History

The Normans — Marjorie Chibnall

Published on November 5, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of The Normans

The Normans
Marjorie Chibnall
191 pages including index
published in 2000

So the Normans eh? Bunch of Vikings who plundered the English and French coasts for a while, before the king of France made an offer they couldn’t refuse and they settled in what became Normandy, named after them, to defend France against, well, other Vikings. Traditionally this is supposed to have happened in 911 CE. unlike other Scandinavian invaders attempting to set up stock in the countries they raided, these Vikings not only survived but thrived, creating essential a new people, the Normans and a new country, Normandy, in the process. Not only did Normandy become a powerful duchy, more or less indepdent from the kingdom of France, from there on William the Conqueror went on to take over England and Wales and invade Ireland, while other Normans went on to the Mediterranean and found kingdoms in Sicily and Antioch.

What the Normans managed to do looks a whole lot like what earlier “barbarian” invaders like the Goths did to the Roman empire, grabbing a piece of it and settle there in return for protection against other “barbarians”. But, as Marjorie Chibnall explains in her book, the Normans were “a product, not of blood, but of history”, not so much a people on the move as in the “classic” — and quite likely never to have happened in that form — people movements of Late Antiquity. Instead, it was a tightly knit group of warriors loyal to a specific ruler which took over and created Normandy, mixing with and ruling over the original populations. It was similar ties between ruler and noblemen that would later enable William the Conqueror to win the English kingdom.

A slight digression. I’ve been attempting to play a computer game called Crusader Kings II, which starts at roughly the conquest of England. At first glance this looks a standard grand strategy game, where you take control of a medieval country or duchy and attempt to conquer Europe from it, but which instead turns out all to be about building up your family and feudal ties and making your family the most prominent and powerful in Europe. It was hard to get into the mindset, but The Normans helped me a lot with this.

Because as said, if you trace the history of the Norman conquests after they’d been established in Normandy, it’s not a people or even a country going out to conquest, but instead smaller and larger groups of noblemen and knights, often younger sons left out of an inheritance, looking for adventure and spoils outside Normandy. The invasion of England was a highly organised state run enterprise; the establishments of Norman kingdoms in southern Italy/Sicily and Antioch were almost accidents, opportunities grabbed by clever, strong leaders.

Especially in their later conquests the Norman rulers were never more than a tiny minority, ruling over often already fairly mixed populations. For the most part they turned out to be tolerant of their subjects and their faiths, though not hesitant to sponsor and promote their own brand of Catholicism, including providing new monastries for their favourite orders.But because the Normans were always a minority at best, always intermixing with the populations of the countries they conquered, it’s hard to point to specifics about Norman culture and the chapters dealing with this are the weakest.

Overall though The Normans is a good, concise overview of Norman history, a good foundation to explore the Norman world from.

Norman London — William Fitz Stephen

Published on August 27, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Norman London

Norman London
William Fitz Stephen
109 pages including index
published in 1990

Now here’s an interesting little booklet. The meat of it consists on a treatise on Norman London, originally written by one William Fitz Stephen for his Life of Thomas Beckett, sometime before 1183. It’s therefore as close an eyewitness account of Norman London as we could ever get. Though interesting, this in itself is not enough to make a book of course. It is therefore partnered by another, more modern essay on the city, written in 1934 by Frank M. Stenton, a renowned historian of Anglo-Saxon England. These two pieces combined from the basis for what’s perhaps the most useful feature of the book, the maps of Norman London at the back of it.

There’s not really much more to say about Norman London. It’s an informative little booklet, but nothing more than that. What’s more, as the Stenton essay is more than seventy years old, it can’t help but be outdated, as new insights, more archaeological research and new theories will have altered our views of the period. I don’t think this would give a good picture of what we thought the Norman city looked like anymore. But this doesn’t make it worthless, if only because it still includes that eyewitness account of London, one of the few if not the only one we have of London at that particular point in time. The Stenton essay on the other hand is more of interest now for its own inherent historical value than for its accuracy.

Fitz Stephen’s depiction of London is that of the civic booster, the Londoner proud of his city, painting a rosy picture of the daily life of its inhabitants. It’s written with a naive enthusiasm, which is tempered by Stenton’s much more business-like summing up of what the city of London was like around 1100. His picture is based on not just Fitz Stephen’s account of course, but other sources as well, combined with archaeological research. So yeah, I bought this for a couple of euro on a book fair and read it in about an hour. An interesting curiosity, great to get a quick picture of Norman London, if not perhaps the most up to date picture.

The Empress Theodora — James Allan Evans

Published on June 24, 20122 Comments

Cover of The Empress Theodora

The Empress Theodora
James Allan Evans
146 pages including index
published in 2002

Ken MacLeod once said that “history is the trade secret of science fiction”, but sometimes it’s abused and nowhere more so than in the cribbing from early Byzantine history that has been ongoing ever since Isaac Asimov first put in thinly disguised expys of emperor Justinian and general Belisarius in his Foundationtrilogy. Largely overlooked in these sort of appropriations is the empress Theodora, who as James Allan Evans shows in The Empress Theodora – Partner of Justinian was just as important as her husband in determining the course of the Byzantine empire.

There were quite a few strong woman emperors in Byzantine history, but most of them either ruled through their weak husbands, or as regents ruling in place of their still minor children. Theodora on the other hand ruled together with Justinian, a strong emperor himself. Their rule was a true partnership and it’s this relationship and Theodora’s role in it that Evans wants to examine here. At the same time The Empress Theodora is also a concise biography/history accessible to lay people like me.

The main problem with writing a biography of somebody who died in 548 CE is of course finding reliable sources. Archaeology won’t really help you much in pinning down the details of any given individual ruler’s life, though it can help with establishing the broad outlines of their reigns (e.g. through coins minted during their rule, or statues dedicated to their thriumps). Therefore the biographer needs to depend on the fortitious survival of primary sources dealing with their chosen subject. For Theodora luckily there are several such sources; contemporary histories, religious treatments and so on, but there’s one source that throws its shadow over the rest: the Secret History of Procopius.

Procopius was an official on the general staff (so to speak) of Belisarius and a gifted writer and historian. As such he wrote a history of Justinian’s wars, The History of the Wars in which he of course biggened up both the emperor and Belisarius, which is the most important reason why the latter is still so well known. As what you might call a court historian he was of course full of praise for the emperor and Theodora both, but in private his opinions were much less flattering. The Secret History is where all this saved up bile spewed out and Theodora does not come out looking well.

According to Procopius Theodora was born and raised in the theatre, a whore who used her sexual favours to become empress and kept using it to keep Justinian in her thrall and through him ruin the empire. Nonsense obviously, the rantings of a jealous man with the usual accusations against any woman who gains any sort of power in a patriarchal society like the Byzantine Empire, but not without a grain of truth, as Evans argues. That Theodora was of a humble background, even a theatrical background has been claimed in other sources as well, sources not as obviously hostile to her. Procopius therefore is likely to have been largely right about her background, just very slanted in how he presented it and biased in his interpretations, which has coloured later views of her.

James Allan Evans tries to look past the bias of Procopius and other sources to the real Theodora and the pictures he sketches of her is appealing. He argues that she was a true partner to Justinian as empress, also functioning as a sort of “loyal opposition” to him, the one person who could stand against him when necessary without fear of her life. This was especially important in the religious conflicts that dominated Justinian’s reign.

It’s hard to judge the importance of Christian dogma in the politics and daily life of the Byzantine Empire, but it’s fair to say these were more than academic debates. Once the Roman Empire had become an explicitely Christian one it was always going to become monoreligous, with only one kind of Christianity allowed. Which kind was decided by the ruling emperor and Justinian followed his immediate predecessor by supporting the Chalcedonian doctrine, against the Monophysites, who were now heretic. Theodora on the other hand was herself inclined towards Monophysitism and supported and protected them, to the point where she was later made a saint. Evans argues that she also functioned as a lightening rod, drawing dissenters towards her, with the end result being that Monophysite dissent could largely be channeled, rather than run wild. Theodora played the same roles in more down to earth political matters as well, as Evans e.g. shows how she influenced Justinian into putting more effort in his Italian campaigns to retake the old Western Empire.

At just under 120 pages, The Empress Theodora is more of a sketch than a full biography of course, but it’s a great way to start. Evans is a clear and careful writer, taking care to note the limits of his sources. Glad I took this out of the library.

Charlemagne — Rosamond McKitterick

Published on March 13, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Charlemagne

Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity
Rosamond McKitterick
460 pages including index
published in 2008

I knew Rosamond McKitterick from the volume in the Short Oxford History of Europe series she edited, which is why I picked up Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity from the library. Charlemagne himself has only relatively recently picked my interest, mostly through having read Emperor of the West a few years back. Interest in Charlemagne in general has rather picked up in the past decade, as the search for a common pan-European identity has taken on obvious political significance, what with the EU and all.

Which is where this comes in, as Rosamond McKitterick attempts to get back to contemporary sources to re-evaluate Charlemagne and his reign, without the interpretations later historians have given them. Her goal is to in this way provide a new critical understanding of what these sources tell us about the development of the Carolingian empire, its political identity and how these changed during Charlemagne’s reign. It makes Charlemagne a heavily text orientated history, as McKitterick examines the narrative representations of Charlemagne produced during his lifetime and shortly after. To be honest, at times this made it heavy going, especially when I read most of it during the morning and afternoon commute.

Charlemagne is divided into five chapters. In the first McKitterick tackles the problem of how Charlemagne has been represented in late eight century and early ninth century sources, like the Annales regni francorum produced during his lifetime and revised shortly after, as well as purely posthumous sources like the Vita Karoli. The largest problem with these sources is of course the dating of them, which is far from easy; obviously it makes a difference if a source is truly contemporary or written several decades after his reign, with memories having become unreliable in the meantime and political useful interpretations of it having been developed…

The second chapter: Poppinids, Arnulfings and Agilolfings: the creation of a dynasty, is the closest this book comes to a narrative history as McKitterick gives a short overview of the rise of the Carolingian dynasty and Charlemagne’s own rise to the throne, first as ruler together with his brother Carloman, then on his own. The assumption underlying much of Carolingian history is that Charlemagne had fallen out with his brother at some point, but as McKitterick shows, this is actually not easy to prove using contemporary sources. From there on, she moves on to Charlemagne’s own succession as well as the growth of the empire during his lifetime.

The third chapter introduces another important aspect of Carolingian history where the orthodox interpretation might not quite be in synch with what can actually be deducted from the historical documents available: the royal court. She first looks at the representations of the court in various types of texts, then at what we might be able to conclude from these, in the context of whether the image of Charlemagne’s court as an itinerant one, travelling with the king between palaces, is actually correct. She also looks at Charlemagne’s own travels, the political and diplomatic space in which he operated and on a more meta level, at the survival and redaction of royal charters and what information these can give us.

The fourth chapter builds on this, examing the king’s own communications both within and outside the empire and what they reveal about the Carolingan political identity and programme, if there was such a thing. This and chapter five, looking at the religious aspects and ideology of Charlemagne, were the hardest chapters to finish, as McKitterick’s analys of the primary documents on these subjects is somewhat less than gripping, to be honest.

On the whole Charlemagne wasn’t quite the history book I was looking for, but it is obviously a valuable contribution to Carolingan studies.

Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company — Wil O. Dijk

Published on February 25, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company

Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680
Wil O. Dijk
348 pages including index
published in 2006

I got this book out of the library soley on the strength of the author’s own story. Wil O. Dijk was born in Kobe, Japan in 1934, the daughter of a Dutch businessman and a Montenegrin-Burmese (!) mother. As a child she lived in Japan and Burma, with her brother got sent to Singapore when war broke out in 1941, became a prisoner of the Japanese there, like so many other children, while her mother fled to India and her father joined the British 14th army. They all survived war and after being reunited with their parents she and her brother spent some years at boarding school in Holland, before they returned east to Karachi when the Korean War broke out. There she stayed, met her husband, a Dutch foreign service employee, travelled with him from posting to posting all over the world, raising three daughters in the process, then came to stay in Holland permanently in the 1980ties. Wanting to reconnect with her Asian roots, she enrolled as a mature student at Leiden first to study Japanology, then to specialise in Burmese history, the end result of which is this book, written when she was well in her seventies!

Even without the author’s lifestory I would’ve gotten this book though. The focus in Dutch colonial history has understandably always been with Indonesia as well as with the colonies in the Americas, Surinam and the Dutch West Indies, as these were the most enduring, important and longest lived Dutch colonial ventures. With some exceptions (Nieuw Amsterdam obviously, South Africa), the rest of Dutch colonial history is mainly a concern for specialists. Which as Wil O. Dijk makes clear in her introduction, goes double for Dutch involvement with Burma, largely neglected even by specialists, yet no less important and interesting for it.

It’s not for lack of sources that this subject has been neglected for so long: the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) archives are largely complete and extensive, recognised as long ago as 1939 by D. G. E. Hall of being a rich source of informaetion of the VOC’s trade with Burma. It’s this data that forms the basis for this book, painstakingly gathered by Wil O. Dijk for her dissertation. This is the sort of tedious, labour intensive research that’s sometimes dismissed as beancounting by more trendy historians, but which is essential as a foundation for further research. It does perhaps make Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 somewhat dry at times therefore, but that can’t be helped.

The Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1602 as a monopoly for the Dutch trade with Asia. Its mission was to exploit the trade potential there to establish itself in the lucerative spices trade with Europe and to muscle out the enemy, Spain and Portugal. In this early stage it was not yet the colonising power it would become in later centuries, depending more on intra-Asian trade to finance the spice trade, which is where Burma came in. Burma was both a place where the VOC could sell (e.g. clothes and textiles from India) and buy (gold, long peppers, tin, rice, various kinds of wood) and make a profit at both ends. What’s more, getting into the Burmese trade would also win one over the Portuguese, who had been in the Gulf of Bengal for decades. In fact, one Portuguese adventurer had carved out its own kingdom in Burma, but came to a sharp end and was impaled, once this kingdom was reconquered by the Burmese.

The Burmese trade promised rich rewards to the VOC, but trade was never straightforward. The kingdom of Pegu, as the VOC knew it, was ruled by strong kings who kept trade restricted and who at all times were concerned about the stability of their own power, determined not to undermine e.g. the royal monopoly on rubies. They kept prices for import goods artificially low, prices for export products high, quantities of many goods restricted and on the whole the VOC was very much dependent on the sometimes arbitary decisions of the Burmese king.

Which is why it was hesitant at first to get into Burma, despite its rich potential, as it could not be certain of steady, year on profits. After the first few hesitant years though this worry was no longer a concern and while the trade did decline somewhat in later years, it wasn’t this that got the VOC to withdraw in 1680, but more the increased competition of other European (and other) trading companies and more importantly, its own internal restructuring. In the later part of the seventeenth century the VOC more and more focused on the direct trade with Europe, rather than the intra-Asian trade, starting to become a true colonial power with imperial holdings in Indonesia and the Spice Islands. While the Burma trade was very profitable, it no longer fitted its strategy, so it was abandoned. Some halfhearted attempts would be made a few decades later to reopen it, but this came to nothing.

When I normally think about the VOC and Dutch exploration in Asia, the picture I get is one of imperialism and colonalisation, with the native civilisations as the inferior, exploited party. But what Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 shows is a situation in which the Burmese, far from inferior, are actually the superior power, with the VOC as just one of many trading parties, neither particularly welcome, nor particularly feared, quickly replaced by others once it upped sticks. The Burma trade for a few decades was very important to the VOC, but the VOC was never all that important to Burmese trading…

So all in all, Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 does well both in sketching what these five-six decades of Dutch-Burmese trade looked like, its impact on VOC and Burma both and in presenting the data that support these conclusions.