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Character assassination and public opinion are closely connected in the modern era, with defamation generally presupposing a public capable of reacting in such a way as to promote the agenda of the attacker.¹ Of course, attackers sometimes fail to turn public opinion against their target, bringing opprobrium on themselves instead, but modern publics, informed by media, polls, and election results, usually are able to judge whether an attack achieves its mark or backfires. In contrast, the success of a premodern act of character assassination is hard to analyze. We cannot easily distinguish between a report of an attack in contemporary documents, like chronicles, and a publics reaction to an attack. A chronicler's description of an "unpopular" individual may prove only that someone was slandering him or her; that is, such a description may represent an act of character assassination rather than a publics response to an act of character assassination.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137344168_7

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