INTRODUCTION According to the Russian Mathematician Anatoly T

INTRODUCTION

According to the Russian mathematician Anatoly T. Fomenko, the history of Western historiography since the Renaissance has been char- acterized by a struggle of epic proportions between a brave gang of outlaws against an all-powerful syndicate. Among the members of the former group, Fomenko counts early modern characters such as the Jesuit antiquary Jean Hardouin (1646–1729) and Isaac Newton (1643– 1727) as well as a string of more recent authors leading up to himself, who have spent the past few centuries trying to alarm the world that they have discovered nasty cracks in the basement of history. Sadly, their Cassandra-like calls are consistently ignored by a malicious cabal of historians and chronologers, who have been scheming to defend the traditional timeline that had been forged by the legendary Huguenot philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger (1583–1609). After several decades of arduous work on the plumbing of chronology, Fomenko believes he has found strong evidence that ‘Scaligerian chronology’, which is still slavishly followed by historians, is nothing but a gigantic hoax, a grand concoction, built on forgeries and historical wishful thinking. If Fomenko and his followers are right, our history textbooks may soon have to be rewritten to match his insights that—to mention only two of his more startling claims—Jesus Christ was born in AD 1152 and crucified in AD 1182 and that the book of Revelation was written after AD 1486.1 Abstruse as these and other theories proposed by the Russian school of ‘New Chronology’, which has found an equally dazzling German counterpart in Heribert Illig’s ‘Phantomzeittheorie’, may be, they serve to highlight the fundamental importance of technical chronology for our understanding of human history. Chronology’s role as an indispensable item in the tool kit of historical research stands in striking contrast to the relative neglect it has suffered at the hands of

1 Anatoly T. Fomenko, History: Fiction or Science?, 2nd ed., 7 vols. (Paris: Delamere, 2003–6); Fomenko, Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Material and its Appli- cations to Historical Dating, 2 vols. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). For an introduction to Fomenko’s theories, see Florin Diacu, The Lost Millennium(Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2006). 2 introduction twentieth-century historians. Although many dates in our textbooks are the result of intricate technical arguments, hingeing on the suc- cessful reconstruction of exotic calendars and the often precarious interpretation of ancient eras, the working knowledge necessary to assess these arguments is rarely taught in seminar rooms, while scholars interested in the subject are too often forced to work their way through long out-of-print publications in foreign languages. As the recent Russian and German onslaughts against history’s very founda- tions go to show, such continuous lack of interest is easily exploited by those who inhabit the fringes of academic scholarship and may even serve to undermine the discipline’s credibility in the public eye.2 If chronology has been an unfashionable and marginalized pursuit for the past hundred years, this holds true to an even greater extent for its history as a discipline. For all the obvious distortions inherent to his account, Fomenko’s schematic view of the roots of technical chronology is in fact largely shared by mainstream historians, who have frequently singled out Scaliger, the arch-villain of Fomenko’s tale, not as the culprit in a conspiracy theory, but as one of the main heroes in the development of modern historiography. With his two ground- breaking works, the Opus de emendatione temporum (15831, 15982, 16293) and the even more ambitious Thesaurus temporum(1606 1, 16582), in which he attempted to reconstruct the world chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, Scaliger is said to have singlehandedly invented historical chronology as a discipline.3 Following the lead of his first modern biographer Jacob Bernays, subsequent scholars have painted a picture according to which the French polymath fertilized the grey and unscientific pastures of medieval chronography by combining philol- ogy with the new results of sixteenth-century astronomy, thereby

2 For the German context, see Heribert Illig, Das erfundene Mittelalter (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1996); Uwe Topper, Kalender-Sprung (Tübingen: Grabert, 2006), and the refuta- tions by Franz Krojer, Die Präzision der Präzession (Munich: Differenz-Verlag, 2003); Ronald Starke, Niemand hat an der Uhr gedreht! (Munich: Differenz-Verlag, 2009). 3 The standard monograph on Scaliger’s oeuvre is Anthony Grafton,Joseph Scaliger, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–93), the second volume of which deals with his chronological work. For a comprehensive bibliography up to 1993, see Anthony Grafton and Henk Jan de Jonge, “Joseph Scaliger: A Bibliography 1850–1993,” in The Scaliger Collection, ed. Rijk Smitskamp (Leiden: Smitskamp Oriental Antiquarium, 1993), i–xxx.