Late Latin formed when large numbers of non-Latin-speaking peoples on the borders of the empire were being subsumed and assimilated, and the rise of Christianity was introducing a heightened divisiveness in Roman society, creating a greater need for a standard language for communicating between different socioeconomic registers and widely separated regions of the sprawling empire.

Serving as some sort of lingua franca to a large empire, Latin tended to become simpler, to keep above all what it had of the ordinary.

Politically, the excluded Augustan Period is the paradigm of imperiality, but the style cannot be grouped with either the Silver Age or with Late Latin.

In 6th-century Italy, the Western Roman Empire no longer existed and the rule of Gothic kings prevailed.

In the former case, the infimae appears extraneous; it recognizes the corruptio of the corrupta Latinitas which du Cange said his Glossary covered.

He does, however, give some idea of the source of his infima, which is a classical word, "lowest", of which the comparative degree is inferior, "lower".

Apparently, du Cange was basing his low style on sermo humilis,[14] the simplified speech devised by Late Latin Christian writers to address the ordinary people.

The Christian writers were not interested in the elegant speech of the best or classical Latin, which belonged to their aristocratic pagan opponents.

Instead, they preferred a humbler style lower in correctness, so that they might better deliver the gospel to the vulgus or "common people".

By corrupt, du Cange only meant that the language had resorted to nonclassical vocabulary and constructs from various sources, but his choice of words was unfortunate.

It allowed the "corruption" to extend to other aspects of society, providing fuel for the fires of religious (Catholic vs. Protestant) and class (conservative vs. revolutionary) conflict.

Low Latin passed from the heirs of the Italian renaissance to the new philologists of the northern and Germanic climes, where it became a different concept.

Writers taking this line relied heavily on the scandalous behavior of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the bad emperors reported by Tacitus and other writers and later by the secret history of Procopius, who hated his royal employers to such a degree that he could not contain himself about their real methods and way of life any longer.

Starting with Charles Thomas Crutwell's A History of Roman Literature from the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius, which first came out in 1877, English literary historians have included the spare century in Silver Latin.

Taking that media et infima Latinitas was one style, Mantello in a recent handbook asserts of "the Latin used in the middle ages" that it is "here interpreted broadly to include late antiquity and therefore to extend from c. AD 200 to 1500.

"[17] In essence, the lingua franca of classical vestiges was doomed when Italy was overrun by the Goths, but its momentum carried it one lifetime further, ending with the death of Boethius in 524 CE.

The first recognition that Late Latin could not be understood by the masses and therefore was not a lingua franca was the decrees of 813 CE by synods at Mainz, Rheims Tours that from then on preaching was to be done in a language more understandable to the people, which was stated by Tours Canon 17 as rustica Romana lingua, identified as Romance, the descendant of Vulgar Latin.