Pre-modern Christians (don't know a lot about the years between 1500 and 1900 or so) generally didn't ask the question that way. Allegorical interpretations of the bible are extremely old: for example, Paul's letter to the Galatians (around 50 CE) includes an allegorical interpretation of a story in the book of Genesis.

However, they didn't think that was incompatible with it also being factual, and they generally didn't spend a lot of time arguing about it. One good example is the medieval fourfold method of interpretation, in which every verse has four meanings: literal, allegorical, moral (sometimes called tropological), and anagogical (teaches about the end times). Most of the time, religious leaders thought that the literal sense was the least important because, unlike the others, it had no spiritual lessons to teach. So if you asked, say, Gregory the Great whether Noah's Ark really happened, he would probably say yes, but whether or not it happened wasn't something he thought about very much, and he would have looked down on a religious leader who thought that the most important element of scripture was its factual accuracy.