Many important annals, chronicles, and histories pre-date the historical output of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. What marks the central medieval period is the sheer volume of the works that were produced. In part this can be explained by the events unleashed by the Crusades, by the vicissitudes that took place in Normandy and England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the acquisition of the kings of Germany of the imperial title, and the development of urban communes in Italy and elsewhere. In addition to these external factors, men and women in this period seemed genuinely interested in recording and exploring their individual and collective experiences. Although medieval historians were not attempting to be objective in any modern sense of the word, they were on the whole committed to gathering as much material as they could from available written and oral sources, carefully distinguishing between what they considered to be reliable and what they did not. William of Malmesbury wrote, for example, in his Deeds of the Kings of the English: ‘Incited by different motives both Normans and English have written of William [the Conqueror]. The former have praised him to excess, alike extolling to the utmost his good and his bad actions, while the latter out of national hatred have laden their conqueror with undeserved reproach. For my part as the blood of each people flows in my veins I shall steer a middle course.. .’.' What separates them from their modern counterparts was their conviction that it was their duty to assess their material not just within their immediate context but also within the much wider framework of their view of unfolding salvific* history, from the Creation to their own age, which they placed before the second coming of Christ and the Last Judgment. Closely linked to these considerations, which were replete with theological overtones, was the fundamental belief that one of the purposes of recording events of the past was to impart lessons in morality to their readers.
Early in our period, Sigebert of Gembloux in present-day Belgium (d. 1112) produced a chronicle that reached 1111. An important model
The Normans in Europe, ed. and trans. E. Van Houts (Manchester, 2000), 164-5.
For this kind of writing was the world chronicle by Eusebius (d. 340). Sigebert started his own chronicle in 381, the year after the ending of the Latin translation by Jerome (d. 420) of Eusebius’ Greek Chronicle and Canons. For the period before his own day he abbreviated the texts of a great many sources, including the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede (d. 735). Sigebert was very widely read and taken as the starting point by numerous later chroniclers. On a more local level, William of Jumieges produced the Gesta Normannorum Ducum (‘History of the Dukes of Normandy’) between 1060 and 1070. His work absorbed earlier work, notably the eulogistic History of the Dukes of the Normans by Dudo of Saint-Quentin (completed by c.1015); his own work was continued by Orderic Vitalis (i075-c. ii42) and Robert of Torigni (writing 1139-1154). As a whole, the Gesta are an important source for the history of Normandy and after 1066 of England until the death of King Henry I in 1135.
Orderic Vitalis was chief among the historians of Normandy, one of the most productive regions for the writing of history. His history of his own monastery, Saint-Evroult, quickly turned into a history of the Normans in general before ending up as a universal ecclesiastical history. His Ecclesiastical History contains much valuable information for the history of Normandy, England, and France, which Orderic had gathered from many different sources between c.1110 and c.1142. He informed his readers what he had recorded on the basis of firsthand knowledge. The lengthy work closes with an epilogue in which Orderic put the details of his own life within the context of his faith: ‘And so, a boy of ten, I crossed the English Channel and came into Normandy as an exile, unknown to all, knowing no one. Like Joseph in Egypt, I heard a language which I did not understand.’46 The well-researched Deeds of the Kings of the English and the Historia Novella (‘Modern History’) by William of Malmesbury (c.1090-c.1142) were meant to start where Bede had left off. They give an account of the kings of England from the immigration of the Anglo-Saxons to 1142. William’s explicit purpose was to edify his readers by the examples he gave in his text; he was widely read. Of the defeated English, William, for example, says: ‘Drinking in parties was a universal practice in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days. They consumed their whole substance in mean and despicable houses unlike the Normans and the French who in noble and splendid mansions live in frugality. The vices attendant on drunkenness which enervate the human mind followed.’3 Other important Anglo-Norman historians were Henry of Huntingdon (1109-1155), William of Newburgh (d. 1198), and Roger of Howden (d. 1201/2). Geoffrey of Monmouth’s (c.1100-1155) very successful, and very fanciful, History of the Kings of Britain advanced the idea of a Christian Arthurian Britain that boasted Trojan origins (see below, p. 170). In Norman Sicily the Liber de Regno Siciliae (‘Book about the Kingdom of Sicily’) provides intriguing information about court life from the death of Roger II in 1154 until 1168/9. The author must have been a courtier; much later he was assigned the fictitious name of Hugo Falcandus. The work of another kind of courtier came from the pen of Galbert of Bruges. Galbert was a notary of the count of Flanders at Bruges and gives an eyewitness account of the tumultuous happenings following the murder of Charles the Good in 1127 in the shape of a diary (see pp. 42-3). The Murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders provides a remarkable insight into the political and social changes that took place in twelfth-century Flanders. Whether or not it was a true diary, it is the only such work we have of this period.
In the thirteenth century the monastery of Saint Albans was a centre for English historical writing. Roger of Wendover (d. 1236) composed his Flowers of History, which are especially informative for the period 1214-36, for which Roger gathered his own evidence, including a text of Magna Carta. Matthew Paris (c.1200-59) took over from Roger at his death. Matthew quoted documents at length and collected some 350 of them in an appendix. He also provided illustrations to his text. This approach did not, however, save the work from Matthew’s many careless errors, deliberate inaccuracies, and embellishments. He betrayed his Benedictine bias in his frequent attacks on Dominican and Franciscan friars. In France the Abbey of Saint-Denis collected documentation and produced historical writing in support of the Capetian kings, many of whom were buried there. The Life of Louis VI by Suger (1081-1151) is an early example. Others such as Rigord (c.1145/50-1207) and Primat (fl. 1244-77) continued the tradition. Primat set in train the adaptation of these individual Latin
The Normans in Europe, ed. Van Houts, 169.
Histories and others into a multilayered vernacular compilation of French history known as the Grandes chroniques, which in its final redaction would go up to 1461.
In the German Empire we encounter Otto of Freising (c. m2-u58), who was in a prime position to gather material as the grandson of Emperor Henry IV and the half-brother of Conrad III with whom he went on the Second Crusade. Otto joined the Cistercian Order after having enjoyed a Parisian education. He became bishop of Freising in 1138. Otto’s greatest work is The Two Cities. Writing in the vein of Augustine’s City of God he aimed to write universal history from a theoretical point of view. To his mind, Augustine’s two cities, the earthly city and the City of God, had become one city at the time of Constantine or Theodosius. This was the city of Christ, which he calls ecclesia (church); a mixed city, based on collaboration between empire and priesthood, a collaborative enterprise, which the struggle between King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII threatened to undermine (see Chapter 4). In a biblical vein, Otto saw the end of the world as the culmination of earthly history, which would span four universal empires and which was marked by transfers from one empire to the next, from Babylon in the East to start off with to Rome in the West at the end. Latterly the Roman Empire had moved from the Franks (with Charlemagne) to the Lombards (with the tenth-century kings of Italy) and, finally, to the Germans (with the Ottonians, Salians, and, most recently, the Hohenstaufen). Otto drew a stark contrast between human sinfulness and the hope of Heaven. His intimate knowledge of the conflict between the empire and the papacy and the problems within the German Empire seem to have fed his gloom. The final book of The Two Cities set out Otto’s vision of heavenly Jerusalem. His Deeds of Frederick I were more positive, in which he set off the accession to the throne of Frederick Barbarossa (1152) against the problematic years of Henry IV in the previous century.
William of Tyre was born in Jerusalem around 1130 and studied liberal arts and theology in Paris and Orleans and law in Bologna before returning to the kingdom of Jerusalem, where he became archbishop of Tyre in 1175. He died in 1186. His history of the crusades (History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea) gives invaluable information about that kingdom. He blamed Christian spiritual laxity and sin for the downturn in the fortunes of the Crusader Kingdom. Good examples of histories of the crusades that glorify the deeds of the Franks are The History of the Crusades by Fulcher of Chartres (d. 1127), The Deeds of God through the French by Guibert of Nogent (d. c.1125), and The History of the Crusade of Louis VII by Odo of Deuil (d. c.1162). Nor were accounts of the crusades written by Latin Christians alone. Byzantine reactions can be found in Anna Comnena’s Alexiad (1140s) and Niketas Choniates’ O City of Byzantium (written after 1204; see above, pp. 16-17); there were also a number of important Muslim sources. Three fascinating Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade were composed before 1150. They relate the persecutions of the Jews by the armies of the so-called popular crusade in the Rhineland in the spring and summer of 1096 and contain vivid, hair-raising accounts of Jewish self-martyrdom to preserve their own Jewish identity and that of their communities. Blending history with liturgy, the chronicles beg many questions concerning their historical accuracy. Did so many Jews martyr themselves? Do the chronicles accurately portray the martyrdoms as they occurred? Whatever the case may be, the chronicles forcefully portray human beings acting in the way they believe God intended them to, in order positively to affect the course of history.
Town chronicles reflected the burgeoning civic pride of developing communes of the period. An excellent example of this is Caffaro’s history of Genoa. Caffaro (1080/1-1166) was involved in the formation of the Genoese commune and frequently served as consul. He started his history as a private enterprise, but it became official when he handed it over to the consuls of Genoa in 1152. A copy was made and placed in the archives of the town. With the help of Caffaro, material was added until 1163. The work was carried on after Caffaro’s death until 1293. Town histories were also produced in Milan and Pisa from the middle of the twelfth century. Arnold fitzThedmar, alderman of Bridgeward, is probably the author of The Chronicle of the Mayors and Sheriffs of London, which was written between 1258 and 1272. This work does not just provide information on the City of London and its neighbouring abbey. It also touches on German affairs on account of the fact that Richard of Cornwall was elected king of Germany in 1257 (see Chapter 3).
Finally two thirteenth-century world chronicles need to be mentioned because of their enormous popularity. The first is the Speculum Historiale (‘Historical Mirror’) of Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), a vast historical encyclopaedia of the world until around 1250, consisting of extracts of a myriad of works. The second is The Chronicle of Popes and Emperors of Martin the Pole of Silesia (d. 1279), which was hugely popular in Germany.
The biography of Louis IX (St Louis, d. 1270) by Jean de Joinville (1224(?)-1317), which was written in French, should be added to the various royal biographies mentioned earlier. It mixed hagiography with analysis of the king’s politics and exciting descriptions of his foreign adventures. Joinville made much use of the personal knowledge he had of the king, with whom he had been on crusade. His work also tells us a fair amount about himself. Autobiographies were a particularly important innovation of our period. The late-classical model for this was Augustine’s Confessions. They reflect the period’s genuine interest in the development of human beings, albeit within specific frameworks, established by communal and religious expectations. A good example is On Temptations, the work of Othlo of Saint Emmeran (C.1010-C.1079), work in which he movingly wrote about his struggles with religious doubt. Guibert of Nogent’s autobiography reveals a very troubled old-fashioned monk’s prejudices against the remarkable economic and social changes he was witnessing in northern France. Peter Abelard recorded his version of the controversial events shaping his career in his long letter Historia Calamitatum (‘The Story of [Abelard’s] Adversities’). The letters Heloise wrote in response reveal the burning love she had for her former husband. The Opusculum de Conversione Sua (‘Short Account of his own Conversion’) by Herman the Jew, which was composed around 1150, describes the tortuous path of the Jew David of Cologne to the baptismal font. Although some scholars have questioned its authenticity, most accept it as a post factum account of a real conversion. An exceptional, and exceptionally important, work of autobiography is the chronicle of King James I of Aragon-Catalonia (1213-76), which was written in Catalan, not Latin, and which describes from the king’s viewpoint the Catalan conquest of Majorca (1229) and of Valencia (1238).
Obviously the previous examples can only give a glimpse of the historical output between 1000 and 1300. But they reveal a keen interest in human affairs that is such an important hallmark of the period. The increased use of the vernacular by historians prompts us to look more closely at processes by which a literate vernacular culture came into its own in this period.
World History
