Early modern European states corresponded in Latin, and courts kept a salaried scholar to draft and translate it. England's Council of State appointed the poet John Milton as Secretary for Foreign Tongues in 1649; he composed the republic's Latin correspondence, with Andrew Marvell later assisting, until the Restoration. As French and then national vernaculars displaced Latin in diplomacy over the eighteenth century, the office quietly ceased to exist across Europe.
Latin secretary no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1100 – 1600
Toledo, print and the vernacular Bible
Toledo's translators turned Arabic learning into Latin and fed Europe's universities; Gerard of Cremona alone accounted for over seventy scientific works. Printing then made translation dangerous as well as influential: vernacular Bibles broke the Latin monopoly on scripture, Luther's German shaped a language, William Tyndale's English New Testament was smuggled in cloth bales and cost him his life in 1536, and the humanist printer Étienne Dolet was burned in Paris in 1546 over three words added to a Plato translation.
What else was happening then
1522
Luther's eleven-week New Testament
Hiding in the Wartburg castle under an assumed name, Martin Luther translates the entire New Testament from Greek into German in about eleven weeks. The "September Testament" sells out instantly, and Luther's plain, spoken German — he insisted on listening to "the mother in the house, the children in the street, the common man in the market" — helps standardize the modern German language.
Where that work lives now
The profession that carries meaning between languages — from the Septuagint and Jerome's Vulgate to Toledo, Nuremberg's booths and the machine-translation age.
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