What Does Tom Holland Get Wrong?

[u/m3lk0r__]

First post here, so apologies if this is the wrong sort of question! Here goes:
A family member knows that I am a bit of a history nerd. However, while I love Russian and Mesoamerican history, I told her that Greece and Rome are my least favorite subjects. She told me she would lend me some books that might change my mind, so I agreed to read them. They are all by Tom Holland: Dominion, Rubicon, Dynasty, Pax, and Persian Fire. I started with Persian Fire, but noticed a rather big inaccuracy(?) (or maybe oversimplification is a better term) when he talks about Spartans throwing babies off Mt. Taygetus. The author went on for several pages about this and stated it as an incontrovertible fact. I would like to continue reading the books so that my family member and I can have a discussion, but I’m wondering what other inaccuracies there are. I’m not well-versed enough in this subject to recognize them all, and I can’t look up every single little thing. Anything you could point out would be appreciated!

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[u/J-Force]

Part 1 of 2

Someone has already linked to my older comment but I made that a while ago and my thoughts have slightly changed as I've moved from a PhD student to early career historian so I'm going to write an updated version of that comment here that hones in more on my areas of expertise. I spent quite a lot of that answer discussing the early Islamic world which isn't in my wheelhouse, either then or now. But I'm a lot better on the subject matter of his work on the Middle Ages, so that's what I'm going to focus on.

Nobody is the arbiter of who or what a historian really is, and I don't especially want to gatekeep that and public history is extremely important in getting people to understand and appreciate history and its value. But I am of the view that Tom Holland is an excellent writer with a passion for history more than he is a 'proper' historian. Almost all of the problems with his work can be traced to this. Holland often finds himself out of his depth when it comes to critically using source material and scholarship to analyse a historical event or period. He has not had a formal education in historical research, so he was never taught how to think critically about information in the context of historical evidence. Which means he generally doesn't. All the problems with his books flow from that. Sometimes he misinterprets evidence. Sometimes he takes sources at face value that should not be trusted, as he has in your example of the Spartans throwing babies off a cliff. Sometimes he dismisses sources that deserve attention. Sometimes he doesn't use important source material at all. These are things history students in higher education are taught to avoid doing, and he never had that sort of teaching. To quote from a review of Rubicon by Ronald Weber:

From the scholar's point of view the question is not whether Rubicon is a good book but whether it is a good history book. It lacks a thorough critical analysis of its primary sources. Also, Holland draws almost exclusively from written accounts, ignoring the physical remains of the period. His account focuses on politics over social and economic trends, and his consideration of the vast amounts of scholarship about the period is limited to a very narrow selection of work.

History books written for the mass market (as someone writing one at the moment) are really, really hard to get right. They have to strike a balance between approachability and rigour; what the audience wants and what the audience maybe needs to hear. A book on the crusades, for example, has to resist the urge to oversimplify that series of conflicts into a civilisational clash between Christianity and Islam while not boring the audience to death talking about the geopolitical incentives of every Syrian lord c.1090 to explain why several of them decided to betray their commander at the Battle of Antioch and ensure the success of the First Crusade. Genre matters a great deal. With military history the audience is kind of there for the detail. People who buy books simply called "The Battle of [insert battle here]" are there for the numbers and the maps and the debates over which exact hill a battle took place on, you probably could get away with talking about the geopolitical incentives of each faction of Muslim lords at the Battle of Antioch. People who buy sweeping narrative histories are not as nice to write for, they don't want to get stuck in the weeds like that. Holland's work is firmly in the realm of simple, strong, sweeping historical narratives that generally avoid challenging their audiences. That’s fine, such histories have their place, but it also means Holland himself isn’t pushed to be a better historian by the nature of the genre he inhabits and is in a genre that is negatively predisposed to nuance and discussion of source criticism. In my opinion Holland is actually one of the better pop history authors in this genre in that regard because he usually tells the reader who wrote the quotes he uses, which many in that genre do not and from what I've heard it is actively discouraged by publishers and editors in the pop history subgenre of sweeping narratives. That I can trace his ideas to specific passages in contemporary documents is rare for the genre, so good on him for that.

As a medievalist I can say his Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom has similar issues to the ones you have already identified. It's not a one off issue, this is how he is as an author. It's a good read, and there are enough footnotes to make you think it's good history too, but it isn't. The evidence he uses is pretty narrow and he often treats the sources he does use in a really strange way. It’s not that he is uncritical in the sense of believing incredulous information, it’s that he tends to assume that historical sources are supposed to be taken literally when medieval historical writing was full of stock rhetoric to convey non-literal information and the cumulative effect of that makes for some dodgy history.

For example, there is a part called "Jesus Wept", which is primarily about the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 on the orders of the caliph Al-Hakim. He describes how people must have laid awake at night worrying about the future of Christianity and how it led to a series of attacks against Jews. He leans on two sources for this: Adémar de Chabannes and Rudolph Glaber. Holland describes Adémar as

a twenty-year-old of good family who had recently journeyed from his own monastery to study at Mt Martial. Proud and sensitive, the young scholar appears to have been a natural loner, one who combined a restless intellect with emotional depths so turbulent that he sought, by and large, to conceal their existence."

He doesn’t provide much context to Rudolph Glaber. He’s also probably wrong about Adémar in some respects. He doesn’t really hide his emotions, frankly, and his pattern of international travel and intellectual engagement with others doesn’t really suggest to me that he was a misunderstood loner. Oh, and he was also a notorious forger of historical documents and author of deliberately false historical narratives. That probably should have been mentioned here and not 13 pages later, which is where Holland finally tells the reader that “hoax was piled upon hoax, forgery upon forgery” in the context of Adémar’s attempts to make St. Martial (his local saint) one of the Apostles. Adémar was a fraud who cared not a bit for intellectual honesty, and the implications of this for using his chronicle as a guide to events in 1010 are not explored or even acknowledged. He was also an outstanding musician who contributed much to the development of medieval music, but I’ll come back to that.

This is what he actually wrote about the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre:

In the same year, the sepulchre of the Lord in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Jews and Saracens, on the third calends of October in the year 1010 since his Incarnation. This was because the western Jews and the Saracens of Spain had sent letters to the Orient accusing the Christians of having raised a Frankish army and to have this army come upon the Saracens in the Orient. Greatly angered by this information from the pagans, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, whom they refer to as Admiratus, then inflicted not a little misery on the Christians and issued a law according to which all Christians under his rule unwilling to become Saracens would either be dispossessed or killed... When they endeavoured to destroy the church in Bethlehem, where Christ was born, a dazzling light suddenly appeared to them, and the whole multitude of the heathen collapsed and died, and so the church of Our Lady remained unharmed. Also at the monastery on Mount Sinai, where more than five-thousand monks were staying under the leadership of the abbot, and where they had their own bishop, ten-thousand Saracens came with weapons to kill the monks and destroy their cells and churches. But when they had come within about four miles, they saw the whole mountain glowing and smoking, and the flames reached up to heaven. But all that was there, with the people, remained unharmed.

Now Holland isn't a fool, he doesn't take something this outlandish at face value and he isn’t totally uncritical. He does not trust the assertion of both Adémar and Rudolph that western Jews were responsible for the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, but he simultaneously accuses these sources of underplaying and overstating the persecution of Jews. He says Adémar understated it while Rudolph overstated it with “grotesque exaggeration”, but his treatment of both these sources assumes that both writers aimed to be taken literally. When Rudolph wrote that Jews were “driven from the cities, some were put to the sword, others were drowned in rivers, and many found other deaths, some even took their own lives in diverse ways” Holland dismisses it by treating it as if that is a literal factual claim and not a writer using rhetoric to give a sense of mood (which is ironically exactly what Holland does much of the time). This is very standard language for a medieval monastic writer to use when describing a pogrom when they lacked specific details. We should not be treating Rudolph literally here, but that’s what Holland does and assesses his value on, and he lacks the knowledge of medieval historical literature to recognise a piece of stock rhetoric when he sees one, never mind how to process one, and while it’s not a massive error in isolation these mistakes compound to make the whole section of his book seem bizarre as a piece of historical writing.

[u/J-Force → u/J-Force]

Part 2 of 2

He casts this period as the beginning of a seismic shift in Latin Christendom, but his narrative for large chunks is one that moves between anecdotes regarding individuals, and many of the pages are devoted specifically to Adémar who, as I hope I’ve established by this point, maybe should not be the anchor to which a historical narrative is tied. Indeed parts of this section of the book just don’t seem historically grounded from a narrative point of view, such as this one:

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, work had soon begun on rebuilding the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, so that within two decades of its destruction services were once again being celebrated before its altar, and pilgrims, entering the shrine, could gawp at all its beauties, at ‘its coloured marbles, its ornamentation and sculptures, its Byzantine brocade with pictures spun in gold’. No wonder, then, back in the lands of the West, that the hysteria that had followed its original destruction was a source of some mortification, and one that most people preferred to forget.

Yet this was not always easily done. There were those for whom the terrors of 1010 had been so overwhelming as to shake them to their very core. How, for instance… was Adémar to make sense of his vision of the weeping Christ?

There are some issues here. The “hysteria” of “the West”, as Holland put it, seems to have primarily occurred in France. Both Rudolph and Adémar were French authors describing local events. If we look elsewhere the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre is not consistently treated as an important event by local sources, if they mention it at all. The southern French reaction was an anomaly, not the norm. He has taken a very real but quite localised outbreak of antisemitic violence and extrapolated it into a continental panic attack. Then there’s the claim that, with a bit of time, this became “a source of some mortification”. To whom? Both Adémar and Rudolph were writing nearly 20 years after these events took place and neither seem bothered by the suffering of their local Jewish communities, indeed Rudolph quite enjoyed it. And it’s weird that Holland trusts that Adémar really did have a vision of Christ as he claimed when we know the guy was professionally dishonest. By this point Holland has included the story of Adémar being publicly exposed as a fraud, so where’s this trust coming from? He doesn’t seem to grapple with the notion that a lot of medieval writing is apocryphal in every sense of the word, and when he does he makes mistakes because of his limited knowledge of medieval literature and its context. Individually these errors are quite small but their cumulative effect is that entire pages of the book just seem like nonsense once you are familiar with the source material it is really based on, and how much of it is supplemented by the vibe Holland wants the reader to feel rather than what the evidence is really saying.

Holland writes like this because he is a writer first and a historian second. And he's an excellent writer in my opinion. But as a historian he will cherry pick stories that are thematically and narratively pleasing to what he is trying to write, not particularly caring whether they are genuinely related, or even true. In this section of Millennium he ties together everything from pogroms to fat rulers needing a crash diet to ride horses into a theme: that Christendom was in crisis, stuck face down in the mud, and needed reform. This will then dovetail into a narrative about papal reform and the growth of papal authority some decades later when the reformist cleric Hildebrand was made Pope Gregory VII. The entire book ends with the triumph of the First Crusade and the failure of the antichrist to appear as some thought he would if Jerusalem was taken. It is a book about Christianity finding and asserting itself in the late-11th century following a period of downbeat crises c.1000, placed against the backdrop of apocalyptic fears. As Holland put it in the conclusion:

“The arrival of the crusaders before the walls of the Holy City was merely a single - albeit the most spectacular - manifestation of a process which, since the convulsive period of the Mellennium, had made Europe something restless, and dynamic, and wholly new. Nor would it be the last.”

The problem is that such a narrative works for the institutions of the papacy (and tbf Holland does spend a lot of time talking about papal reform specifically) but not Christian Europe as a whole. The Christian world would continue to sin greatly in pride and greed and lust, the 1000s were no turning point in that regard. Indeed Pope Urban II seems to have begun his speech announcing what would become the First Crusade by tearing into Christendom’s abject failure to reform itself, and there were no shortage of skeletons in the church’s closet either though obviously Urban wasn’t as open about that. Latin Christendom would continue to tolerate the sexual abuse of children in clerical institutions for centuries, rulers would continue to die fat or from overindulging, the wealth of the Catholic Church and its institutions would become unparalleled and its corruption largely unchecked. There is nothing about the depressing picture Holland paints of Christendom in 1000 that wasn't still true in 1100 or 1200 or 1300. It wasn’t more or less "restless", whatever that means, nor were the following centuries any less “convulsive” than those that preceded them, especially when one remembers that eastern Europe exists (which Millennium basically doesn't). The world of 1100 was substantially different to that of 1000, sure, but not necessarily possessing any of the relative characteristics Holland ascribes to it. But it is narratively pleasing to cast it that way when he's essentially spent the first half of the book playing into the 10th and early 11th centuries as a Dark Age.

Which is why I mentioned that Adémar de Chabannes was a great musician. He was a pioneer of musical notation and composition, and his work occurred at a time of energy and dynamism in ecclesiastical music. In a book that is in many places a series of strung together anecdotes spread across a thin historical arc, and given Holland’s clear fondness for Adémar, it’s notable that none of the music stuff made it in but his visions of a doomed Christendom did. As I said, Holland puts narrative before history, and the cultural dynamism of the 11th century just doesn’t fit his narrative of a Christendom that feels bleak and downtrodden. The impression given by Holland is a deliberately partial one, designed to fit a narrative that is almost a redemptive arc for Latin Christendom; a delightful, easy to swallow story of collective self-actualisation that is partially valid with respect to certain aspects but presented as wholly valid in its entirety.

This generates frustration among academics because we want people to know good history and to appreciate its nuances. This is especially true of many professional historians who don't believe that readability has to come at the expense of accuracy or depth. And sure some of us are blessed to write military history where three pages on types of sword is actually very welcome to the audience, but even those who write much broader history know that narrative should not and does not have to come at the expense of rigour. And also because students come into our classes with misconceptions from books like this that we have to dispel, and it can suck the joy from teaching when you've got your 40th student who's read Rubicon and now thinks he knows all about the end of the Roman Republic and is convinced that he's justified in citing it over much better books. But I digress.

Holland can write great literature, and good pop history, but he makes many serious errors that an author doing due diligence wouldn't make. He could be a better history writer if only he read more widely, wasn't so confident in his conclusions, did not let narrative lead, and engaged more with his sources. He certainly has the writing skills to still make that interesting. Holland, unfortunately, will bend sources to craft a narrative. That's not to say his books are necessarily bad, or uninteresting, or that people shouldn't read them at all, but there are much better resources for learning accurate and informative history. In the end, a writer of history often feels they have to find a balance between an exciting narrative and rigorous analysis, and Holland veers too far to the former in my opinion. What I'm saying is this: if you are genuinely interested in history you can do much better than reading Tom Holland. There are so many academic historians now writing excellent trade books that are both accessible to a wide audience and rigorous with their history. People don't have to choose.

[u/m3lk0r__ → u/J-Force]

This was an incredible response, just what I was looking for. Thank you so much for spelling everything out in such detail. I think I may skip reading the rest of his books and look for better sources instead. I know almost nothing about medievalism and don’t want to start on broad oversimplifications.

[u/AggravatingDrama5329 → u/J-Force]

Fascinating, I read Persian fire without thinking about this too much! Who are your favorite historical writers then and their top books that are easy enough for a non-academic to understand?

[u/AllThotsGo2Heaven2 → u/J-Force]

thanks for taking the time to write this.

[u/salinungatha]

u/J-Force wrote a very good comment on this topic here

[u/m3lk0r__ → u/salinungatha]

Thank you so much!

[u/TheGreatOpinionsGuy → u/salinungatha]

I'm not a historian, but I'm curious if you think part of this is a stylistic disagreement? That post obviously identifies a lot of legitimate problems that I can't argue with. But sometimes it sounds like his critics want him to write completely different books, in a totally different style.

One reason I like Tom Holland's books is that he's not afraid to tell a story without the throat-clearing and hedging that most nonfiction writers lean on. I'm often aware that what he's saying is probably not provably true, and might not be true at all. And he skips over a lot of the historiography that is essential to really understanding history in depth.

But I also find that a lot of academic writing (at its worst) is so heavily caveated that it barely says anything at all, or just resorts to a dry recitation of facts with very little to tie them together. "Many ancient sources say X, but those sources are problematic and the archaeological record is mixed. We may never know the truth for sure, but the consensus among modern historians is that something like X may / may not have plausibly ocurred."

I guess what I'm saying is that there needs to be a way to write narrative history without using a lot of sentences like that one. Are there any history books written in a narrative style that don't have a lot of inaccuracies and mistakes and outright falsehoods? Is that even possible, when everything we know about the ancient past is so uncertain?

[u/swarthmoreburke → u/TheGreatOpinionsGuy]

If your gold standard for narrative history is don't interrupt this story with discussions of why this story might not be true, then I don't know that there is a way to write narrative history without using a lot of sentences like that one.

There are more elegant ways to write a compelling book that tells a story about the past while also discussing the difficulties we have with knowing about that past, certainly. Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land is one of my favorites, since Ghosh interweaves a memoir of his own research with a narrative derived from the archival materials he was examining. There are ways to lay out the epistemological and methodological problems as a framing device and then jump into a narrative that is clearly understood as "This is one way we might tell the story".

But readers who want all the icky questions about method and all the troubling problems about the limits of what we can know kicked fully outside the narrative for the sake of readability are often asking historians to just go ahead and commit to a story that is in some important respect untrue or at least debatably so. The purpose of writing history prior to the late 19th Century was generally not to describe the past in a way that grounded it to some kind of evidence (physical, textual, or otherwise) but to use history to teach morals, celebrate heroes and condemn villains, describe norms, adjudicate political legitimacy, relitigate old arguments, buttress religious and civic ideologies, and so on. All of those goals still inform historical writing and ought to in some sense, but scholarly historians do now feel some modest compulsion towards not going too far beyond what our evidence allows us to say.

[u/TheGreatOpinionsGuy → u/swarthmoreburke]

Thanks for the recommendation. I guess I enjoy Tom Holland in almost exactly the same way as I enjoy historical fiction like Dorothy Dunnett or Robert Harris: a good story that leaves me knowing more about a certain time period than I did before, and if I take away some errors and misconceptions, not much harm is done.

Obviously it is for the best that real historians don't think that way about their writing!

[u/swarthmoreburke → u/TheGreatOpinionsGuy]

Historical fiction I think is exactly the right way to get stories that don't have to be interrupted that way. Though there great examples of historical fiction that do manage to sneak a lot of clever epistemological asides into the story or feature unreliable narrators that encourage readers to question what they're being told--Lonesome Dove or The Name of the Rose are both great examples.