History

Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715 — John A. Lynn

History
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Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715


Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715
John A. Lynn
652 pages including index
published in 1997

I keep safe the memory of an invisible giant. The Son of kings, this armed colossus once towered above his foes to bestride a continent. He ate an mountain of bread and drank a river of wine at each meal. Yet historians renowned for being the most forward looking and sophisticated in skill and interpretation, fail to see him; they write as if he never existed. He must be invisible. Otherwise, how could something so big, so costly, and so powerful remain so long unnoticed? This book is a portrait of that giant, the French army of the grand siècle, made visible again.

A historian who opens his book with these words obviously has an axe to grind and once again I had the feeling of coming into an argument without knowing the particulars or the people involved. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten used to in the past few years as I’ve been reading the more serious history books rather than sticking to pop history. The more history you need, the more you realise that there are no certainties in history, but many historians can be quite certain about a colleague’s flawed theories…

Sniping aside, Giant of the Grand Siècle is an excellent synthesis history of the French army in the age of the Sun King, Louis XIV, an age when France became Europe’s predominant superpower. What John Lynn attempts to to here is to provide a portrait of this army as it really was, something that hasn’t been done before, at least not to his satisfaction. In his preface he argues that what attention the French army of this period has gotten from historians has either focused too much on the soldier in a social context, ignoring his role as a warrior or, when looked at by military historians, has been only written about in service of theorising about the supposed military revolution that took place in this century. Lynn is dismissive of both approaches and states that he will try to show the real army and show that instead of revolution, it went through a long evolution as it adapted itself to changed circumstances and turned from an almost medieval army into a recognisable early modern one.

He is nothing if not thorough, looking at all aspects of the army and the way it fought. After setting his context, he starts with examining the way it was administered and supplied, moves on to issues of command before looking at the common soldier, the way they were recruited, disciplined, fought and discharged, and how their morale was kept up. Finally, he looks at how the army waged war, the weaponry and tactics used, how the French army taught and practised field warfare as well as siege warfare, what he calls positional warfare, as it’s not just about sieges, but how fortresses can be used and countered to protect or invade a province or country.

Of each of these aspects he traces the way they evolved over the course of the grand siècle. His emphasis in tracing these developments is that the way in which army tactics or the command structure developed was a process of evolution rather than revolution, that these always involved compromises, were largely routed in older practises and always limited by what resources –men, food, money — were available or not, as the case might be. One consequence of the latter was that the supposedly absolutist rule of Louis XIV was in practise often compromised by the need to secure (monetary) support for the army, for example by having the aristocracy buy regiments then spent their own resources on their upkeep, or the fact that a large part of what the army consumed in food, ammunition, clothing etc had to be locally sourced rather than centrally provided, giving the provincial powers at least some measure of control too. On the whole therefore, while the army was much more the king’s army then it had been before Louis XIV, the French aristocracy still had its role to play.

Giant of the Grand Siècle is a complex, not always easy history to read through. For anybody interested in early modern military history it’s an interesting and illuminating book, of value even if you’re skeptical about some of Lynn’s theories, like this reviewer.

Singled Out — Virginia Nicholson

History
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Singled Out


Singled Out
Virginia Nicholson
312 pages including index
published in 2007

I found Singled Out in the Middelburg library and picked it up because it looked like the sort of book Sandra would’ve enjoyed reading. She had always been interested in social history, especially of Britain between the wars and of the role women played in these years. Sandra had actually been the one who first pointed out to me why there were so many spinsters in twenties and thirties detective stories, all those women living alone in bedsit rooms or sharing a cottage together. That was something I had noticed but assumed just to have been some sort of convention of the genre, rather than something real reflected in fiction.

But that was exactly what it was, as the interwar period was the period of the “Surplus Women”, two million women for whom there was no and would be no husbands, with the “flower of British manhood” cut down in the mud of Flanders. The First World War had left hundreds of thousands British men dead and many more crippled for life and a whole generation of women without enough husbands to go around. Granted, as the raw statistics prove this was not a new situation, as in Victorian times too this had been the case, but this was the first time this gender imbalance was both large and out in the open. This time it had hit the middle and upper classes disproportionally and therefore was widely commented on in the media and felt by those women themselves. What’s more, it came at a time of huge societal changes and anxiety and, as Nicholson shows, these socalled “surplus women” played a huge role in making British society more equal to women in general.

In Singled Out Virginia Nicholson attempts to tell the stories of this generation of women, who had all been brought up with the belief that the highest possible duty and happiness for a woman lay in marriage and motherhood, having to cope with a reality in which for them this was no longer possible and for some (many?) of them it was no longer as desirable either. The realities of the First World War, in which the absence of men had forced women into roles earlier denied them had given a great many young women a taste of greater freedom already. Now that two million of them were completely unable to fullfill their traditional roles, they had to find new meaning in their life, nor were they content to be pushed in the role of the traditional spinster as free caretaker for her sibling’s children or her aged parents. Instead they became business women, college students, artists, socialists or activists, forged new roles for themselves and the women coming after them.

Virginia Nicholson has taken great care to let these women talk for themselves as much as they can at this late stage. As Singled Out was published in 2007, a lot of the women of this generation were already dead, but she has managed to find quite a lot of first hand accounts nonetheless, by interviewing those women still alive, through tracking down memoirs and dairies, as well as contemporary documents: novels, essays and newspaper articles, even poetry. The stories that she tells this way are touching, often moving.

Especially the stories of those women who did leave a husband to be on the battlefield and had to deal with that grief for the rest of their lives. I’ve after all just lost Sandra myself and can understand what they were going through, even if my grief is different from theirs.

But these stories are also inspiring, as Nicholson shows how these women, had to deal not just with the loss of their men, but also with the expectations and disapproval of much of British society and the realities of being a single woman in a world where opportunities for single women were still few and far between and there was little help for them. Yet many of them still managed to find fullfilment in life through work, through political activism or even through taking care of other people’s babies. We’re all in their debt, because their efforts helped shape our modern world.

Medieval Warfare — Helen Nicholson

History, Warfare and military history
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Cover of Medieval Warfare


Medieval Warfare
Helen Nicholson
232 pages including index
published in 2004

Helen Nicholson’s Medieval Warfare is, as she puts it in her introduction, “intended to provide a point of entry tpo the subject of medieval warfare for students and others with an interest in the subject who are perplexed by the rapidly expanding body of scholarship in this area”. Which is just what I needed, as this is indeed a subject I’ve become interested in following on from my earlier readings in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Medieval Warfare is an ambitious book for trying to cover this whole period (300 to 1500 CE) even in overview in just 166 pages, excluding index. But Nicholson is a reader in history at Cardiff University who has written extensively on Medieval military matters and therefore is well suited to the task.

As any good historian should, she sets out how she will go about it in her preface. What she attempts to do is to look at the development of the main aspects of medieval warfare from just after the end of the (western) Roman Empire to the end of the Middle Ages, using concrete examples to illustrate these developments. She chose the period 300 to 1500 CE to emphasise the continuity between the military practises of the Late Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, with the latter date providing a convenient cutting off point between them and the Renaissance. The fourth century was chosen as a starting point because it was in the late fourth century that the Roman bureaucrat Vegetius wrote his manual on military strategy, a book that was hugely influential in European warfare until at least the sixteenth century. Geographically, Nicholson limits herself mostly to Europe, particularly France, Italy, England and Germany for her examples, though she does look to Eastern/Byzantine examples as well when appropriate.

After the introduction, Medieval Warfare starts with a chapter on the theory of warfare, followed by chapters on military personnel, buildings and equipment and finally one on the practise of warfare, with a smallish chapter on naval warfare tacked on at the very end. Each chapter is organised in a roughly chronological order, though several start with enumerations, as e.g. in the military buildings chapter first the various kinds of military buildings are briefly examined. Where necessary, Nicholson has also taken care to present the various parts of a given subject in a logical order, where e.g. the chapter on the practise of warfare has her first looking at the training of soldiers, troop manoeuvring, the actual battle, sieges and finally the aftermath of war.

The overall impression that you get from the development of the art of warfare in the Middle Ages was that it was largely evolutionary rather than revolutionary. After the collapse of the Roman political order war was effectively privatised, with professional warriors recruited for service by a warlord rather than trained by the government. As new states became stronger warfare became more centralised and professionalised again, but there wasn’t a real watershed moment. As Nicholson argues it is tempting to think about a warfare revolution in the last few centuries of the period, what with the development of larger standing professional armies, the switch from largely cavalry based armies to infantry based ones, not to mention guns and gunpowder, but in fact most of the fundamentals of warfare remained the same throughout the period.

As a primer to a huge subject Medieval Warfare was quite good, with one minor caveat, as there were no illustrations at all, which would’ve helped with some of the more technical bits.

The Crusades c. 1071 – c. 1291 — Jean Richard

History
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The Crusades c. 1071 - c. 1291


The Crusades c. 1071 – c. 1291
Jean Richard
Jean Birrell
516 pages including index
published in 1999

The Crusades are not my favourite subject in Medieval history, as I tend to concentrate my reading on the early Middle Ages, but The Crusades c. 1071 – c. 1291 is part of the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series which I have good experiences with. The volumes in this series I’ve read so far all have been good introductions to their subjects. Of course, much still depends on the writer and I didn’t know Jean Richard, but he turns out to be a French historian who is well known enough to have an entry on the English language Wikipedia; this book was first published as Histoire des Croisades. The translation is by Jean Birrell and is good enough that you don’t really notice it is a translation.

Because of the American shenanigans in the Middle East in the past decade, the Crusades have been used quite a lot as a metaphor for these adventures, as well as an example for internet jihadists and Keyboard Kommandos both of the War Between Christianity and Islam as an universal war. The crusaders themselves feature as either the heroic defenders of the free west or bloodthirsty invaders of the peaceloving Islamic world. Reading a history like this is the best anecdote to that sort of nonsense. Jean Richard is careful to show that the motivations on both sides were slightly more complex than “Christ v Allah”. Religion obviously played a key role in the Crusades and there were certainly fanatics on both sides, but the realities of the Crusades and life in the Holy Land were more complex than the Crusading myths make out. What Richards contineously emphasises is that the key motivation for the Crusades was not the idea of forcibly converting heathens to Christianity, but rather of safe guarding the Holy land for Christianity, making it safe for pelgrims to visit, keeping the holy places safe for Christian worship.

Fortunately for an already exhaustive history, Richards limits his focus to the Crusades to Palestinia/the Middle East and doesn’t take into account other crusades elsewhere, against heretics in already Christian countries in Europe, or the German campaigns against heathens at the Eastern borders of Christendom. These were different enough from the “real” crusades that it would’ve made this book incoherent. It’s complicated enough already as it is. The Crusades is a largely traditional chronological history, starting from just before the First Crusade to the end of Frankish rule in the Holy Land, some two centuries full of kings called Baldwin. His point of view lies largely with the crusaders and the Frankish lands, their Muslim opponents only discussed in the context of their dealings with the Franks.

Even with this omission Richards is basically writing two histories at once: that of the Crusades proper and that of the Frankish or Crusader states, founded after the success of the First Crusade and which managed to survive in increasingly hostile conditions for some twohundred years. Either of these is complex enough on its own already, treating them together does make for some difficult reading at times. That Richards manages to make a clear and concise narrative from these complex histories is quite an achievement, even if sometimes the flood of rulers with the same names becomes a bit too much.

The question of why the Crusades started when they did and what the motivations were of the crusaders is a complicated one as Richard shows. It had been some centuries since Islam had overrun the Holy Land after all, but while Christians living there and pilgrims visiting it had to endure some humiliations, there wasn’t a real proximate cause for the Crusades, other than the pressure the Byzantine Empire was under pressure from the Turks. Yet while the Pope might have called for a Crusade to relief that pressure (and also reforge ties with Eastern Christians), what it turned into was
the liberation of Palestine and the establishments of several Christian kingdoms there.

These Frankish states had to survive amidst their Islamic neighbours, but this didn’t mean they existed in a state of perpetual war, let alone Holy War. Instead for long stretches of time between crusades, the region was dominated by the same sort of power politics as any other region with various weaker and stronger powers, as states fought each other, became allies, traded or became vassals of stronger countries. For both Christian and Muslim rulers, realpolitics usually trumped religious convictions. It’s when they didn’t, when there was a Saladin determined to destroy the Frankish states that the Crusades resumed.

These Crusades were never succesful in the sense that they defeated the Muslim powers in the region for ever, but they did guarantee the continuing survival of the Frankish states for roughly two centuries. Each time these kingdoms were truly threatened, the arrival of crusaders from the west was able to restore the balance. It was only when the broader political situation in the Middle East had changed, with first the arrival of the Mongols and then the creation of the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt, combined with a loss of interest in the region in the west as other concerns preoccupied European powers, that the Frankish kingdoms were overrun.

The Crusades c. 1071 – c. 1291 is an excellent overview of this history, but was sometimes a bit of a slog to get through, due to the repetive nature of some of this history.

Hellenistic and Roman Sparta — Paul Cartledge & Antony Spawforth

History
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Hellenistic and Roman Sparta


Hellenistic and Roman Sparta
Paul Cartledge & Antony Spawforth
312 pages including index
published in 2002

When most people think of Sparta their first thought will probably be about that godawful movie based on that godawful Frank Miller comic 300: This! IS! Sparta! and all that. For all its faults, it does mirror the common view of Sparta as a warrior state, one of the superpowers of classical Greece, indomitable in its resistance to tyrannical Persia, if not quite a democracy itself. But there is more to Sparta’s history. There’s a tendency in pop history to look only at the classic Sparta, to lose interest once it has been overtaken by Thebe and lost its supremacy, just before the rise of Macedon under Philip and Alexander. What happened to the city once it became just another polis doesn’t interest us all that much, it seems.

We should therefore be grateful for books like this: Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: a Tale of Two Cities which does look at Sparta’s history after its fall from grace, first under Macedon rule, then under Rome. It was originally published in the early nineties, but updated for a second edition in 2002. More of a textbook than a pop history book, but I’ve struggled through much drier texts. At the very least it was an effective treatment of a part of Greek history I’m not that familiar with.

As the title indicates, this is a book of two halves. The first part treats Sparta as a Hellenistic city and is largely a chronological overview of its history from the end of the fourth century BCE when it lost its status as a great power to when it became part of the Roman Empire. The second part is much less chronologically arranged and gives more of a general overview of what the city looked like as just another provincial town in the empire, with the last few chapters looking at particular aspects of Spartan city live.

Part of this difference in approach is that historical sources are much more abundant for the first, Hellenistic period, when Sparta was still active in greater Greek politics, than they are for the Roman period, when its politics were largely local. For the later period then greater emphasis is laid on archaeological sources and what they can say about life in the city rather than on chronological history. To be honest, these later chapters were therefore off less interest to me.

What I took away from the book was that Sparta didn’t take its loss of great power status lying down and repeatedly attempted to restore its dominion, but just lacked the resources to do so. Under the Macedonian hegemony, an independent Sparta was only tolerated as long as it didn’t threaten the status quo, while its neighbours were more than happy to pull it down if it became too powerful again. Whether through internal reforms, using mercenaries financed through the foreign adventures of its kings or by gaining the support of greater powers, each of Sparta’s attempts to get back the land and possessions it had lost failed. Its resource base was too small and its local enemies too powerful to overcome, though not powerful enough to destroy the Spartan state completely.

Despite this Sparta entered Roman rule on better terms than many of the other Greek city states, having become a loyal if passive ally at exactly the right time to ensure that Sparta entered the empire as a free city. It helped a lot that Romans appreciated the traditional Spartan values of martian valour and sober, simple, clean living. Sparta made full use of its history to lure influential visitors to the city, including through various Olympic style games. This enabled the city’s elite to forge ties with notable Roman families, including those of a couple of emperors, making it more important than it really was as a smallish provincial town…