ABSTRACT
What is true history? Why do we write or read history? The humanists of the Renaissance had a firm answer to these questions. ‘True history’ was history written in imitation of the classical historians, particularly Caesar, Sallust, and Livy, with carefully constructed battle scenes, long imaginary speeches put into the mouths of the historical characters. Its object was ethical: to learn from the ‘examples’ of historical characters how to avoid vice and follow virtue, how to lead a moral life. Factual accuracy, the use of documentary sources, the analysis of causal connections between events, all these things were subsidiary to the main aim of a ‘true history’, to teach ethics by ‘examples’. When Sanudo wrote a fairly factual history of Venice he felt that he had to apologise for not following the humanist pattern; and when Bembo completed Sanudo's work it became a ‘true history’ in the humanist sense, a rhetorical exercise with moral intention. Sanudo's part of the history is now a valuable historical source, whereas Bembo's has little factual value. Nevertheless, the historical writing of the humanists, lifeless and empty though it may often seem as compared with the lively chronicles of the Middle Ages, with Froissart or with Joinville, marked a stage in the emergence of history, as we know it today.
