1. Introduction : Chronicles and Histories

1.1 Is Martino Martini (*) a chronicler or a historian? The answer to this question will depend on the meaning we attach to the terms "chronicle" and "history". For the purpose of our investigation, a simple differentiation between these two kinds of historical accounts will do. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, C.W. Jones, under the word "chronicle", gives this description of the genre: "Chronicles, records of noteworthy events both natural and cultural, arranged in chronological order, represent a more detailed and sophisticated form of annals [...]. Insofar as they are bare statements of fact, given without comment and compiled without inductive purpose, chronicles differ essentially from history (Gr. historia, "inquiry"), which is understood as being concerned not only to describe but also to interpret the actions of men. Nevertheless few chronicles are entirely free of tendentiousness; from the earliest times their compilers began to select data in order to exalt a reigning house or a religion, or to provide moral exempla." (1) Even a superficial reading of Martini's De bello tartarico shows that both this description of the genre "chronicle" and the proviso attached to it are relevant to Martini's work. How relevant are they? Is Martini "a chronicler with a purpose"? "These are the kind of questions that I am going to deal with.

1.2 The starting point of my research is the article which the late Chinese historian Ma Yong wrote for the First International Congress on Martino Martini. (2) This article is, as far as I know, the first and the best concise presentation of Martini's De bello tartarico to the world. At the beginning and at the end of his presentation, Ma Yong expresses a twofold judgment which will form the backbone of my own discussion. At the beginning Ma Yong says: "The De bello tartarico is not a truly historical work, but is rather a non-systematic collection." (3) At the end of the article Ma Yong says: "[The De bello tartarico] remains a reference work of excellent historical value." (4) So in Ma Yong's view, Martini's book on the final struggle of the Ming against the Qing is "not a truly historical work", but "a reference work of excellent historical value." The title and the content of my article are simply meant to illustrate this careful judgment of the distinguished Chinese historian.

1.3 Martino Martini, for his part, considered his own work to be a true "history", in the sense, of course, given to this term in his own times. The De bello tartarico reads much like the continuation of the Tongjian Gangmu, the supplement to the official Chinese history of the Song and Yuan dynasties, parts of which Martini probably had occasion to read. (5) Today, however, we understand the word "history" in a stricter sense, and distinguish history-writing from chronicle-writing and other literary forms. If I may elaborate somewhat in a personal way the distinction given above between "history" and "chronicle", I would say that the most striking difference between the two forms lies in this: history-writing is essentially a communitarian enterprise; it presupposes an as wide as possible search for documents, a comparison and an interpretation of these documents, and the offering of this interpretation to the scrutiny of scholarly criticism. Chronicle-writing, instead, is a highly individual enterprise; its purpose is to offer a valuable historical document to posterity regarding persons and events that the chronicler deems memorable; its contents consist mainly (if the chronicle is to be valuable) of eye-witness reports, whether the eye-witness is the chronicler him/herself or people directly contacted by him/her. So, on the one hand, a chronicle shares somehow the highly individual character of a diary. But, on the other hand, it is different from a diary, in that the focus of attention in a chronicle is not introspection but interested observation of the events and persons of the surrounding world. This 'public' interest is something the chronicle shares with history. A final point distinguishing chronicles from histories is that it is essential for the chronicler that he or she be contemporary or almost contemporary with the events he or she describes. Instead, for true history writing, it is essential that there be a certain time lag between the history-writer and the events he or she describes, so as to ensure independence and objectivity of judgment. If not "the mother of truth", time is at least "the midwife of historical truth". This point was well taken by the European editor of the Qing history published in Europe in 1780 while emperor Kang Xi was still alive: "[It is] impossible to have the authentic history of the Qing, because such a history can appear only when another dynasty has succeeded the present one." (6)

1.4 From this elementary outline of the literary forms of history-writing and chronicle-writing it is already rather clear where Martino Martini and his De bello tartarico stand. (7) Contemporary with most of the events he describes, often passing a very personal judgment on persons and events, he is one of the many primary sources (8) for the history of this period, when China saw the dramatic, even tragic, dynastic change from Ming to Qing. This is a crucial period whose claims to be treated as the beginning of the history of Modem China are at least as good as those of the Opium Wars period.(9) In the rest of my paper I will illustrate how Martini's "Chronicle" of the Ming-Qing succession wars differs from a standard "history" of the period. I shall concentrate especially on one aspect: the judgments Martino Martini passes on several personalities and events, judgments which I have found to be at odds with the findings of contemporary historiography.(10)

* Martino Martini, S.J. was born in Trent in 1614; he went to Rome in 1632 to continue his studies and in 1636 he joined the Society of Jesus. In 1640 he left Rome for China as a missionary and reached Macao in 1643. In Europe, in the sixth decade of the seventeenth century, he published his main historical and geographical works on the Chinese Empire. He returned to China and died in Hangzhou in 1661. Martini's three main works are the following: 1) De bello tarlarico, 2) Novus alias sinensis, 3) Sinicae historiae decas prima. In recent years scholarly interest in the person and work of Martino Martini S.J. has been stimulated by international congresses jointly organized by the University of Trent (the city of the Council!) and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. The proceedings of these congresses have been published in book form and constitute a precious reference material for the study of the Martino Martini: 1) Giorgio Melis (ed.), Martino Martini: geografo, cartografo, storico, teologo, Trento 1614－Hangzhou 1661, Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Italian-English edition (Trento: Provincia Autonoma, Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali 1983) 248-262; 2) Franco Demarchi and Riccardo Scartezzini (eds.), Martino Martini: A Humanist and Scientist in Seventeenth Century China, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Martino Martini and Cultural Exchanges between China and the West, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing 5-6-7 April 1994 (Trento: Universita Degli Studi 1996). This book has been published also in Italian and in Chinese. The writer of this article happens to hail also from Trent, Martino Martini's fatherland. This research is meant as a humble contribution to the knowledge of this great Catholic missionary of the Society of Jesus in the turbulent China of the mid-seventeenth century.

1. C. W. Jones, "Chronicle", Encyclopedia Britannica (1972 edition). Volume 5, 713. This current meaning of 'chronicle' is somehow the reverse of the meaning current in classical antiquity. As C.W. Jones points out in the same article, "some grammarians followed Verrius Flaccus [...] in distinguishing chronicles (annales) and history (historiae) as accounts respectively of past or of current events: Tacitus, for instance, in his Annals wrote of events that occurred before his birth or in his early childhood, and in his Histories described his own times. This specific terminology, however, was not followed by the medieval historiographers of western Europe, whose work the word 'chronicle' particularly denotes. [...] Their scribes described such works indiscriminately as chronica or historiae. In the main, however, chronicles continued to provide succinct dry records of indisputable events and phenomena such as legations, councils, coronations, deaths, earthquakes, eclipses and wars, securely set in a framework of time." (Ibidem, 713-714). I think this quotation goes a long way to explain in what spirit Martino Martini wrote the De bello tartarico and why the early translations were entitled, for example, Histoire de la guerre des Tartares contre la Chine.

2. Ma Yong, "Martino Martini's activity in China and his works on Chinese history and geography", in Giorgio Melis, Martino Martini, 248-262.

3. Ibidem, 255.

4. Ibidem, 257.

5. This Chinese historical work, which ends with the Yuan dynasty, has been available to me only in the French translation of De Mailla (cf. note 6). This translation seems to have supplemented the original work with other material concerning the Ming and Qing dynasties (perhaps the Tungjian Man, published with the approval of emperor Qian Long in 1759). Ma Yong surmises that the original Tongjian Gangmu by Zhu Xi was probably one of the sources of Martini's Sinicae historiae decas prima. Chapters 1-22 of the Tongjian Gangmu deal with the Song dynasty; chapters 23-27 with the Yuan dynasty.

6. My translation from the French of Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (trans.), Histoire Generate de la Chine, Tome Onzieme: Vingt-Deuxieme Dynastie. Les Tsing. (Paris: Ph.D. Pierres & Clousier 1780) 1, note 1. Here the European editor (Le Roux des Hautesrayes) is merely echoing a standard principle of Chinese historiography, namely, that the history of a dynasty can be written only by historians of the next dynasty. The reason for such a principle of Chinese historiography is well illustrated in the period under consideration by the tampering with historical records at the hands of the infamous imperial eunuch Wei Zhung Xian, cf. Fredrick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett (eds.). The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University 1988) 607-608.

7. Ma Yong, p.255, calls Martini's De hello tartarico "a documentary book of things he has seen and heard.".

8. Martino Martini's De hello tartarico is listed among this period's Primary Sources (as distinct from Secondary Sources) in at least one of the recent historical works on the end of Ming and the beginning of Qing which I have consulted in the library of the University of Hong Kong. Unfortunately I have been unable to retrace this reference.

9. Cf. Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, Second Edition (New York, London, Toronto: Oxford University 1975) 4.

10. Since unfortunately I have been unable to gain access to the Latin original of Martini's De bello tartarico, in the following sections, when quoting from Martini's work, I shall have to translate from the (early, but already second) French translation of the De hello tartarico published as an Appendix to the Histoire Universelle de la Chine by Alvarez Semedo, Lyon: Hierosme Prost, 1667, with this title: Histoire de la guerre des Tortures, centre la Chine. Contenant les revolutions estranges, qui soni arrivees dans ce grand Royaume, depuis quaranie ans. Traduite du Latin du P. Martin Martini. For some passages I have used the partial English translation of Martini's work given in the History of the Two Tartar Conquerors of China, Including the Two Journeys into Tartary of Father Ferdinand Verbiest, in the Suite of the Emperor Kang-Hi, from the French of Pere Pierre Joseph D' Orleans of the Company of Jesus, to which is added Father Pereira 's Journey into Tartary in the Suite of the Same Emperor, from the Dutch of Nicolaas Witsen. Translated and Edited by the Earl of Ellesmere. With an Introduction by R.H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum, Honorary Secretary of the Hakluyt Society, London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society (1854). The original work of Pierre Joseph D'Orleans is entitled Histoire des Deux Conquerans Tartares qui ont subjuge la Chine (Paris: Claude Barbin 1688). Therefore, this English translation, I sometimes use, is a second-hand translation like mine. In this second-hand translation of mine, for the proper names I have kept the phonetic system of the French translation, providing as far as possible the Chinese equivalent (in pin yin between square brackets). This is necessary because some of the transliterations used in the French translation are very different from current ones. When no equivalent is provided, I will add a question mark between square brackets, thus [?], meaning that I have been unable to find the corresponding Chinese characters. In the following notes I shall refer to the French translation as the Histoire. When quoting from contemporary historical works, I shall keep the phonetic system of each work without adding the pin yin equivalent.