Why do we have lowercase letters at all?

We have lowercase letters because scribes writing quickly with a pen rounded and simplified the capitals, and in the age of Charlemagne a clear, uniform version of it became the standard for copying books. Alphabets were originally written entirely in capitals. When people wrote quickly with a pen, those capitals tended to turn into rounder and much simpler forms, and the first lowercase hands grew out of those.

The key moment came under Emperor Charlemagne, who was never fully literate but understood the value of literacy and a uniform script in running his empire. He sent for the English scholar Alcuin of York to run his palace school and scriptorium at Aachen. The result was Carolingian minuscule, a script meant to be a clear, uniform and consistent way to copy books. It gave readers spaces between words, more punctuation, capitals for titles and lowercase for the body of a text.

That is close to how a page looks today. The scribes also did the world a favour: most of what we know of classical literature comes from copies made in Charlemagne's scriptoria, and over 7000 manuscripts in the script survive from just the 8th and 9th centuries.

The story has a twist. Centuries later, early Renaissance humanists loved these clear old books so much that they took them for ancient Roman originals, and used them as the model for their own handwriting. Printers then copied that hand, and it became the basis of our modern lowercase typefaces.