Constantinople 717-18

by on June 15, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The city of Constantinople is best known for the ‘bookends’ of its founding as a capital for the newly-Christian Roman Empire, and its fall to the Muslim Ottomans over a millennium later. Following that would be its fall to the Fourth Crusade. With those two exceptions, the city never fell to enemy forces, mostly thanks to a very defensible position, and extensive fortifications.

This does not mean that this important city was never brought under siege apart from 1204 and 1453, and Sheppard discusses what might be the most serious of those other attempts to take the city. As is usual, there is a background to the campaign, though this one goes back to 626 and the first ever siege of Constantinople. This, and some other sieges are largely passed over, but the chapter as a whole is quite long, going fairly in-depth for a book of this size into the military history of the next ~100 years.

To a certain extent I was disturbed by how much space this was allowed to take, but it really is a very good ~20-page history of the fighting between Byzantium and the early Caliphate. It does dissolve into a flow of names on a couple occasions, but mostly it’s very effective at showing the amount and types of activity on the frontier during this time. There are constant raids into Anatolia, and fighting over Armenia, and its obvious that the Byzantine military is struggling to get any real grasp of the situation ever since the Battle of Yarmuk. This is something that gets assumed, or passed over in a lot of works touching on the period, so its very nice to have a lot of the action layed out and shown.

Sheppard also spares a few words for various Muslim commanders of this period. Their achievements rank in the first order of military command, but not only do they not get celebrated (or even reviled) in the West, but their names are nearly unknown. He posits ideological reasons for this, but I wonder if at least some of this comes from Islamic myth-making, which has done a good job of painting the entire early expansion of the Islamic world as being bigger than any one person, and more of an impersonal force (divinely-inspired or not); this would also tend to minimize the contributions of army commanders. It would be informative what Islamic scholarship makes of them, and how they were viewed historically. At any rate, learning more of Maslama b. ‘Abd al-Malik (the commander of the army at this siege) would be interesting, as he shows as a capable and accomplished commander.

Except, on this occasion. I’m seeing a TV-miniseries drama, where Emperor Leo III is sponsored onto the throne of Byzantium by the Muslims, and as he keeps promising al-Malik that he’ll be a good puppet king, and hand over the city just as soon as he convince the rest of the nobles that it’s the best idea. And then he turns around and tells the rest of the Byzantine government of course he’s not going to turn the city over to the infidel, he just needs their support to hold out a bit longer. And as the tension mounts, the audience is never quite sure who, if anyone, he’s telling the truth to.

But al-Malik believed him. Believed him enough to destroy his food stores when Leo III told him that it would convince the city that they were serious, and on the verge of storming the city. And he even agreed to let Leo send men out to to gather some of the food first, to distribute in the city.

I’d love to see that conversation.

As a whole, the book is very well produced, with color reproductions of art and coins throughout, along with some very good maps, and some good illustrations. Its a highly recommend addition to Osprey’s Campaign series that covers a siege that just does not get enough attention.

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Servant of the Empire

by on June 7, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I will admit to not being a big fan of the Riftwar Saga. It certainly made a splash at the time, but I was unhappy with stretches of it, and have never had a desire to revisit it.

However, I read Daughter of the Empire… either shortly before or after that, I don’t recall, on a recommendation, and it lived up to it. DotE is a great, highly recommended book. I regret that it’s taken literal decades to get back to it, but I finally have, and the second book lived up to my memories of the first.

Mara is a maverick, a leader in a very traditional society who is not afraid of change. She has bent rules before, and now she plunges into actual questioning of her society’s values. Slaves from Midkemia (the main setting for the main series) were popular exotics at first, but their alien values and general intransigence has made them much less prized, but Mara ends up buying a lot of them for her under-staffed estates. It’s obvious from the first that they’re exceptional, as they’re organized to make a hash of the ordinary way of doing things (such as selling off clothes as they’re being distributed, and then complaining the allotment was short).

This is basically because they’re ably led by an intelligent, resourceful man who’s determined to get out. A lot of what follows certainly owes Shogun a debt, as Kevin ends up as a nearly co-equal central character for… say three-quarters of the book. He and Mara have a passionate relationship, and she absorbs a lot of information from him, and becomes ever more reform-minded.

Meanwhile, the politics of the Great Game continue, advancing the plot in somewhat uneven lurches. Also, some of the more dramatic parts of the middle of the Riftwar saga happen during this book, with the characters here present for one of the big ones (which was dramatic enough that I have dim memories of it from the original books roughly thirty years later). The Minwanabi clan is still more powerful than the Acoma, and continue to be the main source of threat.

The really nice thing here is that despite being the middle book of a trilogy, it stands well on its own. What happened in the first book is important, but you don’t really need to have read it to understand this one, and… where the next book is going isn’t really shown here. This is a separate complete book, and therefore does not suffer from the common ‘middle’ problem. Also, the Kindle version is in very good shape, and I didn’t note any of the usual OCR-induced typoes, though the formatting needed a little help.

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Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior: England 865-1066

by on May 30, 2020 at 12:00 pm
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I’ve been a bit leery of Osprey’s “Combat” series, since it’s impossible not to think ‘pirate vs. ninja’, or ‘Enterprise vs. Death Star’ when looking at their titles. But their recent electronic book giveaway included one of the more interesting books in the series, giving me a chance to try out a PDF version risk-free.

There is a good two-plus page overview of the Viking era in England, and then a chapter that tries to directly compare the two sides, and how they approached recruiting, leadership, and logistics. There’s also plenty of the usual Osprey good photographs of equipment, mostly in color. A good two-page section talks about the changes in strategy over time, including the varying amounts of ability Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had to actually call up armies.

About half the book is descriptions of three major battles of the Viking era (Ashdown, Maldon, and Stamford Bridge), which is the major attraction for me. All three are interesting battles that we know enough to say something intelligent about, though I naturally only knew anything about Stamford Bridge going in. All get good maps showing the campaign that lead up to the battle, though Osprey forgoes the bird’s eye view maps of the battlefield that is the centerpiece of the Campaign series (and I think a good Campaign book could definitely be done on Stamford Bridge, though the other two probably are too uncertain in details for that). A nice bit are some illustrations meant to show what the action looked like from in the middle of it, including a pair showing opposite views of the same scene.

There’s a four-page ‘analysis’, which is part of the entire ‘versus’ nature of the title, which in this case comes down to there not being a lot difference in general equipment and technique. What differences there are get subsumed into the details we don’t have. We know both sides used axes, though the Vikings used them more, we know Anglo-Saxon armies made use of the shield wall as a common formation, we don’t know how much the Vikings did the same, or what cohesive formations they might have commonly used.

There’s about a pages worth of aftermath, which goes into the end of Viking raids in the decades after 1066, and then there is an extensive bibliography, which spends a bit more than a page talking about the seven primary sources for the era, before the usual listing of scholarly works.

Overall, it’s a good Osprey production, and good enough that I will get some of the other more interesting volumes, but it does seem more ‘introductory’ in nature (much like the Essential History series), and remains a lesser interest for me.

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Samurai 1550-1600

by on May 23, 2020 at 12:00 pm
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This is Osprey’s third book looking at the most emblematic part of Japan’s military history (starting with the 1979 Men-at-Arms Samurai Armies, to the 1989 Elite The Samurai, to this 1994 Warrior book), and it still manages to miss a few opportunities.

The Warrior series generally concentrates on the details of equipment. Other volumes have some full-color ‘exploded’ diagrams of things like swords, showing just how many parts go into such a simple-looking thing, and really showing how that goes together. A few of those would be very handy Japanese armor which works from very different principles. There is a good examination of the parts that go into a katana hilt, and an illustration of all the tools used by armorers along with how they hung armor pieces to assemble them (and a reproduction of of an original source woodcut).

As usual, this volume is graphically very solid. In fact, much more so than many Osprey books on older subjects, which are reliant on what little archaeology can provide. There’s many photos of surviving armor sets, various styles of helmets, etc. There’s also a few shots of Japanese movie sets to help show the kind of world the samurai lived in (I seem to remember those photos were in one of the earlier books, but I haven’t gone back to check). And of course, the Angus McBride art is first-rate.

The text itself is also very good and informative. It hits all the things you’d want and expect in a clear format, and includes essentials of how samurai were trained, what equipment was expected on the march, and so on. I’d say sieges (which were different than the European model) were somewhat underserved, but I expect that is better handled in the later fortress book, and the important parts would move away from the focus of the Warrior series anyway. The text is also helped by having a fairly tight fifty-year focus, which is pretty much at the climax of a lot of the developments discussed.

I have the PDF version of the book, which is obviously a scan of the physical book, and the scans are in very good shape. There’s some crookedness evident, but not distractingly so. Overall, a very good quick guide to the details of medieval Japanese arms and armor, which sadly misses getting down to some of the fiddly detail I’d like.

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Medieval Polish Armies 966-1500

by on May 16, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

First, I must express a certain amount of disappointment. Osprey’s Men-at-Arms series has a number of good books on medieval military history of various countries. These are generally in two volumes, one covering 1000-1300, and the second 1300-1500. That Poland only gets one book for the entire period is a real shame (though it’s not the first time it’s been done this way, either).

As usual with such a short book, the historical background leaves a lot unsaid, especially when the subject is as unfamiliar to me as the history of Poland is. But it’s a decent summary, and of course comes with a good chronology.

The main sections on organization, and arms and armor, are of course the bulk of the book, and fairly well detailed for available space, and probable lack of regular documentary evidence. I kind of wish just a bit more detail was offered on the earlier periods, as it is evident that German and western European military fashions overtook many of the more Polish/eastern fashions as time went on. More meditation on that would also be interesting, but also consume limited space on speculation.

The art is fairly good (Angus McBride is still missed, but Gary Embleton and his son have some good work here), though I’m really unsure about the city walls shown in Plate G. In fact, with a couple exceptions, the backgrounds really seem to suffer here. But the main figures are well done, with good commentary about what’s going on with their equipment (…in fact, this is one of the longer commentary sections Osprey has had, short of books like The Ancient Greeks in the Elite series which was pretty much all commentary). As ever, the black-and-white photographs of period art and artifacts are plentiful and helpful, and include the floor plans of six different fortresses.

In many ways, this all just marks it as typical of the Osprey breed, which it is. Poland is not something that sees a lot of military history coverage here, so I’m very happy to have the book. As ever, it’s well produced, and I hope we see more by Sarnecki.

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