Sources of Knowledge Cultures of Recording

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SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE; CULTURES
OF RECORDING*
Medieval historians no longer work simply from texts, if indeed they ever did;
but certainly now there is an almost universal commitment among those
exploring the medieval centuries to an approach that unites texts and material
culture, together increasingly with evidence from the biological and physical
sciences. Individual historians choose their particular mix to work with, and
those specializing in texts, whether as editors or interpreters, rightly remain
central figures in the field, but it would be hard to think of anybody who really
thinks the past is only accessible through written sources. That is good news
for global historians because it has long been apparent that evidence in writ-
ing does not cover the whole world, and what it does cover it illuminates in
very different ways. Writing is a characteristic of complex societies, which
tend in turn to be both the cause and effect of more people living in the
same place. It follows that our written sources are likely to tell us most
about those parts of the world where most people lived, and usually less
about anywhere else.
The maps in Figures 1 and 2 are an attempt by Kees Goldewijk and his
colleagues in the History Database of the Global Environment project to
display the density and distribution of the world’s population over time.1
Up to the nineteenth century most of the underlying data is soft, and what the
maps show is inevitably open to debate. Taking the maps for 1000 and 1500 CE
in Figures 1 and 2, for example, it would be possible to argue about the
shading to represent the population of the Americas. There is evidence to
suggest more people lived in the Amazon and Mississippi basins in the medi-
eval millennium than the maps allow.2 The demographic history of many
* Mark Whittow died tragically before finally revising this text. The revisions have been
made by Chris Wickham; they are limited to some editing, plus the insertion of two
paragraphs of a framework sort.
1
K. K. Goldewijk, A. Beusen and P. Janssen, ‘Long-Term Dynamic Modeling of Global
Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way: HYDE 3.1’, The Holocene, xx
(2010).
2
Amazon: J. Watling et al., ‘Impact of Pre-Columbian ‘‘Geoglyph’’ Builders on
Amazonian Forests’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America, cxiv (2017); W. M. Denevan, ‘Rewriting the Late Pre-European
History of Amazonia’, Journal of Latin American Geography, xi (2012); C. H.
McMichael et al., ‘Sparse Pre-Columbian Human Habitation in Western Amazonia’,
Past and Present (2018), Supplement 13 The Past and Present Society
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FIGURE 1
HISTORICAL POPULATION DENSITY, 3000 BCE–1000 CE
K. K. Goldewijk, A. Beusen and P. Janssen, ‘Long-Term Dynamic Modeling of Global
Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way: HYDE 3.1’, The Holocene,
xx (2010), 569. Reproduced with permission of Sage Ltd under the STM Guidelines.
FIGURE 2
HISTORICAL POPULATION DENSITY, 1500–2000 CE
Goldewijk, Beusen and Janssen, ‘Long-Term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and
Built-up Area’, 570. Reproduced with permission of Sage Ltd under the STM Guidelines.
48 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 13

parts of medieval Eurasia is similarly controversial.3 On a macro scale, how-
ever, these are details. Few medieval people lived in the parts of the world that
are not shaded on the map, and a lot of people were doing a lot of things in the
shaded areas. In terms of textual evidence, we are always likely to know much
more about the shaded areas than the rest of the planet.
But only up to a point. Not all the shaded areas were equally addicted to
writing, or to recording, or to preserving what had been written. Not all
writing technologies are equally good as bearers of information, nor are
they equally good at surviving time and neglect. Not all climates are equally
helpful, and not every part of the world has seen the stability and peace that
tends to favour the survival of libraries and archives, or been equally keen to
bury texts in tombs where we may hope to recover them. Our view of the
medieval globe can be compared to a series of overlays: writing here, archival
practices there, destruction and loss here, preservation there. What this adds
up to is a world speckled with historiographical hot spots that allow a thicker
description, and cold patches where the same sorts of questions, generated by
a density and intensity of evidence, cannot be answered. Just as important is
that recording and preserving are cultural and social phenomena, and the
detailed differences in this respect between one society and another are cru-
cial. Two parts of the world may have preserved just as much written material,
but what the evidence reveals about one place may be largely hidden in an-
other. Understanding those distorting prisms has to be a first step for any
historian wanting to think on a global scale.
What I have to say here will not surprise the specialists in the history of
individual regions of the world. Similarly, my general conclusions, once
stated, may seem obvious: that we are prisoners of our evidence, that the
evidence from different parts of the globe is of different types, and that this
Science, cccvi (2012); M. J. Heckenberger, The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place, and
Personhood in the Southern Amazon, AD 1000–2000 (New York, 2005); Mississippi: T.
R. Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians (Cambridge, 2004), 78–9, 99, 106–7;
L. V. Benson et al., ‘Possible Impacts of Early 11th-, Middle 12th-, and Late 13th-Century
Droughts on Western Native Americans and the Mississippian Cahokians’, Quaternary
Science Reviews, xxvi (2007).
3
Japan: W. W. Farris, Population, Disease and Land in Early Japan, 645–900 (Harvard-
Yenching Institute Monograph series xxiv, Cambridge, Mass., 1985); W. W. Farris,
Japan’s Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility and Warfare in a Transformative Age
(Honolulu, 2006); China: H. Bielenstein, ‘Chinese Historical Demography AD 2–1982’,
Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, lix (1987); Middle East: D. Ayalon,
‘Regarding Population Estimates in the Countries of Medieval Islam’, Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient, xxviii (1985).
SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE 49

fact has privileged different approaches to how history itself has been seen in
different regions. But these differences, amounting sometimes to distortions
of the lived past, have all the same been rarely confronted and compared
explicitly; and they need to be. This is my aim in this chapter, and it underpins
much else which is said by others in this volume.
I
WORLDS WITHOUT WRITING
Medievalists have only recently stopped treating medieval Africa south of the
Sahara as if it did not exist, save as a source of gold, slaves and ivory (Map 7).4
Certainly the population of the central and southern African interior was
generally low, but that was not true of the Atlantic coast from the Kongo to
Senegal, nor of the lands on the southern flank of the Sahel and the Sahara,
nor of the upper Nile and the Ethiopian highlands, nor of the Swahili coast.
The reason for the neglect has been an apparent lack of written sources.5 In
fact there are more written materials than was once appreciated. Texts from
the medieval Nubian kingdoms of Sudan and the lower Nile survive in a
changing repertoire of Meroitic, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, and above all Old
Nubian, for the whole period from the fourth to the fifteenth century.6
Further south, the kingdom of Aksum was using Greek and Ge’ez for inscrip-
tions and manuscripts from the fourth century onwards. The illustrated
Garima Gospels, written in Ge’ez, have recently been dated to the sixth century
on the basis of radiocarbon analysis, making them the earliest known surviv-
ing complete Christian illuminated manuscript from anywhere in the world.
The early Middle Ages appear to mark something of a hiatus, but from the
fourteenth to the sixteenth century the Ethiopian successor to the Aksumite
kingdom saw a flourishing literature in Ge’ez.7 One of the few first-hand
4
Maps 1–8 are collected at the front of the volume. For recent work putting medieval
Africa on a new footing, see M. Brett, Approaching African History (London, 2013); F.-X.
Fauvelle-Aymar, Le Rhinocéros d’or: Histoires du Moyen Âge africain (Paris 2013); G.
Connah, African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2001).
5
D. Henige, ‘Oral Tradition as a Means of Reconstructing the Past’, in J. E. Philips (ed.),
Writing African History (Rochester, NY, 2005), 169; H. Djait, ‘Written Sources Before the
Fifteenth Century’, in J. Ki-Zerbo (ed.), UNESCO General History of Africa, i,
Methodology and African Prehistory (Berkeley, 1981).
6
Mokhtar Khalil and Catherine Miller, ‘Old Nubian and Language Uses in Nubia’, Égypte:
Monde arabe, 1st ser., xxvii–xxviii (1996); G. R. Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and
Economic History (Oxford, 2012); D. A. Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia:
Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (London, 2002).
7
D. W. Phillipson, Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the Northern Horn
1000 BC–AD 1300 (Woodbridge, 2012), 51–68; N. Finneran, The Archaeology of Ethiopia

accounts of an Islamic conquest from the point of view of the conquered,
namely the Chronicle of John of Nikiu, which provides the only contemporary
account of the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, survives in a
very early seventeenth-century (1602) Ge’ez translation of an Arabic trans-
lation of a Coptic original.8 Particularly for west Africa a considerable body of
material in Arabic also survives. Most of this was written by outsiders, many
of whom had never been south of the Sahara, but it includes over four hun-
dred Arabic inscriptions, ranging in date from the eleventh century to the
fifteenth, coming from what is now the territory of Mali. A smaller number
are found from Somalia to the Swahili coast, the oldest of which dates to the
twelfth century. By the sixteenth century Arabic charters are known from the
Sudan and Darfur, and by the seventeenth a chronicle tradition had de-
veloped at Timbuktu.9 By the sixteenth century too, the king of the Kongo
was sending letters that survive to the king of Portugal.10 But that said, the
great west African empires of Wagadu/Ghana and Mali, which so impressed
Arab commentators from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, effectively
operated without writing other than in the limited context of Muslim
(Abingdon, 2007), 155, 165–73; S. C. Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late

Antiquity (Edinburgh 1991), 246–8; R. Pankhurst, The Ethiopians: A History (The Peoples
of Africa; Oxford, 2001), 78–9, 99, 106–7; J. S. McKenzie and F. Watson, The Garima
Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia (Manar Al-Athar Monograph, iii,
Oxford, 2016).
8
P. Booth, ‘The Muslim Conquest of Egypt Reconsidered’, Travaux et mémoires, xvii
(2013); P. Booth, ‘Shades of Blues and Greens in the Chronicle of John of Nikiou’,
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, civ, 2 (2012).
9
J. Hunwick, ‘Arabic Sources for African History’, in Philips (ed.), Writing African History;
West Africa: N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West
African History (Cambridge, 1981; 2nd edn, Princeton, 2000); P. F. de Moraes Farias,
Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles, and
Songhay-Tuareg History (Fontes historiae Africanae, new series, iv, Oxford, 2003),
xxxiv–xxxv, xxxvii–xxxviii, lxxx–lxxxv; P. F. de Moraes Farias, ‘Intellectual Innovation
and Reinvention of the Sahel: The Seventeenth-Century Timbuktu Chronicles’, in S.
Jeppie and S. B. Diagne (eds.), The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town, 2008); East
Africa: F. Chami, F. Le Guennec-Coppens and S. Mery, ‘East Africa and the Middle
East Relationship from the First Millennium BC to about 1500 AD’ Journal des africanistes,
lxxii (2002), 30–5; G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville and B. G. Martin, ‘A Preliminary Handlist
of the Arabic Inscriptions of the Eastern African Coast’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
of Great Britain and Ireland, ii (1973); G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, The East African Coast:
Select Documents from the First to the Earlier Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1962), 5–65.
10
J. Thornton, ‘European Documents and African History’, in Philips (ed.), Writing
African History, 257–9.

religious practice.11 Like high medieval Lithuania before conversion to
Christianity, these complex societies, with wealthy and powerful rulers and
a sophisticated material culture, were cultures where record and memory
relied on oral tradition. A similar issue affects another heavily populated
part of the medieval world, the Mississippi basin (Map 2). In the early
1540s European invaders encountered large populations with complex cul-
tures, but there is no evidence they used writing.12 This was clearly not a
problem for them; but it hides many aspects of their past from us.
Worlds with writing can become worlds without writing. Deliberate and
accidental destruction has been common, and depressingly continues to be
so. Tranches of the medieval past disappeared with the deliberate destruction
of the State Archives at Naples in 1943, the Irish Public Record Office in 1922
and the University Library at Louvain in 1914. On a wider timescale, what we
know and do not know is marked by the fall of the Sasanian state in the
seventh century CE, the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the sack of
Baghdad in 1258 (Map 6), the dissolution of the monasteries in England in
the 1530s, the same in France in the 1790s, the Cultural Revolution in 1960s
China, and the threat to the libraries of Timbuktu in 2012–13.13
On the face of it, the most damaging of the medieval known unknowns
results from the losses that followed the Spanish conquest of Central and
South America (Map 2). For the latter, where Tawantisuyu (the Inca empire)
was one of the largest polities on the planet in 1500, this is unequivocally so. In
this complex, centralized state, with its system of taxation imposed in labour
that among other things created over twenty thousand kilometres of roads,
the nearest thing to writing were khipus — essentially a system of knotted
strings that operated in a way akin to a form of mnemonic braille. Similar in
appearance to a string mop head, over seven hundred khipus are known to
survive; the largest having as many as two thousand individual strings, each
string with a series of knots. These are only a fraction of the number that once
existed in Inca archives, but the greater loss results from the fact that Spanish
rule and the introduction of an alphabetic writing system led to the
11
N. Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (Studies in African History, vii, London, 1973),
113–14, see also 186–9, 193, 197 (role of literate Muslim scholars).
12
Lithuania: D. Baronas and S. C. Rowell, The Conversion of Lithuania: From Pagan
Barbarians to Late Medieval Christians (Vilnius, 2015), 66, 117, 230; Mississippi:
Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians. See also, for early Anglo-Saxon
England: T. Lambert, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2017), 27–34.
13
On Timbuktu, see C. English, The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied
City and the Race to Save its Treasures (London, 2017); C. English and P. Thonemann,
‘Adventures in Fiction’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 2017, 7–8.

downgrading of khipu records and the disappearance of those who could read
them — or at least read anything more than simple lists. Until recently the
balance of opinion was in favour of seeing khipus as a more sophisticated
version of the tally sticks produced by the medieval English exchequer: khipus
supposedly could record numerical and non-numerical data, and act as a
check on what a messenger reported orally, but no more. This now looks to be
a serious underestimate. Spanish transcriptions of khipu records show that
the strings could encode statements with a subject, object and verb, and if that
was possible, then all the possibilities of a writing system begin to open up. All
this is lost to us. We can now only access Inca history in textual form through
colonial-era authors using the Latin alphabet; pre-conquest Inca writings in
their original medium have become as inaccessible as Linear A or
Harappan.14
For Central America the picture is more complicated and the role of the
Spanish more ambiguous. The region was heavily populated and highly
sophisticated, with at least three writing systems in use when the Spanish
arrived: Maya, Mixtec and Nahuatl, the last used by the Aztecs and their
neighbours. One of the more dramatic scholarly breakthroughs of recent
decades has been the demonstration that Maya script was not purely logo-
graphic — in other words made up of pictograms that each represented a
thing or concept — but was syllabic too. With a writing system on the face of it
no less sophisticated than Chinese, Maya scribes were therefore in theory
capable of expressing anything they wanted.15 Mixtec and Nahuatl scripts,
on the other hand, seem to have been purely logographic, and as understood
14
T. N. D’Altroy, The Incas, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2015), 17–27, 146–64, while 5http://khi-
pukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/WhatIsAKhipu.html4provides a useful introduction to the
debate; then see G. Urton, Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources
(Austin, 2017); G. Urton, ‘Writing the History of an Ancient Civilization without
Writing: Reading the Inka Khipus as Primary Sources’, Journal of Anthropological
Research, xxiii (2017); G. Urton and C. J. Brezine, ‘Information Control in the Palace
of Puruchuco: An Accounting Hierarchy in a Khipu Archive from Coastal Peru’, in R. L.
Burger, C. Morris and R. Matos Mendieta (eds.), Variations in the Expression of Inka
Power (Washington, DC, 2008); G. Urton and C. J. Brezine, ‘Khipu Accounting in
Ancient Peru’, Science, cccix (2005), 1065–7; G. Urton, ‘From Knots to Narratives:
Reconstructing the Art of Historical Record Keeping in the Andes from Spanish
Transcriptions of Inka Khipus’, Ethnohistory, xlv (1998).
15
M. D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code, 3rd edn (London, 2012); D. Tedlock, 2000 Years of
Mayan Literature (Berkeley, 2010), 1–10.

at the moment, less sophisticated writing systems with a more limited po-
tential than Maya.16
It is often asserted that, thanks to the catastrophic appearance of the
Spanish, a whole Mesoamerican world recorded in writing has been lost.17
The reality is more complicated. The Spanish certainly destroyed a large
number of writings they saw as idolatrous, but the European impact in this
respect was ambiguous even so. In the case of Mexico, one of the reasons we
know so much about the Aztec world is because of the introduction of an
adapted version of the Latin alphabet for Nahuatl. The new technology did
not just replace pictograms; it enabled Nahua writers to record things that
would have been previously impossible. An Aztec picture codex needed
someone to perform orally what the pictograms might imply but cannot
say. Without that informed oral performance they are silent. The post-con-
quest texts reveal a rich rhetorical culture, which would have disappeared
without trace but for the adoption of a writing system that could record what
the speaker had said. The survival of so many colonial period Nahuatl texts
written for the indigenous elite, in almost every genre apart from the strictly
religious, shows that nothing was stopping them keeping pre-conquest texts
either. Their disappearance must reflect the fact they were no longer thought
to be useful.18
With the Maya, the situation was different. Between the fourth century BCE
and the tenth century CE, the Maya had produced a mass of written material
on wood, stone, ceramic and plaster, and on thousands of bark-paper codices.
By the early sixteenth century, however, this was far in the past. Most Maya
cities in the south and centre had been abandoned in the ninth century, and in
the mid fifteenth the same happened at Mayapan, the last major centre in the
north. The durable epigraphy, most of which pre-dates the tenth century,
survives; but only four codices, two post-conquest, one fifteenth century, and
one fragmentary example discovered in a dry cave and dated by radiocarbon
to the period either side of 1250. The Spanish certainly destroyed Maya books,
16
J. Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of
Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, 1992), 326–30; L. B.
Diel, ‘Nahua and Mixtec Pictorial Books: Religion and History through Visual Text’, in
D. L. Nichols and C. A. Pool (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology
(Oxford, 2012), 874–6.
17
C. Mann, 1491: The Americas Before Columbus (London, 2006), 270.
18
C. Townsend, Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial America Kept their
History Alive (Oxford, 2017), 1–52; Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, 326–69,
374–92; E. Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs
(Austin, 2000), 2–5.

but the vast majority of medieval codices would already have long dis-
appeared, the inevitable victims of lowland Central America’s damp tropical
climate. To reach us, this material would have needed to be reproduced by
successive generations, whether in the Maya script, or, like so much Nahuatl
material, in a version using the Latin alphabet. To some extent this happened,
notably in various versions of the so-called Book of Chilam Balam; but only to
a limited extent. The fact that the post-conquest Maya produced so many
fewer writings than did contemporary Nahuatl speakers in central and north-
ern Mexico suggests that factors within Mayan society, at work long before
the sixteenth century, explain the loss of the codices and what they contained,
quite as much as the direct actions of the Spanish.19
For what we know and do not know about the Maya, their choice of writing
material is crucial. Bark paper was ideal in all respects, as the inhabitants of
Novgorod in northern Russia knew too, except it was not durable.20 The fact
that we can actually say a great deal about the early medieval Maya is conse-
quently down to their epigraphy, especially on stone, which has the great
advantage over other writing materials of being highly resistant to abandon,
neglect, fire and damp, and cannot be eaten by mice or insects.21 South and
south-east Asia were similarly regions of advanced literacy from an early date
where before the thirteenth century very little written material survives dir-
ectly other than as inscriptions on stone, metal, or more rarely wood (Map 5).
Buddhism, a literate and textual religion par excellence, originated in India.
In the early Middle Ages, Chinese Buddhists made expeditions to India to
collect essential texts, although Sanskrit literature in India itself now survives
entirely in later copies. More prosaic documents do not survive at all save
where they were written as inscriptions.22 Zhou Daguan, a Chinese envoy
19
M. D. Coe, The Maya, 7th edn (London, 2005), 111–200; D. Webster, ‘The Classic Maya
Collapse’, in J. H. Cox (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature
(Oxford, 2014); G. Vail, ‘The Mayan Codices’, Annual Review of Archaeology, xxxv
(2006); T. Ward, ‘The Popol Wuj and the Birth of Mayan Literature’, in Cox (ed.),
Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature.
20
See the website ‘Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus: Contents and Contexts’,
5http://gramoty.ru/birchbark/about-site/4(accessed 7 May 2018). Novgorod birchbark
texts survive because they were left in waterlogged conditions in the ground, in a way that
Yucatan ecology would make impossible.
21
Tedlock, 2000 Years of Mayan Literature, 246–7; S. Martin and N. Grube, Chronicle of the
Maya Kings and Queens, revised edn (London, 2008), 6–23.
22
R. Salomon, Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and
the other Indo-Aryan Languages (Oxford, 1998), 3–5, 110–59, 226–44; D. Ali, ‘Indian
Historical Writing, c.600–c.1400’, in S. Foot and C. F. Robinson (eds.), The Oxford
History of Historical Writing, ii, 400–1400 (Oxford, 2012), 83–92.

who in 1296–7 came to Angkor, the great capital and cult centre of medieval
Cambodia, talks of writing for private and official purposes as an everyday
feature of life. But none of this material survives. What Zhou Daguan de-
scribes seems to have been temporary and reusable: writing in white chalk on
pieces of black-dyed parchment that could be wiped clean when no longer
needed. For more permanent writings in both south and south-east Asia,
palm leaves were the normal medium. They have the advantages of cheapness
and ease of preparation, and make a very good writing surface. Indeed the
easy accessibility and low price of palm leaves is likely to have been a major
factor in the early spread of literacy across the region. But the disadvantage, as
with bark paper, is that they are not durable. Palm leaf manuscripts are sus-
ceptible to damp and insect damage, and in time crumble. To last more than a
couple of centuries at most they need dry conditions and careful handling; to
last longer than that a text will need to have been copied.23 The result is that in
terms of written evidence, what we can say about these regions through the
Middle Ages depends to a great extent on the reports of outsiders, on the texts
(mostly religious) that were important enough to deserve copying, and above
all on the epigraphic habit.
If the choice of writing material can be crucial, so too can a change from
one material to another. As the Maya moved from writing on stone to writing
almost exclusively in bark-paper codices, so less was preserved. In a similar
way, as the Greco-Roman world moved away from stone inscriptions, a cul-
ture fell silent (Map 1). Up to the third century CE, huge numbers of inscrip-
tions in Greek and Latin of all sorts are known, documenting this world in
detail. From the fourth century onwards the number goes down. The decline
is partly to be explained by a shift away from epigraphy, which in turn can be
interpreted in social, cultural and economic terms; but it was also a conse-
quence of a new fashion for painted rather than inscribed texts. Under most
conditions painted texts do not last well. The Roman world in Late Antiquity
produced just as much writing as its predecessor. Especially in the form of
theological and hagiographic texts copied into later manuscripts, far more
has been preserved for the fourth to seventh centuries CE than for the first to
third. But for those subjects not of interest to later copyists, a source of
indispensable evidence dries up.24
23
O. P. Agrawal, Conservation of Manuscripts and Paintings of South-East Asia (London,
1984), 24–5, 36–54; J. G. Samuel, ‘Preservation of Palm-leaf Manuscripts in Tamil’, IFLA
Journal, xx (1994), 294–6.
24
E. A. Meyer, ‘Epigraphy and Communication’, in M. Peachin (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World (Oxford 2011); B. Salway, ‘Late
Antiquity’, in C. Bruun and J. Edmondson (eds.,), The Oxford Handbook of Roman

The use of papyrus throughout the Roman world facilitated extremely
widespread literacy, but texts on papyrus only survive in any number from
Egypt, where the desert, close by the centres of population along the Nile,
provided ideal conditions for rubbish dumps of unwanted writings to survive
for centuries. What they contain are hundreds of thousands of fragments of
texts, ranging from the literary to the deeply prosaic: wills, leases, receipts,
letters, spells; everything in fact one might wish to use writing for. As a result,
hugely more is known about Roman Egypt than any other province in the
empire; and that fact is a constant reminder of what is lost elsewhere.25 A few
papyri survive from other parts of the empire, notably Arabia, Palestine,
Ravenna and Merovingian Gaul, but very few.26 By contrast, from the mid
eighth century onwards the number of surviving texts of all sorts in what had
been imperial territory goes rapidly up. Many more books survive, and even
more dramatically, the number of original charters rises to the thousands.
Until quite recently the assumption was that this reflected the collapse of
Epigraphy (Oxford, 2014); Mark A. Handley, Death, Society and Culture: Inscriptions and
Epitaphs in Gaul and Spain, AD 300–750 (British Archaeological Reports, international
series, mcxxxv, Oxford, 2003), 181–6; C. Witschel, ‘Der epigraphic habit in der
Spätantike: Das Beispiel der Provinz Venetia et Histria’, in J.-U. Krause and C.
Witschel (eds.), Die Stadt in der Spätantike: Niedergang oder Wandel? Akten des inter-
nationalen Kolloquiums in München am 30. und 31. Mai 2003 (Stuttgart, 2006).
25
P. Sarris, ‘Lay Archives in the Late Antique and Byzantine East: The Implications of the
Documentary Papyri’, in W. C. Brown, et al. (eds.), Documentary Culture and Laity in the
Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2013); R. S. Bagnall, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-
Roman East (Sather Classical Lectures series, lxix, Berkeley, 2011), 2, 139–44; A. K.
Bowman, ‘Literacy in the Roman World: Mass and Mode’, in J. H. Humphrey (ed.),
Literacy in the Roman World (Journal of Roman Archaeology, suppl. series, iii, Ann Arbor,
1991); compare W. V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), esp. 9–10, 13,
175, 331–2. The case for widespread literacy is compatible with Harris’s argument that
overall levels were low.
26
Arabia: J. Frösén et al., The Petra Papyri, 4 vols. (Amman, 2002–13); Palestine: L. Casson
and E. L. Hettich, Excavations at Nessana, ii, Literary Papyri (Princeton, 1950); C. J.
Kraemer, Excavations at Nessana, iii, Non-Literary Papyri (Princeton, 1958); Italy: J.-
O. Tjäder, Die nichtliterarischen lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit 445–700, 3 vols.
(Lund, 1954–82); Merovingian Gaul: D. Sonzogni, ‘Le Chartrier de l’abbaye de Saint-
Denis en France au haut Moyen Âge: Essai de reconstitution’, Pecia: Ressources en méd-
iévistique, iii (2003), nos. 1, 3, 6, 31, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 54, 55; Chartae
latinae antiquiores, ed. A. Bruckner et al. (Zurich, 1954–), nos. 549–63, 569, 592; D. Ganz
and W. Goffart, ‘Charters Earlier than 800 from French Collections’, Speculum, lxv
(1990), 912–14. In Chartae latinae antiquiores, xxix (1993), most of Tjäder’s charters
reappear in slightly improved editions by Tjäder himself.

literacy and learning in the immediately post-Roman period, and a revival
from the eighth century under the Carolingians. A more convincing explan-
ation is the contemporary shift from papyrus to parchment: much more
expensive, more time-consuming to produce, but durable.27 In 1791 the
great French abbey of Cluny was dissolved, and many of its buildings and
their contents subsequently destroyed. Two decades later a local antiquarian
discovered what was left of Cluny’s archives, dumped as waste. Gradually the
material was collected and much of it transferred to Paris, where it has
become one of the great sources of European medieval history. Had
Cluny’s scribes used papyrus or palm leaf, very little would have survived.28
In those parts of the world which were literate, what is known of the
medieval globe has therefore been through a selection process imposed as
much by the choice of writing material as by deliberate destruction. We know
more about some parts than others very simply because what was written was
on stone or parchment which has survived where less durable materials have
disappeared. But even this is only part of the story. Again to think about the
Maya and the Nahua: more important than either deliberate destruction or
natural decay was the prevailing culture of memory. Who wanted to remem-
ber and record what about the past, and in what ways and for what pur-
poses?29 Or, consider the Merovingian papyri: fragile and susceptible to
damp, but, all the same, in the monastery of St Denis outside Paris a papyrus
archive survived until the eleventh century, of which nineteen documents
survive to this day. The disappearance of Merovingian papyri was clearly not
inevitable.30 Above all other factors, the reason why writings have been pre-
served is because someone has thought it worthwhile.
II
CULTURES OF WRITING; CULTURES OF KEEPING
Much of western Europe is well provided with medieval writings that survive
either as originals or as copies. It is no accident that medieval history in its
current academic form is in effect a European invention. I am writing this in
27
B. Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. D. Ó. Cróinı́n and
D. Ganz (Cambridge, 1990), 8.
28
L. Delisle, Inventaire des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds de Cluni (Paris,
1884), xiii–xviii, xxi; B. Marguery-Melin, La Destruction de l’Abbaye de Cluny, 1789–1823
(Cluny, 1985), 22, 27–8, 39–41.
29
I. Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570, 2nd edn
(Cambridge, 2003), 69, 155–7, 161–3; Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest, 376–92.
30
P. J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First
Millennium (Princeton, 1994), 107–13; G. Halsall, Settlement and Social Organization:
The Merovingian Region of Metz (Cambridge, 1994), 47–8.

Oxford, sitting across the room from a row of bookshelves filled with the
publications of the Oxford Historical Society. The first volume was published
in 1885, and since then a further 144 have appeared, of which 56 cover the
period before 1500. The volumes include registers, letters, building accounts
and property deeds — the last in their thousands. Two of the volumes make
up the Revd Herbert Salter’s Survey of Oxford. From 1907 onwards, Salter, an
Anglican priest and historian, had published thirty-two volumes of largely
medieval materials for the Society, in addition to other medieval Oxford
material elsewhere. What this had taught him was that in the Oxford archives
was the evidence to reconstruct the medieval town, quite literally foot by foot:
who owned exactly what from the thirteenth century onwards. The result was
the Survey of Oxford, which mapped this out, and gave the evidence which lay
behind it. Property boundaries are not the whole story, but from this per-
spective at least, Salter’s work made Oxford one of the best understood medi-
eval towns in the world.31
It is easy for medievalists working in western Europe to take this story for
granted, but it is actually very peculiar. We know so much about Oxford
because such a large part of the medieval town was owned by permanent
ecclesiastical institutions, who kept archives, and transcribed charters and
property deeds into cartularies. The majority of these were dissolved in the
early sixteenth century, but one category among them, the colleges, survived,
and further colleges were in due course established, in some cases endowed
with property once owned by now dissolved monasteries. As permanent in-
stitutions, the colleges behaved as their predecessors, preserving the deeds
that proved ownership of their properties, memorialized the generosity of
founders and donors, and demonstrated their longevity. They have contin-
ued to do so to the present day.
To take one example of this process, the Augustinian abbey of Oseney,
founded in 1129, owned many properties in the town. The priory was dis-
solved in 1529, and in 1546 the abbey’s properties in Oxford along with the
associated charters and title deeds were given to Henry VIII’s new foundation
of Christ Church. The deeds remained there until moved to the Bodleian
library in the twentieth century. Had Christ Church not found them useful
they would not have survived. Indeed in 1667 the College was happy to give
the deeds for properties it did not own to Anthony Wood, a local antiquary.
Wood eventually gave them to the Bodleian, where they still are; but the point
31
H. E. Salter, Survey of Oxford, 2 vols. (Oxford Historical Society, new series, xiv and xx,
Oxford, 1960–69); E. Craster, ‘Salter, Herbert Edward (1863–1951)’, revised by H. C. G.
Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); W. A. Pantin, ‘Herbert
Edward Salter, 1863–1951’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xl (1954), 219–39.

is that for Christ Church, as for other Oxford colleges, medieval documents
mattered most of all when they pertained to properties they owned.32 The
continuing existence of the colleges, with effectively permanent property
interests, in turn ensured the survival of thousands of medieval documents.
The role of Wood has a further significance. Thanks to him, over a thou-
sand medieval documents that had no interest for Christ Church, not just
deeds and charters, but many of Oseney’s rent rolls too, made their way to the
Ashmolean museum.33 This was material that would have had no value for
anyone writing history in a classicizing tradition, still less for a scholar of
ancient texts; but Wood was part of an antiquarian turn, acutely aware of how
much knowledge of the past was slipping away, and looking for evidence to
support modern English institutions, such as the University of Oxford, whose
history he first published in 1674. Wood was not alone. His interests were
widely shared, not least by Elias Ashmole, the founder of the Ashmolean, the
museum which after Wood’s death in 1695 provided a new home for the
latter’s huge collection of Oseney documents. Only through such a web of
very particular cultural practices and institutional structures did this mass of
medieval material avoid destruction.34
Oxford illustrates a wider point. From time to time I have wondered what a
map of medieval Europe would look like scaled according to the volume of
surviving written material. England as a whole would stand out, at least for
the period after 1066, very much for the reasons that explain the quantity
surviving in Oxford: first, the existence of a literate culture that produced
large quantities of documents and personal letters, as well as literary texts of
all sorts, including chronicles and histories;35 second, the existence of per-
manent institutions with an archival sensibility linked to a legal system which
required documents for proof, initially mostly ecclesiastical, but increasingly,
from the twelfth century onwards, those of the English state; third, the early
modern emergence of an antiquarian culture that took steps to preserve re-
cords of the past.
32
H. E. Salter (ed.), Cartulary of Oseney Abbey, 6 vols. (Oxford Historical Society, lxxxix, xc,
xci, xcvii, xcviii, ci, Oxford, 1929–36), i, pp. i, ix–xii, xxvii.
33
Salter, Cartulary of Oseney Abbey, i, pp. xi–xii. The Wood manuscripts, including the
Oseney documents, were transferred to the Bodleian library in 1860.
34
G. Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford,
1995), 1–21; G. Parry, ‘Wood, Anthony (1632–1695)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, 2004).
35
M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd edn (Oxford,
2013); M. Carlin and D. Crouch, Lost Letters of Medieval Life: English Society, 1200–1250
(Philadelphia, 2013), 1–15.

A select group of particular places that dominate our current sense of the
European Middle Ages would include for various periods the cathedral li-
brary of Freising, the great East Frankish monasteries of St. Gall, Fulda,
Lorsch, and Wissembourg, the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, the
Norman monastery of St Evroult, the Italian cities, perhaps above all
Bologna, Lucca, Milan, Florence, Genoa, Venice and Rome including the
papacy, as well as Catalonia, the home not only of ecclesiastical archives
beginning in the tenth century whose holdings add up to tens of thousands
of documents, but also of the Archives of the Crown of Aragon, which houses
tens of thousands more.
It is a select group. I could have chosen others for my mental map. But these
are all places with bodies of material that have a good claim to have deter-
mined our view of the European Middle Ages. We see the Carolingian world
of the eighth and ninth centuries through the German monasteries.36
Whether or not we follow the interpretations of Georges Duby or more re-
cently Dominique Iogna Prat, so much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is
seen through what was written and preserved at Cluny and at St Evroult. The
former has left us more than 5,500 charters; the latter the Ecclesiastical History
of Orderic Vitalis, a monk of St Evroult whose work has had a profound
influence on modern medieval studies.37 The history of Italy could and has
been written through materials with a similarly monastic provenance, but our
sense of Italy’s institutional, economic and cultural creativity comes much
more from the great urban archives, or from those of the Church of Rome.38
Finally, consider Catalonia. Perhaps most European medievalists outside the
comunitat do not view the Middle Ages from here, but there is a case that they
should. Topics as varied as land use, literacy, aristocratic culture, peasant
36
M. Innes, ‘Archives, Documents and Landowners in Carolingian Francia’, and H.
Hummer, ‘The Production and Preservation of Documents in Francia: The Evidence
of Cartularies’, both in Brown et al. (eds.) Documentary Culture and Laity.
37
Cluny: G. Duby, La Société aux xie et xiie siècles dans la région mâconnaise, 2nd edn (Paris,
1971); D. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism,
and Islam, 1000–1150, trans. G. Edwards (Ithaca, 2002); St Evroult: M. Chibnall, The
World of Orderic Vitalis (Oxford, 1984).
38
P. Cammarosano, Italia medievale: struttura e geografia delle fonti scritte (Rome, 1991); I.
Lazzarini, ‘Introduzione: Scritture e potere. Pratiche documentarie e forme di governo
nell’Italia tardomedievale (secoli XIV–XV)’, Reti Medievali, ix (2008); J.-C. Maire-
Vigueur, ‘Révolution documentaire et révolution scripturaire: le cas de l’Italie médié-
vale’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes, cliii (1995); L. E. Boyle, A Survey of the Vatican
Archives and of its Medieval Holdings, revised edn (Subsidia Medievalia, i, Toronto, 2001),
7–24, 103–13, 114–72; F. X. Blouin, Vatican Archives: An Inventory and Guide to
Historical Documents of the Holy See (Oxford, 1998), xv–xvi, xviii–xxii, 106–16, 131–8.

revolts, Muslim–Christian relations, and the development of bureaucratic
methods are all illuminated through the extraordinary wealth of the
Catalan archives.39
What these examples have in common is that they are the products of
essentially the same factors that explain the riches of Oxford’s and
England’s libraries and archives. They produced documents because medi-
eval western Europe was a literate world, where documents were written and
used in large numbers and ordinary ways by laity and clergy, and not just in
the later Middle Ages. In originals and cartulary copies, the monasteries of
East Francia have preserved some seven thousand charters that date to the
eighth and ninth centuries, and those texts in turn hint at the existence of
many others.40 What Oxford also shows is the importance of what happened
next, and the variety of paths that could follow. Peaceful storage in situ has
been rare. A number of Italian city archives and libraries are exceptions. So
too is the monastery of St Gall in Switzerland whose medieval library survives
to this day, preserving more than a thousand manuscripts and seven hundred
original charters dating to before 900 CE. St Gall was not wholly spared; the
abbey was attacked and looted in 1531 and 1712, but the losses were not
permanent and most of what had been taken was returned in 1946 and
2006 respectively.41 The monasteries and sees of Pyrenean Catalonia have
also fared well, as more remarkably have the royal archives in Barcelona. Their
survival in the middle of the city through the Catalan revolt of 1641–59, the
sieges of 1705 and 1713–14, the Tragic Week of 1909, and the civil war of the
1930s, might be regarded as miraculous. The medieval cathedral library at
Freising is also something of an exception. Although not in situ, it has sur-
vived relatively intact. When the ecclesiastical principality was dissolved in
1802 the Bavarian occupiers took the library en bloc to Munich, including its
39
P. Puig i Ustrell, Els pergamins documentals: Naturalesa, tractament arxivistic i contingut
diplomatic (Colleccio Normativa arxivistica, iii, Barcelona, 1995), 155–9, 181–201; P.
Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du xe à la fin du xi e siècle: croissance et mutations d’une
société, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1976), i, 22–32; R. I. Burns, Diplomatarium of the Crusader
Kingdom of Valencia: The Registered Charters of Its Conqueror, Jaume I, 1257–1276, i,
Introduction: Society and Documentation in Crusader Valencia (Princeton, 1985), 15–25.
40
The Languages of Early Medieval Charters: Anglo-Saxon England and Eastern Francia,
c.700–c.1100, 5http://www.ehu.eus/en/web/lemc/iturriak4 (accessed 7 May 2018);
Hummer, ‘The Production and Preservation of Documents in Francia’, 192–4.
41
M. Borgolte, ‘Kommentar zu Ausstellungsdaten, Actum- und Güterorten der älteren St.
Galler Urkunden’, in M. Borgolte, D. Geuenich and K. Schmid (eds.), Subsidia
Sangallensia i, Materialien und Untersuchungen zu den Verbrüderungsbüchern und zu
den älteren Urkunden des Stiftsarchivs St. Gallen (St. Gallen, 1986), 330–459; R.
McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), 77–131.

ninth-century cartulary, a vital source for the history of Carolingian Europe
that records over seven hundred documents dating to between 744 and 848.42
More typical are the stories of what happened elsewhere. The papal library
and archives suffered as the popes stayed away from Rome in the later Middle
Ages, and even more when the city was sacked by Charles V’s army in 1527.
The creation of the modern Vatican library and archives was part of a con-
scious effort to make good what had been lost. One of the reasons why the
papacies of Gregory I and Gregory VII loom so large in the minds of modern
historians is because the registers of their letters survive where those for most
other popes before the end of the twelfth century have not.43 Fulda’s medieval
library steadily leaked volumes as scholars borrowed them to form the basis of
printed editions, but failed to send them back. This proved fortunate when
Fulda was sacked by Protestant troops from Hesse in 1632, and the library
almost completely destroyed; a fact which explains why so many Fulda manu-
scripts are now in Basel, a centre of the early modern publishing trade.44 What
we know of the contents of two volumes of the monastery’s ninth-century
cartulary is similarly the result of their falling into the hands of members of
the Hohenzollern family, who in the early seventeenth century allowed them to
be published by the German historian Johannes Pistorius.45 Early modern
interest also saved a great deal of the medieval library of Lorsch. After the
dissolution of the monastery in the mid sixteenth century, the library was
42
Freising Manuscripts (Traditionsbücher, cartularies, urbaria and accounting books),
5https://www.bayerische-landesbibliothek-online.de/freisingertraditionenen4
(accessed 26 July 2018).
43
A. M. Piazzoni, ‘Introduzione alla storia della biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana’, in A. M.
Piazzoni and B. Jaffa (eds.), Conoscere la Biblioteca Vaticana (Vatican City, 2010), 15–31;
A. Grafton, ‘The Vatican and its Library’, in A. Grafton (ed.), Rome Reborn: The Vatican
Library and Renaissance Culture (Washington, DC, 1993), 34–45. For the registers, see
Boyle, Survey of the Vatican Archives, 103–13, 114–72; Blouin, Vatican Archives: 131–8.
44
Codices Fuldenses Helvetiae, 5http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/list/subproject/
fuldenses4 (accessed 26 July 2018); M.-A. Aris et al., ‘Fulda, St Salvator’, in F. Büll, F.
Jürgensmeier and R. E. Schwerdtfeger (eds.), Die Benediktinischen Mönchs- und
Nonnenklöster in Hessen (Germania Benedictina, vii, Munich, 2004), 254, 255, 294,
341–9.
45
E. E. Stengel, ‘Fragmente der verschollenen Cartulare des Hrabanus Maurus (Fuldensia
III)’, Archiv für Diplomatik, ii (1956), 116–17; P. Lehmann, Mitteilungen aus
Handschriften, ix, Zu Hrabanus Maurus und Fulda: und Register zu vii–ix
(Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-
Historische Klasse, ix, 1950, Munich, 1951), 3–7; J. Raaijmakers, The Making of the
Monastic Community of Fulda, c.744–c.900 (Cambridge, 2012), 198–9; H.-J. Günther,
‘Pistorius, Johannes’, Neue Deutsche Biographie, xx (2001).

first removed by the Elector Palatine to Heidelberg. From there it was taken as
war booty by the Bavarians in 1622 and given to their Catholic allies, including
the Pope and the Archbishop of Mainz, who thereby obtained Lorsch’s early
medieval cartulary.46 The medieval library of Wissembourg in Alsace was simi-
larly dispersed following the abbey’s sack by the Swedes in the Thirty Years
War, and again what survives can be ascribed to antiquarian interest. A number
of important medieval manuscripts were bought by the duke of Brunswick-
Wolfenbüttel in whose library they remain, while the early medieval cartulary,
after a period in Paris, was acquired by local historians who took it to Speyer.47
Cluny and St Evroult were both victims of the French Revolution, whose
libraries and archives were, as we have already seen for Cluny, likewise saved
from total loss by the antiquarian impulse.48
The process by which Cluny’s archives have come down to us is an example
that illustrates another important point. Historians tend to know Cluny for
its charters, or more accurately they know Cluny for the charters made avail-
able in print in the nineteenth century and online at the end of the twenti-
eth.49 Numbering over 5,500 documents, they are a remarkable survival. Well
used by historians, most famously they form the basis for Georges Duby’s
influential 1953 study of the tenth- to twelfth-century Mâconnais, the region
around Cluny. A regional study in what was then the classic style of French
theses, Duby’s book owed its impact to the fact that it offered a model, not just
for the Mâconnais, but for France and in some ways for western Europe more
generally.50 What Duby tended to overlook, however, was that the published
46
M.-A. Aris et al., ‘Lorsch’, in Büll et al. (eds.), Benediktinischen Mönchs- und
Nonnenklöster, 811, 816–21, 851–2; Bibliotheca Laureshamensis digital: Virtual
Monastic Library of Lorsch,5http://www.bibliotheca-laureshamensis-digital.de/en/klos-
ter/bibliothek_skriptorium.html4 (accessed 7 May 2018).
47
H. Butzmann, Die Weissenburger Handschriften (Kataloge der Herzog August Bibliothek
Wolfenbüttel, new series, x, Frankfurt am Main, 1964), 3–4; K. Glockner and A. Doll
(eds.), Traditiones Wizenburgenses: Die Urkunden des Klosters Weissenburg, 661–864
(Darmstadt, 1979), 44–6; Die Handschriften des Klosters Weissenburg: Blick in eine
Bibliothek des frühen und hohen Mittelalters:5http://www.hab.de/ausstellungen/weissen-
burg/4(accessed 7 May 2018).
48
Cluny: Delisle, Inventaire des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds de Cluni, xiii–
xv; Marguery-Melin, La Destruction de l’Abbaye de Cluny; St Evroult: L. Duval, ‘Les
Bibliothèques et les musées du département de l’Orne pendant la Révolution’, Bulletin
de la Société historique et archéologique de l’Orne, iii (1884), 238, 240–4.
49
A. Bernard and A. Bruel, Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, 6 vols. (Paris 1876–1903);
Cartae Cluniacenses Electronicae, 5http://www.uni-muenster.de/Fruehmittelalter/Projekte/
Cluny/CCE/Welcome-e.htm4(accessed 26 July 2018).
50
Duby, La Société aux xi e et xii e siècles dans la région mâconnaise.

charters cannot be treated as a simple reflection of the medieval world, even
one restricted to the Mâconnais.51 Leaving aside the issue of the extent to
which any body of writings can do more than hold up a distorting mirror to
the society that produced it, the published charters stand at several removes
from what once existed. Some documents were lost in the Middle Ages, some
disappeared when the monastery was pillaged by the Huguenots in the six-
teenth century, and a great deal more was destroyed after 1790. Some of these
losses were accidental; others reflect a view of what was useful and what was
not. Very few of the published texts were edited from an original. Only about
seven hundred original charters from Cluny survive for the period before
1300; most were lost in or after 1790. The majority of the published texts are
therefore known either from a series of cartularies (volumes or more occa-
sionally rolls containing transcriptions of the original documents), the oldest
produced in the late eleventh century, the fullest dating to the thirteenth; or
from copies of the lost originals made by Lambert de Barive between 1770 and
1790. Cartularies were compiled for contemporary purposes. They omitted
what was not needed, and often emended when that would make them more
useful. Even the medieval evidence therefore distorts what was once there. De
Barive, who had been sent to Cluny on the initiative of the French govern-
ment, was an exemplary copyist who recorded thousands of now lost charters.
When his work can be checked his texts are accurate, and often significantly
closer to the original than the medieval cartulary versions. But again de Barive
was not simply reproducing what was in Cluny’s archives. He copied texts
that seemed likely to interest his employers, and that tended to mean docu-
ments that were earlier rather than later. The same view was shared by the
nineteenth-century editors. We see what we have been allowed to see. The title
page of the collection says it all: these are the charters up to 1300; the late
Middle Ages in effect do not exist.52
Well documented at Cluny, the process whereby the evidence available to
us is the outcome of a series of selective triages is a global phenomenon. The
fate of Maya writings provides one illustration; Byzantium another. The
medieval Roman empire with its capital at Constantinople inherited from
51
M. Innes, ‘On the Material Culture of Legal Documents: Charters and their Preservation
in the Cluny Archive, Ninth to Eleventh Centuries’, in Brown et al. (eds.), Documentary
Culture and Laity ; F. L. Cheyette, ‘Georges Duby’s Mâconnais after Fifty Years: Reading it
Then and Now’, Journal of Medieval History, xxviii (2002), 304–14.
52
S. Barret, La Mémoire et l’écrit: L’Abbaye de Cluny et ses archives (x e–xviii e siècle)
(Münster 2004), 27–33, 377–400; S. Barret, ‘Cluny, Note sur le Recueil des chartes de
l’abbaye de Cluny d’Auguste Bernard et Alexandre Bruel’, Bulletin du Centre d’études
médiévales d’Auxerre, xiii (2009).

the classical past the habit of ordinary day-to-day pragmatic literacy, a bur-
eaucratic system of government, housed in the imperial capital, and a trad-
ition of keeping archives. To judge from the evidence that an ordinary
provincial landowner’s library in the eleventh century included (among
other texts) a history, and multiplying that by the thousands of such land-
owners across the empire, it seems that history writing was a common phe-
nomenon too. To judge from the hundred thousand or so surviving lead seals
that were once attached to documents of all sorts, including personal letters,
this was a society were literacy was widespread and writing things down was
normal.53 Yet so little survives. What comes to us has been filtered by delib-
erate and accidental destruction, and by successive choices of what was
thought worthwhile to preserve. Much was no doubt lost in the huge fires
set off in Byzantine Constantinople by the Nika rioters in 532 and by the
Venetians and their crusader allies in 1203–4.54 But just as fatal to so many
archives was the progressive disappearance of the institutions that might have
been concerned to preserve them. What need would the new Latin rulers of
Constantinople in 1204, or the Ottomans in 1453, have had of thousands of
legal and fiscal documents referring to parts of the Byzantine world they
would never rule, or the operations of institutions that no longer existed?
As in western Europe, the pattern of what has been preserved reflects a
combination of institutional survival and antiquarian interest; both rarer and
more tenuous for the Byzantine world than in, say, Oxford or Venice. The
only institutions to survive are ecclesiastical, most important being the mon-
asteries on Mount Athos in northern Greece. Like the monks of the Latin
West, what the Athonite monks generally wanted for their libraries were
works of theology, hagiography and patristics; rather differently, however,
what they did not want, unlike St. Gall and Cluny, were hundreds of leases and
charters, rent rolls and inventories, even of properties they still owned.
Golden Bulls given by a generous emperor tended to be kept, but most
53
M. Jeffreys, ‘Literacy’, in E. Jeffreys, R. Cormack and J. F. Haldon (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford, 2008), 796–802. For a landowner’s history, see S.
Vryonis, ‘The Will of a Provincial Magnate, Eustathius Boilas (1059)’, Dumbarton Oaks
Papers, xi (1957), 270; on seals, see J.-C. Cheynet, ‘Introduction à la sigillographie byzan-
tine’, in J.-C. Cheynet, La Société byzantine: L’Apport des sceaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 2008), 1–
82; J. Nesbitt, ‘Sigillography’, in Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, 150–6.
54
For 532, see N. Westbrook, ‘The Account of the Nika Riots as Evidence for Sixth-Century
Constantinopolitan Topography’, Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, vii
(2011); for 1203–4, see T. F. Madden, ‘The Fires of the Fourth Crusade in Constantinople,
1203–1204: A Damage Assessment’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, lxxxiv–v (1991–2); P.
Magdalino, Constantinople médiévale: Études sur l’évolution des structures urbaines
(Paris, 1996), 55, 92.

ordinary documents seem to have been regularly weeded if no longer of use.55
Thus even though we have a substantial number of Athonite documents,
there were once far more. The same impulse would seem to have limited
the monks’ antiquarian interests. Most of the secular texts that for modern
historians have shed most light on the Byzantine world — the great tenth-
century work on court ceremonies commissioned by the emperor
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, for example — survive not in the east
but in western libraries where western antiquarians and book collectors
have taken them.56 All of which helps to explain why we know what we
know about medieval Byzantium, and why there are more medieval docu-
ments of all sorts in Oxford than anywhere in Greece or Turkey. It also ex-
plains what it is about Byzantium that we don’t know, and why it is that we
don’t know it.
The pattern of Chinese survival makes the same point (Map 5). China
certainly surpasses Europe in terms of the sheer volume of medieval material
that has been preserved. Like Byzantium, this was a highly literate society that
used writing on a large scale and for every possible purpose. It was a bureau-
cratic polity, which prized literary skills and kept thousands of documents in
well-organized archives. It was also a society that had discovered how to make
cheap and strong paper by the second century BCE, and woodblock printing by
the eighth century CE.57 Even so, what has survived to reach us reflects a very
particular culture of preservation and recording.
History writing in China goes back to at least the fifth century BCE, and the
fact that both the Book of Documents and the Spring and Autumn Annals were
credited to Confucius gave the genre high prestige. Output grew from the
third century CE onwards, propelled by the demands of rival regimes for
narratives that placed them in a legitimate sequence of imperial dynasties.
In 629, early in the Tang dynasty, a History Office was established which
presided over a complex process of writing and recording the dynasty’s
55
N. Oikonomides, ‘Byzantine Archives of the Palaiologan Period, 1258–1453’, in R.
Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic Literacy, East and West (Woodbridge, 1997).
56
For Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Book of Ceremonies, see M. Featherstone, ‘Preliminary
Remarks on the Leipzig Manuscript of De Cerimoniis’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, xcv
(2008), 457–79; M. Featherstone, J. Grusková and O. Kresten, ‘Studien zu den
Palimpsestfragmenten des sogenannten ,,Zeremonienbuches‘‘ I. Prolegomena’,
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, xcviii (2006), 423–30.
57
Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, ‘Paper and Printing’, in Joseph Needham and Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin,
(eds.), Science and Civilisation in China, v, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, pt 1,
Paper and Printing (Cambridge, 1985), 1–3, 132–3, 146–59; J. P. McDermott, A Social
History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong
Kong, 2006), 1–12.

ongoing activities. The process evolved through the Tang and Song, but the
first step was always the Court Diaries (qiju zhu) that recorded the emperor’s
daily activities, and the Records of the Current Government (shizheng ji ),
which were confidential official summaries of administrative activity. These
were then summarized into Daily Calendars (rili ) which in turn formed the
basis for the Veritable Records (shilu) that provided a history of the reign of
the immediately preceding emperor or emperors. Collections of shilu formed
the main basis for Histories of the Current Dynasty (guoshi ), and they in turn
provided the material for the twenty-four Standard Dynastic Histories that
form the traditional core of Chinese historical knowledge, each normally
covering the previous dynasty.58
The Standard Histories are history on the grand scale and contain a re-
markable amount of disparate material, but they are also the embodiments of
a process of drastic selection and destruction on the large scale, and, before
the Song, very little of the underlying material survives, even in later copies.
From the early seventh century onwards, the archives were cleared of any-
thing inessential every three years. The result is that only one Veritable Record
of a Tang emperor has survived, covering no more than six months of a
dynasty that lasted 289 years.59 As a result, we see the history of medieval
China through the distorting prism of the priorities of bureaucratic officials,
the agendas of the compiling dynasty, and perhaps above all the values and
preconceptions of a Confucian elite. The reign of the Empress Wu (690–705)
is an extreme example, but one with wider implications. Wu is described in
the Standard Histories as a radical Buddhist who wanted to outlaw meat-
eating in China, a mother who murdered a daughter and one son while
driving another to suicide, a wife who murdered her husband, a nympho-
maniac who ruled in her own right and presided over a ruthless tyranny.
What is true and what is not in this list is hard to make out. But quite obvi-
ously what we are being told is what a later, male and Confucian court elite
58
Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 4th edn (Harvard-Yenching
Monograph series, c, Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 603–5, 608–27; Hilde De Weerdt,
Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Management of Empire in Song
China (Harvard East Asian Monographs, ccclxxxviii, Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 37–44.
59
E. Wilkinson, ‘How do We Know What We Know about Chinese History?’, in Michael
Szonyi (ed.), A Companion to Chinese History (Chichester, 2017), 11–27; B. S. Solomon,
The Veritable Record of the T’ang Emperor Shun-tsung (February 28, 805–August 31, 805):
Han Yü’s Shun-tsung Shih Lu (Cambridge, Mass., 1955).

thought we ought to learn from such a regrettable episode.60 History was too
important to be left, in Ranke’s well-known phrase, ‘How it essentially was’.
Getting out of the echo chamber of traditional Chinese historiography is
not easy for any part of the medieval period, but it is particularly hard for the
centuries up to the eleventh. For this reason a great deal of attention has been
paid to other written sources including wood and bamboo slips, inscriptions
on stone, and the huge cache of documents from Dunhuang in central Asia.
All in their way provide remarkably rich evidence. The 140,000 third-century
CE bamboo slips found in 1996 at Zoumalou in Changsha city, Hunan
Province, include accounts, legal texts, muster rolls and items as prosaic as
visiting cards.61 Inscriptions on stone, which survive in large numbers either
as such or as collections of rubbings, record a great deal that did not make it
into the Standard Histories, including much on the lives of women. Detailed
funerary inscriptions, many on stone steles, others painted or deposited in
tombs, set out individuals’ careers, family connections, and honours that are
not recorded elsewhere.62 Among the Dunhuang documents (under which
label I include material not just from Dunhuang itself but from other Tarim
basin sites) are texts of all sorts, including material that has transformed the
study of Chinese Buddhism.63 Yet for the medievalist none of these sources
60
N. H. Rothschild, Wu Zhao: China’s Only Woman Emperor (New York, 2008); D.
Twitchett and H. J. Wechsler, ‘Kao-tsung (reign 649–83) and the Empress Wu: The
Inheritor and the Usurper’, in D. Twitchett (ed.), Cambridge History of China, iii, Sui
and T’ang China, 589–906, pt i, (Cambridge, 1979), 248, 251, 265, 267, 270–1, 273; R. W.
L. Guisso, ‘The Reigns of the Empress Wu, Chung-tsung and Jui-tsung (684–712)’, in
Cambridge History of China, iii, 294, 297, 302; M. Whittow, ‘Motherhood and Power in
Early Medieval Europe, West and East: The Strange Case of the Empress Eirene’, in C.
Leyser and L. Smith (eds.), Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400–
1400 (Farnham, 2011), 59–61.
61
Wilkinson, Chinese History, 733–4; Yang Lu, ‘Managing Locality in Early Medieval
China: Evidence from Changsha’, in W. Swartz et al. (eds.), Early Medieval China: A
Sourcebook (New York, 2014), 95–6.
62
Wilkinson, Chinese History, 734, 748–9, 766, 784; N. Tackett, The Destruction of the
Medieval Chinese Aristocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), 13–25; E. M. Davis, Entombed
Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China: A Brief History of Early
Muzhiming (Leiden, 2015); Huaiyu Chen, ‘Religion and Society on the Silk Road: The
Inscriptional Evidence from Turfan’, in Swartz et al. (eds.), Early Medieval China,
176–93.
63
Wilkinson, Chinese History, 742–7; International Dunhuang Project website:5http://idp.
bl.uk/idp.a4d4 (accessed 26 July 2018); H. Sørensen, ‘Perspectives on Buddhism at
Dunhuang during the Tang and Five Dynasties Period’, in V. Elisseeff (ed.), The Silk
Roads: Highways of Culture and Commerce (New York, 2000). For recent discussion of

offers more than a partial alternative. Wood and bamboo slips gradually
disappeared from use after the sixth century as paper became the normal
writing material.64 Medieval China was an epigraphic culture on a scale that
almost matches that of the Greco-Roman world, but for the most part its
content tends to flesh out rather than transform our picture.65 Glen
Dudbridge, for example, makes use of Wang Renyu’s epitaph which still
survives as it was cut on stone some twenty years after his death in 956. It
adds important details and a change of perspective to what is recorded in the
Standard Histories, but nothing that would have been out of place.66
Similarly, although the Dunhuang documents are not wholly concerned
with Buddhism, that is what most of them are about; and those which are
not, and which are not in languages other than Chinese, are largely about a
world very distant in all senses from the heartlands of the Chinese state.67
On the face of it, escape from the echo chamber becomes easier from the
eleventh century onwards, as a woodblock publishing industry developed,
capable of printing books and pamphlets on a huge scale.68 Demand was
driven by the contemporary rise of the examination system. Status and for-
tune under the Song came to be inextricably linked to being a candidate, not
even so much to being a successful candidate as to the very fact of being part of
the empire-wide literary culture embodied in the examinations. This was a
society where certain literary skills were essential components of elite identity:
skills that lent themselves to display in poetry or the exchange of sophisticated
and allusive letters. Both sorts of writing could then be collected and pub-
lished to display that status to an even wider audience, including that of
finds and context, see I. Yoshiro, ‘The Provenance and Character of the Dunhuang
Documents’, Memoirs of the Tokyo Bunko, lxvi (2008); V. Hansen, The Silk Road: A
New History (Oxford, 2012).
64
Wilkinson, Chinese History, 904–5.
65
V. Hansen, ‘Inscriptions: Historical Sources for the Song’, Bulletin of Sung and Yüan
Studies, xix (1987); R. E. Harris, The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and
Medieval China (Seattle, 2008). A case for the potential of epigraphic evidence is made in
Tackett, Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy; and E. B. Vermeer, Chinese Local
History: Stone Inscriptions from Fukien in the Sung to Ch’ing Periods (Boulder, 1991).
66
G. Dudbridge, A Portrait of Five Dynasties China: From the Memoirs of Wang Renyu (880–
956) (Oxford, 2013).
67
Hansen, Silk Road; Sørensen, ‘Perspectives on Buddhism at Dunhuang’.
68
McDermott, Social History of the Chinese Book, 43–64; Tsien, ‘Paper and Printing’,
159–72.

generations to come.69 But literary skills also focused on more apparently
prosaic texts. The examination system required candidates to write essays on
public policy and administration, essays backed by reference not just to the
ancient classics, but to recent events and decisions. In theory the imperial
court was committed to keeping access to such information under tight con-
trol, but in practice this was impossible. The numbers of candidates from all
corners of the empire were growing exponentially; if the system were to be fair
then all had to have access to histories, laws and decrees. By the twelfth cen-
tury the imperial archives were leaking documents, and publishers were pro-
ducing every sort of compilation of official text that the growing market could
want. Lists of the contents of scholarly libraries from all over China show they
were full of such printed material. Demand led to supply, and supply led to
demand, with the publication of new genres, or at least new provincial vari-
ants of genres that once would have been a monopoly of the court and the
central administration, and in unprecedented volume. In this category come
difangzhi, conventionally translated as local gazetteers, and biji or notebooks,
most in manuscript but many printed, which circulated miscellanies of in-
formation likely to appeal to the scholar-literati.70
For the historian, all of this adds up to a rich body of material, and it is
telling that the two most detailed works available in western languages on the
social history of Song China have largely been written on the basis of evidence
from local gazetteers and from biji, especially from the latter.71 But one also
has to recognize that this material represents a very particular perspective. If
they open a window on medieval China different to that provided by the
Standard Histories, it is still one which only offers a very partial view.
Local gazetteers had begun as court-sanctioned reports, intended to
inform the centre of the nature of the localities. By the thirteenth century
they had evolved into the mix of geography, history, literature and govern-
ment records that characterized the genre through to the twentieth century.72
69
Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service
Examinations in Imperial China (1127–1279) (Harvard East Asian Monographs, cclxxxix,
Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 5–14, 129–50, 375–81; Wilkinson, Chinese History, 299–304.
70
Wilkinson, Chinese History, 650–2; J. M. Hargett, ‘Sketches’, in V. H. Mair (ed.), The
Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York, 2001), 560–5; Chu Ming-kin and
Hilde De Weerdt, ‘Introduction’, East Asian Publishing and Society, vi (2016), 1–4; De
Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks, 281–324.
71
J. Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276, trans. H. M.
Wright (London, 1962); R. Zhu et al., A Social History of Middle-Period China: The Song,
Liao, Western Xia and Jin Dynasties (Cambridge, 2016).
72
J. R. Dennis, Writing, Publishing and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–
1700 (Harvard East Asian Monographs, ccclxxix, Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 1–4.

They had also evolved into an essentially localist phenomenon. Between 1285
and the early nineteenth century successive dynasties undertook occasional
projects to produce empire-wide gazetteers. On each occasion, more or less
detailed instructions were issued listing what they should contain. For ex-
ample, in 1412, the Ming emperor ordered the compilers of gazetteers to
include information on the following: administrative boundaries, walled
sites, mountains and rivers (together with any associated poems), towns,
local products, local customs and practices, size of population, schools, mili-
tary units, local offices, temples and shrines, antiquities and scenic sites, the
accomplishments of local officials, the biographies of local worthies (espe-
cially scholars and those who had passed the imperial examinations), the
records of transcendent beings, including Buddhist and Daoist monks, in-
formation about remarkable natural features and finally, verses written in or
about the particular region.73 What is interesting about this list is how far
what is being asked for was pushing at an open door. Gazetteers whose pub-
lication was on entirely local initiative covered very much the same things. In
other words the scholarly elite resident in the provinces shared the same
world view as the officials of the imperial court and were defined, and defined
themselves, as an elite by their membership of a shared empire-wide literary
and administrative culture.74
The same can be said about biji, which have been described as jottings or
literary miscellanies of interest to the scholarly elite, compiled by that same
group on the basis of conversation and reading. The genre took off as a
publishing phenomenon in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with authors
and printers widely distributed across the southern Song empire. The anec-
dotes focus on politics, history and the doings of the imperial court, with an
important place too for stories on such themes as literature, friendship and
the art of conversation.75 As Hilde De Weerdt and others have recently noted,
biji were above all an expression of what bound the scholar elite together; they
were the ultimate networking literature.76
Gazetteers and biji therefore only very partially free us from the constraints
of official dynastic history. In fact they do more to show the extent to which
the imperial court and the scholarly elite of the provinces were bound to-
gether by a common culture; and it is largely through the prism of that culture
that we see their world. The gazetteers and biji, to which could be added the
73
Dennis, Writing, Publishing and Reading Local Gazetteers, 38–42.
74
De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks, 325–94; see also Hilde De Weerdt,
Catherine Holmes and John Watts in this volume.
75
De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks, 281–311.
76
Ibid., 317–21, 325–94.

collected works which successful scholar-officials liked to publish, were all
composed by that elite, read by that elite, and very largely preserved through
the centuries in the private collections of that elite. In reality, however, China,
like most developed medieval societies, was a world where local power rested
on the control of land and of those who worked it. It was a place too where the
vast majority of the population were neither office-holders nor scholar poets.
Writings from other groups in Chinese society, perhaps above all merchants,
and documents that were concerned with law and property, especially landed
property and its administration, once existed in quantity but, save for frag-
ments and for periods after the Middle Ages, the material has not come
through to us.77
I cite China as an example to set beside western Europe and Byzantium of
how what we know of the medieval past is the outcome of a series of filters:
accident and destruction — certainly — but more important the survival of
institutions and a literate culture that stored and preserved what was once
produced. The key to what we know about medieval Europe has been long-
lasting institutions such as monasteries or Oxford colleges or the state, com-
bined in each case with a later culture of antiquarian curiosity. The key to
what we know about China is the scholarly elite itself. We have almost entirely
only what they wrote, and only what they chose to preserve and make public.
With this in mind it is possible to see the surviving written evidence for the
Middle Ages on a spectrum. There are overlaps between China and the West.
Erudite letter collections are a feature of both, and a historian–bureaucrat
such as the twelfth-century Yorkshireman, Roger of Howden, reads rather
like his Chinese contemporaries when the only surviving copies of key ad-
ministrative documents are to be found in his privately produced chronicle.78
But the general patterns are different. While the equivalents of letter collec-
tions and the works of Roger of Howden-like scholar officials, along with
official histories, dominate our view of China, it is the detail of land owner-
ship, gifts and sales, rents and services, that loom largest in our view of the
medieval West.
Byzantium with its many surviving works of literature and theology, and
few charters and rent rolls, fits at the Chinese end of the spectrum. So too does
77
J. P. McDermott, The Making of the New Rural Order in South China, i, Village, Land, and
Lineage in Huizhou, 900–1600 (Cambridge, 2013), ix–x; Vermeer, Chinese Local History,
6; Dudbridge, A Portrait of Five Dynasties China, 1–3.
78
D. J. Corner, ‘Howden, Roger of (d. 1201/2)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford, 2004); D. J. Corner, ‘The Texts of Henry II’s Assizes’, in A. Harding (ed.), Law-
Making and Law-Makers in British History (Royal Historical Society Studies in History,
xxii, London, 1980).

Ireland, where so much medieval material in Irish was produced by scholars
for scholars, and was preserved by them until it attracted the attention of early
modern antiquarians.79 So too do the heartlands of the Islamic world in the
Middle East (Map 6). Empires such as those of the Abbasids in the eighth,
ninth and tenth centuries, or the Fatimids in the tenth to twelfth, were highly
literate, bureaucratic states that produced and stored documents on a scale to
match China. This was an archival culture par excellence.80 But very little
survives. Egypt as ever is something of an exception, but even here one should
be careful not to exaggerate. The principal source of Fatimid administrative
documents is the great dump of redundant Arabic writings in Hebrew script
attached to the Ben Ezra synagogue and known as the Cairo Geniza. No
Hebrew manuscript however trivial or prosaic could simply be thrown
away, so for more than a thousand years up to the nineteenth century local
Jews had been depositing here unwanted writings of all sorts.81 A great part of
the Geniza material comprises religious books and scrolls, but there are also
thousands of secular documents, including administrative documents in
Arabic script that originally came from the Fatimid archives. Some of these
79
A. O’Sullivan and W. O’Sullivan, ‘Edward Lhuyd’s Collection of Irish Manuscripts’,
Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (London, 1962). (I owe this
reference to Edward Lluyd’s journey round Ireland in 1699–1700, which he spent col-
lecting manuscripts from the last generation of Irish hereditary poets and traditional legal
scholars, to the kindness of Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards).
80
M. Van Berkel, ‘Archives and Chanceries: pre-1500, in Arabic’, in K. Fleet et al.,
Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (Leiden, 2013); M. Van Berkel, ‘Reconstructing Archival
Practices in Abbasid Baghdad’, Journal of Abbasid Studies, i (2014); C. Robinson, Islamic
Historiography (Cambridge, 2003), 4–7, 31–2, 146–7; P. E. Walker, Exploring an Islamic
Empire: Fatimid History and its Sources (Ismaili Heritage series, vii, London, 2002), 112–
26; M. Rustow, ‘A Petition to a Woman at the Fatimid Court (413–414 AH/1022–23 CE)’,
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, lxxiii (2010), 1–4; T. El-Leithy,
‘Living Documents, Dying Archives: Towards a Historical Anthropology of Medieval
Arabic Archives’, Al-Qantara, xxxii (2011), 389–92; P. Sijpesteijn, ‘The Archival Mind in
Early Islamic Egypt: Two Arabic Papyri’, in P. Sijpesteijn et al. (eds.), From al-Andalus to
Khurasan: Documents from the Medieval Islamic World (Leiden, 2007).
81
M. Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate
(Ithaca, 2008), xix–xxii; S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish
Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6
vols. (Berkeley, 1967–93), i, 1–28; M. R. Cohen, ‘Geniza for Islamicists, Islamic Geniza,
and the ‘‘New Cairo Geniza’’ ’, Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review, vii (2006),
129–31. See too the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit website, and especially the
link to ‘Fragment of the Month’, 5http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/
taylor-schechter-genizah-research-unit4(accessed 26 July 2018).

documents had been important to the Jews whose papers would eventually
end up in the Geniza, but as Marina Rustow is currently showing, most came
here as reused scrap paper. Thrown out of the Fatimid archives where they
had originally been written, they made a cheap and convenient writing sur-
face for lots of day-to-day purposes; and for the Hebrew-script texts, that
ultimately led to their preservation in the Geniza. Beyond these, a very small
number of Fatimid documents have been preserved at the monastery of Sinai
or its dependencies; otherwise the medieval state archives of Cairo have dis-
appeared as totally as those of Kaifeng or Hangzhou.82 It is telling that the best
source of original documents for the study of the Fatimid fiscal system is not
Cairo but Sicily, where the Norman kings employed Arabic scribes to run a
Fatimid-style administrative system, and institutional continuity ensured
their preservation.83 Writing the medieval history, certainly of Iraq, and in
many respects of Egypt too, effectively depends not on first-hand evidence
but on historical compilations produced by scholars such as al-Tabari writing
in the tenth century, or al-Maqrizi in the fifteenth — compilations not dis-
similar in essence to the Chinese Standard Histories.84
As with China, historians of the Islamic world have worked hard to get out
of the echo chamber, and the Cairo Geniza — the medieval Middle East’s
equivalent of the Dunhuang caves — is one of the exceptional survivals that
show up how much is otherwise missing.85 Fragments of secular documents,
as opposed to religious texts, only make up about 5 per cent of the total, but
82
For possible reasons why, see Rustow, ‘A Petition to a Woman at the Fatimid Court’, 16–
24; M. Brett, ‘Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean: John Wansbrough and the
Historiography of Mediaeval Egypt’, in H. Kennedy (ed.), The Historiography of
Islamic Egypt (c.950–1800) (Leiden, 2001), 10–11; H. Halm, The Fatimids and Their
Traditions of Learning (London, 1997), 77.
83
J. Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Dı̄wān (Cambridge, 2002),
12–13.
84
Al-Tabari: C. E. Bosworth, ‘al-Tabarı̄’, in P. Bearman et al. (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam,
2nd edn (Leiden, 1960–2009); Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 35–8; H. Kennedy, ‘The
Sources of al-Tabarı̄’s History of the iAbbāsid Caliphate’, in H. Kennedy (ed.), Al-Tabarı¯:
A Medieval Muslim Historian and his Work (Princeton, 2008); al-Maqrizi: F. Bauden,
‘Taqı̄ al-Dı̄n Amad ibn iAlı̄ al-Maqrı̄zı̄’, in A. Mallett (ed.), Medieval Muslim Historians
and the Franks in the Levant (Leiden, 2014), 161–200; F. Rosenthal, ‘al-Makrı̄zı̄’, in P.
Bearman et al. (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn.
85
The geniza phenomenon was not limited to Jews, nor is the Cairo Geniza the only
example: Cohen, ‘Geniza for Islamicists’, 136–9. For the recently reported Afghan
Geniza, apparently coming from northern Afghanistan and dating to the mid eleventh
century, see 5http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/collections/jewish-collection/Pages/
afghan-genizah.aspx4(accessed 26 July 2018).

numbering, it is estimated, between ten thousand and fifteen thousand items,
they are able to shed light on all aspects of this medieval community. From
letters, wills, accounts, inventories, marriage contracts and legal records, we
hear about their families and how they ran their households, their disputes
with their neighbours, and most famously their trading operations across the
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.86 As the Dunhuang documents have
transformed understanding of medieval Buddhism, so the Geniza material
has transformed our picture of so many aspects of the world of the Cairo Jews
and of those with whom they came into contact.87 As with Dunhuang, how-
ever, the transformative effect of this material emphasizes how much the
Geniza is an exception that proves the rule. So many things we are able to
say about this community can only be guessed at for others. Given that most
surviving texts from the Islamic world are not documents such as these, but
theological and literary works composed by Muslim scholars, it is perhaps not
surprising that among historians of the medieval Middle East who work
primarily with texts there is a growing sense that the most intellectually
engaging aspect of the field lies not in trying to piece together new narratives
of politics and war, nor even in writing social and economic history — as they
would often be for western Europe — but rather in exploring the network of
ideas and contacts that made up the imagined world of medieval Islam.88
At the other end of the spectrum is Japan, which like western Europe, and
for much the same reasons, has preserved a very large number of documents
to do with the ownership of land: some thirty thousand before the early
fourteenth century (Map 5). From the sixth century Japan had adopted
many aspects of Chinese literary culture, including the notion of official his-
tory. From the ninth century the Heian court ceased to look to China as an
explicit model, and what gradually emerged was an indigenous historical
and literary culture, with evident Chinese roots, but characterized by such
86
Walker, Exploring an Islamic Empire, 128–30; J. L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the
Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and their Business World (Cambridge,
2012); Goitein, A Mediterranean Society ; S. D. Goitein and M. A. Friedman, India Traders
of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza ‘India Book’, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2008).
87
Cohen, ‘Geniza for Islamicists’, 131–6.
88
K. Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural
History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh, 2013); K. Hirschler, Medieval Damascus:
Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (Edinburgh, 2016); M. Hanaoka, Authority
and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries
(Cambridge, 2016).

distinctively Japanese genres as court diaries, historical tales, military tales
and a literary culture in which elite women played a prominent role.89 Japan’s
relative isolation and the survival of a number of ancient archives and libraries
has preserved a great deal of this material. Some, such as the Pillow Book of Sei
Shōnagon or the Diary of Murasaki Shikibu are well known to medievalists
outside Japan; the Diary of Fujiwara no Michinaga ought to be.90 A detailed,
day-to-day, contemporary record of the years 995 to 1018, written in his own
hand on twenty-six rolled scrolls by a dominant figure at the Heian court, the
Diary is unmatched anywhere in the rest of the world before the sixteenth
century. But the material that has really shaped the study of Japanese history is
the documentary evidence, which reveals a world of rich temple estates, and
of military elites, rewarded for service with land worked by tied peasants.91
When Japanese scholars first became aware of western notions of medieval
history, and western scholars became aware of the Japanese material, it was
natural on both sides to see medieval Japan in terms of what was then the
accepted model of feudal society. The last half-century has done much to
dismantle the idea of feudalism as a model for anywhere, and to talk of feudal
Japan would now seem distinctly dated; but the fact remains that, seen
through the charters that constitute so much evidence for the medieval
world in both Japan and Europe, these do appear as societies with much in
common.92 The point is not so much the extent to which they were, but the
fact that a certain type of evidence, available for parts of Japan and western
Europe, allows us to explore aspects of both worlds that are hidden elsewhere.
China and the Middle East (outside Egypt) may or may not be less like Europe
89
J. R. Bentley, ‘The Birth and Flowering of Japanese Historiography: From Chronicles to
Tales to Historical Interpretation’, in Foot and Robinson (eds.), Oxford History of
Historical Writing, ii, 58–79.
90
Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, trans. M. McKinney (London, 2006); Murasaki Shikibu,
The Diary of Lady Murasaki, trans. R. Bowring (London, 1996); F. Hérail, Notes journal-
ières de Fujiwara no Michinaga, ministre à la cour de Hei.an (995–1018), 3 vols. (Geneva,
1987–91).
91
J. F. Mass, The Kamakura Bakafu: A Study in Documents (Stanford, 1976), 6–13; J.
Fröhlich, Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan: Ategawa
no shō 1004–1304 (Worlds of East Asia, xii, Bern, 2007).
92
K. Friday, ‘The Futile Paradigm: In Quest of Feudalism in Early Medieval China’, History
Compass, viii (2010), 179–96. Studies in this mode include P. Souyri, ‘La Feodalité
japonaise’, in E. Bournazel and J.-P. Poly (eds.), Les Feodalités (Paris, 1998), 715–49;
P. Souyri, Histoire du Japon médiéval: Le monde à l’envers (Paris, 1998); J. W. Hall,
Government and Local Power in Japan 500–1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province
(Princeton, 1966); K. Asakwara, The Documents of Iriki: Illustrative of the Development
of the Feudal Institutions of Japan (New Haven, 1929).

than Japan, but certainly the lack of a particular type of evidence makes it
much easier to see them so.
III
HISTORY WITHOUT WRITING
If the written materials available for the Middle Ages are both patchy and
distorting, how do we make progress? How do we get a clearer view of worlds
such as China or western Europe with rich but partial sources? How do we get
any view at all of those parts of the medieval world that never produced
written materials, or that did, but they have been destroyed? How do we
get a better sense of the underlying factors such as economic growth and
recession, migration, climate change, or the changing patterns of disease?
One answer, flagged at the beginning of the chapter, has been a turn to
material evidence. As archaeologists have increasingly embraced the gains
to be derived from using texts and objects together, so historians have wanted
to do the same. Cappadocia in the centre of the Anatolian plateau in modern
Turkey is a landscape of soft tufa excavated by the Byzantines to make houses,
halls, chapels, store rooms and monasteries — everything indeed that one
would expect in a built environment, but in this case excavated from the rock.
The result is one of the best preserved medieval settlement landscapes any-
where in the world. But there are almost no writings. The documents and
histories that would once have existed here, in Dunhuang- or Geniza-like
profusion, have all been lost. Bar a little epigraphy, Cappadocia has become a
world without writing. Recent work, however, above all by Robert
Ousterhout, has found ways to use the settlement landscape as a source in
its own right. Is what Ousterhout writes art history, archaeology, or simply
history? The question is almost superfluous.93
Without a material turn a global history of the Middle Ages would be hard
to imagine. But for material evidence the African cultures that built Great
Zimbabwe or cast the Ife heads would have been lost entirely; so too would the
North American cultures that built the Mississippi mounds or the pueblos of
93
R. G. Ousterhout, Visualizing Community: Art, Material Culture, and Settlement in
Byzantine Cappadocia (Dumbarton Oaks Studies, xlvi, Washington, DC, 2017), 1–20;
R. G. Ousterhout, A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia (Dumbarton Oaks Studies, xlii,
Washington, DC, 2005). See too T. Matthews and A.-C. D. Matthews, ‘Islamic Style
Mansions in Byzantine Cappadocia and the Development of the Inverted T-Plan’,
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, lvi (1997); V. Kalas, ‘Cappadocia’s
Rock-Cut Courtyard Complexes: A Case Study for Domestic Architecture in
Byzantium’, in L. Lavan, L. Özgenel and A. Sarantis (eds.), Housing in Late Antiquity:
From Palaces to Shops (Leiden, 2007).

the south-west.94 We would have wholly underestimated the societies of
medieval South America, and have had no idea of the pattern and scale of
trade that bound together the late antique Mediterranean, early medieval
Eurasia, or the medieval Indian Ocean.95 But like the world of texts, not
everywhere and everything is equally revealed. Here too our view of the
medieval globe can be compared to a series of overlays: evidence here, de-
struction and loss there; here too, what this adds up to is a world speckled with
hot spots and cold patches. Material evidence shows different things to that of
writing, but its coverage is no less partial, and its prisms are no less distorting.
In the first place are issues of production and destruction. As with texts
most material comes from the more heavily populated parts of the world:
good for production, but unfortunately good for destruction too. Ideal for
archaeology are places once heavily populated but then abandoned. Gertrude
Bell’s early twentieth-century photographs provide vivid evidence for how
effectively later isolation and neglect had until that date preserved the ma-
terial remains of a late antique and medieval boom on the desert margins of
94
Great Zimbabwe: I. Pikirayi, ‘The Zimbabwe Culture and its Neighbours’, in P. Mitchell
and P. J. Lane (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology (Oxford, 2013); I.
Pikirayi, ‘Stone Architecture and the Development of Power in the Zimbabwe Tradition
AD 1270–1830’, Azania, xlviii (2013); Ife: A. Ogundiran, ‘Towns and States of the West
African Forest Belt’, in Mitchell and Lane (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of African
Archaeology ; H. J. Drewal and E. Schildkrout, Dynasty and Divinity: Ifè Art in Ancient
Nigeria (New York, 2009); S. P. Blier, Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power,
and Identity, c.1300 (Cambridge, 2015); for the Mississippi mounds, see T. E. Emerson,
‘Cahokia Interaction and Ethnogenesis in the Northern Midcontinent’, and J. H. Blitz,
‘Moundville in the Mississippian World’, both in T. R. Pauketat (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of North American Archaeology (Oxford, 2012); for pueblo culture, see M.
D. Varien, T. A. Kohler and S. G. Ortman, ‘The Mesa Verde Region’, in Pauketat (ed.),
Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology.
95
South America: D’Altroy, Incas, 29–31; R. A. Covey, ‘The Inca Empire’, in H. Silverman
and W. H. Isbell (eds.), The Handbook of South American Archaeology (New York, 2008);
on the Late Antique Mediterranean, see C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages
(Oxford, 2005), 708–94; on the Eurasian and Indian ocean, see S. Priestman, ‘The Silk
Road or the Sea? Sasanian and Islamic Exports to Japan’, Journal of Islamic Archaeology, iii
(2016); J. Stargardt, ‘Indian Ocean Trade in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries: Demand,
Distance, and Profit’, South Asian Studies, xxx (2014); J. Carswell, S. Deraniyagala and A.
Graham, Mantai: City by the Sea (Aichwald, 2013); R. Krahl et al. (eds.), Shipwrecked:
Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Washington, DC, 2010); O. Watson, ‘Revisiting
Samarra: The Rise of Islamic Glazed Pottery’, Beiträge zur Islamischen Kunst und
Archäologie, iv (2014).

the Fertile Crescent.96 The recent application of LiDAR technology has done
the same for the jungles of Central America and the Amazon basin.97 A part of
the Middle East had been marginalized by the Islamic world’s reorientation to
Egypt and Iraq; two American regions had seen their populations wiped out
by imported European pathogens and their significance marginalized in a
new economic geography that reflected the logic of an Atlantic rather than an
indigenous world; here, at least, we can to an extent re-create them by other
means. But these are exceptions. Archaeologists of African hunter-gatherers
and Eurasian nomads have done a great deal with what is available, but the
fact remains that small populations make for little material culture, and most
places that were attractive to humans in the past have remained so since.98
Whether as deliberate destruction, accidental damage, or the collateral
effects of creating other things — people destroy. War, by its nature focused
on where people live, is destructive, and has become potentially more so.
Histories are full of sacked cities and ravaged countrysides. Watching Leni
Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will with its repetitive views of 1930s Nuremberg
is amongst other things a reminder of how much of the city would soon be
lost.99 Recent actions by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and by the Taliban in
Afghanistan have highlighted deliberate destruction for ideological reasons,
and this is not a new phenomenon. Consider General Ludendorff’s 1917
decision to dynamite the great medieval castle at Coucy, the French demo-
lition of the Bastille in 1789, English iconoclasm through the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, or the Ottoman destruction of the church of the Holy
Apostles in Constantinople in the 1460s to make way for the conqueror’s
mosque. Just as important are the collateral consequences of peaceful devel-
opment. Dam building, such as the Chinese Three Gorges dam on the Yangzi
96
Gertude Bell Archive, Newcastle University,5http://gertrudebell.ncl.ac.uk/photos.php4
(accessed 8 May 2018).
97
A. F. Chase and D. Z. Chase, ‘Detection of Maya Ruins by LiDAR: Applications, Case
Study, and Issues’, in N. Masini and F. Soldovieri (eds.), Sensing the Past: From Artifact to
Historical Site (New York, 2017); C. T. Fisher et al., ‘Identifying Ancient Settlement
Patterns through LiDAR in the Mosquitia Region of Honduras’, PLoS ONE, xi (2016):
e0159890; S. Khan, L. Aragão and J. Iriarte, ‘A UAV-lidar System to Map Amazonian
Rainforest and its Ancient Landscape Transformations’, International Journal of Remote
Sensing, xxxviii (2017). On LiDAR in general, see S. Crutchley, The Light Fantastic: Using
Airborne Lidar in Archaeological Survey (Swindon, 2010).
98
L. Barham and P. Mitchell, The First Africans: African Archaeology from the Earliest Tool
Makers to Most Recent Foragers (Cambridge, 2008), 400–42, 455–61; R. Cribb, Nomads in
Archaeology (Cambridge, 1991).
99
L. Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens (1935),5https://archive.org/details/TriumphOfThe
WillgermanTriumphDesWillens4(accessed 8 May 2018).

or the Turkish dams on the Euphrates and Tigris, has the potential to wipe out
tranches of the past.100 Open-cast mining can have a similar effect: the en-
virons of Roman Viminacium in Serbia are being steadily eroded by a lignite
mine; the Buddhist complex and its surroundings at Mes Aynak in
Afghanistan is threatened with obliteration by Chinese copper miners
(Map 6).101 Urban development also destroys: the recent rebuilding of
Beijing echoes in this respect the nineteenth-century Haussmannization of
Paris, which in turn was replicated all over Europe, and by Europeans all over
the world.102
Less spectacularly, but equally damaging, the past suffers daily erosion at
the hands of farmers and builders, some certainly with an eye on plunder for
the antiquities market, but many simply looking to clear new fields, make use
of convenient stone or fulfil a contract without fuss. Up to the 1830s the
Algerian countryside had been dotted with the remains of Roman settle-
ments. Over the following hundred years almost all were destroyed; not as
the result of a deliberate decision, but simply because these sites were useful
heaps of building materials that took up space better used for productive
agriculture.103 Archaeology across much of the developing world faces the
same future: a figure of 220,000 Chinese tombs looted between 1998 and 2003
gives a sense of scale.104 None of this is entirely new, though bulldozers, deep
ploughs and explosives have made it more effective. Cluny, the largest medi-
eval abbey in Christendom, was sold off for building stone after 1790. English
abbeys suffered the same fate in the sixteenth century. To put this in more
positive terms, humans have always been interested in recycling.
100
E. L. Cunliffe, M. W. de Gruchy and E. Stammitti, ‘How to Build a Dam and Save Cultural
Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage in the Digital Era, i (2012), 221–6; S. A. Brandt
and F. Hassan, Dams and Cultural Heritage Management Final Report (Working paper
submitted to the World Commission on Dams, 2000).
101
E. Nikolić, O. Ilić and D. Rogić, ‘Possibilities of Defining the Archaeological Site of
Viminacium as a Unique Cultural Landscape’, in A. Filipović and W. Toiano (eds.),
Strategie e Programmazione della Conservazione e Trasmissibilità del Patrimonio Culturale
(Rome, 2013); Saving Mes Aynak, documentary, dir. B. E. Huffman (2014):5http://www.
savingmesaynak.com/4(accessed 8 May 2018).
102
A. Jacobs, ‘Bulldozers meet Historic Chinese Neighbourhood’, New York Times, 20 July
2010.
103
M. Greenhalgh, The Military and Colonial Destruction of the Roman Landscape of North
Africa, 1830–1900 (Leiden, 2014).
104
R. E. Murowchick, ‘ ‘‘Despoiled of her Garments’’: Problems and Progress in
Archaeological Heritage Management in China’, in A. P. Underhill (ed.), A
Companion to Chinese Archaeology (Chichester, 2013), 13–14.

There is also destruction at the hands of archaeologists. One of its principal
techniques, excavation, destroys as it explores, and every generation mourns
the loss of essential data at the hands of predecessors who failed to record
evidence subsequently seen as vital. Eighteenth-century barrow diggers,
opening twenty a day, were seen as vandals by the scientific professionals of
the late nineteenth century, who in turn wiped out whole categories of evi-
dence that their successors a hundred years later would have deemed invalu-
able.105 In 2017, an exhibition was held in Rome to showcase the results of
recent work on the medieval history of the imperial fora.106 Fifty years earlier
and there would have been little to say; archaeology in Rome was almost
exclusively focused on the city’s ancient remains. Signs of change by the
1970s were the growing impact of the British School at Rome’s multi-
period South Etruria survey carried out in the countryside north of Rome,
and the launch in 1975 of a journal specifically devoted to medieval archae-
ology, Archeologia Medievale. But the decision in 1982 by the excavators of the
Crypta Balbi, a first-century BCE site in the centre of Rome, five hundred
metres from the Capitol, not simply to dig down to the ancient remains,
but to pay equal attention to all periods, and then the later decision to display
that in a new museum, marked a revolution. That site made others possible:
the fora had been largely cleared of medieval remains in the 1930s, but enough
had survived to be excavated in the 1990s. The results overturned any notion
of early medieval Rome as an all but abandoned ruin field, and in doing so
made the 2017 exhibition conceivable. A similar revolution has taken place in
Istanbul, where an equivalent role to the Crypta Balbi excavations has been
played by the Yenikapı project. Launched in 2004, when the builders of the
new metro discovered thirty-seven Byzantine wrecks and a huge volume of
associated medieval ceramics, the excavations that followed lasted eleven
years, and the published results have already overturned previous under-
standing of the Byzantine economy. Much more is to come, including
what is intended to be a world-class museum to house and study
what has been discovered. A generation earlier, none of this would have
happened. There was little tradition of modern urban archaeology
in Istanbul, little interest in the city’s Byzantine past, no local expertise in
dealing with a major waterlogged site and no funds available to pay for a
project on this scale.107
105
B. M. Marsden, The Early Barrow Diggers, expanded edn (Stroud, 1999).
106
N. Bernacchio and R. Meneghini (eds.), I Fori dopo i Fori (Rome, 2017).
107
U. Kocabas , ‘The Yenikapı Byzantine-Era Shipwrecks, Istanbul, Turkey: A Preliminary
Report and Inventory of the 27 Wrecks Studied by Istanbul University’, International
Journal of Nautical Archaeology, xliv (2015); C. Pulak, R. Ingram and M. Jones, ‘Eight

But it is important not to exaggerate. It is actually very hard to destroy all
trace of the past. Unless a site is mined out, evidence of occupation and use
will persist. Paradoxically, development and destruction can be an ally of
archaeology. Post-war research on Europe’s bomb-damaged cities trans-
formed what was known about Europe’s urban history, and development-
led archaeology has paid similar dividends.108 What is required are trained
archaeologists, and a political will to give permission and provide funding.
Modern archaeology is a cultural phenomenon that has spread from
Europe and America across the world. Current best practice, even if by no
means always followed, could be summarized as stratigraphic open-area ex-
cavation by experienced archaeologists, carefully working with trowels, sen-
sitive to changing soil types, and recording what they are doing in accurately
noted contexts linked together in a Harris matrix, downloading survey data as
they go on. Hand in hand with this should be appropriate sampling strategies
for every type of pottery and small find, as well as for organic remains, includ-
ing pollen, plant seeds and bones. Finds should be appropriately and speedily
conserved to prevent damage and loss of evidence, and organic elements
sampled and tested for C14 and aDNA potential. All this should then be
followed by a programme of post-excavation analysis, preservation, publica-
tion and display. Similar things could be said about the most successful
underwater archaeology or extensive survey projects.109
Some of the best evidence for what archaeology can achieve comes from
Britain, where the last fifty years have seen early medieval archaeology trans-
form our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. Through burial archae-
ology at sites as various as Mucking, Finglesham, Prittlewell and Sutton Hoo,
it has been possible to rewrite the history of social and religious identity,
power, and the structures of incipient states (Map 1). Through the thousands
Byzantine Shipwrecks from the Theodosian Harbour: Excavations at Yenikapı in

Istanbul, Turkey. An Introduction’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, xliv
(2015); Z. Kızıltan, (ed.), Stories from the Hidden Harbor: Shipwrecks of Yenikapı
(Istanbul, 2013); U. Kocabas (ed.), The ‘Old Ships’ of the ‘New Gate’: Yenikapı’nın Eski
Gemileri (Yenikapı Shipwrecks/Yenikapı Batıkları, i, Istanbul 2008).
108
H. Sarfatij (ed.), Report on the Situation of Urban Archaeology in Europe (Strasbourg,
1999); R. Bradley et al. (eds.), Development-led Archaeology in North-West Europe
(Oxford, 2012); M. Pitts and R. M. Thomas, Building the Future, Transforming our
Past: Celebrating Development-led Archaeology in England, 1990–2015 (London, 2015).
109
C. Renfrew and C. G. Bahn, Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice, 6th edn
(London, 2016); P. A. Barker, Techniques of Archaeological Excavation, 3rd edn
(London, 1993); E. C. Harris, Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy, 2nd
edn (London, 1989).

of sites excavated at the expense of developers, or the large volume of new
finds discovered by metal detectorists and recorded by the Portable
Antiquities Scheme, economic and social history has been rewritten. A
world which half a century ago seemed more than a little primitive and pa-
rochial, now appears as anything but.110 Britain is not unique, but its archae-
ology does usefully highlight the factors necessary for success: well-trained
archaeologists, reliable funding, a sophisticated research culture, and a pol-
itical environment supportive to archaeology in general and medieval archae-
ology in particular. Without needing to give a list of places where archaeology
is too dangerous or an expensive luxury, where techniques are out of date or
trained archaeologists in short supply, where development ignores archae-
ology, or where the medieval period does not suit national or political agen-
das, it is still quite obvious that there are many parts of the world where these
issues apply.
So far I have been considering what could be called traditional archaeology,
but the last twenty years have also seen the emergence of new techniques in the
biological and physical sciences, which might appear set to transform the
field. Already modern genetics, isotope analysis, parasitology, and core sam-
pling from lake beds and the world’s icecaps have produced new evidence for
patterns of human migration, a new history of climate and the environment
and a new history of disease.111 The ninth-century appearance of the Neo-
Eskimo moving east to the Canadian Arctic from Siberia, the Medieval
Climate Anomaly (MCA), and apparent relationship between climatic
changes in the Pacific and the Black Death, are among the discoveries that
are now widely treated as fact.112 In some ways the Global Middle Ages itself is
one of the consequences of such scientific developments; global data revealing
global events seemed to demand global thinking. As it has emerged that more
110
See the papers in D. A. Hinton, S. Crawford and H. Hamerow (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology (Oxford, 2011).
111
See W. Pohl (ed.), The Genetic Challenge to Medieval History and Archaeology, special
issue, Medieval Worlds, iv (2016); A. Gogou, A. Izdebski and K. Holmgren (eds.),
Mediterranean Holocene Climate, Environment and Human Societies, special issue,
Quaternary Science Reviews, cxxxvi (2016); M. Green (ed.), Pandemic Disease in the
Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, special issue, The Medieval Globe, i
(2014); P. D. Mitchell (ed.), Sanitation, Latrine and Intestinal Parasites in Past
Populations (Farnham, 2015).
112
D. A. Bolnick et al., ‘Native American Genomics and Population Histories’, Annual
Review of Anthropology, xlv (2016); B. M. S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate,
Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge, 2016), 10–15, 36–8. E.
Graham, et al., ‘Support for Global Climate Reorganization during the ‘‘Medieval
Climate Anomaly’’ ’, Climate Dynamics, xxxvii (2011).

or less convincing explanations for the Turkish invasions of the eleventh
century or the European crises of the fourteenth century might lie in shifts
in the world’s climate, so to treat these events only in their immediate regional
context has come to seem unduly parochial.113
Among those exploring the medieval world, the response in some quarters
to this scientific turn has been enthusiastic, in others it has been more
muted.114 However important such material might be, it is not easy to
apply at the scale at which most medieval historians want to work. It is
either too large and determinist: climatic changes affecting half the globe
over centuries; or too small and insignificant: an individual whom stable
isotope analysis suggests was born in a different place to where they died. A
possible response might be to point to notions of Deep History at one end or
Microhistory at the other, but as yet most medievalists seem to be slightly
sceptical of what a turn to the sciences can really contribute.115
Before 2007, ancient DNA (aDNA) was too fragile for reliable study and
research focused on extrapolating back from DNA patterns in a modern
population. Research in the 1990s identified patterns in the population of
Britain that were convincingly linked to those of modern populations living
in north-western Germany. At first sight this appeared to support Bede’s
stories of Anglo-Saxon migration from very much the same region. But
since there was no means of telling whether the genetic similarity was the
result of people moving fifteen hundred years ago or ten thousand years ago,
in other words Anglo-Saxon migration in the fifth century or population
movement at the end of the last Ice Age, it did nothing of the sort.116 In
113
R. Ellenblum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline
of the East, 950–1072 (Cambridge, 2012); Campbell, The Great Transition.
114
See J. Nelson, ‘Why Re-Inventing Medieval History is a Good Idea’, in G. A. Loud and M.
Staub (eds.), The Making of Medieval History (York, 2017), 26–32; Michael McCormick,
‘Molecular Middle Ages: Early Medieval Economic History in the Twenty-First Century’,
in J. R. Davis and M. McCormick (eds.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New
Directions in Early Medieval Studies (Farnham, 2008).
115
See for Deep History, D. L. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, 2008); and for
micro-history, see D. L. Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late
Medieval Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2016).
116
S. Schiffels et al., ‘Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Genomes from East England Reveal British
Migration History’, Nature Communications, vii (2016); R. Martiniano, ‘Genomic
Signals of Migration and Continuity in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons’, Nature
Communications, vii (2016); M. A. Jobling, ‘The Impact of Recent Events on Human
Genetic Diversity’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, ccclxvii (2012); C.
Hills, ‘Anglo-Saxon DNA?’, in D. Sayer and H. Williams (eds.), Mortuary Practices and
Social Identities in the Middle Ages: Essays in Burial Archaeology in Honour of Heinrich

2007, a technique was developed that made it possible to analyse much
smaller samples, and aDNA research became a realistic possibility.
However even then, although DNA can prove a biological link, historians
have been quick to point out that DNA says nothing of an individual’s
perceived identity. It is telling that the currently ongoing project to sample
aDNA from supposedly Lombard cemeteries in Hungary and Italy puts the
stress not on proving migration but on identifying biological links within a
single cemetery. To most historians that sounds very sensible, but it is quite a
pointillist contribution to global history.117
Five years ago the data for lead pollution in the Greenland icecap was
limited to 21 data points between 1000 BCE and 1500 CE; there is now a se-
quence of sub-annual data for the entire period from 1250 BCE to the present
day. But can lead pollution in the Greenland ice cores really serve as a proxy
for economic performance? If, as now seems the case, a Republican period
Roman high was followed by a late antique low, returning to Republican
levels for the period 750–850, and less consistently for spikes in the tenth,
eleventh and twelfth centuries, does that track the economy as a whole, or
simply a complex matrix of factors: mining as opposed to recycling, the
whereabouts of European mines filtered by climatic oscillations that varied
the volume of precipitation? In any case pollution only reaches the Arctic
from Europe and not from Africa and China, which have good grounds for
being seen as the largest metal smelters of the medieval world.118
Härke (Liverpool, 2009); M. G. Thomas, P. H. Stumpf and H. Härke, ‘Evidence for an

Apartheid-like Social Structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, Proceedings of the Royal
Society B, cclxxiii (2006); J. E. Pattison, ‘Is it Necessary to Assume an Apartheid-like
Social Structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England?’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, cclxxv
(2008); M. G. Thomas, P. H. Stumpf and H. Härke, ‘Comment : A Response to Pattison’,
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, cclxxv (2008); A. L. Topf, et al., ‘Tracing the
Phylogeography of Human Populations in Britain Based on 4th–11th Century
mtDNA Genotypes’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, xxiii (2005); M. E. Weale et al.,
‘Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration’, Molecular Biology and
Evolution, xix (2002).
117
S. Brather, ‘New Questions instead of Old Answers: Archaeological Expectations of
aDNA Analysis’, Medieval Worlds, iv (2016), 22–41; P. Geary, ‘Rethinking Barbarian
Invasions through Genomic History’: 5https://video.ias.edu/Geary-BarbarianInvas
ions4(accessed 8 May 2018).
118
A. Wilson and J. McConnell, ‘History in Ice: 3,000 Years of Anthropogenic Lead
Pollution’, unpublished seminar paper (Economic History seminar, Brasenose
College, Oxford, 23 May 2017); A. Wilson, ‘Quantifying Roman Economic
Performance by means of Proxies: Pitfalls and Potential’, in F. de Calataÿ (ed.),
Quantifying the Greco-Roman Economy and Beyond (Bari, 2014), 156–7; F. de Callataÿ,

The impact of climate and environmental change has joined gender and the
economy as factors we must consider; genetic evidence has joined studies of
texts and material culture as a route into the past. Nearly two decades into the
twenty-first century, the excitement provoked by such new sources has not
worn off, but there is also a sense that this has not fundamentally changed
what historians do. A new source contributes a new overlay, with new pos-
sibilities for thick description and new gaps to work round and explore.
IV
SOURCES FOR GLOBAL HISTORY
The publication in 2015 of the multi-volume Cambridge History of the World
was a milestone in the field, summing up much of what had been achieved
over recent decades and suggesting ideas for the future. Nothing I have said
dissents from the view expressed there by Benjamin Kedar and Merry
Wiesner-Hanks that in absolute terms there is a mass of evidence for every
part of the medieval globe, and new technologies and new questions keep
offering more.119 It is telling, however, that to make this point they cite recent
work on the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem. In some ways it serves their
purpose well. The Kingdom has long been a focus of attention. Its history is
illuminated by an array of literary and documentary materials in a range of
languages that include Latin, Old French, Arabic, Greek, Syriac and Hebrew,
and survive in archives and libraries across the Middle East and Europe.
The Kingdom is well served too by material evidence of all sorts, and
new approaches have maximized what it can say. As they explain, recent
research on topics as varied as domestic architecture, skeletons, latrines
and lists of personal names have combined to transform how we
understand Frankish settlement in the east and its interactions with the
local population. In other words the Kingdom of Jerusalem represents exactly
the most positive combination of factors that make for the evidential hot
spots of the medieval world.
What Kedar and Wiesner-Hanks do not emphasize is the extent to which
this combination is actually rather peculiar. The story of the Crusades and the
Islamic response encouraged the writing of its history from the Middle Ages
onwards. Institutional continuity and antiquarian interest preserved docu-
mentary evidence for the Kingdom unmatched for other areas of the medieval
‘The Graeco-Roman Economy in the Super Long-Run: Lead, Copper, and Shipwrecks’,
Journal of Roman Archaeology, xviii (2005); A. F. More et al., ‘Next Generation Ice Core
Technology Reveals True Minimum Natural Levels of Lead (Pb) in the Atmosphere:
Insights from the Black Death’, GeoHealth, 1 (2017).
119
Kedar and Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Introduction’, 15–17.

Middle East. French, British and Israeli archaeologists were all drawn to the
region and the period and the research culture that created has left a continu-
ing legacy. The one thing that is typical of the Kingdom is its very peculiarity
— the characteristic of idiosyncrasy that applies to everywhere that has pre-
served evidence for the Middle Ages, anywhere in the world.
Historians do not always get away from their tramlines and are often cau-
tious about new methodologies and types of evidence. Sometimes they are
right, sometimes wrong. But the slow build-up of these methodologies can
and does help to combat the distortions which written evidence, taken on its
own, often presents us with, distortions which I have tried to highlight in the
course of this chapter. And that build-up is global in scale. Everywhere, like
the Kingdom of Jerusalem, is idiosyncratic. But everywhere can be compared.
If we use our sources of knowledge in the full awareness of their particular
emphases, idiosyncrasies and limits — what they can and cannot tell us, what
they privilege and exclude — then we will get much further in a global under-
standing of medieval history.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford Mark Whittowy

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(Abingdon, 2007), 155, 165–73; S. C. Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late

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Byzantine Shipwrecks from the Theodosian Harbour: Excavations at Yenikapı in

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Härke (Liverpool, 2009); M. G. Thomas, P. H. Stumpf and H. Härke, ‘Evidence for an

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Corpus Christi College, Oxford Mark Whittowy

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