Approximately three hundred years after the death of Jesus, the Roman emperor Constantine not only legalized the Christian religion but began to favor it over the centuries-old worship of the Roman and Greek deities. In 410 AD the city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, and in the year 476 the last Roman emperor in the western half of the empire was deposed, while the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire continued without interruption. With the rise of the Germanic kingdoms in place of the western empire, there came a devastating loss of much of the literary and intellectual tradition of the Greco-Roman world, yet the loss was not total. The historiography of the medieval world was intellectually and artistically far inferior to that of the classical world, but the tradition of writing accounts of the past by no means disappeared.

Given the overwhelming dominance of Christianity for many centuries, it should come as no surprise to learn that historiography during the Middle Ages had significant religious content. While space allows me to touch on only certain aspects of the related developments, our foray into this period’s historiography will enable us to determine to what extent it can be considered sacral history.

Contrary to popular opinion, the medieval world is not best described as an age of darkness. In large measure it was an age of burgeoning growth and complexity after a near collapse of civilization that occurred with the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire. At first a variety of barbarian kingdoms ruled all of Europe, but after 1100, towns arose again and then more complex states developed, especially in England and France. The glue holding the feudal world together was the Roman Church, the most crucial aspects of which were the papacy, which wielded considerable political as well as moral power, and the monasteries, which for many centuries were the primary centers of learning. Nevertheless, despite the length and complexity of this period, it will be useful to consider very briefly the major types of historiography that predominated, in order to place in perspective how recently our modern ideas of history were established.

In broad terms, there were two common types of historical writings during the Middle Ages. The most common by far can be classified as annals and chronicles. This basic historiographical genre often took the form of recording current or recent events. For example, the so-called Royal Frankish Annals cover the period from 741 to 829, with entries for each year. The entries for the earlier years tend to be quite brief and unadorned, recording only the most striking events during the year, while those for the later years contain a slightly fuller record. Written anonymously, the entries are generally considered to have their origin in the royal court as an official record and seem to have had more than one author.[1] The larger monasteries also kept annals, such as the Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, a monastery in Suffolk, England. In that case the author is known to us: the monk Jocelin of Brakelond. As towns began to grow and become more significant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some began to compile annals as a kind of city history.

By and large, the events related in such chronicles were reported in strictly human terms. They did not regularly refer to direct interventions by God (except in vague terms such as “by the grace of God”), but they were by no means reluctant to relate miraculous events on occasion. For example, the Royal Frankish Annals note that in the year 755 the Lombards “began the war” against the Franks but that “by God’s help and the intercession of the blessed apostle Peter” the Franks were victorious. No details are given as to the nature of the supposed intercession.[2] Even the monasteries did not fill their records with numerous miracles. Jocelin notes that once a disaster was averted when a monk heard a timely voice telling him to get up immediately. He found that a candle had been carelessly left lit at night and was about to fall on some straw, and the door and window to the room had been locked, so no one could have escaped the fire.[3]

The second major genre is commonly described as “universal history.” The goal was to create an overarching chronological and historical structure by which to coordinate the histories of the known world, with the ultimate purpose of understanding God’s intentions in history on a broad scale. These histories included, at the least, the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the early Christian church, in some cases even attempted to include such remote civilizations as the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians. One of the earliest attempts was Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks from the later sixth century. The work is unapologetically religious in tone. In the opening of this work, Gregory proclaims in no uncertain terms that he is a Catholic (i.e., not a heretic) and insists that although he is not a highly skilled writer comparable to the classical historians, his approach to his task is one of unswerving faith:

My one desire is that, without the slightest deviation and with no hesitation whatsoever in my heart, I may hold fast to what is ordained in church that we should believe, for I know that one given to sin may obtain pardon with God through the purity of his faith.[4]

There is much religious content in his history (in addition to much violent political intrigue!) in the sense that there are many references to God, “saintly bishops,” and men and women making prayers and carrying out a variety of good works, but all this deals with the religious lives of men and women rather than with God himself.

Gregory’s goal of writing a universal history is clear from the beginning. He begins his history with a brief account of the Creation, Adam and Eve, the Noachian flood, the history of the Israelites, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the rise of the Christian church in the context of the history of the Roman Empire. Beginning in book 2, he focuses his attention almost exclusively on his own province of Gaul (France) and the invasions of the Germanic peoples, primarily the Franks. As was the case with the annalistic writings, most of his narration takes place on a strictly human level, although he is more generous with miraculous tales than many later writers. He frequently provided a list of “portents,” which he considered as signs from God, but without drawing any clear meaning from them. He evaluated the Frankish kings individually by their piety and virtue—the degree to which their actions were pleasing to God, which he frequently associated in great part with their ability to maintain good relations with priests of the church (Gregory himself was a bishop).[5]

The principal goal of such universalizing histories was to attempt to frame human events within God’s purposes for humankind as outlined in the Old and New Testaments. In general, the writers did not do this very systematically, but they did frequently adopt a scheme such as that found in chapter 2 of the book of Daniel, which records Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue whose parts are interpreted as representing a succession of kingdoms—of gold, silver, bronze, and iron. The kingdom of iron was typically interpreted as being the Roman Empire. Other writers developed a scheme of six world ages based on the book of Revelation.[6]

All this clearly falls under the rubric of sacred history, or Heilsgeschichte. The most pervasive of our criteria for sacral history, however, is that of moralizing history. It was quite common for historians to suggest that sin was followed by punishment. For example, Saxon invaders in fifth-century England were presented as an instrument of God’s punishment for the sinful Britons, while the invading Huns served as punishment in consequence of the sins of various nations.[7] John of Salisbury, in the introduction to his Memoirs of the Papal Court (Historia pontificalis), states:

My aim, like that of other chroniclers before me, shall be to profit my contemporaries and future generations. For all these chroniclers have had a single purpose: to relate noteworthy matters, so that the invisible things of God may be clearly seen by the things that are done, and men may by examples of reward or punishment be made more zealous in the fear of God and the pursuit of justice.[8]

Otto of Freising (in Bavaria) wrote in the middle of the twelfth century what is perhaps the grandest attempt of this era to encompass all human history into one volume.[9] This work, known as The Two Cities, begins with the creation of Adam and his expulsion from Eden, the great flood, and the story of Abraham and the patriarchs. He attempts to coordinate the histories of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Medes, Babylonians, and Persians and then moves into detailed accounts of the Greeks and Alexander, the Romans (including the stories of John the Baptist and Jesus), the Germanic invasions, and much of German history to his own time. His last book in The Two Cities begins with a discussion of the anti-Christ, signs to precede the Lord’s second coming, and how the Resurrection will take place. It is truly history on a cosmic scale, taking as its fundamental paradigm “the drama of salvation which began in heaven and would end there.”[10]

And yet Otto’s fundamental purpose is moral—to show that the vicissitudes of human history are filled with “pitiful tragedies made up of mortal woes.” A proper history, in his view, would demonstrate “what is surely a wise and proper dispensation of the Creator, in order that, whereas men in their folly desire to cleave to earthly and transitory things, they may be frightened away from them by their own vicissitudes, if by nothing else, so as to be directed by the wretchedness of this fleeting life from the creature to a knowledge of the Creator.”[11]

While space does not permit us to pursue here the later medieval developments in historiography in detail, we will see that even as stories of miracles and divine interventions became progressively less common, the moralistic approach to history by no means disappeared, even in the early modern period of Europe.

Early Modern Europe

The historiographical writings during the period of early modern Europe (roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) can best be described as antiquarianism rather than history—that is, highly erudite writings in such highly specialized and technical fields as law, chronology, epigraphy (inscriptions), and numismatics (coins). There were relatively few attempts to write narrative history on a broad scale. The general idea behind the writings of the antiquarians was to collect and preserve every type of remains from the past. But in their quest to understand how it all fit together, they began to develop more rigorous methods of dating and analysis. Antiquarians produced learned tomes that were mostly dry catalogs of information and unreadable by the general public, such as a compilation of the written historical sources of Gallic and French history up to 1328 or a catalog of English bishops. But these critical skills were essential preparation for the later development of modern historiography with its emphasis on thoroughness and critical analysis of documentary sources, and such works became foundational as nineteenth-century historians began penetrating the minutiae of history.[12]

One great early success of such critical analysis was in the field of philological analysis and textual criticism. In 1440 Lorenzo Valla produced a close analysis of the so-called Donation of Constantine, a document that for centuries had been believed to establish the right of the papacy to political control over the territories in central Italy known as the Papal States. Valla demonstrated through rigorous linguistic examination that the Donation could not possibly have been written in the age of Constantine, as it claimed to be, but was a much later production—it was, in effect, a medieval forgery. Among other things, he pointed out numerous points of Latin usage that were typical of the eighth century rather than the fourth century.

This type of detailed and critical approach to studying the past made inroads into the broader field of historiography only slowly. Beginning in the eighteenth century, it came to be widely felt that history should be literary in nature—readable, interesting to a wide public, and morally edifying. This view was typical of the eminent French writer, essayist, philosophe, moralist, and propagandist Voltaire. Voltaire has been described as “primarily a moralist chiefly concerned with spreading the gospel of enlightenment.”[13] This was true with respect to his historical writings as well as his more openly philosophical work.[14]

Voltaire believed in writing “philosophical history,” which had a basic moralizing intent, though in a somewhat different sense from the long-standing idea of historiography as furnishing models of virtuous behavior. We might describe his view as insistent that historiography have a broad moral vision that taught “the progressive enlightenment of mankind,” which included the “history of human stupidity,” thereby “becom[ing] one of the instruments of progress.”[15] He disdained antiquarianism and any kind of history that became bogged down in masses of details for their own sake. As the vanguard of the Age of Enlightenment, the French philosophes of the age believed strongly that history should be edifying. As one modern commentator has stated:

Both the antiquarians before them and the disciples of Ranke after them are distinguished from the philosophes by their exclusion of moral interests from historical research; even materialists like Diderot and d’Alembert, as well as deists like Voltaire, believed firmly in the moral value of history. Philosophe history was to be above all things edifying, and the erudites [the antiquarians] were to be censured for failing to discriminate between what was edifying and what was not. That alone counted as historical which was useful in the campaign against l’infâme, the unenlightened. History thus becomes a broadsword in the passionate onslaught against tyranny, intolerance, torture, priestcraft and superstition, which amply atones for much that is crude and shallow in philosophe thinking and gives it an honorable place in the European story.[16]

Voltaire’s advice to the historian [was]: “If you have nothing to tell us other than that one Barbarian succeeded another Barbarian on the banks of Oxus or Iaxartes, of what use are you to the public?” and again: “Woe to details. They are a vermin that destroys great works.” The value of facts lay in their philosophical and moral implications.[17]

To a modern historian trained to believe that the sine qua non of history is the accuracy of its details, Voltaire’s view of history is almost shocking. In the introduction to his Age of Louis XIV, he states boldly that he is interested only in historiography that deals with “grand themes” that would foster patriotic virtues and lead to refinement of morals and art.

All histories are virtually equal in the eyes of any one who only wants to stuff his memory with facts. But whoever thinks, or what is still rarer, whoever has taste, will consider only four ages in the whole history of the world [as worth knowing]. Those four blessed ages are those in which the arts were perfected and which, by marking an epoch in the greatness of the human mind, stand as examples to posterity. . . .

The reader must not expect to find here, any more than in the survey of earlier centuries, the exhaustive detail of wars, of towns besieged, taken and retaken by force of arms, given and regained by treaty. A thousand incidents of interest to contemporaries are lost in the eyes of posterity. They disappear, and disclose only the very great events that settled the destinies of empires. Not everything that is done deserves recording. In this history, only that which merits the attention of the ages will be dealt with—that which depicts the genius and manners of men, or which serves to instruct and inculcate the love of country, of virtue, and of art.[18]

Even during his own life, Voltaire was criticized by his contemporaries for failing to follow the “modern” practice of citing his sources.[19]

In contrast, Edward Gibbon, the English historian and celebrated author of the multivolume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, composed elaborate footnotes that cited as sources not only the standard classical writings but also the erudite works of the antiquarians, such as the chronological work known as L’Art de Vérifier les Dates.[20] Gibbon is one of the first historians who can be said to have amalgamated the technical scholarship of the antiquarians with the broad reach and literary skill of the philosophical historians.[21]

Nevertheless, despite Gibbon’s immense erudition and literary sophistication, his view of history was still broadly based in moral considerations. Regarding the fall of the Roman Empire, he concluded:

The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of enquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the Republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the Purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigor of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.[22]

Modern Historiography and the Rise of the Scientific Ideal

The later nineteenth century is usually seen as the beginning of modern historiography, which was secular, objective, factual, and even scientific. As a broad generality this attitude is accurate, but it can easily be exaggerated. We can begin our brief survey by considering Leopold von Ranke, a German historian of the mid-nineteenth century who is generally considered to be the father of modern historiography. Ranke was highly influential throughout Europe in contributing to the rise of history as a profession, one composed of rigorously trained experts who were highly skilled at research in the library and the archives and trained to read critically the primary documents found there. Ranke is best known for the statement “To history has been attributed the office to judge the past and to instruct the present to make its future useful; . . . [however] at such high functions this present work does not aim—it merely wants to show how things really were.”[23]

This last phrase, in German wie es eigentlich gewesen, has often been translated as “how it actually happened” and then interpreted to mean that Ranke believed that history should be based entirely on hard-core facts and written without the slightest bias or interest on the part of the historian. Instead, as more recent commentators have observed, his intended meaning was something more like “how it essentially was.” This focus on the “essence” of a particular time and place was important for Ranke. He himself had a metaphysical, almost mystical, belief in the role of the State—that is, the various states of Europe—as “spiritual entities,” and he believed, in the words of Ernst Breisach, that “God with his plan and his will stood behind all phenomena of the past.”[24]

Yet despite Ranke’s own spiritual ideas, his followers tended to focus more on history as a “science” than he himself did. In the later nineteenth century there was a strong sense that science could solve all human problems, and the field of history was not impervious to this intellectual trend. There arose a belief that history was as much a science as chemistry or biology. The English historian Henry Thomas Buckle believed that human behavior is “merely the result of a collision between internal and external phenomena” and could even be reduced to a series of scientific laws, and that historians should cease believing in some kind of mysterious providence behind human events that cannot be analyzed objectively and historically.[25] The eminent historian of ancient Greece J. B. Bury reflected this general attitude toward history, declaring in 1903 that history “is a science, no less and no more.”[26]

A common assumption at the end of the nineteenth century was that, given enough patient research, it would be possible to establish a definitive version of history. After all, if historiography was the just the objective collection and analysis of facts, there could be only one correct version of the past, and once that ideal had been attained, there would be no need for further discussion. The multivolume Cambridge Modern History (1905–12) was supposed to represent a major milestone in that endeavor. However, within fifty years its view of history seemed somewhatdated because historians had begun to “ask fresh questions dictated by new interests.” The New Cambridge Modern History (1957–68) essentially superseded the prior rendition. In a general introduction to the entire work, Sir George Clark declared it impossible merely to update the older edition with more recent findings.[27] Not only had new approaches and methods been widely adopted, but “history” was now thought to comprehend all aspects of civilization—social, cultural, economic, religious—in addition to political and administrative developments. Above all, the notion that historiography was simply a progressive endeavor aimed at collecting “all the facts” had been discarded. “The vision of definitive history [had] faded. There [could] be no universally accepted story of the past.”[28]

With respect to the idea of sacral history, it goes without saying that the belief in scientific history excluded all consideration of divine intervention of whatever type—even Ranke’s mysticism of the state. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the old ideas of the moral value of history, or of history having an overriding purpose or goal, were dead. For example, the widespread belief in the idea of continuous social progress led to the view that it was the proper role of historiography to demonstrate (at least implicitly) the superiority of the modern world to everything that had come before.

While historians today tend in general to oppose any kind of overt moralizing, many still hold that it is not inappropriate for historians to convey a moral opposition to such phenomena as slavery, Nazism, fascism, racism, and so on. Historian George Cotkin has recently argued that “moral vision” should not be limited to literature but has a place in historiography as well:

Historians should demand equal time on the stage of moral narration. After all, historical narratives are concerned with demonstrating how cruelty and evil are produced, disseminated, and experienced. Reading nuanced and engaged accounts of historians about slavery and abolitionism, about war and peace, about shifting boundaries of gender and race, all of this can be, no less than in fiction, a means of conveying moral meaning to students of history. Historians will, of course, make judgments, but the impetus behind moral history should be to trouble issues, to make palatable the pain and necessity of the moral imagination. The hope is that, in the process, historical work widens vision and cultivates virtues.[29]

In the later twentieth century there has been a considerable retreat from the idea of history as a science, written with complete objectivity and absence of bias. Even Bury himself, in his later years, acknowledged: “I do not think that freedom from bias is possible, and I do not think it is desirable. Whoever writes completely free from bias will produce a colourless and dull work.”[30]

Notes

[1] See Bernhard Walter Sholz, Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories, trans. Barbara Rogers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 40.

[2] Sholz, Carolingian Chronicles, 40.

[3] See Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, trans. Diana Greenway and Jane Sayers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 29.

[4] Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974), 67.

[5] See Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 374.

[6] See Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 83–92; see also Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), 27–46.

[7] See Breisach, Historiography, 90, 94.

[8] John of Salisbury, John of Salisbury’s Memoirs of the Papal Court (Historia Pontificalis), ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1956), 3.

[9] See Denys Hay, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London: Methuen, 1977), 50–53.

[10] Alan Richardson, History, Sacred and Profane (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964), 65.

[11] Otto I (Bishop of Freising), The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.D., ed. Austin P. Evans and Charles Knapp (New York: Octagon, 1966), 93–94.

[12] Breisach, Historiography, 201–2.

[13] Jerome Rosenthal, “Voltaire’s Philosophy of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16, no. 2 (April 1955): 159.

[14] See Patrick Henry, “Voltaire as Moralist,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 1 (1977): 146.

[15] Breisach, Historiography, 209.

[16] Richardson, History, Sacred and Profane, 93 (emphasis added; original emphasis on foreign terms retained).

[17] Richardson, History, Sacred and Profane, 92–93.

[18] In Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (New York: Meridian, 1956), 40, 43–44 (emphasis added).

[19] See Hay, Annalists and Historians, 172.

[20] The full title of this work can be translated as “The Art of Checking the Dates or Historical Facts of Charters, Chronicles, and Ancient Monuments since the Birth of Jesus Christ, Using a Chronological Table, Where Are Found the Years of Jesus Christ and the Era of Spain, the Indictions, the Paschal Cycle, the Easter of Each Year, the Solar and Lunar Cycles; with a perpetual calendar, the abridged history of the councils, of the popes, of the Roman, Greek, French, German and Turkish emperors; kings of France, Spain and England, Scotland, Lombardy, Sicily, Jerusalem, etc., dukes of Burgundy, Normandy, Brittany; of the Counts of Toulouse, Champagne and Blois by Benedictine monks from the congregation of Saint Maur.” (Sound like a great read?)

[21] See Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” in Studies in Historiography (London: Garland, 1966), 1–39.

[22] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 2:509–10 (emphasis added).

[23] Quoted in Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacobs, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 74 (emphasis added).

[24] Breisach, Historiography, 233; see Appleby, Hunt, and Jacobs, Telling the Truth, 74.

[25] Breisach, Historiography, 274–75.

[26] J. B. Bury, “The Science of History,” in Selected Essays of J. B. Bury, ed. Harold Temperley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 4.

[27] “General Introduction: History and the Modern Historian,” The New Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 1:xxxiv–xxxv.

[28] David Bebbington, Patterns in History: A Christian Perspective on Historical Thought (Westmont, IL: Intervarsity, 1979), 8.

[29] George Cotkin, “History’s Moral Turn,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (April 2008): 298.

[30] Quoted in Breisach, Historiography, 286.