J.’s Reviews > Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe – How Charlemagne's Dynasty Fell and Why It Matters for Understanding Political Collapse > Status Update

"They wrote backward from the present--from what they saw as the pinnacle--to make the past a predestined prelude to the present. The story they told themselves, in other words, was one that was never intended to be factual; it was intended to be true, to reveal a hidden divine plan they saw for themselves, to demonstrate that they were inevitable."