HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

ETHNIC AND NATIONAL HISTORY CA. 500‒1000 59feast”, 44) or, far less often, from natural death (“morte propria”, 59).The genre of the work has never been satisfactorily defined. Itmakes no use of vernacular legends, as would be expected in anorigo gentis. On the other hand, despite its title and the dominantinfluence of Orosius, its exclusive concentration on the Visigothsmakes it impossible to classify the HG as a historia in the late antique/early medieval sense proposed by Werner.It has been argued that the HG marks the literary and ideologicalbirth of the Spanish nation, created and led by the Goths andunified under their rule and in this sense the earliest of the Europeannations of today. 54 This reading of the text is contradicted by thetotal absence from its pages of the Hispano-Roman majority, anabsence so pronounced that the Spania of the famous “Praise ofSpain” with which the work begins has to be presented in purelygeographical terms, almost as if it were uninhabited.The originality of the HG, surprising in an encyclopaedist such asIsidore, lends credibility to the argument made of late that the shortversion of the HG is in fact either identical with or else very closeto a historiola of the Goths ascribed to Maximus of Zaragoza andlong believed lost. 55 In this case, the long version would be Isidore’srevision of Maximus in light of the events of the early 620s and, inparticular, of the achievements of Suinthila.Two Historians of the Franks A. FredegarThe author known as Fredegar 56 composed his chronicle circa 658–60,some seventy years after Gregory completed the Historiae. The presentform of the text, four books divided into chapters, does notoriginate with the author but was introduced later. The author hadarranged it as a series of chronicles, five of them abbreviated fromearlier historians, the sixth his own; the present fourth book, identicalwith this last chronicle, still bears the heading “In nomine domininostri Iesu Christi incipit chronica sexta”. 5754Teillet (1984), esp. 463–501.55Collins (1994), 345–58.56Evidence for this name goes back to the sixteenth century only.57Chronicarum qui dicuntur Fredegarii scholastici libri iv, ed. B. Krusch, MGH, SSRMII (Hanover, 1888; repr. 1956).