The Wars of the Roses

by on October 29, 2014 at 7:58 pm
Posted In: Books

The Wars of the Roses is the second book by Alison Weir I’ve read, and it definitely tells me there’s no need to stop here. The writing is good, and gives a great overview of what is a legendarily confusing period of English history. This actually a successor/prequel book to her early book, The Princes in the Tower, which is about the final act of the Wars of the Roses; the contest between Richard III and Henry VII (née Tudor), and the fate of the children of Edward IV.

Therefore, this book is actually about the rest. Starting with the deposition of Richard II, Weir spends quite some time of the shaky political footing of the Lancastrian Henry IV, and the successful Henry V, before moving on to the reign of Henry VI, and the large number of political problems that led to the Lancastrian-Yorkish struggle that forms the bulk of the Wars of the Roses, and ends with Tewksbury and the death Henry VI. The book is about evenly split by length between the lead up, and then the multiple armed crises.

There are a lot of names that fly by, and several people change names (titles) during the course of events, and despite efforts, Weir does not entirely clear up the confusion that results. I think this is a subject that really needs a dramatis personae to refer to. Geneological charts are provided, but were stuck in the very back of the Kindle edition I read, with a link to a web page with a larger reproduction, so I didn’t know of it until I was finished.

Another problem is that while she establishes the state of 15th-century England well at the beginning, and talks about how little disruption of life actually resulted from the wars at the end, this isn’t really mentioned during the bulk of the book, forcing one to perhaps have to correct some opinions after the fact.

Still, in all I did enjoy it and found it informative and recommend it. The main niggling worry I have is that since The Princes in the Tower was her first book, it may not be as good a companion to this as might be wished.

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Queen of the Conqueror

by on September 7, 2014 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Tracy Borman’s book about Queen Matilda (William the Conqueror’s wife, if you’re not keeping score at home) does a very good job with tracing the live of a medieval woman (much better than Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitane, but it is also only 3/4s the length of that book), but manages to be irritating on a regular basis.

The introduction of the book gives a commonly told story of Matilda, upon hearing that she was to be betrothed to Duke William “the Bastard” of Normandy, rejecting the idea that she (related to the King of France) would never stoop so low as to marry a bastard. William, hearing this, rides to her family’s palace in Flanders and finding Matilda beats her mercilessly. Matilda then decides that she would marry no one else as he was a man of high courage and daring. When Borman gets to this part of Matilda’s life in the narrative, she repeats the story, and then starts casting doubts on the story, pointing out that it is first mentioned about two hundred years after the fact, and that one of the primary sources for it has a strong anti-Norman bias. The section ends with a conclusion that we just don’t have any clear picture of what, if anything, happened between the two before they were married.

This pattern is followed in many parts of the book. Tales are given with a straight face, and only afterward are problems or alternate versions talked about. Worse, are the cases where something is mentioned as being from ‘a nineteenth century chronicler’ with no discussion as to where he got it from, or why we should think he knew anything about it. After the number of other unsubstantiated stories that are discussed, it raises alarms.

But despite these problems, it is a good book about Matilda. It is not as comprehensive, or detailed as, again, Allison Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitane, but that book failed at being the biography it was supposed to be, while this one is a good biography that gives a much clearer picture of its subject.

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Kawanakajima 1553–64

by on September 6, 2014 at 11:25 am
Posted In: Books

The Five Battles of Kawanakajima are not that well known in the West, but they are one of the most celebrated incidents of the Warring States period in Japan (right behind those parts that are better known in the West, such as Nobunaga’s career and the Battle of Nagashino that forms the climax of Ran).

Turnbull starts with the most basic rundown of the situation, including the fact that while all the battles occurred near the plain of Kawanakajima, most of them could properly be termed something else entirely, and that you could count eight battles of Kawanakajima, by including three more that fit the pattern of the other five. But, most Japanese histories consider the same five battles between Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin as ‘the battles of Kawanakajima’, and this book focuses on them, and especially the Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima as the main confrontation.

As usual with Osprey’s Campaign series, the background and events are well presented, with plenty of clear maps that show what was happening. Turnbull’s analysis is good, and only occasionally breaks down under the weight of the number of different things to keep track of. A very good book for anyone who has an interest in Japanese military history.

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The Trojan War

by on August 15, 2014 at 1:16 pm
Posted In: Books

I was expecting Strauss’ The Trojan War: A New History to be a scholarly study of every detail we have about the Trojan world; basically an updated version of In Search of the Trojan War. Instead, it is a more scholarly Age of Bronze. The book is structured around the story of the Trojan War, which is then clothed in modern archaeology, and decorated with Homer.

And it works. Taking the view that the Trojan War is based on something that happened, the book gives the ‘history’ of the war, cross-referencing with what we know of other nearby Bronze Age cultures. There’s plenty of passages where something from the Iliad is compared to existing Bronze Age writings and shown how it is typical of the time. In fact, the book hides a fairly good overview of Bronze Age politics and warfare.

In all, it is a short but quite worthwhile book.

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War for the Holy Land

by on August 5, 2014 at 1:20 pm
Posted In: Books

Authoritative – adj. “having or showing impressive knowledge about a subject”

Asbridge’s ‘authoritative history’ of the Crusades certainly does this. It is a very extensive look at the period in a single volume. There are problems; I think there is still not enough examination of what was going on in the Muslim world around the Crusader States, and the role of Byzantium in the area is barely touched on most of the time. But, neither are these absent.

In fact, the role of Byzantine cooperation with the First Crusade is examined in some detail; it is only later that they drop too far off the stage. Also, the role of jihad (or even the existence of it) is meditated upon at length in the middle of the book, especially in relation to rooting out how much of Saladin’s actions matched his propaganda as a mujahid. Indeed, one of the primary goals of the book is to try and ‘correct’ certain long-held traditions, notably around just how much animosity existed around Outremer with relation to Byzantium and the surrounding Muslims.

I have to note that despite this detailed study, I was disappointed with losing a lot of details that I’m used to. This is because I’m used to Runciman’s three-volume A History of the Crusades. One volume can’t really compete with three (though they are individually smaller than this one), but the ‘authoritative’ tag made me instantly want to compare them.

As a one-volume history, it is very good, but it does not replace Runciman’s history, and while the parts that do re-evaluate the Crusades are a nice companion to it, it is too extensive just for that.

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