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People with a logical turn of mind say that the history of the world can be summarised in a sentence. A précis of mediaval historian Richard William Southern's work made in that spirit would identify two characteristics, one housed inside the other, and both quite apart from the question of its quality as a work of art. The first is his sympathy for a particular kind of medieval churchman, a kind who combined deep thought about faith with practical action. This characteristic fits inside another, touching Southern's historical vision as a whole. Its genesis is traceable to those few seconds in his teens when he ‘quarrelled’ with his father about the Renaissance. The intuition that moved him to do so became a historical fides quaerens intellectum. Reflection on Southern's life work leaves us with an example of the service an historian can perform for his contemporary world, as a truer self-perception seeps into the common consciousness by way of a lifetime of teaching and writing, spreading out through the world (all Southern's books were translated into one or more foreign language).

This chapter scrutinises the role of the unfortunate Picts, who were as much of an embarrassment to medieval historians as they have proved a ‘problem’ to their modern successors. When Scots were content to trace their origins to Ireland the Picts were useful as the objects of conquest, but by the later thirteenth century they had to be integrated into the proto-history of Scotland, a feat ultimately accomplished by John of Fordun using materials assembled a century before he wrote.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the life and work of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963). Kantorowicz is considered one of the most influential of all medieval historians, if not the most influential. His book The King's Two Bodies has been kept in print by Princeton University Press since its first appearance in 1957. The steady sales and numerous translations reflect the fact that Kantorowicz's book has had extraordinary resonance in several disciplines: not only in history but in art history, literary criticism, and political thought. After the Nazis took power, Kantorowicz courageously spoke against them as a full professor from the lecture platform to an overflowing crowd in Frankfurt in November 1933. In 1938 he barely escaped Kristallnacht and fled first to England and then the United States, where in the fall of 1939 he took a one-year position at Berkeley.

Alterity is inflected with allegorical valences in Nizam al-Mulk’s biographies. Medieval historians imagined the vizier as the sultan’s alter ego: he is old and wise, learned and vigilant, Persian and Shafi‘i; the sultan is young and brash, frivolous and uncouth, Turkic and Hanafi. They also upheld him as a paragon of non-partisanship and stressed his willingness to compromise. In Siyar al-muluk, his mirror for the Saljuq prince, on the other hand, governance is inflected with the language of religious and ethnic difference. This chapter attempts to reconcile these seemingly contradictory assessments. The vizier’s policies vis-à-vis Turkic rulers, Abbasid caliphs, and heretics including Shi‘is and Sufis are scrutinized to suggest that secular, political concerns couched in the language of religious metaphors may be read to reveal the scaffolding of authority in medieval Islamic thought.