HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

74 JOAQUÍN MARTÍNEZ PIZARROwere compiled year by year and entries made immediately after theevents, or in the same year. In reality, however, whole sequenceswere often reconstructed many years later, and archetypes createdin one region, within a specific community, were incorporated intoother annals or used to start a record of the same type somewhereelse. Texts of this nature, whose original function was to support achronological scheme by labeling the different years with memorablehappenings, have been said to lack the defining characteristics ofnarrative: unity of design, closure, and the totalizing force that comeswith an individual author and his conception of history. 96 Thesereservations apply better to ideal annals, put together diachronicallyin a strict year-by-year sequence, than to the early medieval textsthat have come down to us, which frequently owe large blocks ofentries to a single annalist and are even more often revised and supplementedto reflect an institutional or personal point of view.Noteworthy and a case in point are the Royal Frankish Annals (RFA), 97which cover Frankish history from 741 (the death of Charles Martel)to 829 and are a source of fundamental importance for the reignsof Charlemagne and Louis the Pious and for imperial expansionunder the Carolingians. Language and style show them to be thework of three authors: one who was active between 787 and 793and who was also responsible for the retrospective entries from 741,which he drew from earlier annals and the continuators of Fredegar’schronicle, a second one who wrote the entries from 794 or 795 to807, and a third one who composed the sequence 808–29. Theirapproach to Frankish history, however, is remarkably uniform: theevents related are almost exclusively matters of policy, especially militaryand diplomatic, and the annalists systematically ignore or attenuatethe errors and defeats of the Frankish rulers and their armies.This optic, which strongly suggests an official point of view, wouldappear to place the authors in the Carolingian royal chapel ratherthan in a monastic community, which would have projected its ownmore local interests and predilections. 98 What separates the RFA most96White (1980), esp. 6–14.97Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque as a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissensesmaiores et Einhardi, ed. G. H. Pertz, revised by F. Kurze, MGH, SRG (Hanover,1895).98Wattenbach-Levison (1953), 245–53. More recently Collins (1998) has arguedfor a less linear and uniform tradition behind the RFA: the 741–87 section, for