Vivarium; Gregory the Great

Cassiodorus vaults the corpus at Vivarium. Gregory the Great takes over Roman administration in the West.

In plain words

Cassiodorus stores the books at his monastery of Vivarium, and Gregory the Great takes over Rome's government in the West. The honest half of the ledger: the monks kept copying through a collapse that would have destroyed the texts, including the text that would one day convict them.

The mechanism

THE HONEST HALF OF THE LEDGER — the monastics preserved literacy and copied manuscripts through a collapse that would otherwise have eaten them. The text that eventually convicts the copyists survived because the copyists kept copying it

How it was checked

• EvidenceT5 INDEPENDENT SECULAR; Status: COMMITTED
• Letter eraTHE CAPTURE 313 to 1302
• SourcesSECULAR RECORD