Sources of empire: Negotiating history and fiction in the writing of historical IR

Abstract

In framing themselves as myth-busters, historical IR scholars have inscribed the distinction between history and fiction into how they speak to the discipline. And yet, engagement with what this might mean for the status of historical knowledge has mostly focused on broad metatheoretical distinctions and debates. Against this, I argue that questions about historical knowledge and its status are best understood as contingent settlements in the research practice of writing history, pursuing specific questions and writing specific answers. Through an exploration of the early stages in the creation of the Iberian Empires in the fifteenth century and the chronicles that provide an account of it, the article seeks to make visible the negotiations and settlements involved in writing history along four aspects of the distinction between history and fiction: facticity, emplotment, genre and the situated politics of history.

Introduction

Although it may not appear so at first sight, the distinction between history and fiction has been central to how historical International Relations (IR) scholarship has spoken to the discipline.¹ While acknowledging, to paraphrase E. H. Carr (1990), that all history is interpretation, historical IR scholars have engaged in self-declared myth-busting exercises, trying to correct the pernicious and sticky myths and wrong narratives espoused by the mainstream of the discipline. Thus, not only have they have exposed the ‘myth of 1648’ (Teschke 2003), of ‘Westphalia’ (Osiander 2001), of ‘1919’ (De Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson 2011), of ‘the first great debate’ (Wilson 1998; Schmidt 2012), but also the myths of disciplinary history (Ashworth 2019), of a ‘monolithic Christian identity’ (Costa Lopez 2016), of ‘modernity’ (Halperin 2006), of ‘the laws of war’ (Vergerio 2022), of ‘traditional sovereignty’ (Glanville 2013) or of the ‘military revolution’ (Sharman 2018). In doing so, the distinction between a fictional-qua-mythical account of the history of international relations, and the better historical narratives provided by historical IR scholars has been embedded in the grammar of this type of inquiry. Despite this, however, there has been little explicit reflection about what myth-busting entails, nor about what may follow from it. My intention in this article is to start opening up space for this.

Of course, this is not to say that historical IR has been operating with a naive notion of historical truth. Not only is it by now an almost-ritualistic commonplace to acknowledge the role of interpretation in crafting historical narratives, but a large literature has explicitly reflected on how to approach historical inquiry and the stakes of doing so. And central within this literature on the relation between IR and history has been the idea that we should ‘scale back the truth-claims, and be much more attuned to both context and the historiography of any one topic’ (Leira 2015b, xxvi). Thus, far from reducing the task to a mere division of labour between data-producing historians and theory-testing IR scholars (Yetiv 2011; Elman and Elman 1997), this literature has shown the essential if diverse place of history in IR: the extent to which IR scholars rely on different philosophies of history, on different modes of history, on a variety of techniques that are shared with historians, and can ultimately produce their own histories (respectively, MacKay and LaRoche 2017; Hobson and Lawson 2008; Lawson 2010; Leira 2015a). Not only this, but they have also reflected on how specific modes of historical inquiry partake in the reproduction of structures of domination (Grovogui 2013; Saurin 2006). And yet, it is worth noting that, in operating at the level of grand structural categories about possible approaches to history, these debates may create the impression that issues which are essential for the writing of history – such as dealing with sources – can be reduced to technicalities that flow almost directly from these prior commitments. MacKay and LaRoche (2017, 204), for example, claim that ‘basic questions [about the long-run form of human history] orient more specific methodological questions about the writing of particular histories,’ which thus become ‘technical matters.’

My starting point in this paper is that, although helpful in drawing some broad, structuring distinctions, grand schemes and systematised categories cannot provide an account of how the distinction between fiction and history operates within the field, nor of the politics and blind spots that result from it. Instead, I seek to recentre the writing and politics of historical IR from an available menu of metatheoretical options and approaches to something constantly (re)negotiated in the daily activity of writing histories. To do so, I draw inspiration not only from debates in theory of history, but also from Michel de Certeau’s (1992) notion of a historiographic operation, which forces us to take literally the productive tensions that emerge from the writing of the past. I seek to make visible the types of processes, decisions and (in)visibilities that follow from the practice of writing history and that are usually taken for granted under the banner of ‘history means interpretation’. In doing so, I argue, questions about how to distinguish history from fiction, about historical knowledge and its status, are best understood as contingent settlements in the specific practice of research pursuing specific questions and writing specific answers (see Peters 2021).

Consistently with this idea, rather than proposing yet another categorisation within historical IR, I interrogate the settling and negotiations surrounding the history/fiction distinction through a specific historical site and a specific set of sources: the early stages in the creation of the Iberian Empires in the fifteenth century and the royal and eyewitness chronicles that provide an account of it. Although IR scholars have focused on (Iberian) empires as a modern phenomenon starting mostly in the sixteenth century after the Columbian exchange, on the one hand, and the arrival of the Portuguese to the Indian Ocean, on the other,² a wealth of historical literature understands these as the continuation of a variety of fourteenth and fifteenth century processes and dynamics that have the Mediterranean and West Africa as their centre stage (Fernández-Armesto 1987; Benton 2009; Abulafia 2008; in IR, Phillips 2017). Thus, for example, Mediterranean commercial expeditions started sailing down the African Atlantic coast in the fourteenth century, if not earlier, establishing trade relations, missionary outposts and beginning the conquest of the Canary Islands. Similarly, Latin Christian kingdoms engaged in war against Muslim polities in the Iberian Peninsula sought to continue these processes of conquest in North Africa.³

Interestingly for reflecting on writing historical IR, the corpus of sources that we have about these developments is comparatively limited, particularly for the early fifteenth century. As Malyn Newitt (1995, 85 [9]) remarked, ‘the intriguing nature of the detective work clearly lies in the fact that the record of early European expansion is very meagre indeed and clues are often tantalisingly inconclusive.’ Specifically, a few extant eyewitness travel accounts and royal chronicles constitute the main traces we have left from these expeditions, besides perhaps a number of short administrative documents in various secular and church archives.⁴ These chronicles and travel accounts were written at various points in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, sometimes in the first person by the travellers themselves, sometimes by official chroniclers associated with royal households, sometimes by priests or intellectuals who themselves may or may not have taken part in these early processes of conquest. In this paper, I take them as the site and starting point for an interrogation of the distinction between history and fiction in the writing of historical IR. In focusing on these sources and the question of early Iberian empire formation, I not only bring to light a complex politics of history and fiction in historical IR, but most importantly hope to highlight that this emanates from specific, situated and contingent negotiations in the practicalities of dealing with historical material and writing histories.

Specifically, the paper proceeds in four steps, each of which problematises an understanding of the history/fiction distinction and highlights the practical negotiations that stabilise it.⁵ The first section focuses on the division as a matter of facticity, of the distinction between (real) facts and fictions. The second section uses the mentions of Prester John, a fictional figure, to discuss the negotiations that lead to emplotment in a context where different systems of belief need to be assessed, and with it the role of theory in the writing of history. The third section looks at history/fiction as a matter of genre through the case of the chivalric emplotment of these chronicles, opening up how the problem of genre recurs at various levels of historical practice. This not only problematises the distinction between historical and fictional texts, but also forces us to consider how these continuities are themselves imbricated in the creation of empire. In the concluding section, I unpack the political afterlives of these chronicles and their tropes in twentieth century Iberian politics, and their role in the legitimation of current and past politics.

Facticity

The other three islands inhabited by idolaters are bigger and much more inhabited, especially Gran Canaria, which has around eight thousand souls, and Tenerife, which is the largest of the three, has about fifteen thousand souls. (Cà da Mosto 1507, 6v)⁶

In the so-called island of Lanzarote lived sixty men, in Furteventura eighty, and in the other, called el Hierro, there were twelve men. (…). In the sixth Island, which is that of Tenerife or of Hell (…) live six thousand fighting men. The seventh Island is called Gran Canaria, in which there are about five thousand fighting men (Zurara 1841, lxxix).

Many people live [in the Island of Gran Canaria], and it is said that it is six thousand noble men, excluding those of other condition. [The Island of Lanzarote] used to be very populated, but the Spanish and other corsairs of the sea have captured them and enslaved them so often that there are barely any people left, … there were only some three hundred people. ("Le Canarien - Manuscript G" 2003 [15th C.], lxix, lxxi)

A first way of looking at how history/fiction is negotiated and stabilised concerns its somewhat commonsensical understanding: the distinction between fact and fiction, that is, the matter of facticity. Entire libraries have of course been written in philosophy and other disciplines about how we can (if at all) understand the real. My intention here is firmly not to enter these debates, but rather to offer some practical reflections, and make visible the contingency and negotiation in the processes of determining facticity in historical writing. For, so far, despite the apparent deep disagreement,⁷ the terms in these debates have been surprisingly symmetric: either the search for a stable line that allows for the differentiation between fact and fiction, truth and falsity, or the denial of a line at all in a ‘radical historicisim’ that attempts ‘deconstruction without reconstruction’ (Hobson and Lawson 2008, 424–425; see Vaughan-Williams 2005). And yet, it is worth noting that even the most well known narrativist approaches operate with a notion of ‘facts’ (see Spiegel 2019, 5). Thus, for example, Campbell (1998, 262), following narrativist beacon Hayden White, can affirm that ‘facts are structured in such a way that they become components in a particular story,’ painstakingly taking care to remark, just like White, that ‘historical events are different from fictional events’. Against this somewhat unproductive debate, I want to draw attention here to how the boundary between facticity and fiction is neither an absolute nor an entirely absent one, but rather is situationally settled in the writing of histories.

The quotes at the beginning of this section give us a first and fairly traditional way into the issue of facticity. As three contemporary accounts, two of which written by eye witnesses, they are entirely contradictory about something apparently factual: the number of inhabitants in different islands in the Canaries in the fifteenth century. How do we establish that fact? At the risk of stating the obvious, it might be worth unpacking the type of procedure – the type of practice (De Certeau 1992) – that goes into distinguishing fact from fiction. At a very basic level, I suggest, this involves the non-automatic interrogation of the nature, validity and information provided in a source. In other words, before we even consider emplotting anything into a narrative, a series of open questioning processes that relate our interest to the source and to ‘history’ as what happened in the past must take place.⁸ The distinction between facts as what happened and as statements about what happened as articulated by Kosso (2009, 11ff) is a productive one in this sense, for it reminds us, first, that as far as we are concerned ‘facts’ are statements – thus determinations of the writer of history. And second, that establishing the relation between both meanings as a matter of correspondence is not the only path to validity, but also that this does not mean abandoning the reflection on validity altogether.

In order to see this, now in relation to those quotes, we may be puzzled by the claim that in el Hierro there were only twelve men. How can we understand this? It is difficult to take a strict reading of the sentence at face value, for it seems both implausible and socially unsustainable. We may however choose to read this in parallel with what is said of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, where the text reads ‘fighting men’. Suddenly, el Hierro appears as a more plausible small community, for the ‘twelve men’ may not refer to all the inhabitants. And yet, it is worth reminding ourselves that these two sentences are actually pages apart in the text. What enables the reading of one in terms of the other is a presumption (on the part of the researcher) of a) a certain coherence in the text, plus b) the knowledge that this is an official royal chronicle narrating a conquest, and consequently not a ‘neutral’ ethnographic description, but rather the provision of information relevant to conquest, and to exalting the feats of those who undertake it. Conversely the first quote from Cà da Mosto, a Venetian who wrote an adventure and commercial travel account, is more interested in the number of inhabitants as part of an overall narrative of wonder (Abulafia 2008), and thus speaks of ‘souls’. To put this in more general terms, what this example shows is that under ‘sources need to be read in context’ lies a fundamental difference between sources and facts, in which sources are always already emplotted. As De Certeau puts it, ‘in the realm of history, an endless labor of differentiation … forms the condition of all relating elements which have been distinguished – and hence of their comprehension’ (1992, 36). Distilling facts thus is a matter of situated, contingent negotiation in the research process.

Let us however consider a slightly different example in order to unpack how this settling of fact and fiction relates to the research process. In the Chronicle of King João II, written by Rui de Pina, we find a scene where Wolof ruler Bemoim, having travelled to Portugal, addresses King João II asking for help.⁹ From the chronicler we read that Bemoim ‘with great pause … and gravity made a public speech, which took a long time, and using words and sentences so remarkable that they did not resemble those of a Black barbarian, but rather those of a Greek Prince raised in Athens’ (Pina 1950, 92). The text then proceeds not only to recount how Bemoim acknowledged the lordship of João over Guinea and declared himself a vassal, but also quotes him asking for help to recover his position with the words (in Portuguese): ‘Most powerful Lord, God knows, listening to your greatness and Royal virtues, how elevated were my spirits, and how much my eyes wanted to see you’ (92).

Now, what is the factual status of this passage? At face value, we would be forced to conclude that this is fictional: it is unlikely to say the least that a newly arrived prince without the appropriate linguistic knowledge (elsewhere in the chronicle we see João II needing interpreters to address him) would make a speech that sounded like an ‘Athenian prince’, nor use the type of vocabulary or notions of rule that are attributed to him in this passage. We could thus conclude that this is fiction.¹⁰ And yet, we may note that this is premised on a particular type of questioning of this passage that tells us what type of thing we would consider a fact. Indeed, the determination of this as ‘fiction’ is not something intrinsic to the passage, but is a direct answer to the questioning through something along the lines of ‘how did Bemoim address the king?’. But does that mean that this could not possibly be evidence for a historical account? Consider a relevant research inquiry into the historical formation of racial thought and particularly what is currently being debated under the label of (proto-)racism (Heng 2018; Bethencourt 2014). Interrogated through that lens the passage constitutes not fiction, but historical factual evidence of the existence of an association of skin pigmentation with diminished abilities (‘barbarian’). Ultimately, thus, the matter of facticity, understood as the negotiation of the distinction between true and untrue descriptions, between history and fiction, is something that emerges as contingently settled in the asking of specific questions, with specific conceptual and theoretical presuppositions, to specific traces.

Emplotment

This river [Padram] is called this way because on it there is a tall stone post with a cross on top, where the King ordered that the ordinance be put with his arms … in all the new lands that his captains discovered so that it may always be known that the peoples pursuing this enterprise were Portuguese and of the Faith of Jesus Christ: everything in order to meet Prester John. (Pina 1950, 156, ch LVIII)

A second way in which history and fiction are negotiated concerns the matter of what we can preliminarily refer to as historical fictions. With this, I aim to draw attention to the negotiations that take place as a result of the historicity of belief, and the need to assess and settle the relevance of belief from a symbolic system – that of current historical IR – which is entirely different to it. Through this, I want to reflect on how history/fiction is entangled with another important grand binary in the discussions of historical IR: that between theory and empirics.

The reference to Prester John in the quote above, coming from the Chronicle of João II, can provide a good starting point for this exploration. The snippet gives us some information about early practices in West Africa carried out on behalf of the King of Portugal: if we are to trust it, ordinances were publicly posted which explained the nature of Portuguese presence in the region as seeking Prester John. This is not the only mention of the figure we find in the chronicles. Zurara, for example, mentions ‘finding Christian princes whose charity and love would be strong enough to want to help [Prince Henrique] against the enemies of the faith’ (1841, ch vii) as one of the main motives for exploring Africa, as well as another instance of an explicit instruction to an explorer to find him (ch xvi).

What is relevant for our discussion is that for all intents and purposes Prester John is a fiction, a mythical figure who did not historically exist. Originating in the context of early crusades during the twelfth century, a story began to circulate throughout Latin Europe about a great Christian king in the East, who commanded great obedience, ruled over an extensive empire of both Christians and non-Christians, and was extremely wealthy .¹¹ This was not just a tale, but was accompanied by a (forged) letter, allegedly from the king himself to the Emperor of Constantinople, which along with other documentation was to circulate extremely widely for centuries (Brewer 2015). The letter and myth sparked a number of responses, from disbelief, to Papal letters and missions attempting to establish contact, to rumours among crusaders that Prester John was coming to help (Knobler 2016). Finding this fictional figure is what these chronicles credit as a core goal of the expansion into Africa.

How can we negotiate this in the writing of histories about early empires? What is at stake here is the role and significance of something fictional yet adduced by the participants in the unfolding of a relevant historical process. As opposed to the history/fiction negotiations that we have seen above, we are not talking about factual argument, but rather we are firmly in the realm of construction of historical narratives that can help us account for (the motives in) imperial expansion. Four further relevant interpretative contexts concerning Prester John can help us unpack the stakes. First, in the three hundred years that separate the appearance of the myth with the mentions in these chronicles, we can trace how the referent of Prester John moved (Rouxpetel 2014). Not only was it resignified from a specific person to a lineage of kings, but while at the beginning he was clearly located in the ‘Indies’, he was then associated with the Mongols after contacts were established in the thirteenth century, and later travelled to Africa and became associated with Christian Ethiopia. Even then, however, the actual location was rather ambiguous, sometimes maintaining mentions to the ‘East’, but with the belief that Africa was the best way to reach his kingdom. Second, the association with Ethiopia became very prominent after Ethiopian emissaries reached Latin Christian polities – possibly in the fourteenth and certainly from the fifteenth century onwards – in search for artisans and liturgical objects with which to legitimise the rule of the negus – the Ethiopian king (Krebs 2021). Thus, Latin Christian sources on these diplomatic exchanges, for example, repeatedly refer to the rulers of Solomonic Ethiopia as Prester John. Third, at the same time, the myth was not entirely left unquestioned. Already in the twelfth century commentators distanced themselves and expressed some reservations about it (Brewer 2015, 8 ff). Not only this, but after contacts with Ethiopia, when the Council of Florence in the mid-fifteenth century declared the Ethiopian negus to be Prester John, his emissaries ‘rejected [the name] as insufferable and stupid’ (Knobler 2016, 41). Fourth, in the Portuguese and more broadly Iberian context that occupies us, the figure of Prester John resonated with a local millenarist current that legitimated the authority of different Kings since João I in prophetic terms and linked it to the fight against Muslims, and within which the impending contact with a long-lost Christian king could be read (Subrahmanyam 1997, 54ff; Fernández-Armesto 2007, 491–492).

These things considered, was Prester John just epiphenomenal rhetoric for an imperial expansion that was primarily economically motivated? Or was this just part of the religious legitimation of authority that was needed from the Pope in a context of competition with the Castilian and Aragonese crowns? Or, conversely, was it a genuinely held belief that sparked the expeditions? The goal is not to settle this matter here. Rather, it is to point out that rather than merely being a matter of weighing evidence, or even of stringing together evidence into a narrative, each of these interpretations also constitutes a theoretical argument that by necessity goes beyond what could possibly be in the sources. In doing so, in helping us account for the role of these myths, these interpretations also constitute temporary settlements of the division and relation between history and fiction – and its (political) implications. Thus, most simply, an account that discounted Prester John and broader religious framings of conquest as irrelevant, such as that of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, which was firmly embedded in a Braudelian understanding of world economic development within which particular economic positionings of Portugal in broad economic circuits, and of groups within Portuguese society, gives us both an understanding of the fifteenth and sixteenth century expansion and an account for the epiphenomenal nature of Prester John – now conceived as mere rhetoric. Conversely, an account that would understand Prester John and reconquest framings as fundamental for expansion is premised on – that is, necessitates – explicit or tacit arguments not only about the constitutive role of symbolic systems, but also possibly sociological accounts of elite culture and education, cultural transmission, and political legitimation. The nature of ‘Prester John’ as fiction that emerges out of these accounts is thus conceptually and theoretically different than that of economic historians – we have a performative discursive Prester John versus a mere rhetorical figure for example – in a way that lets us see that under the banner of ‘narrative emplotment’, we find not only the relating of events, but the substantive conceptualisation and theorisation of the events and the relations themselves emerging out of the research process.

This is in a sense of course making visible the oft-mentioned idea that historical research is theory-laden. And yet, situating this as a negotiation emerging from the research and writing process as part of a logic of questions and answers disavows us from two common problems in how this is usually framed in IR. First, it highlights the problems in understanding the logic of negotiation in historical writing as a matter of ‘(selection) bias’ (Lustik 1996; Thies 2002). Doing so not only inscribes the writing of history into a semantics of objectivity – thus bringing back the unproductive debate between (historical) realists and constructionists we have already addressed when looking at the settling of facts – but also directs our attention towards the avoidance of ‘bad practices’. And good as that may be, that constitutes a missed opportunity for more productively reflecting on the theoretically productive nature of writing history (Çapan 2020). Second, related to this, situating this discussion in the context of research practice gets us out of the rhetorical entrapment of the theory/history division (see also, although in a very different sense, Vaughan-Williams 2005, 134). Indeed, there is a historicist strand that argues that ‘there is some ‘critical’ value in the plea to elevate the empirical above the theoretical, since describing can have an explanatory value in itself without empirics having to be fitted into an overarching theory that commands their relevance’ (Cello 2018, 243). And yet, what we see through the example of Prester John is neither empirics speaking for themselves, nor theory emplotting everything, but rather the necessary and mutual imbrication of theoretical and empirical reflection in historical writing emerging as a crucial part of the research project. Theory in the writing of history is thus not a set of pre-existing schemes that command relevance, nor a set of master distinctions, emplotment strategies, or specific modes. It is rather something that emerges in a reconstructive fashion (Herborth 2017), as part of a dialogical, negotiated process of research, and as such is inseparable from the specific back-and-forth between empirical material and research questioning.

Genre

It is undoubtable that, in hearing the retelling of great adventures, feats and prowesses of those who in the past undertook trips and conquests against infidels [mescreants] with the hope of guiding and converting them to the Christian faith, many knights felt desires, valour and determination to emulate their feats, in order to avoid any vice and practice virtue and at the end of their days reach eternal life. ("Le Canarien – Manuscript G" 2003 [15th C.], 1r)

So begins the only contemporary account that we have of the early conquest of the Canary Islands by two French knights at the beginning of the fifteenth century. This invites a third way of thinking about the division between history and fiction: as a matter of genre. What constitutes a genre is of course highly disputed in literary theory, but broadly understood, the notion of a genre points to a series of rules, techniques and strategies that govern the production of a specific text and generate a series of expectations among its readers (Rubiés 2000; for an overview, see Duff 2000). Seen through this lens, history writing and fiction writing would not only constitute separate genres, each with their own set of rules and procedures, but as Enzo Traverso (2020) has noted, they would also be genres that have historically since the nineteenth century defined themselves in opposition to one another (Ginzburg 1986). And yet, at the same time, the debates within theory of history spearheaded by authors like Hayden White (1975) hinged precisely on blurring that distinction and claiming that at the level of narrative there was no substantive difference between history and literature. What are we thus to make of genre in the writing of historical IR? In this section I want to make visible, first, how the problems about genre recur at different levels in the research process; and second, how part of the negotiations about genre also concerns the historicity of history itself as genre.

As briefly mentioned in the first section, we should consider the fact that a specific chronicle was a conquest narrative as a relevant interpretative factor. Doing so points to the fact that traces of the past are not just dry bits of information, but as textual documents¹² have their own forms and genres which both give rise to their existence by situating them in their broader social context – what Spiegel (1990) refers to as the social logic of the text – but also structure their meaning. Now, even in linguistic turn theory of history, the chronicle has been considered a traditional genre of historical writing, and one which for that matter ‘typically (…) lacks closure, that summing up of the ‘meaning’ of the chain of events with which it deals that we normally expect from the well-made story’ (White 1980, 20).

The distinctiveness of the genre, however, becomes much less clear if we take some of these chronicles as our starting point. The chronicle known as Le Canarien, from which the quote above comes, constitutes a particularly illuminating example. Written partly by its protagonists, with some later modifications,¹³ it narrates the exploration and conquest of the Canary Islands in the very early fifteenth century – between 1402 and 1404 – by two Norman knights, Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de La Salle. However, while following the traditional chronological style of chronicles, it also features structures and tropes of chivalric romance – a well-established fictional genre of the time.¹⁴ We already saw in the initial quote how the entire chronicle is framed with reference to the feats and accomplishments of other knights ‘in the past’, but the connection is much closer. Honour, crucial in chivalric romance, is a powerful theme in the framing of the characters. The main protagonist –and writer of the original recension of the chronicle – Gadifer de la Salle is consistently portrayed as a man of his word, whereas a number of adjacent characters, such as his companion Jean de Béthencourt, or Bertin, one of the members of the expedition, are consistently cast as treacherous anti-heroes. After the expedition realises that they do not have enough means to conquer the Island of Lanzarote, for example, Béthencourt goes back to Castile to try and get more resources. In doing so, he treacherously tries to manoeuvre himself into being granted rule over the island by the King – the obtaining of new lands being yet another trope of chivalric novels. And in the meantime, sailor Bertin, who has stayed behind, is tired of waiting and decides to abandon his comrades and steal some of their possessions, in an act not only of treason but also of cowardice. Other chivalric tropes also recur throughout: thus, the king of Lanzarote – the Island is named after its purported ‘discoverer’ Lancelotto Malocello, but note also the reference to Arthurian romance and Lancelot – is also cast as the worthy opponent that befits the size of the quest of the knight. As writers of history, we find ourselves in a situation where our only historical source for the early conquest attempts in the Canary Islands is repeatedly emplotted following a fictional genre.

This is not the only case. Chivalric tropes abound throughout the other chronicles. The Chronicle of the Conquest of Guiné, for example, narrates an episode in the 1441 expedition led by Antão Gonzalvez where after a powerful speech about duty and service, the expedition decides to honour their lord by undertaking further tasks – in this case, the capture and enslavement of local African populations to satisfy the information needs of the Prince. After this is performed, we read of the appearance of a knight, Nuno Tristão, who rewards Antão by making him a knight: ‘this is why we devote great praise to this young nobleman for the valour with which he accomplished his task, for he was the first one in capturing people in this conquest, and deserves to be highlighted over all the others who made an effort in it’ (Zurara 1841, ch xii–xiii). Chivalric tropes are so prevalent in this chronicle that a present-day commentator has noted how ‘the ideal of chivalry is thus one of the thematic isotopies of the chronicle, like a core beam of the framing of the subject matter, and even more it ensures the structural and semantic cohesion of the adopted discursive model’ (Figueiredo 2005, 31–32).

At a first level, therefore, the genre mixture in these chronicles poses an interpretative problem that needs to be negotiated. In the example in the first section we had seen genre used as something helpful in settling facticity, yet here we have historical figures emplotted as fictional tropes, significantly blurring the lines between history and fiction – at least in how we understand that division to function today. For what these examples point towards is the need to consider the historicity of history/fiction distinctions themselves. Indeed, it is not only the case that we have an ambiguous emplotment that is at once a historical account and also conforms to some of the figures and techniques of a chivalric novel. Rather, this ambiguous status opens up for examination how this particular enmeshing of history/fiction may have been crucial at the time in fostering the establishment of these Iberian empires – and conversely, how the assumption of not only a too clear-cut division between both, but also a division that functions in a transhistorical way, may have prevented us IR scholars from appreciating this. The opening quote of this section evokes this possibility directly, in suggesting that hearing of past stories may have played a role in fostering ‘knights’ to attempt similar feats themselves.

Let us unpack this step by step. First, the presence of chivalric themes, tropes and plots in these sources points us to a particular elite and intellectual milieu where some types of written works circulated. Thus, since the thirteenth century, romances in the Arthurian tradition proliferated throughout Europe. At the same time, new genres of writing that recorded not only the deeds of kings, but also those of a variety of different, lower-ranked rulers also appeared (Soler Bistué 2022; Jauss 2000). Although some had a fictional vocation and some a historical one,¹⁵ they cannot be read as a separate set of independently developing genres, but rather as part of a specific cultural milieu within which ideas and tropes of chivalry became extremely prominent. Second, it is once we understand this as a complex cultural matrix that we can begin to unpack its political significance. The diffusion among a particular noble class of this cultural production is inseparable from a shift in social ethics and ideals of the nobility tied to the notion of chivalry (Keen 1984), which is in itself also indicative of shifting social bases of legitimation of authority. Thus, tied to particular behavioural and moral ideas such of honour, but also to notions of adventure, the fight against the infidel and divine justice (Guerra 2016, 221), and certainly to specific gendered scripts (Ruiz-Domènech 1993), this cultural matrix powerfully (re)establishes a particular social positioning for the king, whose kingdom and rule the knight seeks to extend.

It is in this context that we can bring together these different threads and understand the matter of genre as part of a broader social logic where imperial expansion took place in a particular culture of adventure, exploration and chivalry (Fernández-Armesto 2007; Goodman 1998). It is worth quoting Carmona Fernández (1993, 14):

the conquistador not only intends to imitate the knight, but he also identifies himself with him, inherits his very same function, is his counterpart in historical reality. In this sense we need to understand the boom of chivalry novels in the period of the conquest and those who accompany conquistadores. Just like the knight in his journey broadens the cosmos and the Arthurian order, the conquistador occupying the new territories carries out the ideal of universal catholic monarchy.

And crucial to understanding this is a particular cultural configuration of blurring of history and fiction that needs to be negotiated in writing, a ‘certain mental abatement of the tacit and in principle rigid borders between ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’, between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’, leading to a peculiar environment that would dominate the multimodal narrative production of the time’ (Figueiredo 2012, 50). In other words, what this brings up is the fundamental historicity of history as a genre itself, and of a notion of history that seeks to differentiate itself from fiction.

Ultimately, thus, in terms of the history/fiction theme that occupies us in this article, the blurring and continuity of genres, but also the circulation of tropes between chronicles, politics, novels and empire building, points to the historicity of our own genre distinctions and the impossibility of assuming that there is something transhistorical to the understanding of history writing or even historical narration. This is important not only as a matter of research practice in selecting and working through historical material,¹⁶ but also because it forces us to question how our own historical writing is itself embedded in and negotiates genre expectations and, crucially, how these genres themselves are entangled in broader social logics that may respond to, reproduce or seek to address particular political contexts, hierarchies and structures of domination.¹⁷

Conclusion: Politics

Indeed, the temptation at this point may be to think of some of these dynamics as part of the past, that is, to temporalise the history/fiction distinction. Knights, chivalry, Prester John and providential kings are part of the past and thus our object of study – 'our’ here standing for a modern, rational scientific community. And yet this would miss the point. To conclude the unpacking of history/fiction negotiations in this article, I trace the present fortunes of these sources and tropes and show the political imbrications of the historiographic settlements and negotiations we have been making. In doing so, I attempt to make visible the complex politics of historiographical writing, by this time focusing not only on the visibilities and invisibilities of specific narratives, but also by stressing the importance of understanding historiography as a socially and institutionally embedded practice in a way that allows us also to consider the role of the negotiations of the history/fiction division in how history relates to (public) memory.

A first way to approach this may be tracing the fortunes of some of the mystical and providential arguments we have seen emerge in these chronicles through both (fictions) such as Prester John and emplotments such as the Christianising adventures of the knight. Far from remaining a medieval idea to be superseded by modern (imperial) rationalities, these themes were fundamental to the creation of a reactionary nationalism from the nineteenth century onwards, and particularly for the legitimation of the Spanish Francoist regime. In this historiographical current, ‘Spain was a millenary nation, providentially destined to the defence of the true faith, Roman-Catholicism, which had reached world hegemony when it had remained loyal to that mission and had decayed when stirring away from it’ (Álvarez Junco and de la Fuente Monge 2017, 490; see also Juan-Navarro 2006). The narrative presents an interesting negotiation of some of the themes that we have seen, and one which has important political functions. Thus, not only are the fifteenth century claims we have seen about Christianisation and messianism deemed historically relevant, but in this historiography they are taken to constitute historical and present truth. In doing so, the medieval appears fundamental in the legitimation of the existence of a transhistorical Spanish nation, founded not only on claims similar to the late-medieval ones, but also on the assessment of subsequent historical evidence through a similar lens (Gelabert and Ángel 2006). Thus, as part of this reactionary historiography, the political consequences of the enlightenment movement in Spain are rejected as they are seen as leading to the loss of the empire throughout the nineteenth century, and at the same time, it is the return to its providential function that legitimates the 1936 fascist uprising that, after the war, led to the establishment of the Francoist dictatorship. It is ultimately this historical narrative that is imbricated with a new providential argument – that of Francisco Franco as a providential leader that can bring Spain back to its providential path (Alares López 2019).

A second example can provide a different angle about the political stakes of negotiating history and fiction. In discussing Prester John, we pointed to the existence of a broad historiography that considered it at best secondary in understanding the Portuguese expansion, which was rather to be understood in geopolitical and especially economic terms. This very same narrative has been particularly crucial in the consolidation of Portuguese national identity, which through a variety of sites and public commemorations has founded itself on the notion of ‘Expansion’ and ‘Discoveries’ – note the difference with the reactionary Spanish current that centred ‘Empire’. And yet, this has relied explicitly on framing the dynamics that have concerned us as fundamentally propelled by a modern mentality: one that pursued not only trading opportunities, but also scientific curiosity (Araújo and Maeso 2012). As João indicates, after the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, ‘it is not a matter of defending an empire … it is a past … that keeps being reinvented as ‘adventure’, the capacity of opening new worlds to the world, of relating to different peoples and cultures’ (2017, 109). In doing so, we see a different settling of history and fiction, one which functions politically by situating the nation squarely into modernity, and thus negotiating the majority of elements we have examined out of the narrative as irrelevant/fictional, and yet keeping the adventure element that we saw in the chronicles, now reworked to be palatable to a contemporary audience.

Ultimately, history and fiction are essential to the writing of histories, and as these last two snippets hopefully show, also to understanding the social lives of our historical narratives. And yet, as I have attempted to show throughout, understanding how they come to play this central role is less productively done as a matter of grand distinctions and great epistemological matters, and better seen as one of situated, negotiated settlements in the context of particular projects, questions and sources. Coming back to a field that has defined itself through this distinction as undertaking a fundamental myth-busting function, therefore, this article calls attention to the need to make explicit the historiographic operations that are undertaken, beyond vague references to interpretation. Most importantly, as I hope to have shown, this is not just a matter of reflexivity about one’s own blind spots. Much more than that, making visible the negotiations in writing histories constitutes an important site to develop new theoretical arguments and reflect on political relevance in a way that allows for a different framing of the contribution of historical work to the study of international relations.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors and contributors of this special issue for their comments and advice, as well as to three anonymous reviewers for their engagement and suggestions. Zeynep Gülsah Çapan, Jaakko Heiskanen, Benjamin Herborth and Filipe dos Reis kindly read through drafts and helped me develop the argument in many conversations over theory of history. My students in the methodology course of the Research Masters in Modern History and International Relations over the years have been essential in shaping how I think and communicate about the issues in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek; This research was funded by NWO grant VI.Veni.191H.048 ‘Inventing the people. Ideas of community in late-medieval cross-cultural encounters along the African Atlantic’.

Notes on contributors

Julia Costa Lopez

Julia Costa Lopez is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen. She obtained a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford in 2016. She is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations, and her work has appeared among others in International Organization, Review of International Studies, International Studies Review, Cambridge Review of International Studies, European Politics and Society and Politics. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 I take historical IR in the broadest sense possible as IR scholarship explicitly concerned with history and historicity. As such, my discussion engages at various points with scholarship that does not use the label.

2 For an exception see Sharman (2019). Helpful recent reviews are Caraccioli (2021); and Phillips and Sharman (2015).

3 In highlighting this, I broadly follow a historiographical approach that has sought to analyse these dynamics as connected processes, rather than taking each polity separately (Subrahmanyam 2007).

4 For a reflection on travel writing in IR see Guillaume (2011).

5 At the risk of engaging in a performative contradiction, these are not to be taken as a substantive typology or a core set of distinctions through which history/fiction must be approached.

6 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

7 For recent, helpful takes on these debates, including an overview of ways in which the apparent gap is/can be bridged, see Spiegel (2019) and Peters (2021).

8 This is of course what historical methodology manuals will sometimes refer to as source criticism. And yet, it is important to highlight that this ultimately relates to the matter of situationally settling facticity, as that is sometimes taken to be just a matter of narrative construction.

9 I have addressed this scene from a different perspective in Kustermans et al. (2022). For a different reading see Russell (2013).

10 Note that despite the appearance of a ‘correspondence’ argument, in this process of reasoning about facticity the determining criteria have been other (con)textual knowledge.

11 In IR, the only mention to my knowledge is Hobson and Sharman (2005).

12 There are of course also non-textual traces, such as artwork or archaeological evidence that are also relevant to the writing of history. I develop the argument with regards to textual sources because it is more pertinent for the sources I am examining here, but the argument can be broadened beyond this as it ultimately hinges on the fact that rule-following is essential to meaning, which does not need to be linguistic.

13 The textual tradition of Le Canarien is particularly complicated, for there are actually two separate versions, with different circulations, and which alternately portray each of the knights in a favourable light.

14 For a full analysis of the chronicle from this perspective, see Goodman (1998), whom I closely follow here.

15 Thinking of this in terms of intention rather than in terms of genre conventions is in itself crucial in order not to forget about the historicity of the history/fiction division itself. For more on this see Taranu and O’Connor (2022, 40 ff.)

16 For a similar point in an IR context see Sajed (2013). For reflections about the historicity of this distinction see the essays in Taranu and Kelly (2022).

17 The work of postcolonial and decolonial scholars among other has been crucial in fostering reflexivity about precisely these matters in IR. See e.g. Grovogui (2013); more broadly, in the context of anthropology, David Scott's (2004) formulation of a problem space provides an important point of connection to my argument, and an explicit way of reflecting about the connection between the questions that are asked, the forms that historical narratives as answers to those questions take, and the broader political contexts they attempt to address.