Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 3
Popkin, ch. 2 (40–47) and ch. 3 · the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle · Bede · al-Biruni — then Machiavelli
3.1 is the medieval sources (parts one and two). 3.2 is the early modern turn (part three). Popkin cited by page; the primary sources by book and chapter.
The claim for today
It is very easy to read today’s medieval sources as bad history — credulous, disorganized, superstitious. Resist that for one hour. Each of these writers has a rule about what counts as proof, and each rule is defensible on its own terms. Your job is to state the rule, not to grade it.
Three medieval answers first — a chronicle that only records, a monk for whom miracles are evidence, a Muslim scholar who screens his sources before he starts. Then the 1450s, when a forged document breaks the frame, and Machiavelli turns the past into a toolkit.
Part one · 3.1
Rome falls in the west. Knowledge of Greek disappears, so Herodotus and Thucydides become unreadable. Almost the only people still literate in Latin are clergy — “their ranks would provide almost all of the authors of history for the next several centuries” (p. 41). Two things follow.
Popkin 01 · The verdict Popkin overturns
The Middle Ages “possessed good writers of contemporary narrative,” but they “were careless and impatient of older fact. They became content to be deceived, to live in a twilight of fiction.” Lord Acton, 1895, quoted in Popkin, pp. 40–41
Popkin’s reply is not that Acton was rude but that he mistook a different purpose for a failure. Medieval writers “adapted history to a new framework, dominated by religious belief, but they still saw themselves as serving the cause of truth. Their purpose, however, was to present truths that would convince their readers of appropriate moral and religious lessons” (p. 41).
Popkin quotes the medievalist Walter Goffart on Gregory of Tours, and says it applies to nearly all of them: “Gregory’s goal was pastoral, and contemporary history was his means of persuasion” (p. 41). Swap in any writer from week 2 and ask what their goal was. Nobody in this course is doing history for its own sake.
Acton is measuring them against a purpose they never had. That’s the “ladder” error from week 2, in its most confident voice.
Popkin 02 · The characteristic medieval form
“William Raleigh was elected Bishop of Norwich on 10th April. That horrible race of men known as the Tartars… laid waste Hungary and the neighboring territories. On 18th June Eleanor, queen of England, gave birth to her eldest son Edward.” a typical chronicle entry for 1239, quoted in Popkin, p. 43
Annals record events “in the sequence in which they happened, without any attempt to connect them to each other” (pp. 42–43). No causes, no argument, no narrative arc. Popkin: they “made no attempt to explain the causes of the events they described, leaving it to readers to make sense of them” (p. 43).
These were compiled by the monks of particular monasteries, often over centuries, so they have multiple authors and no single mind behind them. And they are not neutral: “chronicles kept in a particular monastery often reflected the influence of local rulers who protected the institution” (p. 43).
A form with no argument in it is still making one — about what deserves a line at all. Hold that thought for two slides.
Part two · Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 01 · the year 793
“This year dire forwarnings came over the land of the North-humbrians… excessive whirlwinds, and lightnings; and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these tokens; and a little after that… the ravaging of heathen men lamentably destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne through rapine and slaughter. And Siga died on the 8th before the Kalends of March.” Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A. 793 (Giles trans.)
Everything is joined by and. Portents, famine, the sack of Lindisfarne, and one man’s death sit on the same flat list, at the same rank. The chronicle never says the dragons caused anything — but it puts them first, and calls them “forwarnings.” The causal claim is smuggled in by order, which is the one tool the form allows.
This is the Lindisfarne raid — conventionally the start of the Viking age, and the most consequential event in the entry. It gets one clause, no more than Siga. The scale of an event and the space it gets are unrelated here.
“No interpretation” is a style, not an absence. Sequence is an argument.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 02 · what doesn’t get written
“A. 786.” · “A. 807. 808.” · “A. 810. 811.” complete entries, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Obviously a great deal happened in 786. People were born, taxed, robbed, and buried. What the blank means is that nothing happened to the people who counted, of a kind that counted — no king died, no bishop was consecrated, no army moved. The empty year is the clearest statement of the chronicle’s theory of history, precisely because nobody wrote it down.
In 897 the compiler breaks form: the Danish army did not destroy England, but three years of plague did — and he lists the dead thanes by name, adding “and many also besides these, though I have named the most distinguished.” An editorial decision, stated out loud, in a genre that pretends not to make any.
Ask of any archive: what did it never occur to these people to record? That question runs the rest of this course.
Bede 01 · The preface, 731 CE
“For if history relates good things of good men, the attentive hearer is excited to imitate that which is good; or if it recounts evil things of wicked persons… the devout hearer or reader, shunning that which is hurtful and wrong, is the more earnestly fired to perform those things which he knows to be good.” Bede, Ecclesiastical History, Preface
Livy: “from these you may choose… what to imitate, from these mark for avoidance what is shameful.” Bede: imitate the good, shun the wrong. Eight centuries, two religions, one job description. The only thing Bede adds is the last clause — the good is “worthy of the service of God.”
“To the end that I may remove all occasion of doubting what I have written… I will take care briefly to show you from what authors I chiefly learned the same” — and he does, by name, for pages: Albinus, Nothelm (who searched the papal archives in Rome), Bishop Daniel, the brethren of Lindisfarne. Popkin calls Bede “unusual among medieval historians in his scrupulous concern for accuracy and his acknowledgment of his sources” (p. 42).
A named-source apparatus that would satisfy a modern editor — attached to a moral purpose Herodotus would have recognized.
Bede 02 · The martyrdom of St. Alban (I.7)
Alban shelters a fugitive priest, converts, and is condemned. On the way to execution the river dries up to let him pass; his executioner throws down the sword and asks to die with him; and the man who finally strikes the blow has his eyes fall out at the same moment as Alban’s head.
“For it was impossible that the martyr, who had left no water remaining in the river, should desire it on the top of the hill, unless he thought it fitting.” Bede, Ecclesiastical History I.7
This is not credulity. It is reasoning — Bede notices an apparent inconsistency (why be thirsty after drying a river?) and resolves it with a premise about the saint’s intent. The rigor is real; the premises are different.
The chapter ends at the church built on the site, where “the cure of sick persons and the frequent working of wonders cease not to this day.” That is an appeal to present, public, verifiable evidence: go and look. By his own standard, Bede is showing his work.
If God acts in history, miracles are data. The disagreement with us isn’t about evidence — it’s about what exists.
Bede 03 · King Edwin’s council, 627 CE (II.13)
“The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me… like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter… The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another… passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.” an unnamed counsellor, in Bede II.13
The council meets in 627. Bede writes in 731 — over a century later, in a different kingdom, and the speaker is not even named. Nobody transcribed this. Set it beside Thucydides 1.22: make the speakers say what was called for by each situation. Bede does the same thing and, unlike Thucydides, never tells you he is doing it.
The speech makes the conversion look reasonable — a considered decision by thoughtful men weighing an epistemological problem, not a conquest or a royal whim. The other councillor, the priest Coifi, gives a blunter reason: the old gods never made him prosperous. Bede stages a debate and lets the better argument win.
The man with the scrupulous source list also wrote the best scene in his book.
al-Biruni 01 · Kitab al-Hind, after 1017 CE
“No one will deny that in questions of historic authenticity hearsay does not equal eyewitness… Written tradition is one of the species of hearsay — we might almost say the most preferable. How could we know the history of nations but for the everlasting monuments of the pen?” al-Biruni, preface to the Kitab al-Hind (Sachau trans.)
A Persian polymath — astronomer, mathematician — attached to Mahmud of Ghazna’s court, who goes to India in 1017, learns Sanskrit, and reads the sources himself. Popkin explains where the habit comes from: Muslim scholars, “concerned with preserving the precise words of Muhammad… paid unusual attention to the details of how sayings attributed to him had been transmitted” (p. 44). A whole discipline of chain-of-custody, ported to history.
He ranks his evidence, concedes the weakness of his best source (writing is hearsay), and then argues for using it anyway — because eyewitness can only reach “actual momentary existence,” while written tradition reaches the past at all. He is arguing with himself in public, in a preface.
Herodotus showed you the seams. al-Biruni publishes the rulebook before the game.
al-Biruni 02 · The screen and the taxonomy
“The tradition regarding an event that in itself does not contradict either logical or physical laws will invariably depend for its character as true or false upon the character of the reporters.” al-Biruni, Kitab al-Hind, preface
Source criticism applies only to reports that are physically possible in the first place. Anything that breaks natural law never reaches the interview stage. Bede’s drying river would be screened out before al-Biruni asked who told the story. Two devout men, two incompatible rules, roughly three centuries apart.
Five liars: the partisan for his own family or nation; the man under obligation or nursing a grudge; the coward or profiteer; the habitual liar; and — his sharpest — the one who lies “from ignorance, blindly following others who told him.” Strip out the repeaters, he says, and “there remains the originator of the story.” That is a modern citation chase, in 1030.
His hardest case is the one he names himself: bias is hardest to detect when the system you describe is foreign.
The move · Put them side by side
Names every informant. Distinguishes what he read from what he was told. And treats a river parting as a fact with a cause, because in his world it is one.
Declares his biases, ranks his evidence, chases claims to their originator. And rules the miracle inadmissible before asking who reported it.
Not rigor — both are rigorous. Not honesty — both are scrupulous. The difference is a prior claim about what kinds of things can happen. Every evidence standard rests on one of those, including ours, and ours is not visible to us for the same reason Bede’s was not visible to him.
Three centuries later Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) writes the systematic version — errors from “partisanship toward a creed or opinion,” “over-confidence in one’s sources,” “the inability rightly to place an event in its real context,” and the wish to please a patron (p. 44). Popkin calls it “far more probing than anything written in the European west until the era of the Renaissance.” al-Biruni got most of the way there first.
“Medieval” is a period, not a method. Two writers in it disagree more sharply than Herodotus and Thucydides did.
Part three · 3.2
Printing, the Americas, the Reformation, and a revival of the ancient historians all arrive within a century of each other. Popkin’s claim for the period: “many of our tacit assumptions about modern historical thought emerged piecemeal in the scholarly debates of the Renaissance” (p. 50).
The hinge · Lorenzo Valla, 1439–1440
The Donation of Constantine — cited in medieval histories for centuries as proof that the emperor had handed sovereignty over Rome to the Pope in the fourth century. Valla showed it used words and turns of phrase that did not exist when it was supposedly written, and that no source from that period mentions it (Popkin, p. 50).
Nobody had to go anywhere, interview anyone, or witness anything. The document convicted itself. A text now has a date written into its language whether the forger likes it or not — which means evidence can be tested without a witness, and tradition can lose to a philologist.
If Latin changed that much, the present is not a continuation of antiquity. Renaissance historians drop the Biblical “four empires” and invent the scheme we still use — antiquity, a “middle age,” and their own new era (pp. 50–51). The Middle Ages get named by the people who declared them over.
Anachronism becomes a detection tool. That is the beginning of source criticism as we practice it.
Machiavelli 01 · The Prince, 1513
“A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it… like the clever archers who… take aim much higher than the mark.” Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 6 (Marriott trans.)
Imitate. Livy said it; Bede said it. But they wanted you to imitate virtue, and the payoff was a better soul or a better republic. Machiavelli wants you to imitate technique, and the payoff is that you keep your state. Same verb, and the history it produces is unrecognizable.
Bede addressed a king so the king would be good. Machiavelli addresses a prince so the prince will be effective. The audience barely changes; the promise changes completely. Popkin: he and Guicciardini wrote “purely secular narratives that made no pretense of trying to fit events into a divinely ordained plan” (p. 52).
History stops being a mirror for the soul and becomes a manual for the hands.
Machiavelli 02 · What he does with God
“Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like are the most excellent examples. And although one may not discuss Moses, he having been a mere executor of the will of God, yet he ought to be admired…” Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 6
He declines to discuss Moses — and then puts him in a list with three mythical founders and analyzes all four by the same criteria. He even concludes the others “will not be found inferior to those of Moses, although he had so great a preceptor.” Divine backing is noted, bracketed, and made irrelevant to the analysis.
“All armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed… it is necessary to take such measures that, when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force.” Prophecy is re-described as a persuasion problem with a logistics solution. Bede would not recognize this as an account of anything.
The Greeks fired the gods as causes. Machiavelli keeps them on stage and fires them as explanations — which is ruder.
Machiavelli 03 · How an example is used
Cesare Borgia installs a “swift and cruel man” to pacify the Romagna, then has him cut in two and left in the piazza at Cesena “with the block and a bloody knife at his side.” The result: the people were “at once satisfied and dismayed.”
Rose to rule Syracuse by massacring the senate. Machiavelli grants his courage and “greatness of mind” — then rules that “such methods may gain empire, but not glory.”
Cruelties are “properly used” when “applied at one blow… and not persisted in”; badly used when they “multiply with time.” “Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.” The criterion is timing, not justice.
Compare Livy on Lucretia. Livy’s dead body founds a republic and teaches you what to be. Machiavelli’s dead body is a demonstration of a repeatable technique: transfer the blame, stage the punishment, harvest the relief. The anecdote is not an emblem. It is a worked example.
He is not amoral about history. He has swapped the moral scale for an engineering one.
The reversal · Two readers of the same Rome
A citizen who reads the Republic’s past and becomes worthier of it — history as a monument you choose examples from, so that the state deserves to survive.
A prince who reads the same Republic and learns what worked — so that the state survives, whether or not it deserves to.
Machiavelli was Livy’s most devoted reader — he wrote a whole book of commentaries on him (1517), and Popkin notes that Livy’s “meditations on the fall of the Roman republic” had special force in Florence after 1494 (p. 52). The same text, read closely by an admirer, yields the opposite lesson. That is Carr’s point about the historian, aimed now at the reader.
“The past is useful” is not one position. It splits the moment you ask useful for what, and to whom.
The rest of Popkin ch. 3 · threads we pick back up
Historians could finally compare sources — and “formal systems of censorship, which had not existed in the Middle Ages,” arrived with them.
His Dictionary catalogued so many errors it raised “doubts as to whether any dependable knowledge of the past was possible.”
No single test proves a document; a trained scholar comparing many features of many documents can still judge. “Still echoed in the training professional historians receive.”
“A historical document like any other, written by men” — which opens the road to the Enlightenment, and next week.
Recap · what to carry out of today
“Gregory’s goal was pastoral, and contemporary history was his means of persuasion.”
The chronicle claims to only record. Order, rank, and the empty years do the arguing.
Bede reasons about the miracle. The rigor is real; the premise about the world is different.
al-Biruni tests reporters — but only for events that don’t break physical law. Every method has a prior.
Valla needs no witness. Language carries its own date, so tradition can now lose to evidence.
Livy and Bede say virtue. Machiavelli says technique. Same verb, opposite discipline.
Discussion · 3.1 + 3.2
Write the annal for this year in the Chronicle’s style — four events, no causes, no explanation, joined by “and.” Then hand it to someone and ask what they think you believed. You will find you argued anyway.