The Route We Take to Climb the Wall

“History has more to do with the present than it does with the past. It is the route we take to climb the wall of facts we study, and not the wall itself.”

Author: George Voutov (g.voutov@gmail.com)

History is not a roadmap of the past, and there are thousands of people better equipped to explain this than me. What I can tell you is this. History has more to do with the present than it does with the past. History is constructed by those who practice it. History has more to do with the Zeitgeist it springs from than it does with the collection of facts, events, periods and phenomena it takes interest in.

There was a man once and his grandfather had been Mayor of the Palace of the Franks. His was a destiny to conquer all of Europe and reestablish the glory of the Empire of Rome, and the jewel in his crown would be recognition and legitimacy in the eyes of God. His name was Charlemagne and once the last sword had been laid down and the duchies to the east had been conquered, court chronicler Einhard tells us that, as fate would have it, Charlemagne was visited by pope Leo III, who had escaped Rome in fear of persecution from locals. Whether or not the pope had really fled from persecutors to Charlemagne – thus recognising Charlemagne as an instance of ultimate authority – we may never know for certain, and it does not really matter. What matters is why Einhard wanted us to read this exact story, and not another.

Charlemagne provided safe escort for the pope back to Rome, then held a General Assembly there for all the bishops of the west. A month later on Christmas Day A. D. 800, Charlemagne walked into the old basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, and – imagine his surprise – found a golden crown waiting for him at the altar. And when he knelt to pray at the altar, the pope placed the golden crown - heavy as it was – on his head and proclaimed him Emperor of Rome and true successor of Augustus in front of God[1].

What does this story tell us? That Charlemagne had found himself crowned Emperor of Rome in front of God by a fortunate stroke of fate? Well, that depends on who you ask. To court historians of the Carolingian Empire like Einhard – certainly. To court historians of the Francian duchies and kingdoms that succeeded Charlemagne’s Empire – it likely didn’t matter, so long as there was a way to trace their ruler’s lineage back to Charlemagne. This particular debate is among the oldest in the field of academic history, but as for you and me, to ask what Charlemagne’s true intentions were, and what the causal relationship between him and the pope really was, is to ask the wrong question. The essence of this story lay in what purpose its writers wanted it to fulfill, and how later generations understood it. What matters more than the facts themselves is how their contemporary chroniclers sought to present them, and how later generations have come to understand them. History is the route we take to climb the wall of facts we study, and not the wall itself.

To illustrate this, consider that there exists such a thing as a history of the study of history, better known as historiography. Historiography takes interest in how academic discourse on a particular period has evolved over time. For instance, the founding father of one of my favourite topics in history Peter Brown wrote a timeless classic in the early 1980s titled ‘The Cult of the Saints’.[2] He was the first scholar to lend proper examination to the phenomenon of cult veneration in early Christianity. His fundamental achievement lay in recognising the phenomenon of Christian cult veneration as such, that is – in recognising that such a practice was important enough to everyday life to deserve scholarly attention. The thousands of academic articles and books that have sprawled from his work have evolved considerably over the decades in terms of focus, methodology and aims – most recently shifting to a study of the material dimensions of cult veneration.[3] From an outside perspective, this demonstrates first and foremost the degree to which history is a living and breathing thing, something almost organic and very much in touch with the world it is created in. In other words, history as we understand it today has little to do with history as it was understood in the nineteenth century when it began to emerge as an academic field. The facts that are studied remain the same, but our understanding and manipulation of them changes.

At its core, the aim of history is and always has been to understand exactly what had been going through the minds of the people who have come before us, their way of thinking, how they saw the world, the hierarchies of values that governed their logic, and how these evolved across time and space. The pursuit of history, however, has continued to change in essence with each subsequent generation of historians. History is not the past, but how we view the past, and how we view the past depends on who we are and – most importantly – on when we are.[4] History cannot exist outside of debate, which is why the School of Athens is a fine illustration of what history truly represents – different, sometimes contradicting interpretations of the same, common past. And, lest Ministries of Truth appear in countries all across the world, to govern and to dictate what is and what is not, history will likely never end – so long as there are people willing to create it.[5]

[1] Emperor Constantine (c. A.D. 272 – A.D. 337) moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople in A.D. 330 so technically, the successor of Augustus had been residing there since. At the time of Charlemagne, however, the throne in Constantinople was legitimately occupied by a woman named Irene, and the pope had a problem with that. [2] Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, University of Chicago Press, 1982, 204 pp. [3] For a contemporary leading expert on cult veneration, see the work of Julia Smith, for instance Smith, Julia. ‘The remains of the saints: the evidence of early medieval relic collections’ in Early Medieval Europe, vol.28 issue 3, pp. 388-424. [4] The current-day benchmark introduction to the discipline of history is Tosh, John. The Pursuit of History. Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History, Routledge, 2021, 324 pp. [5] For a famous – and now defunct – argument on how history has come to its end, see Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, 1992, 418 pp.