its way into Italy before it was polished into the Provençal.

As to Naples and Sicily, the expulsion of the Saracens by the Normans,
under Robert Guiscard in 1059, must have produced in that country nearly
the same effect, a similar event soon after brought about in England.
And in fact we have the authority of William of Apulia[BD] to prove,
that the conquerors used all their efforts to propagate their language
and manners among the natives, that they might ever after be considered
only as one people. And Hugo Falcland[BE] relates, that in the year
1150, Count Henry refused to take upon him the management of public
affairs, under pretence of not knowing the language of the French;
which, he adds, was absolutely necessary at court.

That the language of the Romans penetrated very early into Spain,
appears most evidently from a passage in Strabo,[BF] who asserts that
the Turditani inhabiting the banks of the Boetis, now the Guadalquivir,
forgot their original tongue, and adopted that of the conquerors. That
the Romance was used there in the fourteenth century appears from a
correspondence between St. Vincent of Ferrieres and Don Martin, son of
Peter the IVth of Arragon;[BG] and that this language must once have
been common in that kingdom appears manifestly from the present name of
the Spanish, which is still usually called Romance.[BH] These
circumstances considered, I am not so much inclined to discredit a fact
related by Mabillon,[BI] who says, that in the eighth century a
paralytic Spaniard, on paying his devotions at the tomb of a saint in
the church of Fulda, conversed with a monk of that abbey, who, _because
he was an Italian_, understood the language of the Spaniard. Neither
does an oral tradition I heard some times ago appear so absurd to me, as
it did when it was first related to me, which says, that two Catalonians
travelling over the Alps, were not a little surprized when they came