Forgeries, Fakes, and Phantom Time

Except for aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. There are people who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were really by the Earl of Oxford, that JFK was assassinated by the Illuminati, that the Merovingians were descended from Christ. But none of these come close to the weirdness that Jean Hardouin dreamed up. A 17th-century French priest, Hardouin convinced himself that almost every book written before AD c.1300 – including by the Gospels, the Church Fathers, and almost all Greek and Latin literature – was a forgery.

Down the rabbit hole

Hardouin did not start out as a conspiracy theorist. Born in 1646 in a little town not far from Brittany’s Atlantic coast, he had shown early promise as a classical scholar. After joining the Jesuits and completing his studies, he published groundbreaking editions of Themistius’ speeches and Pliny’s Natural History. He pioneered the ‘scientific’ study of numismatics. He was even commissioned to write a history of the Church councils for Louis XIV.

Hardouin’s brilliance was his undoing. He was desperate to say something new. He could not resist the unusual – even if it bordered on the ridiculous. When asked by a fellow Jesuit why he wasted time on such things, he replied: ‘Do you think that I’d have got up at 4 a.m. my whole life, just to say what others had already said before me?’ He was also exceedingly arrogant. He prided himself on having an infallible nose for heresy and was convinced that in numismatics he had discovered a truly objective yardstick for history.

It was this which led him down the rabbit hole. In August 1690, he began to suspect that something wasn’t quite right with the works of the other Church Fathers. Their chronology didn’t stack up with what the coins seemed to suggest. Worse still, their orthodoxy was a bit dubious – as was the authorship of some of their texts. For almost two years, he slogged away, hoping to assuage his doubts. But by May 1692 he had become convinced that the only explanation for these ‘flaws’ was that everything was fake.

As Hardouin explained in Ad Censuram Scriptorum Veterum Prolegomena (‘Introduction to the Critique of Ancient Writings’), Christian doctrine had been transmitted orally for the first 1,300 years of the Church’s history and not set down in writing. But then, in the late 14th century, ‘atheist’ monks suddenly decided to undermine the Church’s authority by introducing heresy into its teachings and, to accomplish this, fabricated all the works traditionally ascribed to the Church Fathers and the Scholastics. According to Hardouin, they had then buttressed their deceit by forging almost the whole of classical literature too. In fact, other than a few inscriptions, the only ‘genuine monuments of Latin antiquity’ were Cicero, Pliny’s Natural History, Virgil’s Georgics, and Horace’s Satires and Epistles.

The implications of Hardouin’s theory were even weirder. If it was possible that hundreds of years’ worth of documents had been forged, it was reasonable to ask whether any people or events they mentioned which were not attested in external evidence (coins, inscriptions) might also have been invented. If people and events could be faked, why not entire centuries?

For a long time, these implications lay dormant. But, shortly after the Second World War, the Russo-American psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky used apparent discrepancies between ancient texts to suggest not only that Egyptian history needed completely redrawing, but also that the Greek ‘Dark Ages’ never happened. About 40 years later, a German editor called Heribert Illig took this a step further. Shifting his focus further forward in time, Illig claimed that the entire period AD 614-911 was invented as part of a vast conspiracy concocted by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II to position themselves at the symbolically significant year 1000.

Most bewildering of all, however, is the Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. In History: Fiction or Science? – a sprawling, seven-volume screed – Fomenko argues everything before AD c.1000 was simply ‘invented’ by early-modern scholars like Joseph Justus Scaliger. Fomenko claims that whenever Scaliger came across an event that was described in two different sources, he ascribed it to two different dates, and sometimes even two different locations. Similarly, a single figure could be ‘split’ into two, or a new person ‘created’ out of several others. Soon enough, Scaliger ended up with two chronologies: one – covering more recent history – was real, the other – covering everything before – a ‘phantom copy’. In this telling, Jesus was born in AD 1152 and died in AD 1185, Plutarch was the same person as Petrarch, and Solomon was Suleiman the Magnificent. Bewildering, perhaps – but perfectly obvious, Fomenko believes, when you consider that most ‘ancient’ texts are only known from medieval ‘copies’, and that many of the eclipses mentioned in ‘antique’ documents cannot possibly have happened when they are supposed to.

Turtles all the way down

This raises a troubling question. How have perfectly intelligent people, like Hardouin, come to embrace such bizarre theories? Psychological factors have no doubt played a part. Like most other conspiracy theories, the ‘phantom time’ hypothesis identifies a ‘villain’ responsible for something ‘wrong’ with the world, and suggests that, once this fraud has been exposed by the theory’s ‘heroic’ proponent, a deeper truth will be revealed. Then there is the lack of faith in authority. Hardouin lived amid the birth pangs of modern Biblical criticism and published his Prolegomena shortly after Louis XIV’s clampdown on Protestant ‘heresy’. Fomenko began to develop his ideas while the USSR was in the grip of glasnost.

But a far more important reason seems to be the nature of history itself. Or rather, the difficulty of separating history from pseudo-history. At root, this is a question of truth. Although historians are notionally interested in establishing the truth, the past isn’t something that can easily be tested. Our evidence simply doesn’t provide us with the impersonal facts that might allow that. Rather than being a window onto a past reality, documents – our main source of evidence – are components of that reality. It doesn’t matter what sort of text we are dealing with: a chronicle, a political pamphlet, or a shopping list. They are all an attempt to structure, shape, or supplement the world from which they sprang, even if they purport to just describe it. Even the words they use can be tricky. As many post-modern philosophers have argued, words do not have a fixed relationship to the ‘external’ world but derive their meaning from use. There is no hard ‘truth’ – at least in the sense scientists might recognise. Every element of every document depends for its meaning on every other. As Terry Pratchett put it, it’s turtles all the way down.

If we are to understand any document, we need to understand how it functioned as part of a whole and worked in relation to other documents. To do this, we need some methodology, some criteria for evaluating our evidence. But where the boundary of reason lies isn’t always obvious. Take Hardouin. He was looking for a ‘scientific’ way of overcoming the difficulties with which documents were fraught. He saw coins as solid, external evidence with which to fix dates. Since the philological techniques he had used on Pliny had served him so well, he saw no reason not to apply them to a wider range of documents. It wasn’t as if forgeries hadn’t been detected before, using the same methods. In the 15th century, Lorenzo Valla had exposed the Donation of Constantine – which the papacy had long used to justify its claims to plenitude of power – as a forgery. So why not others? Fomenko has done much the same, except with astronomical data and mathematics.

The weakness of this, of course, is its myopia. However reasonable such ‘scientific’ methods may seem, they are uniquely unsuited to the messy business of history. Hardouin failed to recognise that, in seeking to judge texts against a fixed standard of ‘quality’ – whether in Latin, Greek, or matters of orthodoxy – he was reading them subjectively and anachronistically. So, too, with Fomenko’s use of eclipses. But once such methods have been used to ‘establish’ that enough texts were ‘forged’, it is impossible to evaluate any single document against any other. The very basis of historical reasoning thus collapses – and any possibility of refutation is destroyed. All that is left is conspiracy theory.

Phantom time

So why does this matter? None of these ‘phantom time’ theories has ever carried much weight with historians. Almost as soon as Hardouin’s Prolegomena came out, it was rejected by the academic establishment. The orientalist Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze wrote not one, but two attacks on him; the Jesuit Order urged the pope to ban his writings altogether. He was forced to publicly repudiate his theory – although, in private, he continued to churn out similar ideas until his death. So too, Velikovsky, Illig, and Fomenko have been vilified by every historian who has come across their work.

But there’s still a hard core of people who do believe them. The Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov among them. And that is dangerous. Not because history can’t sustain vigorous debate. It can. Rather, because entertaining such ideas legitimates them. And if it is legitimate to doubt the existence not just of events, but of entire centuries, without any possibility of refutation, it is legitimate to dispute everything – and use ‘history’ for anything.

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book is Machiavelli: His Life and Times (Picador).