The early Christian conception of history viewed events as part of God's divine plan for humanity, with disasters representing divine punishment and prosperity indicating favor. For historians like Eusebius, the Roman Empire provided conditions for Christianity's spread. Augustine divided history into six eras and argued that Rome's fall was not due to Christianity but humanity's divided nature. Early Islamic historians like al-Tabari and Rashid al-Din produced universal histories linking Islamic and other traditions. Ibn Khaldun analyzed history's inner meanings and causes rather than just chronicling events.

1. Medieval historiography
Written by
Richard T. Vann
CONTRIBUTOR LOCATION: Middletown, CT,
United States
Lectured by
Ram Proshad Barman
Lecturer, sociology, BRUR

2. The early Christian conception of history
 Incorporation of the Hebrew Bible into the Christian canon helped to shape
the Christian conception of history.
 By tracing their history to Adam and Eve and the other figures who preceded
Abraham, Christians encompassed all of humanity within their worldview.
 Reflecting the influence of the Hebrew prophets, the early Christians held
that sins were inevitably followed by divine punishment and that the plot of
history was the unfolding of God’s will for humanity.
 Disasters represented punishment for sins; prosperity indicated divine favour
to faithful humans. Thus, nothing could happen that could not be explained
by the providential interpretation of history.

3. The early Christian conception of
history
 In particular, what was the place of the Roman Empire in the divine plan? For almost three
centuries Christians provoked in Roman authorities puzzlement, exasperation,
and intermittent persecution.
 For their part, Christians treated the empire as at best irrelevant and at worst (as in
the Revelation to John) as one of the beasts of the apocalypse.
 But with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312, Christian historians had to come to
terms with the historical significance of a Christian emperor.
 The challenge was met by Eusebius, whose Historia ecclesiastica (written 312–324; Ecclesiastical
History) was the first important work of Christian history since the Acts of the Apostles.
 For Eusebius, the Roman Empire was the divinely appointed and necessary milieu for
the propagation of the Christian faith.
 Roman peace and Roman roads allowed the Apostle Paul to travel tens of thousands of miles on his
evangelical journeys, and now Constantine had been appointed to end the persecution of
Christians.

4. Augustine
 The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 posed a severe challenge to
Eusebius’s interpretation of history.
 The most famous response was the monumental De civitate Dei contra
paganos (413–426/427; City of God) of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430).
 Augustine was forced to confront the argument that the establishment of
Christianity as the state religion of Rome had led to the downfall of the
empire.
 His rebuttal dissolved the identity of empire and Christianity. Humanity
was composed of two cities, inextricably mixed: the earthly, built on self-
love, and the heavenly, animated by the love of God

5. Augustine
The issue of periodization was vital.
 Augustine divided history into six ages, comparable to the
six ages of the individual human life span: 1. from Adam
and Eve to the biblical Flood 2. from the Flood to
Abraham 3. from Abraham to King David 4. from David to
the Babylonian Exile 5.from the Exile to Jesus 6. and from
Jesus to the Second Coming
 The end of this kingdom would be the end of the world.

6. Early Germanic and English histories
 The fall of the Roman Empire actually resulted from the successful attempt
of Germanic peoples to occupy its lands and enjoy its benefits.
 Goths, Lombards, Franks, and other Germanic peoples carved out new kingdoms from
the moribund Western empire and adopted its traditions and even its identity
 Yet there were difficulties in fitting the Germanic invaders into this pattern. They
were nonliterate and preserved their memories of the past orally in heroic poems
such as Beowulf.
 Historical writing was almost all done by clerics, in Latin. Gregory of Tours (538/539–
594), for example, wrote Ten Books of Histories, a history of the Franks from the
perspective of the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy, and St. Bede the
Venerable (672/673–735) composed the Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People).
 For both authors, the invaders, once converted to orthodox (Roman) Christianity,
were instrumental in repressing heresy: the Franks opposed Arianism (which held that
Christ was not divine but created), and the Anglo-Saxons suppressed the irregular
practices of the Celtic church.

7. Islamic historiography
 The Qurʾān, the sacred text of Islam, contains allusions that constitute the basis of a
providential history of humankind from Adam through Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
 Another valuable resource for Islamic historians is the Hadith (the traditions or sayings of
Muhammad), which is arranged in such a way that lines of transmission can be traced
back to those who knew the Prophet.
Al-Ṭabarī and Rashīd al-Dīn
 The greatest early Islamic historian, al-Ṭabarī (839–923), was reputed to have memorized
the Qurʾān at the age of seven. Legend credited him with producing a 30,000-page
commentary on the Qurʾān and an equally long universal history
 The Persian scholar Rashīd al-Dīn(1247–1318) composed a more truly universal
history, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh(“Collector of Chronicles”), which covered not only the Islamic
world(which by then extended from Spain to northern India) but also included data on the
popes and emperors of Europe and on Mongolia and China.

8. Ibn Khaldūn
 The sophistication of Islamic historical thought was dramatically illustrated by
the Muqaddimah (“Introduction”) of the Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332–
1406).
 The subjects Khaldūn considered in his work include historical
method, geography, culture, economics, public finance, population, society
and state, religion and politics, and the social context of knowledge
 Khaldūn lived with the Bedouins of North Africa and in the sophisticated Muslim
cities of Granada and Cairo.
 These experiences were the source of one of his main ideas: that humans first
lived in Bedouin tribes and then achieved civilization, but civilization
became decadent with increasing wealth and luxury.
 No dynasty or civilization, he believed, could maintain vitality for more than
four generations (though the only example he gives is the decline of the
Israelites after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph

9. Ibn Khaldūn
 Khaldūn contrasted his writing with “surface history,” which was “no more than
information about political events” and was used to “entertain large, crowded
gatherings.”
 Historians of his day, he thought, were too credulous in accepting tradition.
 As for their frequent moralizing about the misconduct of certain caliphs, Khaldūn
asserted that people like to justify their own misconduct by looking in histories
for examples of the great who have done the same things.
 To reach the “inner meaning” of history, the historian had to be “speculative”
and give “subtle explanations” of causes.
 To accomplish this, history had to be rooted in philosophy—or, as Khaldūn said of
his own work, it had to be a new and original science.