1. Renaissance and Reformation. The custom of
producing annalistic notes about the chief events in
Florence has been traced to the early part of the
twelfth century. At this time, lists of officers would
be kept, and, as they served to mark the chronology,
the principal happenings would be recorded under the
successive names. At the same time there emerged the
story that Florence had been founded by Caesar after
Fiesole had rebelled and been destroyed. Florence
could claim to have been “Roman” therefore, while
her rival, Fiesole, had been “anti-Roman.” At a time of
patriotic awakening and emergent political conscious-
ness, the municipality remembered its tradition or
created one for itself. Giovanni Villani (ca. 1273-1348)
produced a chronicle still medieval in many ways and
going back to a legendary epoch but rich in informa-
tion about recent times. It acquired a lasting popularity
and influence.
At the opening of the fifteenth century, the city was
in conflict with the Visconti of Milan, and was begin-
ning to conceive itself as defending democratic liberty
against a tyrant. Its citizens now turned from their
admiration of the Roman Empire, and from their for-
mer interpretation of history, though this latter had
been supported by the authority of Dante. They also
began to look for an origin earlier than the supposed
foundation by Caesar, and they discovered it in the
world of free city-states which had preceded the ex-
pansion of Rome. From this time, they construed their
whole history as a story of liberty and took to them-
selves the eulogies once bestowed on Athens, inter-
preting their political life in terms of the ancient Greek
city-state. Humanist scholars, no longer preferring the
contemplative life, became preachers of civic pride and
civic virtues. Leonardo Bruni, the influential writer,
who has been called “the first modern historian,” was
at the heart of this movement. And the revival of
historiography at the Renaissance is connected with
the development of the modern political consciousness.
The long task of recovering the thought and learning
of antiquity was coming now to a climax, and produc-
ing perhaps a general change in man's attitude to the
past. Its objective transcended that of the historian for
it sought not merely to recapture out of antiquarian
zeal but to reinstate for working purposes in a living
world all the higher aspects of a culture that had been
at its peak in classical times. For the new age, antiquity
was beginning to emerge as a world that had an iden-
tity of its own. A modern lay intelligentsia found in
ancient literature something that answered to its own
secular outlook; and the historical narrator began to
dispense with the more obvious machinery of the su-
pernatural—began, indeed, to envisage his task in
something of the ancient spirit. Under the stimulus of
Leonardo Bruni, and primarily in Florence, there
developed a humanist historiography which went too
far in its subservience to antiquity, breaking up the
continuities of narrative and theme by its “annalistic”
method, encouraging artifice by its restriction of vo-
cabulary, and allowing rhetorical affections to carry
it to a conventional kind of theatricality which pre-
vented either the proper portrayal of men or the gen-
uine interpretation of what had happened. The new
historiography performed a political service, however,
for its function in the first place had been partly to
celebrate the glories of Florence and partly to commu-
nicate the desired image of the city of the outside
world. And all this was a thing that any city-state might
covet, so that other governments in Italy, wishing to
produce the same result, employed humanists as official
historians for the purpose in the fifteenth century.
Indeed, between 1450 and the 1530's, Italian humanists
served as something like court historiographers to an
emperor in Germany and to kings in France, England,
Spain, Poland, and Hungary. One of the significant
features of the new historiography was the closeness
of its identification with the new kind of territorial state
that was emerging; and, since this relationship was to
endure, here was a significant moment in the develop-
ment of modern nationalist historiography. At the same
time there had been awakened an interest in the sheer
pastness of things past, a genuine sentiment for the
remnants that had happened to survive. While the ruins
of Rome were still being plundered to provide material
for builders there emerged a great fervor for “antiqui-
ties” which began to show itself in societies, museums,
and imposing publications. In a tremendous drive to
discover new manuscripts, further ancient historical
writings came to light, e.g., in 1455 the Agricola and
Germania of Tacitus, and in 1506 part of the same
writer's Annals. Better manuscripts were secured,
sometimes from Constantinople; and it became partic-
ularly important to have translations into Latin, a great
part of Polybius, for example, in 1473. The invention
of printing and the wider circulation of both ancient
and modern books meant that history henceforward
was to play a much more important part in the de-
velopment of political consciousness and the shaping
of public opinion. At the same time the greater speed
in intercommunications enabled scholarship to de-
velop on a broader international scale.
The whole movement came to its finest blossoming
in a number of cultivated men who in the early decades
of the sixteenth century talked about politics in
Florence and produced historical work of considerable
quality in the vernacular. The troubles of the city had
led to constitutional speculation and to debate about
both the present and the past, which brought history
and politics into a more intimate relationship with one
another. The French invasion of Italy in 1494, the
political downfall of the peninsula during the subse-
quent conflicts, and the defeat of Florentine republi-
canism in 1512 provoked serious thought about the
ups-and-downs of nations, and historians were stimu-
lated somewhat as Thucydides had been by the
Peloponnesian War. The influence of classical Greece
was now most apparent in the attempt to approach
both history and politics in a semi-scientific manner,
to meditate on the processes that take place in states,
and to produce political maxims for the man of action—
indeed to produce narratives that were tingling with
the practical man's concern for policy problems and
the work of decision-making. Now, more definitely
than before, the case for both reading and writing
history was based on its importance in the education
of a statesman.
Niccolò Machiavelli went further than others in his
belief that laws of political action could be elicited
from history and that, for any given contingency, the
ancient Romans were likely to have discovered the
right policy. Though his History of Florence in 1525
escaped some of the limitations of humanist histori-
ography, and in places showed a real ability to see
things in the large—to grasp connections between
events—it makes clear that his interest was not in
research or the establishment of facts.
Francesco Guicciardini had had a longer and more
successful career in politics, and insisted that Machi-
avelli was not sufficiently flexible in his attempts to
apply to modern situations the lessons drawn from the
past. In the last few years of his life both the tragedy
of Italy and his own disillusionments and disap-
pointments brought Guicciardini to a great confronta-
tion with the whole epoch, and his History of Italy
(from 1492 to 1534) is the most impressive Renaissance
achievement in this kind of literature. It is not limited
to Florence but deals with a complicated general
field—a system of interacting states. It set a standard
for sophisticated narrative in what we call political
history. It can almost be regarded as the beginning of
study of diplomatics. Perhaps it sees events a little too
much as the result of contrivance and intrigue on the
part of unscrupulous men. But Guicciardini has turned
out to be more scholarly, more interesting and authen-
tic in his historical methods, than was realized until
the mid-twentieth century.
In the north of Europe, a tremendous zeal for the
past was awakened, and the humanists had an impor-
tant part to play; but here the development started
from a lower cultural level than in Italy. Those who
were now stirred into some consciousness of history
tended to ask the old, universal “stock questions”—How
did nations begin, how did our own nation acquire its
name?—and there emerged the kind of spirit which
had been significant in Florence, the patriotism which,
as it turns to the past, hunts for things to commemorate.
The various countries liked to claim their origin from
the sons of Noah, and sometimes seemed unwilling to
leave a gap in the subsequent succession of generations.
There was a desire to go one better than the Greeks
and Romans in the matter of antiquity, and show that
one's ancestry could be traced through some leader
of the defeated Trojans. All this was particularly strong
in Germany and was accentuated there by the jeal-
ousies which the brilliant Italians of the Renaissance
had provoked; it was manifested also in the determi-
nation to assert, against the French, the German char-
acter of Alsace. The Germans thought to outdo the
Greeks and Romans, claiming an empire more ancient
still, and a prior cultural supremacy.
The fact that it is easy to exaggerate the modernity
of the sixteenth century is illustrated in the case of
England, where the infatuation for King Arthur
reached unprecedented heights and proved enduring.
The accession of the Tudors, the resulting glorification
of Wales, and the acceptance of Henry VII as being
of King Arthur's line—the naming of a Prince of Wales
after this monarch—helped to multiply the manifesta-
tions of the myth in pageantry, in social life, in
antiquarian speculation and in literature. And this was
a King Arthur who was supposed to have defeated the
Roman Empire, conquered most of Europe, and
acquired Norway, Iceland, and Greenland—the King
Arthur described in the twelfth century by Geoffrey
of Monmouth in a work that had not always been
credited even in the Middle Ages. In England the
antiquarian enthusiasts themselves could not forgive
the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil for his reserva-
tions on this subject; and it is remarkable to see how,
down to the end of the century, the more scholarly
historians (including William Camden) hesitated to
attack the prevailing myths. On the contrary, in the
work of Sir John Price in 1573, the skill and the knowl-
edge of the antiquarian operated powerfully in favor
of the myths which still kept their currency in the
seventeenth century. Eyes were fixed, therefore, on the
ancient Britons, and there were some people who said
that they saw no point in studying the Anglo-Saxons.
Some were prepared to insist that Christianity had
been brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea not
long after the Crucifixion. Before the end of the century
it was coming to be held that the English constitution,
the liberties of Englishmen, and the House of Commons
itself went back to the ancient Britons.
In the meantime, the Reformation had led to the
resurgence of religious preoccupations even in regions
where, during the Renaissance, historiography had
become secularized. The upheaval in the Church was
bound to give a stimulus to the study and writing of
history, and the emphasis now placed on the Bible—the
special importance which the Old Testament came to
have—resuscitated in the modern world some of those
things which historiography owed to the ancient
Hebrews. The challenge presented by Martin Luther
to the papacy and to other branches of ecclesiastical
government—indeed to the whole notion of authority
as hitherto understood in the Church—directed atten-
tion to the opinions held in earlier ages, the contro-
versies of the past, the precedents, the traditions of
fifteen hundred years. Such a debate could only lead
sooner or later to the development of ecclesiastical
history and to a closer analysis of actual official docu-
ments. Apart from this, there emerged also a need for
a history of the Reformation itself and the Protestant,
Johannes Sleidanus (1506-56), produced in Germany
in 1555 a documented study of the religious events
of the reign of the Emperor Charles V. He showed
in both his attitude and method the temperament of
a contemporary historian, not a mere polemical writer.
In 1563 John Foxe, greatly developing previous work,
produced what became famous as
The Book of
Martyrs—a study not merely of Protestant sufferings
(involving the use of bishops' registers), but the en-
globing of this within a framework of Church history
—the whole highly polemical, even dishonest in its
use of the sources.
The ecclesiastical issues of the Reformation were
dealt with in a more imposing manner through a co-
operative work directed by Matthias Flacius between
1559 and 1574—the famous Magdeburg Centuries, a
highly documented production, but crude in its parti-
sanship. The real answer to it from the Catholic side
appeared in twelve volumes of Ecclesiastical Annals
(1588-1607) by Cesare Baronius, a cardinal, who used
documents from the Vatican. Gradually these contro-
versies came to serve the cause of criticism, as each
party answered the arguments of the other, and each
came to realize that a vigilant enemy was ready to
expose its mistakes.
But the Reformation affected wider areas of histori-
ography. In England the “historical revisions” of the
sixteenth century produced a remarkable reaction
against Thomas Becket because he had sided with the
pope against his own country. It led to a still more
remarkable adulation of King John, because he was
held to have been victimized by a pope. On all sides,
Protestants were ready to suspect Catholic perversions
and they made a point of attacking the kind of history
that monkish chroniclers had produced. In England,
again, the desire to find a historical basis for the con-
ception of a national church gave a stimulus to Anglo-
Saxon studies, especially in Elizabeth's reign. The
attachment of Luther (and, still more, of Philipp
Melanchthon) to the general study of the past was to
have significant and enduring ecclesiastical effects in
Germany. Once again, the call for “universal history”
came from the side of religion, and this branch of
study—both stimulated and influenced by the reading
of the Old Testament—gained a firm foothold in the
German universities, ancient history forming an im-
portant part of the program. There was a revival of
the system of periodization according to the four
World-Empires—a system abandoned by the human-
ists, but accepted now by the Catholics, so that in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries men were able to
regard it as having been invented by Melanchthon's
friend, John Carion (1499-1537).
