Despite its origins in Greek historical thought, Roman historiography was in many ways more like Chinese than Greek historiography. The Romans lacked the speculative interests of the Greeks, and their historians made little effort to propound grand or even middle-range theories. This is one reason why they were content for so long with the annalistic form. The Romans of the republic had scarcely less regard for their ancestors than the Chinese did, and both believed that histories should propound moral lessons. Indeed, this was one of the Roman legacies to medieval Christian historiography. Medieval historiography The early Christian conception of history
The earliest Christians thought that history was about to end, because Jesus had said that some of his disciples would still be alive at his Second Coming. Fired with such apocalyptic expectations, all they needed to know of history was that God had broken into it through the Incarnation and that Jesus had conquered death through the Resurrection. Thus, it was hardly inevitable that Christians would develop an interest in history, much less their own philosophy of history. But the authors of the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) regarded the Hebrew Bible as authoritative and reinterpreted it to accord with the new revelation. In their view many prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures referred to Jesus, and many of its stories prefigured his life (thus, Jonah’s three-day sojourn in the belly of the great fish was a foreshadowing of the Resurrection).
St. Mark, illuminated manuscript page from the Gospel Book of the Court school of Charlemagne, c. 810; in the Statsbibliothek, Trier, Ger. Stadtbibliothek, Trier, Ger.
Incorporation of the Hebrew Bible into the Christian canon helped to shape the Christian conception of history. By tracing their history to Adam and Eve and the other figures who preceded Abraham, Christians encompassed all of humanity within their worldview. Reflecting the influence of the Hebrew prophets, the early Christians held that sins were inevitably followed by divine punishment and that the plot of history was the unfolding of God’s will for humanity. Disasters represented punishment for sins; prosperity indicated divine favour to faithful humans. Thus, nothing could happen that could not be explained by the providential interpretation of history.
Nevertheless, the idea of providence did not instantly solve all historical problems, some of which were peculiar to Christianity. In particular, what was the place of the Roman Empire in the divine plan? For almost three centuries Christians provoked in Roman authorities puzzlement, exasperation, and intermittent persecution. For their part, Christians treated the empire as at best irrelevant and at worst (as in the Revelation to John) as one of the beasts of the apocalypse. But with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312, Christian historians had to come to terms with the historical significance of a Christian emperor. The challenge was met by Eusebius, whose Historia ecclesiastica (written 312–324; Ecclesiastical History) was the first important work of Christian history since the Acts of the Apostles. For Eusebius, the Roman Empire was the divinely appointed and necessary milieu for the propagation of the Christian faith. Roman peace and Roman roads allowed the Apostle Paul to travel tens of thousands of miles on his evangelical journeys, and now Constantine had been appointed to end the persecution of Christians. Augustine
The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 posed a severe challenge to Eusebius’s interpretation of history. The most famous response was the monumental De civitate Dei contra paganos (413–426/427; City of God) of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine was forced to confront the argument that the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome had led to the downfall of the empire. His rebuttal dissolved the identity of empire and Christianity. Humanity was composed of two cities, inextricably mixed: the earthly, built on self-love, and the heavenly, animated by the love of God. Only at the Last Judgment would the two be separated. Whatever human glory (or disaster) might attend the earthly city paled in significance compared to the denouement awaiting the heavenly city. Although this vast work (Isidore of Sevilla [c. 560–636] said that anyone who claimed to have read all of it was lying) had great influence, especially in periodizing history, it offered little help to historians who wished to write about the affairs of the earthly city.
The issue of periodization was vital. Augustine divided history into six ages, comparable to the six ages of the individual human life span: from Adam and Eve to the biblical Flood, from the Flood to Abraham, from Abraham to King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile, from the Exile to Jesus, and from Jesus to the Second Coming. Augustine’s disciple Paulus Orosius complicated this scheme by introducing apocalyptic material from the Book of Daniel, which was construed as prophesying four kingdoms, the last of which was the Roman Empire. The end of this kingdom would be the end of the world. Early Germanic and English histories
The fall of the Roman Empire actually resulted from the successful attempt of Germanic peoples to occupy its lands and enjoy its benefits. Goths, Lombards, Franks, and other Germanic peoples carved out new kingdoms from the moribund Western empire and adopted its traditions and even its identity. Yet there were difficulties in fitting the Germanic invaders into this pattern. They were nonliterate and preserved their memories of the past orally in heroic poems such as Beowulf. Historical writing was almost all done by clerics, in Latin. Gregory of Tours (538/539–594), for example, wrote Ten Books of Histories, a history of the Franks from the perspective of the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy, and St. Bede the Venerable (672/673–735) composed the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People). For both authors, the invaders, once converted to orthodox (Roman) Christianity, were instrumental in repressing heresy: the Franks opposed Arianism (which held that Christ was not divine but created), and the Anglo-Saxons suppressed the irregular practices of the Celtic church. Chronicles and hagiographies
Although Gregory and Bede wrote histories, early medieval historiography typically took one of two other forms: chronicles and hagiographies, or lives of saints. The spare nature of the earliest chronicles is illustrated by the following excerpt from the chronicle of St. Gall monastery in Switzerland:
720 Charles fought against the Saxons.
721 Theudo drove the Saxons out of Aquitaine.
722 Great crops.
723 724 No entries.
725 Saracens came for the first time.
726 727 728 729 730 No entries.
731 Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.
732 Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.
Even this rudimentary example, however, exhibits typical characteristics of early medieval chronicles. Only events—human deeds and natural prodigies—are listed. There is no effort to show any causal relationship between them—its style is what rhetoricians call “paratactic” (typically, clauses are simply connected by “and”) rather than “hypotactic” (when subordinate conjunctions such as “since” or “therefore” show some sort of relationship between clauses). Although history is presented only in terms of human actions, the absence of causal language makes agency appear limited. Bizarre occurrences in nature are included merely as oddities. For the early medieval chroniclers, the cosmos was bound up in a network of resemblances: bestiaries praised animals for their quasi-human virtues (e.g., elephants for chastity and bees for industry) and plants owed healing powers to their likeness to parts of the body (walnuts were eaten for disorders of the brain). It was therefore significant when fountains oozed blood or clouds assumed symbolic shapes, since they were indications of the divine will.