Carel Hendrik Theodoor Bussemaker, a historian at the University of Groningen, was on an important mission in the spring of 1904. The recently founded Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse Geschiedenis, a commission for the advancement of national history, had sent him on an official expedition to archives in Lisbon, Seville, Madrid, El Escorial, Simancas, and Brussels. He had been given four months to unearth from these repositories all the important records pertaining to the history of the Netherlands. When Bussemaker returned home, he was a beaten man, for he had failed to fulfill his orders. Instead of finding piles and piles of important records, he had discovered what he considered worthless scraps.
Bussemaker’s commission was yet another episode in the colorful history of nineteenth-century archive fever. As the archives gradually opened their doors to historians during the first half of the century, national research academies, historical societies, and ministries of education began to organize expeditions to foreign archives. The goal of these ventures was either to search for historically valuable documents for publication or to locate and catalogue such sources for a later consultation. Bussemaker was instructed to produce an inventory that would list the relevant collections and documents in the archives in Lisboa, Seville, Madrid, El Escorial, Simancas, and Brussels. The production of these kinds of catalogues with a carefully defined scope was hugely popular: they were obviously much faster to complete than the document editions and thus delivered tangible results in a relatively short span of time. Moreover, they garnered much scholarly admiration for their commissioners and producers. The cataloguing of the enormous quantities of unorganized archival material progressed slowly in the national archives. Historians, who were recruited to locate documents about a specific topic and to publish their results in handy directories, created a shortcut to at least a fraction of this historically valuable material lying in archives all over Europe. Quite understandably, historians were grateful for the fast-growing stock of helpful research aids. Despite the high volume of these catalogues, historiographers have remained remarkably indifferent about them and their role in the formation of modern scholarly practices.
Bussemaker quickly realized that the archives in Spain and Portugal stored only a small number of records that might interest Dutch historians. His spirits dropped, for he would not be coming back home as a celebrated hero of moldy archives. A key element in the nineteenth-century archive narratives was a historian’s glorious homecoming with heaps of notes and copies of hitherto unknown sources. Nothing less seemed to satisfy historians’ scholarly pride than a tremendously large catch. Since Bussemaker fell short of this, he had some explaining to do to the Rijkscommissie and the Ministry of Interior Affairs, which had supplied the funds for the expedition. He offered his excuses in a preface, which he attached to a short catalogue that contained the results of his journey: Verslag van een Voorloopig Onderzoek te Lissabon, Sevilla, Madrid, Escorial, Simancas en Brussel (1905).
The prefatorial apology aptly summarizes the landscape of nineteenth-century archival research and the national rivalries embedded in historical expeditions. First, Bussemaker stressed that four months had not been enough for a thorough investigation of six archives. Second, the incomplete nature of existing archive catalogues and inventories had slowed down his work significantly. Third, the Dutch were hopelessly late with their commission. Bussemaker had no choice but to admit that he had encountered in the Spanish archvives “mown grass.” Belgians had organized official archival expeditions since the 1830s, and Louis-Prosper Gachard had ransacked the archives in Simancas, El Escorial, and Madrid already in the early 1840s. He had published several inventories and a sample of the copied records during the following decades. The Spaniards, too, had launched their own document series, Documents inéditos para la historia de España, around the same time. The Dutch, on the contrary, were remarkably slow to embrace the potential of official archival commissions and it was not until 1903 that the Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse Geschiedenis devised a comprehensive plan for a state-funded publication series for nationally valuable historical documents. Considering this belated start, Bussemaker did not have any another alternative but to report that the Belgian and Spanish publications contained a large share of the important documents which he had been instructed to locate. He had surely expected “a richer harvest” and could only hope that the catalogue he had devised would not be “entirely without use.”
The members of the Rijkscommissie seemed to grasp the situation. After they had politely acknowledged Bussemaker’s report in one of their meetings, the Spanish archives vanished from their discussions. When the Commission published its proposal for the envisioned document editions, Spanish archives were referred to only briefly in it. Archives in Vienna, Paris, Brussels, and London had proven to be more promising destinations for archival expeditions and the writing of Dutch history. “Almost nothing” valuable did not translate into “something”; it meant “nothing” for these historians.
There is something empathetically recognizable in Bussemaker’s mortification which the meagre results of his archival tour caused. Even today, historians share stories either of the immense quantities of pictures they have taken during their archival trips or of how they have patiently searched for weeks and months for that precious needle hidden in a haystack called archival collection without ever finding it. Yet, the silences may become valuable discoveries in themselves. The absence of Spanish archives from the papers of the Rijkscommissie can be, in fact, a significant result. It tells at least as much about the large nineteenth-century research ventures than do the hundreds of pages of recorded discussions about these enterprises amidst the archived papers of learned societies and academies.
Sources
The National Archives, Den Haag: Archief van de Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse Geschiedenis en haar voorgangers.
*
Bussemaker, Th. Verslag van een voorloopig onderzoek te Lissabon, Sevilla, Madrid, Escorial, Simancas en Brussels naar archivalia belangrijk voor de geschiedenis van Nederlanden. ’S Gravenhage: W. P. van Stockum & zoon, 1905.
*
Dorsman, Leen. “De nieuwe eruditie: Het ontstaan en historische bedrijf.” In De palimpsest: Geschiedschrijving in de Nederlanden 1500–2000, edited by Jo Tollebeek, Tom Verschaffel, & Leonard H.M. Wessels, 159–176. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2002.
Clio's footnotes 