The New York Times Accuses Author of Fabricating History, Except He Didn't

​This week in the New York Times, novelist Marcel Theroux reviewed The Lion House, a new history of sixteenth century Ottoman imperialism by historian Christopher de Bellaigue, and Theroux’s review is both a case study in how not to review history and an example of how fact-checking and expertise has drained away from the editorial level of journalism. Theroux accused de Bellaigue of fabricating material, and no one thought it worth checking to see if it were true.

​Theroux begins his review with some odd speculation about whether hypothetical residents of the star Kepler 186f might be watching the drama of court life on sixteenth century Earth as though on TV since light takes 500 years to get there, apparently unaware that one can’t use such light to form camera angles and travel inside buildings.
 
He argues that The Lion House isn’t really history because it is a narrative that does not foreground the uncertainties of historiography and instead tells a story (quelle horreur!):

​Neither exactly a novel nor exactly a history, it is a hard-to-classify book that assembles the known facts about the period and grouts them together with brisk and muscular prose. The method falls somewhere between mosaic, archaeology and taxidermy. […]  While “The Lion House” unfolds like a novel, through scenes rich with authenticating detail and even a sprinkling of dialogue, the extensive notes suggest that at least in its presentation of the major facts his narrative is true to the historical record. Yet I would still hesitate to file the book under nonfiction. “The Lion House” is apparently slavish to a certain notion of accuracy, but it doesn’t include an evaluation of its sources. Questions of historiography are not raised. And its bold declarative (and decidedly contemporary) sentences — “even by the highest standards of arse-licking, Kemalpashazadeh has his tongue fully inserted” — are very far from the tentative formulations of conventional history.

​We could argue all day about what a book of history should be, but the idea of narrative history is an old one. Until quite recently, few would have expected a popular history to lard itself with the concerns of academic writing; the hollowing out of the middlebrow has led publishers to turn so many history books into dissertations. I can’t help but agree with Theroux that using modern slang is unpleasant, but this is a question of taste, not substance. In narrative, the historian’s judgment serves to select among alternatives and craft a narrative from conflicting accounts. It is, I suppose, a question of purpose: The Lion Court is quite obviously more akin to old-style narratives like Barbara Tuchmann’s Guns of August than to a textbook, but editorial judgment shouldn’t disqualify a narrative from the nonfiction label.
 
The meat of the issue, though, is that Theroux seems incredulous that an author can research detail and therefore, without evidence, makes the unfortunate argument that de Bellaigue made them up.

The book’s chosen method seems to forbid the act of mediumship that is the essence of a historical novel like Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall.” But clearly some inventing is going on. De Bellaigue can’t help entering his characters’ minds from time to time: “The sultan is intrigued to think that Ayas may have a similar but undisclosed taste for bling,” we’re told. At other times, he imagines conversations that clearly form no part of the historical record: “They are playing the race card, turning your Hungarian soldiers against you.” These passages are puzzling. If you are going to invent moments like this, one wonders, why only occasionally, and according to what rules?

​It's worth examining this claim. The “imagined” conversation comes from a passage about the advice given by the Dalmatian-born humanist Andronicus Tranquillus Parthenus to Venetian politician Alvise Gritti in which de Bellaigue is quite clearly paraphrasing, as should be clear from the lack of quotation marks:

That’s what they would say, Tranquillus whispers in Gritti’s ear. You can expect them to reject any plan that separates them from your gold. Doczy’s legendary avarice, Tranquillus goes on, makes him impossible to trust, while Batthyany’s worth as a military leader is a measure of his worth as a man. And they are playing the race card, turning your Hungarian soldiers against you.

​Now, I don’t much like de Bellaigue’s style of using language to imply an immediacy we can’t prove, or his use of modern political patois, but the New York Times ought to have higher standards when alleging it has no connection to the historical record. It is an accurate summary, if in linguistically loose translation, of historical sources on Gritti and his war council, such as Tranquillus’s letter about Gritti published as Tranquilli Andronici dalmatae traguriensis de rebus in Hungaria gestis ab illustrissimo et magnifico Ludovico Gritti deque eius obitu epistola. Most of the relevant sources are in Hungarian, which I cannot read, but secondary sources like Ludovico Gritty in Hungary (1951) from the Studia Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae make plain that the gist of the paraphrase is rooted in historical sources. I can see enough of the names in the Hungarian texts to see the material appears therein.
 
In short, the Times published a quite negative review that made some irresponsible claims that say more about the reviewer and the Times than the reviewed.