Al-Ṭabarī and Rashīd al-Dīn

The greatest early Islamic historian, al-Ṭabarī (839–923), was reputed to have memorized the Qurʾān at the age of seven. Legend credited him with producing a 30,000-page commentary on the Qurʾān and an equally long universal history (both survive but are only one-tenth as long). His chief virtues as a historian were his accurate chronology and his scrupulous faithfulness in reproducing authorities. Like Christian annalists, he depended on the Hebrew Bible (as interpreted by Islam), though the world he inhabited was basically Egypt and Muslim Asia rather than Western Christendom. The Persian scholar Rashīd al-Dīn (1247–1318) composed a more truly universal history, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh (“Collector of Chronicles”), which covered not only the Islamic world (which by then extended from Spain to northern India) but also included data on the popes and emperors of Europe and on Mongolia and China.

Ibn Khaldūn

The sophistication of Islamic historical thought was dramatically illustrated by the Muqaddimah (“Introduction”) of the Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406). This introductory volume of a universal history reveals Khaldūn’s ideas about history—something chroniclers hardly ever did. The subjects Khaldūn considered in his work include historical method, geography, culture, economics, public finance, population, society and state, religion and politics, and the social context of knowledge. Khaldūn held high office and was often exiled or imprisoned. Late in his life he had the opportunity to discuss history with the Mongol emperor Timur the Lame, who was besieging Damascus. Timur wrote his own memoirs, and he was evidently interested not only in what Khaldūn knew about North Africa but also in his philosophy of history.

Khaldūn lived with the Bedouins of North Africa and in the sophisticated Muslim cities of Granada and Cairo. These experiences were the source of one of his main ideas: that humans first lived in Bedouin tribes and then achieved civilization, but civilization became decadent with increasing wealth and luxury. No dynasty or civilization, he believed, could maintain vitality for more than four generations (though the only example he gives is the decline of the Israelites after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph). Khaldūn contrasted his writing with “surface history,” which was “no more than information about political events” and was used to “entertain large, crowded gatherings.” Historians of his day, he thought, were too credulous in accepting tradition. As for their frequent moralizing about the misconduct of certain caliphs, Khaldūn asserted that people like to justify their own misconduct by looking in histories for examples of the great who have done the same things. To reach the “inner meaning” of history, the historian had to be “speculative” and give “subtle explanations” of causes. To accomplish this, history had to be rooted in philosophy—or, as Khaldūn said of his own work, it had to be a new and original science.

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.”

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, 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.