MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 219 which is still talked of, but is not deeply felt, or at least felt with the energy that the words would wish us to believe, the words themselves often sounding like a refrain, as pious as it is conventional. The miraculous gradually fills less and less space and appears more rarely: God acts more willingly by means of secondary causes, and respects natural laws; He rarely intervenes directly in a revolutionary manner. The form of the chronicles, too, becomes also less accidental and arid, the better among the chroniclers here and there seeking a different * order ' — that is to say, really, a better under- standing— and we find (particularly from the thirteenth century onward) the ordo artificialis or internal opposed to the ordo naturalis or external chronological order. There are also to be found those who distinguish between the sub singulis annis describere and the sub stilo historico conglutinare — that is to say, the grouping together according to things described. The general aspect of historiography changes not a little. Limiting ourselves to Italian historiography alone, there are no longer little books upon the miracles and the translations of the bodies of saints and bishops, but chronicles of communes, all of them full of affection for the feudal superiors or for the archbishop, for the imperial or the anti-imperial side, for Milan or for Bergamo, or for Lodi. The sense of tragedy, which weighed so heavily upon Erchempertus, returns with new and stronger accents in the narrative of the deeds of Barbarossa at Milan, entitled Libellus tristitia et dokris, angustia et tribulationiS) passionum et tormentorum. Love for one's city usurps much of the space previously devoted to things celestial, and praises of Milan, of Bergamo, of Venice, of Amalfi, of Naples, resound in the pages of their chroniclers. Thus those vast chronicles are 220 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY reached which, although they begin with the Tower | of Babel, yet lead to the history of that city or of that j event which makes the strongest appeal to the feelings and best stimulates the industry of the writer, and become mingled with the persons and things of the present or future life. Giovanni Villani, a pilgrim to Rome to cele- j brate the papal jubilee, is not inspired with the ascetic spirit or raised to heaven by that solemn spectacle; but, on the contrary, " since he finds himself in the holy city of Rome on that blessed pilgrimage, inspecting its great and ancient possessions, and reading the histories and the great deeds of the Romans," he is inspired to compose the history of his native Fiorenza, " daughter and creation of Rome " (of ancient Rome prior to Christianity). His Fiorenza resembled Rome in its rise to greatness and its following after great things, and was like Rome in its fall. Thus the * holy ' and the ' blessed ' do not lead him to holy and blessed thoughts, but to thoughts of worldly greatness. To the historio- graphy of the communes answers the more seriously worldly, the more formally and historically elaborated historiography of the Norman and Suabian kingdom of Sicily. In the proem to its Constitutiones sovereigns are declared to be instituted ipsa rerum necessitate cogente, nee minus divine provisionis instinctu; with its Romualdo Guarna, its Abbot Telesino, its Malaterra, its Hugo Falcando and Pietro da Eboli, its Riccardo da San Germano, with the pseudo-Jamsilla, and Saba Mala- spina. All of these have their heroes, Roger and William the Normans, Frederick and Manfred the Suabians, and what they praise in them is the sound political basis which they knew how to establish and to main- tain with a firm hand. Eo tempore, says Falcando of Roger, Regnum Sialic, strenuis et pr<eclaris viris abundans, MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 221 cum terra marique plurimum posset, vicinis circumquoque gentibus terrorem incusserat, summaque pace ac tranquillitate maxima fruebatur. And the so-called Jamsilla, of Frederick II: Fir fuit magni cordis, sed magnanitatem suam multa, qua in eo fuit, sapientia super avit, ut nequaquam impetus eum ad aliquid faciendum impeller et, ; sed ad omnia cum rationis maturitate procederet;...utpote qui philosophise studiosus erat quam et ipse in se coluit, et in regno suo prop agar e ordinavit. Tunc quidem ipsius felici tempore in regno Sicili<e erant litterati pauci vel nulli; ipse vero imperator liberalium artium et omnis approbate scientia scholas in regno ipso con- '■■'■• stituit...ut omnis conditionis et fortune homines nullius occasione indigentia a philosophic studio retraherentur.
'■• The state, profane culture, * philosophy/ impersonated . in the heresiarch Frederick, are thus set in clear relief.
K And while on the one hand more and more laical theories of the state become joined to these political and cultural ■"> currents (from Dante, indeed from Thomas Aquinas, to Marsilio of Padua), and the first outlines of literary ::: history (lives of the poets and of men famous for their knowledge, and the rise of vernacular literatures) and •: histories of manners (as in certain passages in Rico- • baldo of Ferrara), on the other hand scholasticism l: found its way to such problems and conceptions by :: means of the works of Aristotle, which represented as \: it were a first brief summary of ancient knowledge.
& It is unnecessary to say that Dante's poem is the chief t monument of this condition of spirit, where the ideas Df the Middle Ages are maintained, but the political, ; poetical, and philosophical affections, the love of fame :■ ind of glory, prove their vigour, although subordinated to those ideas and restrained, as far as possible, by :hem.
222 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY But those ideas are nevertheless maintained, even among the imperialists and adversaries of the Church, and it is only in rare spirits that we find a partly sceptical and partly mocking negation of them. Transcendency, the prescience of God, Who ordains, directs, and dis- poses of everything according to His will, bestows rewards and punishments, and intervenes mysteriously, always maintains its place in the distant background, in Dante as in Giovanni Villani, as in all the historians and chroniclers. Toward the close of the fifteenth century the theological conception makes a curious appearance in the French historian Comines, arm in arm with the most alert and unprejudiced policy of success at all costs. Worldliness, so rich, so various, and so complex, was yet without an ideal standard of comparison, and for this reason it was rather lived than thought, showing itself rather in richness of detail than systematically. The ancient elements of culture, which had passed from Aristotelianism into scholasticism, failed to act powerfully, because that part of Aristotelianism was particularly selected which was in harmony with Christian thought already translated into Platonic terms and dogmatized in a transcendental form by the fathers of the Church. Hence it has even been possible to note a pause in historiographical interest, where scholasticism has prevailed, a compendium of the type of that of Martin Polonus being held sufficient to serve the end of quotations for demonstration or for legal purposes. What was required upon entering a new period of progress (there is always progress, but ' periods of progress * are those in which the motion of the spirit seems to become accelerated and the fruit that has been growing ripe for centuries is rapidly plucked) was a direct conscious negation of transcendency and of MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY 223 Christian miracle, of ascesis and of eschatology, both in life and in thought; a negation whose terms (heavenly and earthly life) had certainly been noted by medieval historiography, but had been allowed to endure and to progress, the one beside the other, without true and proper contact and conflict arising between them.
: IV THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE THE negation of Christian transcendency was the work of the age of the Renaissance, when, to employ the expression used by Fueter, historiography became * secularized.1 In the histories of Leonardo Bruni and of Bracciolini, who gave the first conspicuous examples of the new attitude of his- toriographical thought, and in all others of the same sort which followed them — among them those of Machiavelli and of Guicciardini shine forth con- spicuously— we find hardly any trace of * miracles.' These are recorded solely with the intention of mocking at them and of explaining them in an altogether human manner. An acute analysis of individual characters and interests is substituted for the intervention of divine providence and the actions of the popes, and religious strifes themselves are apt to be interpreted according to utilitarian passions and solely with an eye to their political bearing. The scheme of the four monarchies with the advent of Antichrist connected with it is allowed to disappear; histories are now narrated ab inclinatione imperii^ and even universal histories, like the Enneads of Sabellicus, do not adhere to traditional ecclesiastical tradition. Chronicles of the world, universal miraculous histories, both theological and apocalyptic, become the literature of the people. and of those with little culture, or persist in countries of backward culture, such as Germany at that time, or finally are limited to the circle THE RENAISSANCE 225 of Catholic or Protestant confessional historiography, both of, which retain so much of the Middle Ages, the Protestant perhaps more than the Catholic (at least at a first glance), for the latter contrived at least here and there to temporize and to accommodate itself to the times. All this is shown very clearly and minutely by Fueter, and I shall now proceed to take certain observations and some information from his book, which I shall rearrange and complete with some more of my own. In the political historiography of the late Middle Ages, the theological conception had been, as we have said, thrown into the background; but hence- forward it is not to be found even there, and if at times we hear its formulas, they are just like those of the Crusade against the Turks, preaching the liberation of the tomb of Christ. These were still repeated by preachers, writers of verse, and rhetoricians (and con- tinued to be repeated for three centuries), but they i found no response in political reality and in the con- science of the people, because they were but empty sound. Nor was the negation of theologism and the secularization of history accomplished only in prac- tice, unaccompanied with complete consciousness; for, although many minds really did turn in the direction indicated by fate, or in other words by the new mental necessity, and although the polemic was not always open, but on the contrary often surrounded with many precautions, evidence abounds of the agreement of the practice with the theory of historiography. The criticism of so grave a theorist of history as Bodin is opposed to the scheme of the four monarchies. He makes it his object to combat the inveteratum err or em de quattuor imperils^ proving that the notion was capriciously taken from the dream of Daniel, and that 226 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY it in no way corresponded with the real course of events. It would be superfluous to record here the celebrated epigrams of Machiavelli and of Guicciardini, who satirized theology and miracles. Guicciardini noted that all religions have boasted of miracles, and there- fore they are not proofs of any one of them, and are perhaps nothing but "secrets of nature." He advised his readers never to say that God had aided so-and-so because he was good and had made so-and-so suffer because he was wicked, for we "often see the opposite," and the counsels of divine providence are in fact an abyss. Paolo Sarpi, although he admits that "it is a pious and religious thought to attribute the disposition of every event to divine providence," yet holds it "pre- sumption " to determine " to what end events are directed by that highest wisdom"; for men, being emotionally attached to their opinions, "are persuaded that they are as much loved and favoured by God as by themselves." Hence, for example, they argued that God had caused Zwingli and Hecolampadius to die almost at the same time, in order that he might punish and remove the ministers of discord, whereas it is certain that "after the death of these two, the evangelical cantons have made greater progress in the doctrine that they received from both of them." Such a disposition of religious and cautious spirits is yet more significant than that of the radical and impetuous, openly irreverent, in the same way as the new importance attributed to history is notable in the increase of historiographical labour that is then everywhere noticeable, and in the formation of a true and proper philological school, not only for antiquity, but for the Middle Ages (Valla, Flavio Biondo, Calchi, Sigonio, Beato Renano, etc.), which publishes and restores texts, criticizes the authenticity and the THE RENAISSANCE 227 value of sources, is occupied with the establishment of a technical method of examining witnesses, and composes learned histories.
Nothing is more natural than that the new form of historiography should seem to be a return to Graeco- Roman antiquity, as Christianity had seemed to be a return to the story of Eden (the interlude of paganism having been brought to an end by the redemption), or that the Middle Ages should still seem to some to-day to be a falling back into barbarous pre-Hellenic times. The illusion of the return was expressed in the cult of classical antiquity, and in all those mani- festations, literary, artistic, moral, and customary, familiar to those who know the Renaissance. In the special field with which we are at present occupied, we find a curious document in support of the difficulty that philologists and critics experienced in persuading themselves that the Greek and Roman writers had perhaps been able to deceive themselves, to lie, to falsify, to be led astray by passions and blinded by ignorance, in the same way as those of the Middle Ages. Thus the latter were severely criticized while the former were reverenced and accepted, for it needed much time and labour to attain to an equal mental freedom regarding the ancients, and the criticism of texts and of sources was developed in respect to medieval history long before it attained to a like freedom in respect to ancient history. But the greatest proof and monument of the illusion of the return was the formation of the humanistic type of historiography, opposed to the medieval. This had been chiefly confined to the form of chronicle and humanistic historiography, although it accepted the arrangement by years and seasons according to the examples set by the Greeks and Romans, cancelled as 228 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY far as possible numerical indications, and exerted itself to run on unbrokenly, without chronological cuts and cross-cuts. Latin had become barbarous in the Middle Ages and had accepted the vocabularies of vulgar tongues, or those which designated new things in a new way, whereas the humanistic historiographers trans- lated and disguised every thought and every narrative in Ciceronian Latin, or at least Latin of the Golden Age. We frequently find picturesque anecdotes in the medieval chronicles, and humanism, while it restored its dignity to history, deprived it of that picturesque element, or attenuated and polished it as it had done the things and customs of the barbaric centuries. This humanistic type of historiography, like the new philological erudi- tion and criticism and the whole movement of the Renaissance, was Italian work, and in Italy histories in the vulgar tongue were soon modelled upon it, which found in the latinized prose of Boccaccio an instrument well suited to their ends. From Italy it was diffused among other countries, and as always happens when an industry is transplanted into virgin soil, and work- men and technical experts are invited to come from the country of its origin, so the first humanistic historians of the other parts of Europe were Italians. Paolo Emilio the Veronese, who Gallis condidit historias, gave the French the humanistic history of France in his De rebus gestis Francorum, and Polydore Virgil did the like for England, Lucio Marineo for Spain, and many others for other countries, until indigenous experts appeared and the aid of Italians became unnecessary. Later on it became necessary to throw off this cloak, which was too loose or too tight — indeed, was not cut to the model of modern thought. What there was in it of artificial, of swollen, of false, was blamed — these THE RENAISSANCE 229 defects being indeed clearly indicated in the construc- tive principle of this literary form, which was that of imitation. But anyone with a feeling for the past will enjoy that historical humanistic prose as the expression of love for antiquity and of the desire to rise to its level. This love and this desire were so keen that they had no hesitation in reproducing things external and indifferent in addition to what was better and sometimes in default of it. Giambattista Vico, sometimes so sublimely puerile, is still found lamenting, three centuries after the creation of humanistic historiography, that " no sovereign has been found into whose mind has entered the thought of preserving for ever in the best Latin style a record of the famous War of the Spanish Succession, than which a greater has never happened in the world since the Second Carthaginian War, that of Caesar with Pompey, and of Alexander with Darius/* But what of this? Quite recently, during the war in Tripoli, came the proposal from the depths of one of the meridional provinces of Italy, one of those little countrysides where the shadow of a humanist still exists, that a Latin commentary should be composed upon that war entitled De hello libico. This proposal was received with much laughter and made even me smile, yet the smile was accompanied with a sort of tender emotion, when I recalled how long and devotedly our fathers and forefathers had pursued the ideal of a beautiful antiquity and of a decorous historiography.
Nevertheless, the belief in the effectivity or possi- bility of such a return was, as we have said, an illusion; nothing of what has been returns, nothing of what has been can be abolished; even when we return to an old thought the new adversary makes the defence new and the thought itself new. I read some time 230 HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY ago the work of a learned French Catholic. While clearing the Middle Ages of certain absurd accusations and confuting errors commonly circulated about them, he maintained that the Middle Ages are the truly modern time, modern with the eternal modernity of the true, and that therefore they should not be called the Middle Ages, which term should be applied to the period that has elapsed between the fifteenth century and our own day, between the Reformation and positivism. As I read, I reflected that such a theory is the worthy pendant to that other theory, which places the Middle Ages beneath antiquity, and that both had some time ago shown themselves false to historical thought, which knows nothing of returns, but knows that the Middle Ages preserved antiquity deep in its heart as the Renaissance preserved the Middle Ages. And what is * humanism ' but a renewed formula of that * humanity \ of which the ancient world knew little or nothing, and which Christianity and the Middle Ages had so pro- foundly felt? What is the word c renaissance ' or ' renewal ' but a metaphor taken from the language of religion? And setting aside the word, is not the con- ception of humanism perhaps the affirmation of a spiritual