In short: A chronicle recopied two centuries later preserves not the events but what had become the proper thing to think about them. The figures in the inventory are rounded, and rounded in one direction — which shows if you add them up and set them beside that year's tax.
What the sources say
The copyist worked fast and corrected as he went; half the variant readings in the manuscript are not another version but his tiredness. Distance in these documents is measured in days of travel rather than in miles, which says more about the road than any figure could.
A tax book is more honest than a chronicle: it was read by someone in a position to check it. A city's name in three languages is three different accounts of whose it was.
The epidemic left almost no texts of its own; you see it in the gaps in the parish registers. The drawing of the building survives and the building does not, and we still do not know whether it was ever put up.
Ten years of grain prices describe a war in more detail than a dispatch from the decisive battle. The border was drawn along the river, and the river has since moved away — the argument about it outlasted the border.
The inventory of goods lists objects that no narrative of the period mentions at all. The habit of dating an event by a reign rather than by a year cost historians two centuries of confusion.
Where a source suddenly becomes eloquent, somebody's defence speech is usually beginning. The sources disagree even on how long the siege lasted, and the disagreement is not accidental: everyone who wrote about it was writing for a particular reader.
- The first item in the list
- The second item, which has a nested level
- A nested item
- And another one, longer, to check how a line wraps
- The third item
Three caveats
Archaeology answers questions the chroniclers never asked, and falls silent exactly where the chronicle is most detailed. The trade route was never a line on a map. It was a network of agreements that every following generation had to renew from scratch. A coin says more about a state than a decree does: the decree records what was wanted, the coin what came of it.
Everything we know about that year we know from a man who was not there.
How it is read now
Cities grew where water and road met at a single point, and vanished when either of the two moved a day's travel away. We assume writing was invented for poetry. It was invented for accounting, and the earliest tablets are a warehouse.
- First check the dating
- Then set it against the inventory
- Only then draw a conclusion
What to look at next
Every map of this period is somebody's argument, won on paper well before it was won in the field. A chronicle recopied two centuries later preserves not the events but what had become the proper thing to think about them.
Everything else on the subject is collected in the catalogue.
