The New Murrey and Blue blog

Love, ambition, fame, self-interest, fear, religious conviction, physical desire for something or someone, patriotism, duty, compassion, self-sacrifice, revenge or bitter hatred.

Historians make a case for the various motivations of historical figures in order to try and understand these people themselves and then persuade their readership through their analysis as to why a particular figure acted in certain ways as borne out in the evidence of their deeds and the eye witness accounts of their contemporaries. These motivations tend to fall within a core range of basic drivers; well-known to psychologists and literary writers which most of us tend to believe control why humans do what they do.

Depending on which drivers you apply to the historical facts, a very divergent picture of the figure emerges and a very different set of emotional responses are engendered in the reader so these motivations are hugely important and often controversial in their application.