Inside GMT Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerEven if the title didn’t clue you in, Bradford wastes no time and pulls no punches letting you know what he thinks of the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade. He begins with the arrival of the Venetian fleet[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
At first glance, this is just a new history of the start of Islam, and how the Arabs came to dominate such a large area, one of those parts of history that often defies analysis. And Holland loops this book[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The story of Persia vs the Greeks is one that has told many times over the centuries. Part of this is because we have some very good Greek sources about the conflict, so that we know more about these wars[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
After the Wars of the Roses, some much-needed stability started returning to the English court. Alison Weir starts her book with Henry VII’s negotiations with Ferdinand of Castile to marry his son Arthur to Ferdinand’s daughter Katherine. Nearly half of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
So, we’ve got a few different things going on here. Jack Weatherford is an anthropologist who has spent a lot of time in modern Mongolia, and has a much better grasp of Mongolian culture than anyone else who will write[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Mongols, and their conquest of an exceedingly large chunk of Eurasia is a subject well known in history. Their conquest of China regularly gets good coverage in books talking about this in general, but there’s few, if any, books[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Okay, overall, it is by no means a bad overview of the history of the Hospitallers. And unlike Dan Jones’ The Templars, it has the bonus that you won’t find all of this in any one other place about a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
All right, I was disappointed by this. It is a good book, and well written. If you don’t really know much about the Crusades, and specifically the part the Knights of the Temple played in it, it is an informative[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It is hard, at first glance, to see just what a book dedicated to naval (actually, the ‘maritime’ of the title is a better fit than ‘naval’…) warfare in the Middle Ages would have to say. However, Stanton has done[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Hughes provides a good overview of the end of the western Empire in this volume. He does analyze things, and come to conclusions, but the primary focus is providing a chronological outline of events. That latter is the primary value[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…