In the 12th century, Europeans took an avid interest in the Arabic translations and commentaries on Greek medical, mathematical, and, especially, philosophical works. By the time of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), this interest had waned, and his work would influence only later European historians. The idea of history as a new science, however, would have a long career, beginning with some historians of the Renaissance.
The nature, origins, and even existence of the Renaissance has been subject to intensive investigation since the early 20th century. The term has been applied to cultural movements in the 9th and 12th centuries, and medieval precedents have been identified for developments that were previously thought to be unique to the Renaissance. This is as true for historiography as for any other aspect of Renaissance culture; but while the differences between the Renaissance and the earlier Middle Ages may have been exaggerated, they do exist. Nobody could mistake a historian such as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) for Matthew Paris (died 1259). Petrarch
Although he was not exactly a historian, the Italian scholar and poet Petrarch (1304–74) illustrates much that was distinctive about the Renaissance attitude toward history. If not the first to coin the term Middle Ages, he consistently held that his own age (subsequently to be called the Renaissance) had made a decisive break with the 10 centuries that followed the decline of the Roman Empire. His true contemporaries, he thought, were the historians and poets of Rome’s Golden Age (c. 70 bce–18 ce), to whom he addressed a series of letters, Epistolae metricae (begun 1350). The letter to Livy expresses Plutarch’s wish that he had been born in Livy’s time or Livy in his; thanks him for transporting Petrarch into the company of the worthies of ancient Rome instead of “the thievish company of today among whom I was born under an evil star”; and concludes: “Farewell forever, matchless historian!…Written…in the thirteen hundred and fiftieth year from the birth of Him whom you would have seen, or of whose birth you could have heard, had you lived a little longer.”
Petrarch, engraving.© Ancient Art & Architecture Collection
Medieval historians knew that Livy and the poet Ovid were not Christians (though they sometimes described people hearing mass before the birth of Jesus). Yet, in general they had little understanding of the radical differences between their society and that of the Romans. They conceived of Hector and Achilles as knights like Roland or Lancelot, depicting them in full medieval armour. Petrarch, at least, had an appreciation of the discontinuity between past and present, as well as a painful sense of his own anachronism. For him, all aspects of a culture were in constant change. Petrarch also exhibited an antiquarian interest that would eventually enrich the study of history. He attempted, for example, to reconstruct imaginatively what early Rome looked like. Lorenzo Valla
Renaissance humanists were above all philologists, rhetoricians, and editors and emulators of the texts of Latin (and later Greek) antiquity. One of their triumphs was the demonstration by Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) that the so-called Donation of Constantine could not have been authentic. This document had been suspect, on various grounds, for centuries; Valla’s argument was distinguished by his proof that its Latin style and diction belonged to the 8th century and not the 4th. With similar philological arguments Petrarch discredited a charter exempting Austria from imperial jurisdiction. Two other famous documents, the Isidorian Decretals (also known as the False Decretals) and the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, eventually earned the prefix pseudo through Renaissance scholarship. Flavio Biondo and Leonardo Bruni
Antiquarians such as Petrarch were interested in all sorts of relics of the past, material objects as well as texts—an interest that eventually led to social and economic history and even to “everyday history” and “history from below.” In his works on Roman antiquities Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) virtually founded the field of archaeology. His Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii decades (“Decades of History From the Deterioration of the Roman Empire”), for example, introduced the concept of the decline of the Roman Empire and the idea of the Middle Ages as the period from 410 to 1410. In addition, he used the new textual criticism to eliminate many legends that had been accepted as facts in previous histories.
Biondo, FlavioFlavio Biondo, portrait from Paulus Jovius's Elogia, 1517.© Chronicle/Alamy
Biondo, however, was not what his contemporaries called a “pure historian.” The model of pure history was the Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII (“Twelve Books of Histories of the Florentine People”), by Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444). Although Bruni owed much to the chronicles kept by the Italian cities, he drew extensively from ancient historians and, having learned Greek, was one of the first Europeans since ancient times to read Thucydides. Bruni was greatly influenced by Livy, who provided the paradigmatic account of how a city is founded and becomes great. Bruni scrupulously (though not slavishly) followed Livy’s example in his emphasis on politics—he found nothing worth relating for the year 1348, when the Black Death first struck Florence—and on individual character as the cause of historical actions. He also restricted himself to the vocabulary that Livy used or could have used.
Bruni’s central theme was the people of Florence. His history followed a strong narrative line that described the rise to power of the Florentines and their victory in their war against Milan, which Bruni believed was made possible by republican virtue, or civic humanism. That same pride continued to animate other Florentine historians, even the apparently cynical Machiavelli. Niccolò Machiavelli
Whereas Bruni had written at the apex of Florentine power, Machiavelli’s public career was marked by the desperate situation created by what he called “the calamity”: the invasion of Italy first by the French in 1494 and later by the imperial forces of Charles V in 1527. As a diplomat and later secretary to Florence’s ruling Council of Ten, Machiavelli observed and tried to influence the shifting alliances between the Italian city-states. When the Medici family returned to power and ousted him from office, he turned to reflections on politics and history. In addition to Il principe (1532; The Prince), his most famous work, he wrote the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (1531; Discourses on Livy), the Istorie Fiorentine (1532; Florentine Histories), and Dell’arte della guerra (1521; The Art of War). Machiavelli presented his thoughts on history as “a new route” that would provide instruction to the statesmen of his day by marshaling examples from ancient history. As he writes in the Discourses on Livy,