Historians

The Venerable Bede Ssu-ma Kuang

Born 672 Died 735

Anglo-Saxon historian and theologian

Born 1019 Died 1086

Chinese government official and historian

Al-Mas'udi Anna Comnena

Died 957 Arab historian

Born c. 1083 Died 1148

Byzantine princess and historian

The work of historians is always important, seldom more so than in the Middle Ages. Not only did people then lack modern forms of communication, but in Western Europe at least, the medieval period was a time when the pace of learning slowed for several centuries. Thus it became all the more important to access the wisdom of the past, a time when communication and learning had flourished under the civilizations of Greece and Rome. But history was also important as a means of guessing what might happen in the future. When the Anglo-Saxon historian St. Bede noted that the people of England had ceased to study the arts of war, he hinted that this might have disastrous consequences. Four centuries later, another English historian, William of Malmesbury (c. 1090-c. 1143), would describe the consequence of the English lack of preparedness when he chronicled the then-recent invasion led by William the Conqueror (see entry).

Bede, al-Mas'udi, Ssu-ma Kuang, and Anna Comnena came from a variety of places, as their names suggest: respectively, England, the Middle East, China, and Greece. Each had a different viewpoint on history, informed by differing life ex-

"As such peace and prosperity prevail these days, many... have laid aside their weapons... rather than study the arts of war. What the result of this will be, the future will show."

The Venerable Bede

The Venerable Bede.

Reproduced by permission of Archive Photos, Inc.

Periences. One was a priest, another a traveler, the third a government official, the last a princess—and as a woman, she had a particularly unique perspective. To varying degrees, each wrote history to serve their own purposes, yet each performed a service to the world by preserving a record of their time and place.