With a few exceptions, the ablest minds of the 12th century were attracted into enterprises that ignored history; they were more concerned with systematization of thought and with philosophical speculations. One of the exceptions was Otto, bishop of Freising, in Bavaria. He was a grandson of the Holy Roman emperor Henry IV. He received the best education that his age could give, but he was also briefly a Cistercian monk during the most austere period of that order's history. Otto was torn between conflicting impulses to seek the city of God as the only reality and yet to hope for the progress of the German empire. Out of this conflict came his first work, Chronica (The Two Cities), a chronicle of world history to 1146, perhaps the most profound medieval attempt at a Christian philosophy of history. As Otto himself confessed, it was composed "in bitterness of spirit . . . in the manner of tragedy." The election in 1152 of his nephew and friend Frederick Barbarossa, as emperor, filled Otto with a new elation. The excellence of his second work, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris (The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa), derives in a considerable measure from a quality rare in medieval historians, a sense of optimistic belief in the value of writing history because it might become a record of human progress. The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa contains a penetrating analysis of the problems encountered by the German rulers in trying to rule the precociously urbanized Italian society.
As in antiquity, the best medieval works were accounts of contemporary history by men who had participated in the events that they were describing. It is, however, very significant that some of the writers that are prized most highly today survive in only very few manuscripts and were presumably not appreciated by most of their contemporaries. One such work was the Historia pontificalis ("Pontifical History") covering the period 1148-52, of John of Salisbury, one of the most accomplished scholars of his age, who was writing about the period when he was in the papal service. Another instance of undeserved neglect is furnished by the Liber de regno Siciliae ("Book of the Kingdom of Sicily") covering the period 1154-69, written by an anonymous member of the Sicilian court.
Unlike the ancient historians, the medieval writers of contemporary history had no inhibitions about extensively quoting official documents. In England, a succession of writers preserved a large quantity of such texts. Roger of Hoveden was, in the last quarter of the 12th century, treated by the English kings as a kind of court historian. He preserved valuable legal and administrative records with which he was familiar through his activities as a royal official and justice. Matthew Paris, the most important English monastic historian of the 13th century, was highly regarded by King Henry III and had excellent sources of information. He left behind a collection of transcripts of royal and ecclesiastical documents that today fills a large printed volume. Some writers made their chronicles into an anthology of official records, thinly connected by the author's brief comments. Such is the chronicle of Robert of Avesbury, consisting mainly of the military dispatches of King Edward III and other interesting documents to 1356. Another variant of the same method was for a wholly mediocre chronicle to incorporate exciting pieces of eyewitness narratives by other writers. A dull English monastic product of the late 14th century, the Anonimalle Chronicle, includes a narrative of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, which is one of the most dramatic and interesting eyewitness accounts to be found in medieval historiography.
The most popular histories of the 13th and 14th centuries were encyclopaedic compilations giving all the important facts neatly arranged under the dates of popes, emperors, and other rulers. There were even more ambitious ventures aiming at summarizing all the important facts from all the different branches of human activity. The Dominican Order, created at the beginning of the 13th century, was especially concerned with producing such aids for the dissemination of useful knowledge. The best known of these Dominican works is the immense Speculum historiale ("Mirror of History"), by Vincent of Beauvais, written under the patronage of King Louis IX of France. It is a compilation made up of excerpts from many authors.
The 13th and 14th centuries were not a period of any fundamental innovations in the techniques and nature of historiography, but there was a growing diversity of types of historical writing. Very detailed, chatty narratives multiplied, often badly organized and inaccurate, but conveying the authentic atmosphere of the times and vividly portraying leading personalities. Such were the St. Albans chronicles of Matthew Paris (to 1259), the reminiscences of Joinville about St. Louis during the Seventh Crusade (1248-54), the Lombard chronicle of Fra Salimbene (to 1287), or the vast history of the first part of the Hundred Years' War written in the second half of the 14th century by Froissart. Memoirs and histories written in vernacular languages, such as those of Joinville and Froissart, came to be quite common. Laymen began to write histories. Some were great men, like Geoffroi de Villehardouin, one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade (which captured Constantinople 1202-04), of which he wrote an account. Important urban chronicles began to appear, such as the Florentine chronicle of Giovanni Villani, with its invaluable statistics of Florentine population and activities around 1338. The extraordinary personality of St. Francis, who died in 1226, inspired lives of him more convincingly human than any previous medieval biographies of saints.
The Humanist historians of the 15th century tried to make a deliberate break with the tradition of medieval historiography. By their insistence on a more coherent arrangement of subject matter, by their superior critical outlook, and, above all, by their much more accurate awareness of the process of historical change, they had introduced innovations of fundamental importance. In part they owed their grasp of these new possibilities to the influence of Byzantine scholars. In historiography, as in other matters, the new humanistic scholarship was a joint product of Western and Byzantine traditions.