Yet you believe genitivi who is not a respected source in his community and we only respect him because of Bias of the PC. and we have heard many things say the time the inquisition was alive was a time of chaos and strife, I am not stating that history blames the inquisition for that but why has history never spoken of a unifying force outside of genitivi's letter. the only thing we hear is that the Chantry and the Orlesian empire brought peace to the land. there are two theories. one say the inquisition was causing chaos during a time of chaos and the other stating the inquisition was trying to protect people during the time of chaos. choose which you want but since the chaotic time stayed chaotic i am to believe the Inquisition wasn't all that noble.
And of course Cory'sa account might be biased or opinionated but it is more credible than hearsay without evidence.
Meh. This is a mess, but I'll try to sort through it to the best of my ability.
To take your last comment first: you rate autopsy higher than "hearsay". That is understandable. It is also counter to the entire modern field of history. What you describe as "hearsay" is effectively indistinguishable from "use of primary sources in crafting an argument or narrative". Neither requires personal experience.
I recently read Dennis Showalter's book
The Wars of Frederick the Great, to assist in TAing a class on eighteenth-century Europe. In it, Showalter makes repeated reference to the King of Prussia's public writings and personal correspondence. Friedrich was present and deeply involved in the Silesian Wars and the Seven Years' War; his autopsy is almost impossible to avoid for any modern reader. But, as Showalter mentions, there are very severe problems with the King's letters: they were written by a man with limited perspective under severe stress and wishing to portray a very specific image to his correspondents. His explanation of the outcome of the Battle of Kolin, for example (one of his greatest disasters), was blatantly self-serving in blaming his subordinates for a series of errors for which he himself was primarily responsible. Friedrich was, often, a sober-minded critic of his own generalship and policy; he was an Enlightenment intellectual who palled around with Voltaire. But he was also not an incredibly reliable source on his own doings. Modern historians, like Showalter, Christopher Duffy, Reed Browning, and Franz Szabo, paint a much more balanced picture of Friedrich's wars with the multiplicity of sources at their disposal and the advanced analysis they can bring to bear as the fruit of a century and a half of philosophical development in history.
Those modern historians were not present, obviously, in central Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century. They were not personally there. They didn't smell the acrid smoke after gunpowder discharges, or see the glint of morning sun on the bayonets of the charging grenadiers at Hohenfriedberg, or slog through Moravian mud with nothing but potatoes for sustenance. Yet today, they are considered more reliable sources than the men who
were there and
did experience all of that. Just like how, in modern law, it is trivially easy to discredit an eyewitness, it is also trivially easy to discredit a historical source with personal experience of the events that she wrote about.
This does not mean that modern historians are better than original sources by virtue of their modernity. I can name, offhand, a very large number of academic historians with best-selling works and posts at prestigious universities who employ arguments of the greatest mendacity and the most nugatory intellectual rigor. Source analysis must be applied to
every historical document - secondary sources as much as primary ones.
That means, however, that there must be demonstrable reasons to disbelieve the work of those later historians. They are not bad because they are modern; they are bad because their logic is bad, their source use is bad, their perspective is skewed, and suchlike things. Which brings us to the beginning of your post: the attack on Genitivi and on the World of Thedas historian.
You describe Genitivi's thumbnail sketch as portraying a "noble" Inquisition that was "trying to protect people". I don't think that anything of value can be extracted from your comments. Even the unsourced Codex letter, upon which you put so much weight, tacitly confirms that the Inquisition was "trying to protect people", so long as those people weren't mages, heretics, cultists, and the like. And "noble" is a word that has been twisted so much that it has almost no meaning in the first place. What Genitivi describes is an organization that did some bad things (his acknowledgment that one could reasonably describe what happened as a "reign of terror") and some good things (his claim of relatively even-handed justice regardless of magic ability). That is not a whitewashing. In fact, it doesn't even contradict the unsourced letter: it merely adds context. There's no obvious reason to view this as intrinsically unreliable.
Neither is there a particular reason to view Genitivi himself as a bad historian, from what relatively little we know about him. He is closely associated with the Chantry, but not so closely that he is immune to internal accusations of bad scholarship or, at the most extreme, heresy (viz. what happens if the Warden sides with Kolgrim but lets Genitivi live). Andrastianism has not left him blind to the defects in Andrastian societies, inclined to paper over any grave flaws; he admits, for example, how horrible alienage life often is (Codex: Kirkwall - The Elven Alienage). He openly states that Chantry dogma is precious little upon which to base a historical narrative (Codex: The First Blight, Chapter 2). One can very easily see that he is an Andrastian in his writings - he refers to the Chantry as being fundamentally correct - but it is by no means apparent that he mutates history to cover up for its flaws.
When assessing the reliability of a historian or historical source, one of the most important tools to use is corroboration: making sure that all of the facts match up, both internally within a narrative and externally, between narratives. You assert that Genitivi's description of the Inquisition is bad because it is inconsistent: if the era of the Inquisition was chaotic, you say, certainly it could not have been a force for order.
That's not a logically sound objection. We know next to nothing about the time period, as you yourself have admitted; what indication do we have that the Inquisition
caused the chaos to which you refer? Or, alternatively, look at the difference between intention, action, and outcome: perhaps the Inquisition was formed to restore order, and its actions were taken with that intention in mind, yet those actions resulted in more chaos because of the law of unintended consequences. No one, for example, disputes that the Grey Wardens exist to end the darkspawn threat, yet Grey Warden actions (in
The Calling, and potentially in
Awakening,
Legacy, and
Inquisition) have sometimes helped to create more of a threat from the darkspawn than had previously existed. But to go even simpler, we can turn your logic on its own head. We know that the time period of the ancient Inquisition was chaotic; isn't it reasonable that some people would try to end that chaos by forming together into an Inquisition?
Anyway, you're certainly entitled to your opinion about all this, but I think that I've shown that it's not a particularly well-supported opinion. And on one thing we certainly agree: more sources, and better sources, on the ancient Inquisition would matter far more than all this interpretive nonsense.
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