The oxford history of historical writing volume 2 400–1400

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is the fi rst collective scholarly survey of the history of historical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time... Dan

H IS TOR IC A L W R I T I NG

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a fi ve-volume, multi-authored arly survey of the history of historical writing across the globe It is a chronologi-cal history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with considerable attention paid to different global traditions and their points of comparison with Western historiography Each volume covers a particular period, with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodi-zation, and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, refl ect-ing both the greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in

schol-historical activity around the world since the nineteenth century The Oxford History of Historical Writing is the fi rst collective scholarly survey of the history of historical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time Volume 1: Beginnings to ad 600

Daniel Woolf general editor

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

volume 2: 400–1400

Sarah Foot and Chase F Robinson

volume editors Ian Hesketh assistant editor

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,

United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

© Oxford University Press 2012 Editorial matter © Sarah Foot and Chase F Robinson 2012 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

First published 2012 Impression: 1 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available ISBN 978–0–19–923642–8 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

generous fi nancial support provided by the Offi ces of the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at the University of Alberta from 2005 to 2009 and subsequently by Queen’s

University, Kingston, Ontario

The Oxford History of Historical Writing has itself been the product of several

years of work and many hands and voices As general editor, it is my pleasure to acknowledge a number of these here First and foremost, to the volume editors, without whom there would have been no series I am very grateful for their willingness to sign on, and for their fl exibility in pursuing their own vision for their piece of the story while acknowledging the need for some common goals and unity of editorial practices The Advisory Board, many of whose members were subsequently roped into either editorship or authorship, have given freely

of their time and wisdom At Oxford University Press, former commissioning editor Ruth Parr encouraged the series proposal and marshalled it through the readership and approvals process After her departure, my colleagues and

I enjoyed able help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the managerial level and, editorially, from Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Matthew Cotton, and Stephanie Ireland I must also thank the OUP production team and Carol Carnegie in particular

The series would not have been possible without the considerable fi nancial support from the two institutions I worked at over the project’s lifespan At the University of Alberta, where I worked from 2002 to mid-2009, the project was generously funded by the Offi ces of the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) I am especially grateful to Gary Kachanoski and Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offi ces, who saw the project’s potential The funding they provided enabled me to hire a series of project assistants, to involve graduate students in the work, and to defray some of the costs of publica-tion such as images and maps It permitted the acquisition of computer equip-ment and also of a signifi cant number of books to supplement the fi ne library resources at Alberta Perhaps most importantly, it also made the crucial Edmonton conference happen At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where I moved into a senior leadership role in 2009, funding was provided to push the project over the ‘fi nish-line’, to transfer the research library, and in particular to retain the services of an outstanding research associate, Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh

I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s meticulous attention to detail, and his ability ruthlessly to cut through excess prose (including on occasion my own) in order

to ensure that volumes maintained editorial uniformity internally and together with other volumes, not least because the volumes are not all being published at once A series of able graduate students have served as project assistants, includ-ing especially Tanya Henderson, Matthew Neufeld, Carolyn Salomons, Tereasa Maillie, and Sarah Waurechen, the last of whom almost single-handedly organ-ized the complex logistics of the Edmonton conference Among the others on

whom the project has depended I have to thank the Offi ce of the Dean of Arts and Science for providing project space at Queen’s University, and the Department

of History and Classics at Alberta Melanie Marvin at Alberta and Christine Berga at Queen’s have assisted in the management of the research accounts, as has Julie Gordon-Woolf, my spouse (and herself a former research administrator), whose advice on this front is only a small part of the support she has provided

Daniel Woolf , General Editor

Half a century ago, Oxford University Press published a series of volumes entitled

Historical Writing on the Peoples of Asia Consisting of four volumes devoted to

East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and based on ences held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

confer-in the late 1950s, that series has aged surprisconfer-ingly well; many of the confer-individual essays are still being cited in our own day The books were also remarkably ahead

of their time since the history of historical writing was at that time fi rmly stood as being the history of a European genre Indeed, the subject of the history

under-of history was itself barely a subject—typical surveys under-of the early to eth century by the likes of James Westfall Thompson and Harry Elmer Barnes, following Eduard Fueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie [History of Modern Historiography], were written by master historians survey-ing their discipline and its origins The Oxford series provided some much needed perspective, though it was not followed up for many years, and more recent sur-veys in the last two or three decades of the twentieth century have continued to speak of historiography as if it were an entirely Western invention or practice Since the late 1990s a number of works have been published that challenge the Eurocentrism of the history of history, as well as its inherent teleology We can now view the European historiographic venture against the larger canvas of many parallel and—a fact often overlooked—interconnected traditions of writing or speaking about the past from Asia, the Americas, and Africa

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is conceived in this spirit It seeks to

provide the fi rst collective scholarly history of historical writing to span the globe

It salutes its great predecessor of half a century ago, but very deliberately seeks neither to imitate nor to replace it For one thing, the fi ve volumes collectively include Europe, the Americas, and Africa, together with Asia; for another, the division among these volumes is chronological, rather than by region We decided

on the former because the history of non-European historical writing should, no more than that of its European counterpart, be viewed in isolation We chose the latter in order to provide what amounts to a cumulative narrative (albeit with well over a hundred different voices), and in order to facilitate comparison and contrast between regions within a broad time period

A few caveats that apply to the entire series are in order First, while the series

as a whole will describe historical writing from earliest times to the present, each individual volume is also intended to stand on its own as a study of a particular

period in the history of historical writing These periods shrink in duration as they approach the present, both because of the obvious increase in extant materi-als and known authors, but also because of the expansion of subject matter to a fully global reach (the Americas, for instance, do not feature at all in volume 1; non-Muslim Africa appears in neither volume 1 nor volume 2) Second, while the volumes share a common goal and are the product of several years of dialogue both within and between its fi ve editorial teams and the general editor, there has been no attempt to impose a common organizational structure on each volume

In fact, quite the opposite course has been pursued: individual editorial teams have been selected because of complementary expertise, and encouraged to ‘go their own way’ in selecting topics and envisioning the shapes of their volumes—with the sole overriding provision that each volume had to be global in ambition Third, and perhaps most importantly, this series is emphatically neither an ency-

clopedia nor a dictionary A multi-volume work that attempted to deal with every

national tradition (much less mention every historian) would easily spread from

fi ve to fi fty volumes, and in fact not accomplish the ends that the editors seek We have had to be selective, not comprehensive, and while every effort has been made to balance coverage and provide representation from all regions of the world, there are undeniable gaps The reader who wishes to fi nd out something

about a particular country or topic not included in the OHHW ’s more than 150 chapters can search elsewhere, in particular in a number of reference books which have appeared in the past fi fteen or so years, some of which have global range Our volumes are of course indexed, but we have deemed a cumulative index an ineffi cient and redundant use of space Similarly, each individual essay offers a highly selective bibliography, intended to point the way to further reading (and where appropriate listing key sources from the period or topic under discussion

in that chapter) In order to assist readers with limited knowledge of particular regions’ or nations’ political and social contexts, certain chapters have included a timeline of major events, though this has not been deemed necessary in every case While there are (with one or two exceptions) no essays devoted to a single

‘great historian’, many historians from Sima Qian and Herodotus to the present are mentioned; rather than eat up space in essays with dates of birth and death, these have been consolidated in each volume’s index

Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are sary in any series that aims for coherence, if not uniformity Towards that end, a number of steps were built into the process of producing this series from the very beginning Maximum advantage was taken of the Internet: not only were schol-ars encouraged to communicate with one another within and across volumes, but draft essays were posted on the project’s website for commentary and review by other authors A climactic conference, convened at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada in September 2008, brought most of the editors and just over half the authors together, physically, for an energizing and exciting two days during which matters of editorial detail and also content and substance were

neces-discussed A major ‘value-added’, we think, of both conference and series, is that

it has introduced to one another scholars who normally work in separate national and chronological fi elds, in order to pursue a common interest in the history of historical writing in unique and unprecedented ways As the series’ general editor,

it is my hope that these connections will survive the end of the project and duce further collaborative work in the future

Several key decisions came out of the Edmonton conference, among the most important of which was to permit chronological overlap, while avoiding unnecessary repetition of topics The chronological divisions of the volumes—with calendri-cal years used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and

‘Renaissance’—remain somewhat arbitrary Thus volume 1, on antiquity, ends about ad 600 prior to the advent of Islam, but overlaps with its successor, vol-ume 2, on what in the West were the late antique and medieval centuries, and in China (the other major tradition of historical writing that features in every vol-ume), the period from the Tang through the early Ming dynasties Volumes 4 and 5 have a similar overlap in the years around the Second World War While

1945 is a sensible boundary for some subjects, it is much less useful for others—in China, again, 1949 is the major watershed Certain topics, such as the Annales School, are not usefully split at 1945 A further change pertained to the denota-tion of years bc and ad ; here, we reversed an early decision to use bce and ce , on the grounds that both are equally Eurocentric forms; bc / ad have at least been adopted by international practice, notwithstanding their Christian European origins

It became rather apparent in Edmonton that we were in fact dealing with two sets of two volumes each (vols 1/2 and 4/5), with volume 3 serving in some ways

as a bridge between them, straddling the centuries from about 1400 to about 1800—what in the West is usually considered the ‘early modern’ era A further decision, in order to keep the volumes reasonably affordable, was to use illustra-tions very selectively, and only where a substantive reason for their inclusion could be advanced, for instance in dealing with Latin American pictographic forms of commemorating the past There are no decorative portraits of famous historians, and that too is appropriate in a project that eschews the history of historiography conceived of as a parade of stars—whether Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern—from Thucydides to Toynbee

The present volume, though chronologically the second of fi ve in the series, is last to be published The editors, Professors Sarah Foot and Chase Robinson, respectively scholars of early medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East, have assembled contributions from specialists in a number of regions of the world spanning the millennium from 400 to 1400 As they note in their introduction, periodization (always a challenge in projects of global scope) is especially compli-cated during this very long era (which is one reason why this volume overlaps in its early centuries with ground covered by volume 1 and, in some chapters, stretches at the other end into the time scale of volume 3) The centuries covered

here witnessed the bureaucratization of an already old Chinese tradition of historical writing under the Tang dynasty, and further signifi cant innovation under the Song and Yuan near the end of the period; it also saw the adaptation of Chinese historiography by nearby East and Southeast Asian countries, in particu-lar Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; an additional infl uence throughout the region was Buddhism, imported from India and Sri Lanka Elsewhere, the seventh and eighth centuries saw the emergence and rapid expansion of Islam, and with it an especially vigorous tradition of historical writing in Arabic, Persian, and other languages In Europe, with Christendom divided between Greek East and Latin West, late antiquity gave rise to a host of new genres, beginning with the works

of the great ‘barbarian’ historians of the sixth to eighth centuries, new universal and church histories, continuing with the ‘gesta’ or deeds of kings, emperors, and powerful ecclesiastical fi gures, and ending with the urban chronicles that start to appear, along with the towns whose social and economic life they refl ect, in the thirteenth century Throughout the millennium migration, war, and trade con-tributed to the spread, limited though it may have been, of one culture’s historical forms elsewhere This happened, for instance, in the adaptation of Chinese his-torical forms, rooted in Confucianism, elsewhere in East Asia, and in the dissemi-nation of Islamic historical writing outside its Middle Eastern birthplace, eventually reaching as far afi eld as Southeast Asia The number of languages used

in extant historical writing remained quite limited in much of the world, though the use of vernacular tongues, once quite sporadic, increased in the last quarter

of the millennium In rare cases, the conqueror would adopt both the language and the historiography of the vanquished, as happened during the short-lived tenure of the Mongol Yuan dynasty over China

Professors Foot and Robinson note that this is a millennium through most of which ‘peoples’ rather than ‘nations’ are (along with religions and royal, imperial

or aristocratic dynasties) the more meaningful unit around which historians organized their writings With a geographic range as broad as that in volume 1, the chapters begin in the Far East with China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Japan and thence travel westward, embracing India, Islam, and Byzantium, ending in Western Europe thereby (as is the case in volume 3) explicitly de-centreing the privileged European historiographical achievement The later chapters of the book adopt either a topical or a genre-based approach, exploring forms of histori-cal writing from the local to the universal, from the court-centred to the religious;

in some cases they offer explicit comparisons among historiographical traditions often studied separately, for instance those of Western or Eastern Christendom and Islam (where contacts were more regular than, say, between Europe and East Asia) Collectively, the authors of this book have illuminated both the familiar and the more obscure corners of the historiographical corpus bequeathed to us by

an age which we in the modern West have by long tradition called ‘medieval’—this in itself being a term that has limited application once one leaves the confi nes

of Christian Europe for the east

NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

Non-Roman alphabets and writing systems have been routinely transliterated using the standard systems for each language (for instance, Chinese using the Pinyin system) For the transliteration of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac we

have followed the rules set out by the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Non-English book titles are normally followed (except where meaning is obvious) by a translated title, within square brackets, and in roman rather than italic face, unless a specifi c, published English translation is listed, in which case the bracketed title will also be in italics

List of Maps xviii

Notes on the Contributors xix

Advisory Board xxiii

Editors’ Introduction 1

Sarah Foot and Chase F Robinson

PART I: THE TRADITIONS OF HISTORICAL WRITING, 400–1400

1 The Growth of Historical Method in Tang China 17

Charles Hartman and Anthony DeBlasi

2 Chinese Historiography in the Age of Maturity, 960–1368 37

Charles Hartman

3 The Birth and Flowering of Japanese Historiography: From Chronicles to Tales to Historical Interpretation 58

John R Bentley

4 Indian Historical Writing, c 600– c 1400 80

Daud Ali

5 Kingship, Time, and Space: Historiography in Southeast Asia 102

John K Whitmore

6 The Tradition of Historical Writing in Korea 119

Remco Breuker , Grace Koh , and James B Lewis

7 Coptic and Ethiopic Historical Writing 138

Witold Witakowski

8 Syriac and Syro-Arabic Historical Writing, c 500– c 1400 155

Muriel Debié and David Taylor

9 From Reciting to Writing and Interpretation: Tendencies, Themes, and Demarcations of Armenian Historical Writing 180

Theo Maarten van Lint

10 Byzantine Historical Writing, 500–920 201

Anthony Kaldellis

11 Byzantine Historical Writing, 900–1400 218

Paul Magdalino

12 Islamic Historical Writing, Eighth through the Tenth Centuries 238

18 The Vicissitudes of Political Identity: Historical Narrative in the

Barbarian Successor States of Western Europe 368

PART II: MODES OF REPRESENTING THE PAST

21 Universal Histories in Christendom and the Islamic World,

25 The Abbasid and Byzantine Courts 517

Nadia Maria El Cheikh

26 Historical Writing, Ethnicity, and National Identity:

Medieval Europe and Byzantium in Comparison 539

Matthew Innes

27 Historical Writing and Warfare 576

Meredith L D Riedel

Thomas Sizgorich

Index 629

1 Polities of the Medieval World, c 700 9

2 Polities of the Medieval World, c 1000 10

3 Polities of the Medieval World, c 1300 12

Daud Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Studies, and

Depart-ment of History, at the University of Pennsylvania He is author of Courtly Culture and

Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge, 2004), Querying the Medieval: Texts

and the History of Practices in South Asia (Oxford, 2000, with Ronald Inden and Jonathan Walters), and editor of several other volumes

Sverre Bagge is Professor of Medieval History, University of Bergen, and Director of the

Centre for Medieval Studies His publications include: Society and Politics in Snorri

Sturlu-son’s Heimskringla (1991); Kings, Politics, and the Right Order of the World in German

Historiography c 950–1150 (2002); and From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway, c 900–1350 (2010)

John R Bentley is Professor of Japanese at Northern Illinois University Among his

previ-ous publications are Historiographical Trends in Early Japan ( 2002), and The Authenticity

of Sendai Kuji Hongi (2006)

Nora Berend is Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, UK Her previous

pub-lications include At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and ‘Pagans’ in Medieval

Hun-gary, c 1000–c.1300 (2001), and the edited volume Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c 900–1200 (2007)

Remco Breuker is Professor of Korean Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands

Among his previous publications are Forging the Truth: National Identity and Creative

Deception in Medieval Korea (2008) and Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea,

918–1170: History, Ideology and Identity in the Koryŏ Dynasty (2010)

Charles F Briggs teaches in the history department at the University of Vermont His

previous publications include Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’: Reading and

Writ-ing Politics at Court and University, c 1275–c.1525 (1999) and The Body Broken: Medieval Europe 1300–1520 (2011)

Muriel Debié is a research scholar in the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes

(IRHT) of the Centre national de la recherche scientifi que (CNRS), Paris, and director of the Ecole des Langues et Civilisations de l’Orient ancien (ELCOA) of the Institut Catholique de Paris

Anthony DeBlasi is Associate Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East

Asian Studies of the University at Albany (SUNY) He is the author of Reform in the

Balance: The Defense of Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China as well as articles on various aspects of China’s middle period history

Nadia Maria El Cheikh is Professor of History at the American University of Beirut Her

publications include Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (2004) Her research has been ing on aspects of gender history and the workings of the Abbasid court

Sarah Foot is the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church, Oxford

She is the author of Æthelstan: The First English Monarch (Yale University Press, 2011),

Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c 600–900 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and

has written widely on perceptions and uses of the past in the early medieval West

Petre Guran is a research fellow at the Institute for South-East European Studies (Bucharest)

specializing in religious anthropology applied to Byzantine and medieval South-East European society and culture, and the relationship between religious thought and political power He has studied and taught in Romania, France, and Germany, and defended his dissertation on ‘Roy-

al Sanctity and Universal Power in the Orthodox Commonwealth’ at EHESS, Paris (2003) From 2004 to 2006 he was a Teaching Fellow of Hellenistic Studies at Princeton University

Charles Hartman is Professor of East Asian Studies, the University at Albany, State

Uni-versity of New York The author of Han Yu and the Tang Search for Unity (1986), his

arti-cles on medieval Chinese historiography have appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic

Studies , T’oung Pao , and the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies

Ian Hesketh (Assistant Editor) is a research associate in the Department of History at

Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada His publications include Of Apes and Ancestors:

Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (2009) and The Science of History in

Victor-ian Britain: Making the Past Speak (2011)

Konrad Hirschler is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Near and Middle East at the

School of Oriental and African Studies, London Among his books are Medieval Arabic

His-toriography (2006), Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources (2011), and The Written Word in

the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (2012)

John Hudson is Professor of Legal History and Head of the School of History at the

University of St Andrews, Scotland, and also William W Cook Global Law Professor at

the University of Michigan Law School, USA Among his previous publications are The

History of the Church of Abingdon , 2 vols (Oxford, 2002, 2007), and The Oxford History

of the Laws of England , vol 2: 871–1216 (2012)

Matthew Innes is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London Among his

previous publications are State and Society in the Early Middle Ages ( 2000), Introduction to

Early Medieval Western Europe 300–900 (2007), The Carolingian World (2011, with Marios

Costambeys and Simon Maclean), and Documentary Culture in the Early Middle Ages

(2012, with Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys, and Adam Kosto)

Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University (USA) He has

published extensively on the Byzantine historians (both studies and translations) as well

as on Hellenism in Byzantium (2007) and The Christian Parthenon (2009)

Grace Koh is Lecturer in Korean Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies

(SOAS), University of London She is currently working towards the completion of a

book manuscript provisionally entitled, Historical Vision and Literary Imagination: Private

Inception and Public Reception of the Samguk yusa and Early Korean Narratives

James B Lewis is the University Lecturer in Korean History at the University of Oxford

His previous publications include Korea and Globalization ( 2002) and Frontier Contact

between Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan (2003)

Felice Lifshitz is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Alberta Her

publica-tions include Why the Middle Ages Matter ( 2011), Gender and Christianity in Medieval

Europe (2008), Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies (2007), The Name of the

Saint (2005), and The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria (1995)

Theo Maarten van Lint is Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies at the

University of Oxford and a Fellow of Pembroke College His research addresses the ception of Ezekiel’s throne vision in Armenia, medieval and modern poetry, storytelling and performing poetry, and the eleventh-century layman Grigor Magistros Pahlawuni’s epistolary

Peter Lorge is Assistant Professor of Medieval Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt

University He is the author of War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900–1795

(2005), The Asian Military Revolution (2008), and Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to

the Twenty-First Century (2011)

Paul Magdalino , FBA, is Emeritus Professor of Byzantine History at the University of

St Andrews, and Professor of Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University Istanbul

His previous publications include The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (1993),

L’Orthodoxie des astrologues (2006), and Studies in the History and Topography of Medieval

Constantinople (2007)

Andrew Marsham is Lecturer in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh His

publications include Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: Accession and Succession in the First

Muslim Empire (2009)

Meredith L D Riedel is Assistant Professor of History of Christianity at Duke Divinity

School

Chase F Robinson is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the

City University of New York He has written and edited several books, among which are

Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest ( 2000), Islamic Historiography (2003), and The New Cambridge History of Islam , vol 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to

Eleventh Centuries (2010)

Jonathan Shepard was formerly University Lecturer in Russian History at the University

of Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse He wrote, in collaboration with Simon Franklin,

The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (1996); was the editor of The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (2008); and recently published Emergent Elites and Byzantium in the

Balkans and East-Central Europe (2011)

Thomas Sizgorich was Associate Professor of History at the University of

Califor-nia, Irvine He was the author of Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant

Devotion in Christianity and Islam (2008) He died in 2011 after completing this chapter

David Taylor is the University Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac at the University of Oxford,

and a Fellow of Wolfson College

Charles West is Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffi eld, UK His fi rst book,

Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and

Moselle 800–1100 will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2013

John K Whitmore is a Research Associate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies,

University of Michigan, USA, specializing in pre-modern Southeast Asian and ese history, and the author of a variety of articles in these areas

Witold Witakowski is Associate Professor of Semitic Languages at Uppsala University,

Sweden He specializes in Syriac and Ethiopian studies, and has published papers on both Syriac and Ethiopian historiography

Daniel Woolf (General Editor) is Professor of History at Queen’s University in

King-ston, Canada Among his previous publications are A Global Encyclopedia of Historical

Writing (1998), The Social Circulation of the Past (2003), and A Global History of History

(2011)

Michael Aung-Thwin, University of Hawaii

Michael Bentley, University of St Andrews

Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

Toyin Falola, University of Texas

Georg G Iggers, State University of New York, Buffalo Donald R Kelley, Rutgers University

Tarif Khalidi, American University, Beirut

Christina Kraus, Yale University

Chris Lorenz, VU University Amsterdam

Stuart Macintyre, University of Melbourne

Jürgen Osterhammel, Universität Konstanz

Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna

Jörn Rüsen, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen Romila Thapar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi

Editors’ Introduction

S arah F oot and C hase F R obinson

Parallel administrative, fi nancial, and ideological features in Roman and Chinese imperialism may refl ect a ‘fi rst great convergence’ at more or less opposite ends

of the Eurasian landmass between about 1000 bc , and the late sixth century ad , when the tendency towards political polycentrism in the Mediterranean west and the periodic restoration of imperial unity in East Asia come to constitute separate trajectories 1 Now it might be said that in privileging structure over the accident, the contingent, and the individual, such comparative analyses necessarily dis-count the very differences that give rise to multiple social formations; in this sense, they are exercises in the social sciences, rather than the humanities Even

so, it would be churlish to deny that, at the very least, modes of comparative tory, global history, or historical sociology are heuristically useful, especially inas-much as they function to lay bare Eurocentric and teleological approaches that stubbornly persist, in some cases reassuring the anxious West of its singular achievement and cultural superiority 2

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is predicated upon the uncontroversial

proposition that societies across the globe and across recorded time produced varieties of historical writing that are worth understanding Its coverage is not uniform, in part because not all societies produced historical writing that sur-vives North and South America, which lacked writing systems (though they had other means of graphic commemoration such as glyphs), represents an obvious example; there, as in sub-Saharan Africa, the loss of oral history has meant the loss of narrative history A less obvious example comes in the densely lettered late antique culture of the Sasanian Empire; the military match of its Byzantine rival, the state itself seems to have produced very little in the way of historiography, be

it ‘offi cial’ (in the Chinese sense) or indirectly patronized (in the Islamic), leaving modern-day historians with the diffi cult task of assembling material written by

1 Walter Scheidel, ‘From the “Great Convergence” to the “First Great Divergence”: Roman and

Qin-Han State Formation and Its Aftermath’, in Scheidel (ed.), Rome and China: Comparative

Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford, 2009), 3–10

2 See, for a very recent example, Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London,

2011)

minorities and outsiders In smaller part, the current volume’s inconsistency also springs from the shape of modern scholarship itself, which is so uneven Accounts

of the ‘rise of the West’ are compelling not just because they are reassuring, fl tering, or familiar, but also because they tap into deep veins of historiography Some of these are relatively new, but others reach back into the Renaissance and Enlightenment, assembling, recording, translating sources that have been cultur-ally valorized through history—the Greek and Roman ‘classics’, their Western and Byzantine offshoots during the Early and Later ‘Middle Ages’ (to a lesser extent), and, eventually, the rise, fl owering, and wilting of modern ‘scientifi c’ historical writing It remains a regrettable fact that our knowledge is woefully incomplete even in those non-European traditions that produced history-writing

at-in copious amounts, such as the Islamic Middle East and Chat-inese East Asia The gaps that remain in this volume refl ect the grossly unequal distribution and uneven pace of scholarship that characterize the study of historical writing as global phe-nomena, especially in the pre-modern period 3

Taken singly and collectively, the volumes in this series thus refl ect the state of

an uneven fi eld This, the second of fi ve volumes, covers the period between 400 and 1400, thus overlapping with the fi rst, which closes in about 600 The editors

of that volume called its end-point ‘artifi cial’, which is certainly the case: although the fi rst decades of the seventh century witnessed the rise of two new Asian super-powers, the Muslim conquerors and Tang dynasts, along with associated historio-graphic trends, elsewhere the seventh century makes no sense at all The Armenian script was invented around 405, and its historical tradition follows closely We shall see that in 600 Byzantine historical writing was beginning to run into the ground, and it would only regain its speed in the middle of the eighth century The roots of Korean historical writing also pre-date the seventh-century water-shed Several contributors have consequently backtracked into the sixth and fi fth centuries, so as to trace earlier developments and, in some cases, identify origins The contributions in this volume close about 1400, which usefully marks the rise

of European hegemony, a development now increasingly understood within a broad Eurasian context 4 In one case (the Slavonic), the contribution here sub-stantially overlaps with the chronology assigned to the succeeding volume

Of course periodizations are frequently criticized as arbitrary; and many ians like nothing more than to subvert them by describing continuities that cross those arbitrary divides There is a different point to make, however, which con-trasts these early volumes with later ones The events of the year 1945, which draws the line between volumes 4 and 5, had global signifi cance precisely because they took place in the rapidly globalizing world of the twentieth century, where

transport and technology moved peoples, goods, and ideas great distances at great speeds In the pre-modern period, there is no question of fi nding a ‘1945’, a date that signifi es a cluster of proximate and world-transforming events The closest one that comes early in this period may be the Battle of Talas, when Muslim armies of the Abbasid dynasty defeated a Tang army under the Korean com-mander, Kao Sien-Chih, in 751; it is often said that these captives introduced Chinese techniques of paper manufacture into the Islamic world, but what is clearer is that the battle halted Chinese expansionism into Central Asia The clos-est one that comes later in our period may be 1206, when a Mongol named Temujin was elected as Chinngis (or Ghenghis) Khan, whose movement of con-quest created within two generations the largest Eurasian polity in history and, in some sense, what some call the fi rst ‘world system’ 5 This said, neither 751 nor

1206 (much less 400, 600, or 1400) can be said to set or redirect historiographic trends that transcended what, for the most part, were discrete traditions Indeed, pioneers in historical thought were not necessarily trendsetters even within their own traditions, surely the best example being none other than a geographical and intellectual outlier named Ibn Khaldun, the oft-cited ‘father’ of economic and social scientifi c thinking whose paternity emerged only centuries after his death

in 1406

In the pre-globalized world of 400–1400, we shall see that a diversity of cal writing is the rule Leaving aside comparisons so gross as to be heuristically useless, one can confi dently say that there is no question of fi nding historio-graphic convergence across Asia, much less the globe Diversity of language, approach, subject matter, genre, and much more besides, is what we should expect and what we fi nd in a world altogether less homogeneous than ours Less obvious forms of diversity should also be noted; medium is one In the eastern Mediterranean, history-writing on parchment or vellum was the norm, and, as it happens, the epigraphic ‘habit’ of inscription-writing (on stone) had fallen off considerably during the third century During the ninth and tenth centuries, Chinese techniques of paper manufacture were taking hold in the Near East, and the new, cheaper medium elbowed aside processed animal skins and papyrus in the Islamic world, Europe stubbornly holding out until the fi fteenth century By contrast, history-writing in Southeast Asia was carried out in stone and metal throughout much of our period, paper appearing selectively during the eleventh century The spread of technology was culturally mediated

In the period covered by this volume, historical writing developed at wildly differential speeds and along regional, linguistic, religious, and cultural lines that,

as a general rule , ran parallel to each other, cross-pollinating, transecting, or

fus-ing in ways that scholarship has so far failed to measure in any systematic way

5 For a provocative view, see Janet L Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System

1250–1350 (Oxford, 1991)

Why this is so is an extraordinarily complicated (and poorly understood) issue, but one partial answer can be provided by way of explaining the asynchronous nature of the contributions and highlighting the complex interplay of identity, time, language, and past Human groups typically become a ‘people’ before or as they become subject to ethnographically infl ected history-writing on the part of others, typically neighbours, travellers, or conquerors; the results are mixed at best, and ‘[t]radition, experience and expectation were the determinants of vision’, as J H Elliott wrote of how Europeans perceived the New World 6 But

‘peoples’ are more fully fl eshed out by proto-nationalist history-writing of their own making Ethnogenesis is a politico-cultural process, and history and lan-guage are crucial ingredients in culture The roots of Armenian historical writing can be traced to the religio-ethnic processes that created the Armenian ‘people’ in the fourth and fi fth centuries Similarly, the historical writing of the Rus’, which appears much later, in the tenth century The case of the Jews, who produced lit-tle conventional—that is, chronographic—history in this period shows that, once endowed with a history, ‘peoples’ did not necessarily have to maintain it on their own; this is why the Jewish tradition appears in volume 1, but not here Meanwhile, the case of the Copts, who did write a fair amount of history, chose

to write more of it in the language of their non-Christian rulers (Arabic) rather than in their own

All of this said, there are nonetheless commonalities that transcend the regional, linguistic, religious, and cultural variables that conditioned historical writing during the chronological period assigned to this volume Writers in different geographical locations who chose diverse forms of writing through which to pre-serve the remembered pasts of unrelated peoples and places all shared a concern with chronology and the representation of time, an awareness of place and its relevance to the accounts they told, and—in tailoring their narratives to specifi c audiences—frequently displayed a self-conscious awareness of the purposes to which historical writing might be put

Traditions of historical writing already existed, of course, in China and in the Greek- and Latin-speaking worlds in the period before that covered by this vol-ume, but in several of the regions explored below we can begin to perceive a perceptible historical consciousness which came with the introduction of the technology of writing Early attempts at memorializing signifi cant past deeds and

fi gures in writing could take non-narrative forms; several of the chapters in the

fi rst part of the volume consider fi rst examples of inscriptions, or of the writing down of genealogies of kings (records designed to demonstrate—or confer—royal legitimacy, which in many cases had previously been remembered orally) before turning to connected narratives (see the chs by Whitmore, Bentley, Hirschler, and Berend) The fresh mechanisms that written media offered for the

6 J H Elliott, The Old World and the New: 1492–1650 (Cambridge, 1970), 20

preservation and dissemination of memories previously preserved through oral means (such as via the recitation of poems, epic tales, or other legends) provided

a signifi cant stimulus to the writing of history in many regions, sometimes but not always associated with the introduction of written sacred texts Thus in Japan, the appearance of the fi rst historical narratives accompanies the introduction of written Buddhist scripture (see the ch by Bentley), the emergence of Islam proved key in the development of Arabic as a written language that promoted and expressed administrative, ideological, and religious unity (see the ch by Robinson), and in Central Europe historical writing emerged from combined political and religious change, specifi cally Christianization (see the ch by Berend) Christianity brought with it not just a new technology but also changed cultural attitudes which occasioned the rethinking of received attitudes towards the past (see the

ch by Bagge) The precedent for tracing narratives of peoples offered by the Old Testament, and the account of the origins of the Christian church in the Book of Acts inspired many medieval Christian historians (see the ch by Shepard) In Armenia, as Theo van Lint shows, the transition to written records proved a com-plex process, since a signifi cant interval of time separated the offi cial introduction

of Christianity in Armenia and the development of an alphabet in which to write the Armenian language While unable to write in their native language the Armenians continued to use oral modes of memory preservation beyond the conversion, but existing modes of memorialization gradually underwent pro-found changes when clerics using Iranian models replaced orally transmitted epics of former kings with a written history of salvation organized according to Christian chronology, not cyclic time (see the ch by Breuker, Koh, and Lewis) Writers in different faith-traditions thus saw in writing the means of preserving memories that might otherwise have been forgotten, as well as the mechanisms for controlling precisely which versions of past events found permanent record (see the chs by Foot, Shepherd, and Bentley)

Since new faiths brought with them fresh notions about calculating and senting time, the extent to which chronology dominated historical writing in the period covered by this volume is unsurprising In Part II, Andrew Marsham dis-cusses a particular group of histories which defi ned themselves as universal because their authors located the beginnings of their story either at Creation or

repre-in the remote ancient past, and attempted to survey all of past time, often across

a wide geographical span Other authors limited the scope of their enquiries within a narrower time-frame, but still demonstrated an interest in modes of representing elapsed past time, and often used time as one of the principles by which to organize their material Collections of annals, lists of past events plotted chronologically against a linear sequence of years, represent the most common form of such historical writing; examples occur widely across all the regions explored in this volume from China to Scandinavia, Persia to Scotland While Judaeo-Christian and Islamic monotheism shared an understanding of time that was both linear and fundamentally eschatological (in that it located past and

present eras on the forward-moving arrow that led inexorably towards the eschaton), not all temporal conceptions employed by historians in this period were linear Generational time, the rhythm of successive generations of a ruling dynasty, or of a particular people or ethnic group gave a different temporal model for organizing historical texts, where the lines were vertical rather than horizontal (see the ch by West) Cyclical as well as linear conceptions of time were some-times encompassed within fundamentally linear schemes and could also colour historical writing, as for example Daud Ali shows was the case in India during the centuries studied in his chapter Different cultures and religious traditions none-theless held some common views about the role of divine intervention in deter-mining the fate of humanity, in how divine agencies affected earthly events, and

in how earthly time and divine time related Divine displeasure manifested through various sorts of natural and man-made disasters could portend future misfortune

In addition to exploring diverse modes of representing past time, phers experimented with literary forms to fi nd the most appropriate genre in which to represent the pasts they sought to preserve Where writing was a novelty, authors might seek to record in written form the sorts of information previously remembered by oral means which may in part explain why so many historical works from this period so closely resemble lists (see the chs by Hartman and DeBlasi, Foot, West, and Cheikh); the use of verse rather than prose may simi-larly indicate an oral origin for material that was ultimately written down One of the striking features of the range of historical writing surveyed in this volume is the diversity of genres across all the regions under discussion; perhaps equally striking is how this diversity cuts across discrete historiographic tradi-tions Annals and lists were compiled equally in China, Byzantium, the Islamic, and Western European worlds; genealogies and biographies of rulers and leading local fi gures were composed in all regions; there survive universal histories in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and Persian, a pattern that may refl ect a distinctive West Eurasian orientation; the use of collections of letters to preserve information about the past is attested in Armenia, Eastern and Western Europe and many historians and chroniclers inserted the texts of letters into their narra-tives to support parts of their argument (see the chs by Van Lint, Berend, Lifshitz, and Hudson) Many factors infl uenced the choices historians made about genre including the availability of literary models and, of course, whether

historiogra-or not authhistoriogra-ors wrote within a tradition in which writing about the past was already long established

The circumstances in which a new work was composed and its intended ence could prove equally signifi cant in determining the form it took Adoption

audi-of a new religion, military crisis, dynastic instability, and political change all inspired innovation in literary form For example, the Italian chaplain to the papal legate to Hungary in the 1230s wrote an eye-witness account of the Mongol invasion of Hungary in the novel form of a letter addressed to his patron, the

Carmen miserabile [Lamentation] (see the ch by Berend) Felice Lifshitz shows

how different sorts of historical narrative emerged in the barbarian successor states to Rome in the medieval West, tracing the role of ethnogenesis in shaping

a people’s view of its own past; formation of a centralized, aristocratic state in seventh-century China led to the emergence of an offi cial historiography which was part of the bureaucracy of that state (see the ch by Hartman and DeBlasi) While some writers could shape narratives of the past in order to celebrate present realities (and even prophesy for the future) (see the ch by Briggs), others saw admonitory uses for the past History’s didactic function was as apparent in China and the Arab worlds as in Eastern and Western Europe; in India the moral logic of the past spoke to both present and future audiences (see the ch by Ali) Chinese history made much of the use of the metaphor of history as a mirror, using the rather blunt tool of praise and blame to polish that image and Japanese writers adopted the same image (see the chs by Hartman and DeBlasi and Bentley) Examples of the genre of the mirror for princes, texts that use the past

to advise (and warn) contemporary rulers occur from all regions, including India, Russia, Hungary, the Abbasid Caliphate, Byzantium, Frankia (the future France and parts of Germany), and Ireland

Of course historical writing could serve multiple purposes and speak to much wider audiences than those its authors might have envisaged Motives that drove writers in one era to attempt to create usable pasts did not necessarily continue to resonate for later generations, who might still draw on those earlier narratives to meet new, contemporary needs (see the chs by Kaldellis and Innes) Offi cial, state-commissioned (or state-sanctioned) accounts present different versions of past events from those composed by individuals writing at a distance from the centres of power Language could be used to serve various purposes too; in some regions one must distinguish between histories written in the language of bureau-cracy, those sponsored by religious communities or institutions and written in their sacred languages, and texts composed in a people’s vernacular; in other areas (including the Greek, Islamic, and Chinese worlds) bureaucratic, religious, and spoken linguistic communities overlapped That history could, and did, provide entertainment is self-evident: successive generations enjoyed reading or listening

to the celebration of the heroic valour and glory of kings and military ers, the supernatural powers bestowed on the holy (see the chs by van Lint, Kaldellis, and Robinson) Audiences in search of diversion frequently found it, especially where the boundaries between the factual and the fi ctional blurred (see the chs by Kaldellis and Briggs)

Taken singly, the contributions to this volume are intended to introduce the reader not only to the distinctive features and trajectories of global historiography between 400 and 1400, but also to some of their common approaches and features Part I accentuates those distinctions Organized geographically, and moving from east to west, the chapters in the fi rst half of the volume give appro-priate prominence to traditions that have traditionally been marginalized by a

conventional, Eurocentric approach to historical writing The purpose here is to provide a concise and readable overview of the principal genres and historical development of each tradition, with attention to the distinctive characteristics of each Since our aim is to examine historical representation in different cultures, and not in separate countries, we have chosen not to give the historiographies of separate ‘nations’ individual treatment Equally, this is not the place to devote chapters to single fi gures (such as Bede or Ibn Khaldun) however iconic they have become in the history of historiography Exceptional or especially signifi cant fi g-ures are treated in the context in which they operated Part II explores, often tentatively and experimentally, commonalities shared across space Taken collec-tively, the contributions thus document the remarkable resourcefulness, ingenu-ity, and creativity of our pre-modern historiographers Many of these worked in regions left peripheral or marginal in more conventional overviews, and all of them wrote in a transitional period of global history: rooted in the venerable cultures of antiquity, they preserved and interpreted global passages into the increasingly integrated world of the early modern period

PART I THE TRADITIONS OF HISTORICAL