Robert Baldauf (* April 22, 1881 in Waldenburg BL; † May 26, 1918) studied Classical philology at the University of Basel (Switzerland) for a short time at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is nothing known about a final degree. He worked as a journalist of the Frankfurter Zeitung in Frankfurt from 1904 until his early death in 1918. In 1902 and 1903 he published two out of an intended four volumes under the general title of History and Criticism; the first and fourth volumes in the series. These two volumes are of interest to critics of chronology and written history. Baldauf managed to come to his conclusions by philological analysis. Work Baldauf had studied the archives of the famous Swiss monastery of St. Gallen, formerly one of the key centres of Catholicism, and discovered traces of the barbaric library raid made by Poggio Bracciolini and a friend of his, both of them highly educated servants of the Roman curia. They purloined numerous manuscripts and books that were considered ancient from the library of this monastery (however, the manuscripts may date to a more recent epoch, which wouldn't preclude them from serving as prototypes for the manufacture of numerous "ancient" works by Poggio and his assistants). Baldauf claimed to have studied numerous presumed ancient manuscripts and claimed they were, for the most part, recent forgeries. Baldauf discovered parallels between the historical books of the Old Testament and the works of the mediaeval Romance genre as well as Homer's Iliad that were strong enough to lead him to the assumption that the text of both the Iliad and the Bible date from the late Middle Ages. Some of the mediaeval chronicles ascribed to different authors resembled each other to such an extent that Baldauf was forced to identify them as works of the same author, despite the fact that the two documents were presumed separated chronologically by an interval of two centuries at least. At any rate, some of the expressions characteristic for Romanic languages that one finds in both documents fail to correspond with either of the alleged datings (one of them being the ninth and the other the eleventh century). Apart from that, some of the manuscripts contain distinctly more recent passages, such as frivolous stories of endeavours in public steam baths (which the Europeans only became acquainted with during the late Reconquista epoch) and even