The history of history refers to the history of the ways in which historians, and human societies generally, have recorded their own history. It is a rather ambiguous and clumsy term, but no better one has been developed. Historiography has a somewhat different meaning: the study of the methodology and practices of writing history. "Historiology" would be a logical word for the study of the history of history, but has never gained acceptance.
(It should be noted that in this article the term "history" is used to refer only to human history, not to the narrative of events in the non-human world or the pre-human past, which are usually defined as natural history.)
Proto-history
editHumans have recorded their history ever since the invention of writing, and indeed the desire to record events was one of the principle motives for the development of writing. In non-literate societies, the preservation of a record of events depends on oral tradition. The oral narratives of non-literate societies are often important from the point of view of anthropology, but they are seldom accurate records of events. The preservation of an accurate chronology and record of the past beyond one or two generations requires literacy. It also requires the ability to measure time. The urge to create calendars of various kinds, a development which often accompanied the development of writing, was in part motivated by the desire to record the passage of events.
History, however, is usually defined as more than the keeping of a chronicle of events as they occur, something which all literate societies have done. History, properly defined, is the writing of an account of events in the past, based on research into the surviving documents or other records of the time being written about. The writing of history in this sense requires more than literacy. It requires intellectual inquiry, a desire to know about the past beyond human memory, and freedom for the historian to inquire into that past and write an account of it based on the evidence of the archive.
The writing of history also requires a certain type of society, a society in which independent and secular thought is both possible and acceptable. In a society in which a particular religious ideology is universally accepted or imposed by the state, and in which only one version of the past is conceivable or permitted, is not one in which genuine history-writing can evolve. Although the chronicles of the civilisations of ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia, for example, are valuable as historical source material, they are not themselves history. The Sumerians, the Babylonians and the Hittites tended to believe that things were as they had always been, and that change only took place as a result of the will of their gods. This attitude, as well as the power of the state, discouraged history-writing.
The same was true in Egypt. As early as 3200 BC, the deeds of the Kings of Egypt were being recorded by court scribes, and carved into stone for the education of future generations. This was history-writing of a kind, although lacking in any critical or independent element. Although the Greeks later discovered vast archives of historical records in Egypt (now mostly lost), dating back to about 2500 BC, Egypt in its 4,000 years of continuous civilisation did not produce any tradition of independent history-writing: the power of the state and its ideology was too great.
The ancient Hebrews were also conscientious recorders of events, as can be seen in the collection of Hebrew writings known to us as the Old Testament, compiled between the 10th and 7th centuries BC. Many of these texts, such as Judges and Kings are literary masterpieces which record much valuable historical information. But the Hebrews, like the Babylonians, saw events as being the working out of God's will, not the result of human agency. They recorded events as a "testament" of God's favour to them, His chosen people, and of His wrath towards those who broke His commandments. Thus the writings of the Hebrews, although valuable historical sources, are not themselves history, nor were they intended to be. After the rise of Christianity, however, the Hebrew chronicles came to be very influential in western historical thought, being accepted by Christians as literal historical truth for many centuries.
Ancient historians
editIn the period of time now known to us as the first millennium BC, two societies evolved in which the writing of history in the full sense became possible. These were China and Greece.
China in this period fostered history writing mainly because of the desire of emperors to have records kept of their glorious reigns, and of all Chinese to have knowledge of their ancestors. Since China has had a longer history of continuous stable civilisation than Europe has had, more of the works of early historians have been preserved. But because of this very stability, the Chinese historiographical tradition did not evolve beyond "court history" until relatively recent times. This was partly because of the powerful influence of Confucius, himself a historian, whose ideas became a state ideology (Confucianism) which restricted the development of critical history. Nevertheless early China produced many notable historians such as Sima Qian (c145-87 BC) and Liu Zhiji (661-721 AD), author of the Shi Tong (Generalities on History).
For reasons beyond the scope of this article, however, it was western civilisation, not Chinese civilisation, which rose to a position of world dominance during the period between the 15th and 20th centuries. As a result, the Chinese intellectual tradition, including its tradition of history-writing, has become subordinated to the western intellectual tradition, a process which culminated in the displacement of Confucianism as China's official ideology, firstly (and unsuccessfully) in 1911 by western liberalism and since 1949 by Marxism. As a result, it has been the western tradition of history-writing which has come to be the template for all modern historians, including those in China, India, Japan and other historical centres of non-western civilisation. It is this tradition which this article will explore.
The western historiographical tradition has its origins in Greece. A tradition of secular thought and inquiry developed in the wealthy Greek cities of Ionia (now the west coast of Turkey) as early as the 7th century BC. Although no works from this period survive, later Greek historians such as Herodotus (484-425 BC) (commonly known as the "father of history") knew and relied on the works of earlier history-writers such as Hecataeus and Anaximander. Hecataeus deserves credit as the founder of the Ionian school of history. Herodotus, however, is the first historian whose works have survived, and his influence on later history-writing has been immense. Although his Histories contain a great deal of mythological material, Herodotus made genuine attempts to consult written records in both Greece and Egypt and to verify the stories he told. His account of the Persian Wars and the history of Athens remains the foundation of all subsequent writings on these subjects.
Herodotus was followed by Thucydides (c460-c400 BC), generally regarded as the greatest of Greek historians. His History of the Peloponnesian War remains a classic of history-writing (as well as of Greek prose), noted for its impartiality and critical use of sources, a remarkable achievement given that Thucydides had himself been an Athenian general in the early stages of the war. A little later came Xenophon (427-355 BC), who wrote both memoirs (The Anabasis and narrative history (The Hellenica). In the 4th century, however, the influence of Greek sophism made itself felt in history-writing, and the works of Ephorus (400-327 BC) and Theopompus (378-305 BC) (which are mostly lost) tended to lapse into rhetoric. Unfortunately the works of most 4th century historians, such as Isocrates, have not survived. The best historian of this period is generally held to be Timaeus (356-260 BC), who wrote a history of the Greeks in Sicily and other works, now mostly lost.
In the Hellenistic period (4th to 1st centuries BC), the standard of Greek history-writing is generally held to have declined, partly because of the growth of powerful monarchies such as Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria, which stifled independent thought. History also went out of fashion to some extent among Greek writers, partly because of the influential disapproval of Aristotle, who regarded history as inferior to philosophy and poetry. Nevertheless this period produced Polybius (203-120 BC), author of an extremely valuable history of the rise of the Roman Republic, and one of the first writers to fully explore the question of cause and effect in history. Polybius was also one of the first writers to set himself the task of criticising the works of other historians, which he does throughout his writings. Another important writer of this period was Manetho, an Egyptian with a Greek education, who compiled lists of the Kings of Egypt and preserved much knowledge of Ancient Egypt which would otherwise have been lost.
Polybius was a great influence on generations of Roman historians, beginning with his near contemporary Cato the Elder (243-149 BC), author of the first complete history of Rome (the Origines), and later Sallust (86-34 BC), who wrote another history of Rome and also works on events such as the Jugurthine War and the conspiracy of Catiline. Another notable history-writer of the Roman Republic was Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), who in between his exploits wrote military history in a dispassionate style modelled on Xenophon, notably in his Gallic Wars.
The greatest of the early Roman historians was Livy (c59 BC - 17 AD), whose ambitious history of Rome, From the Founding of the City, is one of the classics of historical writing, although surviving only in part. Livy was the first historian to write consciously for a mass readership. By Livy's time there was a large and wealthy educated class willing to pay for copies of literary works, and Livy's history appeared in installments like a modern serial, eagerly bought and read throughout Rome's growing empire.
Even in Livy's time, however, the power of the Roman state was becoming such that it was difficult for a writer to dissent from the official view of events. Later writers were to find it impossible, and this contributed to the decline of the Roman historical tradition during the imperial period. Nevertheless the early imperial centuries produced notable history-writers such as Josephus (37-100), Plutarch (46-127), Tacitus (56-117), Suetonius (70-130) and Arrian (92-175). Tacitus is usually held to be the best of these writers. It is notable that many of Rome's historians were Greeks: a tradition of independent thought and critical inquiry survived in Greek academies long after the power of the state had made such things impossible in Rome. It was not until the triumph of Christianity in the 4th century that the Greco-Roman tradition of secular history was extinguished.
Nevertheless the Christian Empire did produce important historians, most notably Eusebius of Caesarea (275-339). Although he was a Christian bishop, Eusebius wrote a "universal history" and a history of the early Church which made careful use of sources and showed a desire to write history and not propaganda. Also from this period is the last notable non-Christian historian, Ammianus (c325-c391), who wrote a history of the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 4th centuries. After his time the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, and the power of the Church, made such writing impossible. But in Constantinople the classical tradition survived in a modified form, and produced great writers ranging from Procopius (c500-c565), whose History of Justinian's Wars is an invaluable source, through to later Byzantine writers such as Michael Psellus (1018-c1080), and Anna Comnena (1083-1153), author of the Alexiad and the first known female historian.
The Greco-Roman historical tradition, which was established by the 5th century BC, survived in the west for nearly a thousand years and in the east for another thousand. It was a tradition that focussed almost exclusively on military and political history, and on biography. To this in later times was added Church history. The ancient historians had no interest whatever in what is now called social history: in all the ancient histories the common people never appear, except occasionally as a riotous mob. Even during the Athenian democracy, historians such as Thucydides wrote of the mass of people, if at all, with some disdain, and saw history mainly as a parade of statesmen and generals, speeches and battles. Economic history was also totally neglected, and indeed the idea of economics as a field of study barely existed.
At its best, however, ancient history-writing achieved an intellectual level that was not to be reached again for centuries. It also established the ideal of the independent historian. “When a man takes on the character of a historian,” wrote Polybius, “he will often have to praise and glorify his enemies in the highest terms, when their actions demand it, and often criticise and blame his dearest friends in harsh language, when errors in their conduct indicate it.” Such an attitude was no longer possible in western Europe after about 400 AD, and would not be again for many years.
Mediaeval historians
editThe fall of Rome and the victory of Christianity produced a crisis in history writing. Although the Goths, Franks and other conquering peoples had no desire to destroy the Greco-Roman world, it was inevitable that urban life, trade and travel would decline with the end of the Empire in the west. The great libraries of western Europe fell into disrepair and their archives were lost. The number of literate people fell sharply, and secular education came to an end. The real cause of the end of the Greco-Roman historical tradition, however, was the triumph of Christianity. It is often commented that the Christian Church preserved much of the documentary heritage of the classical world, and this is true. But it is also true that the dominance of Christianity meant the end of the classical tradition of independent inquiry and sceptical thought, without which true history-writing is impossible.
This was disguised for a time by the fact that the first generation of Christian writers had sound classical educations. Most prominent among these were Augustine (354-430), whose City of God, although essentially a theological polemic, preserves much historical information. Augustine saw history as being an arena for the conflict between “the City of God” and “the City of Man,” setting a template for all subsequent Christian history. His disciple Orosius (385-420) wrote a polemical history attacking paganism. Jerome (347-420), who wrote on the early history of the Church among many other things, was also a distinguished classical scholar.
By the 7th century, however, it was no longer possible to acquire such an education in western Europe. Learning shrank to a small circle of monastic scholars, few of whom had more than a smattering of classical education, although they performed the invaluable service of preserving and copying many classical manuscripts. In intellectual terms history-writing fell back more than a millennium, and became little more than the keeping of chronicles. The only writers of any importance during this period were Gregory, Bishop of Tours (c538-c594), who wrote a History of the Franks in very bad Latin, and St Bede (672-735), a Northmbrian monk whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People has earned him the title "father of English history.” Bede had good Latin and some Greek, and had read some Roman writers.
While European intellectual life had fallen to its lowest ebb, however, the classical historical tradition was being absorbed and transmitted by writers in the Arab world. The Arabs conquered most of the former Greco-Roman east in the 7th century, and their occupation of cities such as Alexandria and Antioch gave them access to Greek and Latin authors. The great new Arab cities such as Cairo and Baghdad became centers of learning and scholarship. Although Islam is a universalising religion like Christianity, in practice the atmosphere of the Islamic world was more tolerant of intellectual inquiry than was Christendom at this time.
The Arabs’ contact with the Byzantine Empire and, later, with the Catholic scholars of the Crusader states increased their awareness of the classical heritage. Many Greek and Latin works were translated into Arabic and Persian, and in some cases this has preserved works which would otherwise be lost. Arab writers such as Al-Waqidi of Medina (early 9th century) and his follower Ibn Sad wrote important histories of the age of Mohammed and the Arab conquests. The Iranian writer Ahmad Ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri (late 9th century) wrote a general history of the Muslim world. Islamic historiography reached its greatest heights from the 12th to the 14th centuries, with the works of Ibn Asakir of Damascus (1105-76) and Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332-1406). The latter’s History of the World caused Bernard Lewis to call him "the greatest historian of the Arabs and perhaps the greatest historical thinker of the Middle Ages.” After his time, however, Arab and Persian history-writing shared in the general decline of the Islamic world.
By the 12th century western Europe’s population and economy had recovered sufficiently for there to be a significant revival of intellectual life, known to historians as the 12th century Renaissance, although all intellectual activity still took place under the watchful eye of the Catholic Church. Travel and the exchange of books became easier, literacy rose and universities were founded as centres for the revival of learning. The First Crusade, which captured Jerusalem in 1099, brought western Europe into renewed contact with both Byzantium and the Arab world, and stimulated interest in geography and history. The result was a revival of history-writing.
One of the best-known writers of this period was Otto of Freising (1114-58), a German bishop and scholar. Otto visited Jerusalem and read Aristotle, whose works he introduced into Germany. He wrote a book about Jerusalem and other works, but is best remembered for his Deeds of the Emperor Frederick, a life of Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. Other ecclesiastical historians of the period included the Englishman William of Malmesbury (died 1143), who wrote the Deeds of the English Kings in about 1127, followed by the Deeds of the English Bishops. These are considered to be among the great works of the period. Another important writer was the French knight Geoffrey of Villehardouin (c1150-1213), considered to be the first historian to write in French, who participated in the Fourth Crusade of 1204 and wrote a history of it. Jean Froissart (1337-1405) wrote an important history of the Hundred Years' War and became a semi-official historian at the court of Edward III of England.
The 14th century saw the cities of central and northern Italy emerge as centres of learning as their commercial importance increased. Despite the power of the church, the princes of these cities were sometimes strong enough to protect independent-minded scholars. It was in the Italian cities that the ideal of the independent lay historian was revived. One of the earliest was Giovanni Villani of Florence (1275-1348), a wealthy merchant who became the leading historian of late mediaeval Italy. In 1300 he visited Rome, and was inspired (by his own account) to read “the histories and great deeds of the Romans as written by Virgil, Sallust, Lucan, Livy, Valerius, Paulus Orosius and other masters of history” – it is striking that the works of these authors were already known and available in 1300. He then decided “to set down in this volume and new chronicle all the facts and beginnings of the city of Florence, in as far as it has been possible to me to collect and discover them.”
Mediaeval historians usually wrote in Latin, the common language of educated people at a time when learning was mainly confined to the Catholic clergy and members of religious orders. Few wrote in the “vernacular” languages (Geoffrey of Villehardouin was an exception). They had an international outlook, seeing Christendom as the main focus of their loyalty, although some were attached to particular royal or episcopal courts and wrote to please their patrons. Few saw themselves as having a strong national identity, and none wrote what we would now call nationalist history. Like the ancient historians, they had little interest in social or economic matters. Their main themes were dynastic history, the deeds of kings and popes, wars and battles (particularly the Crusades), and Church history and theological disputations. Although most had some acquaintance with ancient historians, none really absorbed or understood the classical ideal of history-writing.
Renaissance and Reformation historians
editThere is no agreement among historians as to what the Renaissance was or where and when it began, and indeed the whole concept of “the Renaissance” has fallen out of historiographical favour over the last half-century. There is no doubt, however, that there was a revolution in the intellectual life of Europe which began in the 14th century and gathered pace through the 15th, reaching a crisis point in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. It is clear in retrospect that this revolution was the result of economic factors, principally the growth of trade and the revival of urban life, and the consequent growth of a class of secular intellectuals keen to throw off the ideological hegemony of the Church. Contributory factors were the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, which brought a wave of refugee Greek scholars, and their precious manuscripts, to western Europe, and the voyages of discovery of the late 15th century, which opened up new worlds and widened the horizons of European intellectuals.
From the point of view of the history of history, the most important developments of the Renaissance period were, first, the rediscovery and widespread dissemination of the surviving works of the Greek and Roman historians, particularly when translated into modern languages, and secondly the beginnings of “national history” as the states of Europe – and particularly northern Europe – emerged from mediaeval Christendom and began to develop distinct intellectual classes, displacing the cosmopolitan European intelligentsia of mediaeval Europe.
As has been shown earlier, the works of the ancient historians were never entirely lost or forgotten in mediaeval times. But their currency was confined to a very small number of scholars of Greek and Latin, and many of these lacked sufficient historical knowledge to understand what they were reading. In the 15th century this changed rapidly, greatly helped by the invention of printing by Johann Gutenberg in 1448. The humanist scholars of the 15th and 16th centuries eagerly translated and published the ancient authors. Herodotus, for example, was published in Latin in 1474, in Italian in 1533 and in French in 1566. Thucydides was published in Latin in 1452, and Niccolò Machiavelli regarded him as the model for his own historical work. Thucydides first appeared in English in 1550. The works of Polybius were published in 1472, and exercised great influence on the political thought of Jean Calvin among others.
The most influential ancient historian was however Plutarch, whose Parallel Lives, brought to the west in manuscript by a Greek scholar, appeared in print in 1473. He was translated into French in 1559 and into English by Thomas North in 1579. The Lives were a revelation to European writers and had many imitators in most European languages. North’s beautifully written but not very accurate translation of Plutarch was the key source used by William Shakespeare in writing his historical plays, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Plutarch’s biographies of Roman republican figures were very influential during the English Revolution of the 1640s, and still resonated during the French Revolution.
The wide dissemination of these works had several effects. Since they required a high standard of Latin or Greek to read in the original, they stimulated classical education and new standards of scholarship, a process in which the Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus (1466-1536) played a leading role. One by-product of this new scholarship was the proof on linguistic grounds by the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla that the Donation of Constantine, an alleged edict of the Emperor Constantine I giving the city of Rome to the Catholic Church, was an 8th century forgery – a great victory for secular learning and a blow to the Church’s prestige.
The printing of vernacular editions, on the other hand, created a taste for history and fuelled a demand among the newly literate middle classes for new histories of their own times and countries to read. This created a market for secular, national (if not yet nationalist) history-writing, for the first time since the late Roman Empire. Machiavelli (1469-1527) is now remembered for his political writings, but in his day he was best known as a historian, and his History of Florence (published in 1532) set a pattern for national histories which was widely copied and soon became the standard. He was followed by Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540), who published an influential history of Italy. They soon found imitators in France, England, Germany and the Netherlands. If these writers were not yet “nationalist” in the modern sense, they tended to glorify their own kings and countries, setting a new trend in history-writing.
It was the Reformation, however, which provided the decisive stimulus for the development of modern critical history. When the German reformers led by Martin Luther challenged the ancient doctrines and usages of the Church, they turned to historical scholarship to show that these did not derive from the teachings of Christ or the early Church, but were later inventions. The result was the massive Magdeburg Centuries, a history of the Church in 13 volumes, each covering a century, published between 1559 and 1574 by a large number of German Lutheran scholars led by Matthias Flacius of Magdeburg (1520-75). This assault stimulated a response from the Church, the even larger Annales Ecclesiastici by Caesar Cardinal Baronius (1538-1607), using Church archives which had never previously been examined. The idea that all history-writing must be grounded in documentary evidence, which must be read in the original languages and correctly cited, was thus established.
The Enlightnment
editBy the end of the 16th century the Catholic Church’s counter-offensive against Protestantism, the Counter-Reformation, had triumphed in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, choking off much of the new secular scholarship in these countries. The centre of European history-writing thus shifted decisively to the Protestant north, to Germany, England and the Netherlands, which were also (not coincidentally) now the richest and fastest-growing parts of Europe. France occupied an intermediate position, still Catholic, but rich and independent enough not to be dominated by the Pope and his ideological police, the Jesuits. In the 17th and 18th centuries – a period loosely known as the Age of Enlightenment - these countries saw a steady growth in historical scholarship, on increasingly scientific lines.
The outstanding names of this period are the German Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716) – although the great days of the Germans in the development of history were yet to come – the French writers Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Voltaire (1694-1778), the Englishman Edward Gibbon (1737-94), and the Scots David Hume (1711-76) and William Robertson (1721-93). Leibnitz was among the first to argue that there are “laws of history” which operate in all ages independent of human will. He was also a pioneer in publishing source documents as they are found, rather than in edited forms: one of the cornerstones of modern historical scholarship. Montesquieu, author of The Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans (1734), developed much of the modern idea of the structure of European history: he invented the term feudalism, for example, and coined the (derogatory, in his view) name Byzantine Empire.
Voltaire, best remembered as a political philosopher, was a hugely influential historian in his day. He wrote a biography of Charles XII of Sweden, a multi-volume history of France in the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and works on Charlemagne, the Emperor Henry VII and Czar Peter the Great. Taking historical scepticism further than any previous writer, he was the first to dare to say that the Christian Gospels were fiction and that Jesus Christ had never existed (this is not a view which even most atheist historians would accept today, but Voltaire made a good case on the sources then available to him).
The best known English history-writer of the 17th century was the Earl of Clarendon (1609-74), author of an influential History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. But Clarendon was a retired politician, not a historian, and his work was marred by his obvious partisanship. The English empiricist history school (a not very accurate term, since of many of its leading figures were Scots) developed later, in the 18th century. It derived its principles from the English tradition of empiricism going back to Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Hume, although best known as a philosopher, published an influential History of England in parts between 1754 and 1762, which became the standard history for nearly a century, while Robertson published the first systematic History of Scotland in 1759.
The English school reached its full flowering with Edward Gibbon, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest historians of all time, mainly on the strength of his monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). This massive work was hugely influential and set the standard for history writing for a century, although there was eventually a reaction against Gibbon’s tendency to moralise. Gibbon is often called “the first modern historian,” but this is something of an exaggeration. Although his use of primary sources was extensive and rigorous, he was unable (indeed, unwilling) to conceal his own biases - against Christianity, for example.
Gibbon also shared the tendency of virtually all historians before the 19th century to place stress on human will and human ideas as the cause of historical events, while neglecting underlying social and economic factors. Gibbon argued that the Roman Empire fell because the Romans grew lazy and decadent, and because Christianity sapped their will to resist the “barbarian” invasions. This is hardly a “modern” view, since it ignores the key questions of demography, economics and social change which genuinely modern historians see as underlying the more superficial matters with which Gibbon was preoccupied.