learnedly evinces, yet, in the transactions of his own nation, he is, generally speaking, very exact. He died in the year 799.His history was printed at Hamburgh in 1611, and is besides to be found in the eighteenth volume of Muratori’s Rerum Italic. Scriptores. ¹