Trevor Palmer

Nottingham Trent University, Science and Technology, Emeritus

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After graduating from Cambridge University in 1966, Trevor Palmer was awarded a PhD by London University in 1973 for research carried out at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children into inborn errors of metabolism. He became a Fellow of the Institute of Biology in 1990, a Fellow of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences in 1996 and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2007. He was appointed Lecturer in Biochemistry at Trent Polytechnic Nottingham (subsequently Nottingham Trent University) in 1974 and worked there for 32 years, as Senior Lecturer, Principal Lecturer, Professor, Head of Department of Life Sciences, Dean of Science, Senior Dean and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Academic Development) before retiring in 2006 with the title of Emeritus Professor. Initially, he carried out laboratory-based research in the field of Clinical Biochemistry, contributing to 34 published papers and supervising 5 PhD students to successful conclusion, but this was phased out as his role shifted increasingly towards University Management. However, his doctoral research had led to an interest in evolution, followed in turn by an interest in catastrophism and then chronology, and he has continued to carry out library-based studies of topics in these areas, resulting in the publication of numerous papers and several books, up to the present day.
Address: St. Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom

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Writers and Re-Writers of Roman and Medieval History: From the Foundation of Rome to 14th Century Europe. with an Extension to the Turkish Conquest of Constantinople

Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) , 2023

How certain can we be about what happened in the past? In his thought-provoking book, On 'What is... more How certain can we be about what happened in the past? In his thought-provoking book, On 'What is History?', published in 1995, historian Keith Jenkins argued that, apart from some relatively trivial details such as dates, most views about what happened in the past, such as the causes of particular events, are determined by current political and philosophical theories [1]. Some would go further and suggest that even the dates need to be viewed with suspicion. That applies not only to far-distant times, where a degree of uncertainty is generally acknowledged, but also to more recent ones, where it is not. Towards the end of the 20 th century, a significant number of intellectuals in Russia and Eastern Europe, including the Grand Master of chess, Garry Kasparov, and a nuclear scientist, Eugen Gabowitsch, embraced the theories of the Russian statistician, Anatoly Fomenko (first presented in English in 1994 in the two-volume book, Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Materials and its Application to Historical Dating [2]), and maintained that the Roman and medieval periods had been artificially extended by many centuries as a result of misunderstandings and deliberate deceit. In subsequent books, Fomenko and his colleagues, particularly Gleb Nosovsky, continued to develop the thesis that all the surviving sources of information about events during the classical and early medieval periods were fabricated during the 16 th and 17 th centuries AD, initially by Joseph Justus Scaliger and subsequently by Denis Petau (also known as Dionysius Petavius) and others. Hence, most of the supposed histories of those earlier periods were actually based on peoples and events from the first half of the second millennium AD, with several sequences of false early histories often being created from a single genuine sequence from a later time. So, for example, in the view of Fomenko and his colleagues, Byzantine history from AD 830-1143 was a copy of that from AD 1143-1453, and was also the same as English history from AD 1040-1327. Byzantine history from AD 378-830 was similarly a duplicate of English history from AD 640-1040, both being reflections of the same Late Medieval origin [3]. Furthermore, some sequences of repeated events could stretch over a much longer period of time that those mentioned above. For example, in Fomenko's proposed scheme, the war between the Greeks and the Trojans which supposedly took place in the 13 th century BC, the war to depose the last king of the Romans, Tarquin the Proud, in the 5 th century BC, the Roman civil war in the 1 st century BC, the Roman civil war in the 3 rd century AD, the war to defeat the Gothic kingdom in Italy in the 6 th century AD, the German invasion of Italy in the 10 th century AD, and the war for the throne of Sicily in the 13 th century AD, were all the same event, with the key participants, Achilles, Publius Valerius, Lucius Sulla, Emperor Aurelian, Narses, Emperor Otto I and Charles of Anjou all being the same person [4]. During the 1990s, in Germany, author and publisher Heribert Illig produced a model for shortening the first millennium AD which became known as the "Phantom Time Hypothesis". According to Illig, the history we now associate with the period between August 614 and September 911, for which (in the view of Illig) very little archaeological evidence has been found, is completely fictional [5]. A book in English in support of this concept, written by Emmet Scott, was published in 2014. Illig had suggested that Emperor Otto III, in collusion with Pope Silvester II, may have moved the calendar forward by three centuries to associate his reign with the start of the second millennium AD. Scott commented that this change could have passed unnoticed "because of the general ignorance of history among the population, and by the confusion that reigned throughout Europe regarding calendars and dates" [6]. For many years, in Germany, Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist at the University of Bremen, had provided staunch support for Illig's hypothesis but he later produced a new theory which argued for a much greater shortening of the first millennium. Heinsohn gave a preview of it at the 2012 Conference of Quantavolution in Naxos and he then presented his overall scheme in outline in Alfred de Grazia's Magazine of Quantavolution in 2013, the first of an ongoing series of short articles about aspects of his theory in the same magazine. In Heinsohn's view, the artificial stretching of the first millennium was not a consequence of the deliberate invention of false histories but of the chaos caused by a major catastrophic event. Evidence of this was then wrongly interpreted to indicate a number of local events taking place at different times. According to Heinsohn, relatively minor events which are believed to have occurred in different parts of Europe during the 230s, 530s and 930s were manifestations of a single huge event which brought an end to civilised life throughout Europe. In this scenario, the activities of the emperors regarded as ruling from Rome between AD 1-230 and ones ruling from further east between AD 290-520, as well as the activities of rulers in northern and northeastern Europe between AD 701 and AD 930 (including the Carolingian Franks), were all taking place at the same time. This triplication of the history of a single 230-year period would in itself result in a false extension of the timescale amounting to 460 years and, considering the situation as a whole, around 700 years of history, from the 3 rd to the 10 th centuries, would already have been completed before the date when it was supposed to have started. Working back from present dates, Emperor Augustus would have been on the throne in AD 700 so, from that point of history to the end of the Early Medieval Period in Western Europe, in AD 1000, there would have been a period of just 300 years, not 1,000 years as generally supposed [7]. Meanwhile, in Britain, Steve Mitchell, an amateur archaeologist, had rejected Illig's hypothesis, but considered it possible that the history of the first millennium had been artificially extended for a shorter period at an earlier time. In 2008, he argued that the English monk Bede, who was the first to use the AD system of Dionysius Exiguus for historical purposes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed, according to the author, in AD 731) may have made errors in the AD dates he allocated to certain events. Mitchell raised two particular concerns. One was that it appeared from Bede's history that almost nothing of note had happened in England between the reigns of the Roman emperors, Marcian and Maurice, whose accession dates, according to Bede, were AD 449 and AD 582, a span of 133 years. The other was that Early Medieval documents were often dated simply to the year in the current 15-year indiction cycle (introduced for taxation purposes during the reign of Constantine the Great). Putting these two factors together, it was quite possible that Bede had over-estimated the timescale of this period by one or more indiction cycles. Mitchell subsequently went beyond this and, on the basis of perceived historical and archaeological gaps, began to develop arguments that the 250-year-long Early Anglo-Saxon Period (which encompassed the reigns of Marcian and Maurice) may have been artificially extended by up to 200 years [8]. In 2018, Patrick Giles introduced to English readers the work of Tóth Gyula, a Hungarian researcher who maintained that there were serious problems with the conventional view of the chronology of the fifth-century AD. From a comparison of the conventional chronology of that period with what was said in the Chronicon Pictum (a lavishly-illustrated account of Hungarian history written during the Late Medieval Period), Gyula came to the conclusion that, confused by the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar after the Chronicon Pictum was written, modern scholars created a chronology for the 5 th -century in which a period of around 25 years was duplicated, with analogous events being separated by around 44 years. According to Gyula's theory, the period conventionally dated to AD 407-433, which included the sack of Rome by the Goths, was the same as that conventionally dated to AD 451-476, which included the sack of Rome by the Vandals. No complete contemporary history of the 5 th century had survived, so Gyula envisaged a process in which later scholars struggled to piece together a the west. In Egypt, events continued to be dated from the first regnal year of Diocletian, even after the end of his reign. Thus, despite the fact that Diocletian had persecuted Christians, the Christians in Alexandria used this system to date the years in their Easter Tables, which gave future calendar-dates for Easter Sunday determined on the basis of a 19-year lunar cycle. The Diocletian Era system, subsequently renamed the "Era of Martyrs" by Christians (the first attested use of this being in year 359 of the Era), is still used by the Coptic Church in Egypt today. The chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, which consisted of 528 yearly entries, began with the first year of Diocletian. Although the Diocletian Era dating system was not a major feature of this chronicle, Theophanes noted that Anastasius I came to the throne in the 207 th year of Diocletian and was succeeded by Justin I in the 234 th year of Diocletian. John of Nikiu, writing in Egypt, noted the death of Emperor Heraclius in the 357 th year of Diocletian. According to the Chronicon Paschale, the first regnal year of Diocletian, from which the years in the Easter Tables were reckoned, corresponded to the consulship of Diocletian (his 2 nd ) and Aristobalus [17]. Dating by reference to the consuls appointed for a particular year was the traditional system of the Romans. The historical sources say that, after the expulsion of the last king, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin...

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