Or often, the lack thereof.

I was reading a biography recently, of Joanna I, who was queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily, in the 1300s. She led an interesting life, including being married four times, and was one of the few women in that era who wielded power on the international stage in her own name. There were lots of powerful women in the medieval era, but most of them were working on behalf of their husbands, not for themselves.

The other interesting thing about Joanna- who is also called Giovanna in some accounts, but the translation of names is a whole’ nother post!- is that her rule was apparently pretty well documented. Italy in the 1300s was a fragmented region, but it was also fairly urban, cosmopolitan, and literate. Royal courts kept very detailed records of who was there, what they were doing, and how much money they spent.

And yet, when this biography was written in the 2000s, the two main scholarly sources in English on the life of Joanna were a biography written in the 1800s, and a grad student’s dissertation written in 1932. The first is highly favorable to her- a commentator wrote that the author had committed the common error of biographers, and fallen in love with his subject. The second, perhaps trying to balance the first, is much more critical, perhaps overly so.

So, what happened to all the records they used for their research? Surely such an important records would have been preserved and translated by now, right?

Unfortunately, no. They had been preserved, but the German army was in Italy in 1943, and despite having orders not to destroy the crates of records that made up the State archives of Naples, having been assured that they were merely scholarly papers and nothing to do with the war, an overzealous group of soldiers had them burned anyway. Hundreds of years of Neapolitan court records and accounts went up in smoke. Any further research on the subject is obliged to rely on those two sources written before the war, and tangentially related sources like papal documents, letters from contemporary thinkers like Petrarch and Boccaccio, and records from other royal and regional governments that Joanna’s government dealt with- she was also the countess of Provence, and had extensive diplomatic business with other Italian states, France, various Iberian kingdoms, and Hungary. Which meant that until recently, anyone trying to research her reign had to have some serious language skills, or access to good translators.

When you read a biography or similar work, the author has usually crafted something of a narrative, filled in gaps, and tried to generally smooth out what is usually a very bumpy set of primary sources. By the time it gets to you, the information looks neat and clean and is accessible enough for a layman to follow. A lot of stuff gets lost along the way, and it’s trivially easy to misinterpret what’s left. Hence why there’s a certain amount of debate over whether Joanna ordered the assassination of her first husband, Prince Andrew of Hungary. The Hungarians certainly thought she’d done it- until they didn’t- and depending on which set of records you focus on, the papacy also thought she might have been involved (Joanna generally had good relationships with the popes who ruled during her long reign, but the papacy was much more political in that era, and policy could shift with incredible rapidity between popes). But the truth is that, while she disliked Andrew, she probably didn’t have him murdered.

Records, even when they exist in the first place, aren’t a perfect window into the past. There’s translation and cultural issues, biases on the part of both the writer and reader- and every intermediary they’ve passed through- not to mention that people lie, particularly when they’re writing about their enemies.

Even archaeology, the study of material evidence, isn’t perfect, either. It’s startling to realize how many and wide-ranging conclusions about the past are drawn from one tiny fragment of bone, cloth, or metal work, and by the time the evidence is presented to the average layman, ‘there’s a possibility that one person made this one thing that might be a cooking pot, one time, and we can tentatively date it to within a hundred years of its construction,’ becomes, ‘this is undoubtedly a pot, used for a specific purpose, and everyone in the region made their pots this way for hundreds of years.’ Plus the common practice of scientists in the past of labeling unknown objects as ‘ritual items’, whether there was any evidence of ritual use or not.

The upside of all this uncertainty is that it makes great story fodder for writers. Fiction or nonfiction, the same person can be showed as a hero or a villain depending on the perspective of the story and other characters.

The downside is, of course, that it’s difficult to know what really happened, and how widespread any particular practice or policy really was. Even taking into account that past societies tended to be more conformist than we’re used to, humans are going to human, and there’s significant variation in how they live.

The amount of stuff that’s been recorded throughout history is amazing. The amount of stuff that’s been destroyed or lost is equally amazing.

And writers of historical fiction get to fill in the gaps. Mwahaha.