3.1 Introduction: confronting the history of cultural heritage in international law with its Apocrypha In September 2016, the International Criminal Court (ICC) judgment on Al- Mahdi about the destruction of UNESCO world heritage sites in Timbuktu showed that issues of cultural heritage concern wide felds of international law today. While most legal histories on this complex topic repeat a certain canon of narratives and sources to tell the story of that subject, the current “historical turn” in international law creates new opportunities for writing a history of this feld. This text analyses the current historiography of cultural heritage protection. The emphasis is placed on the protection in times of war since the wartime as- pects took the center stage in earlier international legal scholarship. However, the focus on peacetime has increased in commentaries. In consequence, I will contrast the wartime narratives of this feld with the peacetime histories of cul- tural heritage protection in order to provide a broader spectrum of the often neglected or ignored topics of that area of international humanitarian law. My contribution has two purposes. First, I want to discuss the shortcomings of previous approaches to the history of this subject in the light of the historical turn in international law. Second, I will offer an outlook for a potential new narrative of the legal histories of cultural heritage administration and protection. To begin with, a short sketch of current perspectives of legal history and of his- toricizing law in a multipolar world shall be given. 3.2 Current perspectives to historicize the law in a multipolar world 3.2.1 Reorienting Europe and the West: some tasks for a legal history today The European understanding of law and the European legal history were for a long time the paradigms for defning law and therefore also what the subject of a legal history essentially had to be. In public law, civil law, or international law, the narrative of the history of law has been a purely European project. But, this 3 Engaging history in the legal protection of cultural heritage in war and peace Sebastian M. Spitra