Medieval Annals

The terms "annals," "chronicle" and "history" are to a certain extent interchangeable, as Tacitus demonstrated around the beginning of the 2nd century AD, by calling one of his major historical works the Historia, and the other one the Annales -- or perhaps it was someone else who gave the titles to Tacitus' works, I don't actually know for sure. 

While conceding, therefore, that all three terms have been applied to any and all types of historical writing, for the purpose of this blog post, I am using the term "annal" to refer only to that form of Medieval historical writing, within the Catholic/Latin sphere, in which the entries are all labelled by year, in which a typical year's entry might contain as little as a sentence or two -- a king or prince is born or dies, or the Emperor rides to Constance to celebrate Christmas, a comet is seen, famine and/or drought is suffered locally -- or a year might not be entered at all, and in which the entry for a year rarely exceed a page in a modern octavio edition. There is typically not more than one entry per year, but it is clear that sometimes the entry for a past year has later been revised or added to. The language is usually Latin. In the 12th century, French and Italian began to appear in some annals. The only early non-Latin annal of which I am aware is the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which began in the 9th century. But it should be kept in mind that this was just one annal among many Latin annals made in England. Medieval writing in Catholic lands was, overwhelmingly, Latin writing. 

 

If some reader happens to know the precise boundaries between annals, chronicles and histories, and wishes to assist my readers and damn my astounding ignorance upon this point, I, of course, would be delighted.

While ancient Latin and Greek histories had each been the work of one author, who signed his work, an annal could have many different contributors. Some Medieval authors wrote histories in the style of ancient authors. These were usually members of the clergy, but their works were treated differently than the annals of the monasteries. Whether they were humble monks or Popes, whether they stayed in one abbey or traveled widely, their names, in most of the cases I know, were never hidden from us: Gregory of Tours, the venerable Bede, William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris and so forth.

Sometimes the authors of some parts of the annals are known to modern scholars, sometimes they have conjectures as to authorship, and often the authors are unknown. The style of the Latin prose could be quite good, and helpful in identifying its author, or it could be quite ordinary. The annal as a whole was thought of as the product of a monastery or cathedral, in England, France, or Germany, while in Italy some cities also maintained their own annals. An annal may represent as much as several centuries' worth of history recorded on behalf of a particular religious institution or city, and, unsurprisingly, events of local significance are given greater weight than they might be in histories which strive for universal relevance. On the one hand, this may seems to lend to annals a more trivial nature compared to histories. However, the modern historian, while recognizing in the famous Medieval historians forerunners in his own genre, may often make much more day-to-day use of the anonymous annalist, precisely because of the abundance of detailed local information.

Many of the Medieval annals, along with chronicles, histories, letters, decrees, laws, etc, etc, of Medieval Germany and surrounding countries, are collected in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH); Italian annals are among the works collected in the Rerum Italicorum Scriptorum; and British annals are among the Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages (Rolls Series). And there are many more Medieval Latin annals, from Iberia, from Scandinavia, from the Catholic Slavic lands, in other collections. Still more annals from all across Latin Medieval Europe can be found in scholarly journals. And some are still only in manuscripts, still await edition and publication.

Some of the Primary Latin Sources for the Crusades from 1095 to 1187

Eyewitness and contemporary accounts of the Crusades in the period from Pope Urban II's speech at Clermont in 1095 which launched the First Crusade, to the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, were written in many languages including Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew, Persian, Armenian, Georgian and Slavonic. The western European Crusaders themselves, and their compatriots, wrote in several languages besides Latin, most notably French, but also German and others.

In this essay I'm confining myself to a few items written in Latin, and there are many other significant Latin sources which could be named besides the ones I'll mention. To get a sense of the primary sources available for the study of the Crusades, one place to begin would be the bibliographies in the three volumes of Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, and I repeat, that would be one place to begin. It has now been more than 65 years since Runciman published his account, and scholarship has by no means stood still in the meantime.

The Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum was written by an anonymous soldier serving under Bohemond of Taranto in the First Crusade. It begins with Pope Urban's speech in Clermont and concludes shortly after the Crusaders take Jerusalem in 1099. Some of the author's contemporaries derided him as a commoner and simpleton, which didn't stop them from using his account as a basis for their own, and seldom actually improving upon it factually.

Raymond of Aguilers became the Chaplain of Raymond of Toulouse during the First Crusade, and was also present at the taking of Jerusalem. His account, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Jerusalem, while filling out some details of the First Crusade, concentrates mostly on Raymond.

Fulcher of Chartres was the chaplain of Baldwin of Boulogne, who entered Jerusalem soon after it fell and became King Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Fulcher published the Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium in three parts, in 1101, 1006 and 1127.

Three near-contemporary historians of the First Crusade, Ekkehard of Aura, Rudolph of Caen and Albert of Aix, did not participate in in it. Ekkehard and Rudolph arrived in the East years after Jerusalem was taken, and wrote accounts which did not add much to the record. Albert never was in the in the Holy Land. Around 1130 he published his account of the First Crusade and of the first years of the Kingdom Jerusalem, Liber Christianae expeditionis pro ereptione, emundatione, et restitutione sanctae Hierosolymitanae ecclesiae, which until the modern era was much admired for its prose style and considered authoritative. Modern scholars have found that Albert, although admirably energetic in bringing together numerous sources, was not particularly critical of them.

William of Tyre was born in the East shortly before 1130, and was Archbishop of Tyre from 1175 until his death in 1186. William relies heavily of Fulcher's account for events between 1095 and 1127; from there until it ends in 1184, his Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum is the most important Latin account of the events in the Holy Land, and -- by far -- the finest Latin work written by anyone who lived in the Crusader states. William has a breadth of vision, education and writing skill which rival those of any other Medieval Latin historian.

A brief anonymous account entitled Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum describes how Saladin conquered Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.

Monumenta Moguntina

I got this thick volume sitting before me now years ago on Amazon. It was advertised as "Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicum by Philippus Jaffe," and this cover was shown on the Amazon page:

If the publisher who had reprinted this from a download they found somewhere on the Internet, stuck it between covers and put it for sale on Amazon, had had any idea what it was, they might have added "vol 3" to the cover, or "tomus tertius," as it says between the covers, which is Latin for "vol 3," and they might even have added "Monumenta Moguntina," which is the actual title of this particular volume. Not to mention choosing a cover which had some relation to the contents of the volume.

When I got this volume I didn't know what "Moguntina" meant either. "Monumenta" in the title of a volume like this, I knew that meant historical records. So "Moguntina" must be the genitive of whatever these written records were about. Back then I bought a few volumes from Amazon without knowing what they were, just hoping that their contents would be Latin like their titles. It turns out that Mogontiacum is the original name of the German city now known as Mainz, and that Moguntina is the genitive of Mogontiacum. The Romans founded Mogontiacum as an army base in 13 or 12 BC. Many German and Austrian cities along the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers were originally Roman military bases. Those rivers were the frontier of the Roman Republic and Empire, or very close to the frontier, for a very long time. Centuries. Gradually the bases grew into towns. After the Roman Empire had ceased to exist in the region, the towns remained, and often grew into big cities like Mainz.

So, I learned after obtaining this volume, a certain Philipp Jaffe had put together a series of volumes of Medieval German writings and called it Bibliotheca Rerum Germanica, and the third of these volumes had to do with Medieval Mainz, and in particular with two 8th-century Archbishops of Mainz, St Boniface and St Lullus. Almost half of the volume, nearly 300 pages, consists of letters from and to the two sainted Archbishops. The rest of the volume, if you were to judge solely on the basis of the number of pages, would seem to consist of afterthoughts, of whatever other Medieval documents relating to the history of Medieval Mainz Philipp Jaffe could find: many letters by and from other Medieval residents of Mainz; several biographies -- hagiographies -- of St Boniface, various lives of other local saints.

Boniface was born in England around Ad 675, was a leading figure in the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Franks -- that is to say, he had a lot to do with the dangerous business of trying to convert 8th-century pagan Germanic tribes to Christianity, beyond the borders of the Franks, who were already Christians -- and he was martyred in 754.

Boniface is well-known today, and takes up so much room in this volume lying before me, in part, quite simply because the volume of his surviving writing, and contemporary or near-contemporary writing about him, is unusually large, compared to the records left by other 8th-century Western Europeans, or by other residents of Mainz during the entire Medieval era. He's also of interest as a part of the rise of the Frankish Kingdom, which, a few centuries after Boniface's death, during the reign of Charlemagne, became the Medieval Western Empire. The unusual volume of writing by and about him make his life an unusually well-illuminated episode in the Dark Ages.

The Middle Ages

To Catholic apologists, they were the good old days,



between a bloodthirsty and spiritually empty ancient Graeco-Roman world and a modern West which has "lost its way." I don't know how anyone who is not a Catholic who really believes that Jesus Christ is the salvation of the world and that the Pope is his represenative on Earth, that is to say: a particularly conservative Catholic, can have studied the Middle Ages and come to such a positive assessment of them. To these apologists, such as Thomas F Madden, the fact that ancient civilization was not yet Catholic means that it was "bloodthirsty and spiritually empty," and our world today has "lost its way" because it is no longer monolithically Catholic. And the Crusaders were knights in shining armor on white horses saving damsels from the clutches of the minions of Satan.

Perhaps the academic study of the Middle Ages has usually been dominated by such idiotic notions, and the work of Gibbon and Runciman,



with its attempt at a somewhat higher level of realism, is an anomaly amid the academic study of the Middle Ages as a whole. After all, Medieval Europe is Catholic Europe, and it shouldn't be surprising if scholars with strong pre-dispositions to regard Catholicism favorably dominate the field. It's actually hard to find people who have specialized in the study of Medieval Europe who haven't taken potshots at Gibbon and Runciman, although they generally begin by acknowledging that both of them wrote very well. If they didn't acknowledge at least that much, they'd seem even more ridiculous to even more people than they already do. If you interested in the reactions of medieval historians in general to Gibbon and Runciman, look at the indexes of volumes on subjects to do with medieval history for references to the two of them. I daresay that few of those references will completely lack some harsh criticism, but that they will almost all lack actual specific treatments of specific passages in Gibbon or Runciman; in other words, you will read that Gibbon and/or Runciman has distorted this or that aspect of the Medieval world in a way completely unfair to Catholic Christianity, but you will not be given examples of how either one of them distorted what is in the the primary texts or in other evidence. for instance, you will not be shown evidence to refute what Runciman says about Armenian and Syriac Christians saying they were better off being ruled by Muslims than by either Orthodox Greeks or Catholic Crusaders. Which is what the primary documents record them as saying. You will not be shown refutations of what Gibbon and Runciman wrote about the Crusaders often having been much less than heroes on white knights. Because the two of them wrote such things not because of anti-Catholic axes they were grinding, but because that's what the evidence shows.

As I mentioned in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post, alternative history is not history, but fiction. So when the apologists say that the Catholic Church gave us universities and science, implying that without the Church things would have been much worse, they're not writing history, but fiction. And we would also be writing fiction if we replied that if so and so had been different, then this and that would have resulted. That's all alternative-reality fiction. If we really want to discuss history, we must stick as closely as possible to what we know.

Yes, universities sprang up in Medieval Europe beginning in the 12th century. But ancient schools, from Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, down to the most modest of institutions, were all closed down by the Christian authorities by the 6th century. Because they were "heathen," dontcha know. So should we see the Church as an institution which promoted learning, or one which restricted literacy for six centuries almost exclusively to its clergy? Well, it did restrict literacy in exactly that way. Literacy rates went down when the Christians took over, and did not begin to rise again for hundreds of years. I think a sober and realistic study must conclude that scholarship survived in Western Europe despite Christianity, rather than flourishing with its help.

Take a specific sub-set of learning, my special favorite, the ancient Classics. Catholic apologists love to point out that almost all of the texts of the ancient Latin classics which we now possess have survived because they were copied out by Catholic monks. And they're right, we have very few manuscripts of those texts which are exception to that rule: a few very old manuscripts copied out by "pagans" before the Christians wiped out "paganism;" and then some manuscripts made by non-monks in the early Renaissance before printing replaced handwriting as the dominant means of preserving these old texts.

But in addition to the Classical texts which Catholic monks preserved, many works of Classical literature disappeared during the Middle Ages. For every Medieval Catholic clergyman who was an enthusiastic fan of the ancients, it's easy to identify several who were ignorant of the Classics or even condemned them as wicked. A very poignant and much more concrete demonstration of how Medieval Europe destroyed the ancient Classics instead of preserving them are the many palimpsests of Classical texts discovered since the 18th century: Classical texts which were scraped off of pieces of parchment and written over with Christian texts. Modern science has allowed us to recover some of these ancient texts by reading the indentations they left in the parchment. There are few leading Classical authors who didn't write works we know of only by mentions in surviving texts, which went missing in the Middle Ages. Very many of the surviving works have survived with large gaps. There are very many ancient Greek and Latin authors who were very well thought of by their contemporaries, whom we know only by the praise of those contemporaries. We have no idea how many works of classical antiquity are now lost because Church authorities ordered them to be destroyed, how many because they were scraped away to make room for other writing, or how many because worn out parchments were used as fuel in stoves or two stuff furniture or to make book bindings or for some other purpose other than preserving the ancient texts. And until and unless we learn much more about how those texts were lost, we should be reserved in our praise of the Medieval clergy for saving what they did.

But the largest reservation I have about praising the Medieval world for its promotion of culture and learning comes from how intolerant it was. In pre-Christian Europe, one could openly express skepticism of all religions. In the Medieval world one was compelled, as least as far as public statements were concerned, to reject all religions but one and to believe in that one. The ancient Greeks and Romans didn't kill people for philosophical speculations. It wasn't dangerous to assert that the Earth orbited the Sun and not vice-versa. Galileo was threatened with torture and confined to his house for the last years of his life, not for rejecting Christianity -- he didn't -- and not for questioning whether Jesus was the savior of the world -- he never did any such thing -- and not for questioning the authority of the Pope -- he didn't do that either. He was threatened with torture and confined to his house for the last years of his life for looking through a telescope and writing about what he saw. It never would have occurred to any pre-Christian Greek or Roman to punish anyone for something like that. That drastic restriction of freedom of expression is the biggest reason I have to be disinclined to think of the Medieval world as having been wonderful.

But yes, the cathedrals and the Byzantine mosaics and other Medieval artworks are very beautiful.

Things Which Existed In the 13th Century But Not In The 9th

Crossbows. Rockets. Maybe guns, and maybe not; they existed by the 1320's. Spurs. Trebuchets.

Eyeglasses. Sunglasses. Mirrors.

Widespread use of written vernaculars in Europe. Near-total eradication of "pagans" in Europe. The Inquisition.

Universities in Bologna, Padua, Naples, Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca and Paris.

Paper. Paper mills. Vertical windmills. Wheelbarrows. Horizontal looms. Spinning wheels. Wine presses. The adding of hops to beer.

The dry compass. The astronomical compass. The stern-mounted rudder.

Chimneys.

Possibly mechanical clocks. They were around by the early 14th century.

Kings of England, of the Germans, of Poland, Denmark, Portugal.

Gothic architecture, a "King of Jerusalem" and a whole other host of changes brought to Europe by the Crusades.

A separation between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.