History

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

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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…

Indo-Roman Trade — Roberta Tomber

History, Rome
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Indo-Roman Trade


Indo-Roman Trade
Roberta Tomber
216 pages including index
published in 2008

Indo-Roman Trade: From Pots to Pepper is less a history book than an overview of the state of archaeological evidence for trade between the Roman Empire and the Indian subcontinent. It’s short and very much a synopsis; I think for serious students of this subject much of the value lies in the extensive bibliography at the back. For me, it’s one of those books you take a punt on at the local library, which also leaves you wondering why it’s there, lost amongst a sea of pop history books.

I didn’t know much about Indo-Roman trade going into this book, other than vaguely knowing that the Roman Empire was aware to some extent of India as a country, if only through Alexander the Great’s campaigns there. What Roberta Tromper maked clear to me was how extensive the trade was, in both directions, with pepper from India becoming somewhat of a staple in the kitchens of well to do Romans, while Roman wine travelled the other way. It’s not just India Roman traders went to: they all along the Indian Ocean, from Ethiopia and Somalia to Sri Lanka and Arabia. This trade between at least the first century BCE and seventh century CE, though the Romans were of course not the first westerners to reach the Indian Ocean.

Roberta Tomber starts the book with a short history of Indo-Roman trade as well as the discovery of archaeological evidence for it. She opens the chapter with a quote from its first discoverer, the British colonial historian Mortimer Wheeler, who found Roman red pot shards “of the sort that any student of things classical could readily recognize” in a dusty display case in Pondicherry in southern India. Once she has given a short overview, she moves on to the textual evidence in both Roman and various historical Indian texts. These do not just included surviving books like the Periplus Maris Erythraei, a travel guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, but also references in texts like Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and more mundane documents like merchants’ inventories and such. Finally, there is also graffiti, as the Tamil inscription found on a Roman pottery fragment at an Egyptian archaeological site, dramatic proof that some Indian goods moved to the Roman Empire.

From there on she moves on to the archaeological evidence itself, ranging from pottery, coins, tp traces of ancient spices like pepper. This combined evidence is then used in the next two chapters to sketch out the evolution of the Roman Red Sea, where the main ports for trade with India were located and what was going on beyond the Roman world — there are even some tantalising hints that Roman trade might have reached beyond the Indian Ocean into Indonesia and beyond. The final chapter looks to how this trade changed over the centuries.

I read this book in an afternoon, while babysitting my nephew together with my father. Sometimes it did take effort not to start dozing, but that was more due to the comfortableness of the couch I was laying on than any shortcomings of the book itself. This is the sort of book that looks dry, but isn’t; I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Europe after Rome — Julia M. H. Smith

History, Rome
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Cover of Europe after Rome


Europe after Rome
Julia M. H. Smith
384 pages including index
published in 2005

To be honest I only took this book out of the library because there was little else in the way of good history books that day. Europe after Rome was a bit of a safe choice, on a subject I’d already read a lot about and if perhaps it would offer little new knowledge, I knew I would at least enjoy the refresher. I had no high hopes for this book, but sometimes gambles pay off — this was one of these cases. Because Europe after Rome is, as the subtitle makes clear, A New Cultural History of the period between 500 and 1000 CE, between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the start of the “true” Middle Ages.

Traditionally historians have treated this period as a transitional one between this two high points of civilisation, as a story of collapse and rebound, when the seeds were laid for what would become the familiar nations of modern Europe: France, Germany, England. Europe after Rome abandons this teleological view deliberately in favour of an approach that follows three interpretative threads: the role of the Roman heritage in the formation of Early Medieval cultures/policies, the diversity of experience for these cultures — this is not a book about European culture, but about the cultures of Europe — and finally, the dynamism of these cultures, all changing a lot over this period, which Smith is careful never to imply as meaning that these were evolving towards a set goal. To help her with this approach, she takes care to look at a wide range of European experiences, both geographically by looking at a region that reaches from Spain to Scandinavia and from Italy to Hungary and by crosscutting between cultures within each chapter for her examples.

Before I go into the structure of Europe after Rome, I should point out another relatively unusual feature, the care with which Smith has made this a history of all the people who lived in the Early Middle Ages, women as well as men. It’s easy to slip into historical narratives that priviledge the male experience, if only because traditional histiography and contemporary sources both tend to this already. It takes effort to seek out and highlight female experiences as well and more so to incorperate them as naturally as Smith has done here. You almost need to have it pointed out to you to see how unusual this is.

Smith builds up her history from the bottom up, starting with the fundamentals: speaking and writing, living and dying, moving through affinies: friends and relations, men and women, to resources: labour and lordship, getting and giving and finally on to ideologies: kingship and Christianity, Rome and the peoples of Europe. The focus of Europe after Rome at first therefore lies squarely on the common people and their experiences, only slowly moving up the social scale to the kings and popes who are usually in the spotlights. Each chapter is divided into several subchapters, looking at specific aspects of the subject under discussion. So the chapter on friends and relatives looks at identity, friends by blood and honour and vengeance, while the chapter on labour and lordship in turn looks at servitude and freedom, peasants and lords and the search for status, each building logically on its predecessor.

In every aspect of Early Medieval life Smith examines, the influence of Christianity is clearly visible. What’s equally clear however is how diverse Christianity was in this period. Even apart from the differences between the “western” church of Rome and the “eastern” Byzantine church, there’s a lot of diversity in how people experienced Christianity. It quickly becomes obvious that much of what Christianity means to its followers was decided locally, often incorporating already existing traditions and rituals and sometimes based on no more than secondhand information about Christian beliefs. A far cry from the image I sort of had of an Europe ruled by Catholicism.

Though there is something of a broad chronological sweep in Europe after Rome, this is not a chronologically orientated history, so you do need to have some rough idea of what happened in the Early Middle Ages, of who the various players were, to get the most out of it. It is full of interesting little facts, asides and anecdotes, like the one about Boniface of Canossa on his way to pick up his bride, who shod his horse with silver shoes, deliberately made easy to lose so “people may know who he was”. Such a story is not just interesting in itself, it’s also a good illustration of, in this case, the important role gift giving and shows of generosity played in establishing a noble man’s power and worth.

So yeah, a good addition to all the other books about Late Antiquity/the Early Middle Ages and highly recommended to anybody. Sometimes a gamble pays out very well indeed…

Troy and Homer — Joachim Latacz

History
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Cover of Troy and Homer


Troy and Homer
Joachim Latacz
Kevin Windle (translator)
342 pages including index
published in 2004

My first encounters with Troy, Homer and The Illiad came through one of those ubiquitous Time-Life books on Classical Greece and more memorably, through the serialisation of an adaptation of both the Illiad and the Odyssey in the Dutch Donald Duck weekly comic that ran in the early eighties. The story of how that Teutonic romantic Schliemann had found the remains of Troy and the city of Agamennon, Mycene where everybody had always thought these were just pleasant myths, was of course part of the mythology. The recieved wisdom at the time I first got to learn about all this was that though Schliemann had indeed found something where nobody had expected there to be anything, but that it would be wrong to think that this was indeed the Troy of Homer. The experts supposedly all agreed that at best, Homer had been inspired by half remembered stories of a golden age, that any attempt to answer the question of whether the Trojan War had “really happened” was pointless. That at least was the impression I got reading pop history books.

As Joachim Latacz makes clear in Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery that impression was wrong. It is not only possible to answer the question of whether Troy really had existed, whether the city Schliemann had discovered was the Troy of the Illiad and therefore whether this meant it too was based on historical fact, but these questions have been answered, and answered in the affirmative. The Troy Schliemann dug up was the Troy of legend, the Illiad is based on historical fact and there was in all likelyhood a Trojan War similar to the war Homer uses as the background to his epic poem.

As you’d expect from a German scholar, Latacz is very thorough in laying the foundations for these conclusions. He divides the problem into two parts. First, he attempts to establish the historical truth of Troy itself: was the city discovered at Hisarlik in Turkey really Troy and how can this be proved from historical sources other than Homer? The problem being that without independent confirmation, you can’t use the ruins at Hisarlik to prove that Homer was right, nor Homer to prove that these ruins were Troy. Fortunately, that independent confirmation exists, as Latacz shows, in the diplomatic texts found in Hititte archives. What’s more, not just the names of “Illios” and “Troy” as used by Homer can be traced back to historical records, so too can the names he used for Troy’s enemies, the Greeks. The conclusion Latacz therefore is able to reach is that the historical background to the Illiad was real.

The second problem he tackles goes into the opposite direction: given that this historical background to Homer’s poems existed, how much can we say about the historical truth of the Illiad itself? Was it still only just mythology inspired by ruins of a once great city still visible hundreds of years after its fall, visited by a particularly inventive bard? Or does it contain a kernel or more of historical truth transmitted through the ages until the time Homer put it to use, just when the reinvention of writing in Greece meant it was preserved in this form forever?

This is a question that for its answer depends on a lot of complicated, multidisciplinair historical research, hard to sum up in a book that’s intended as a synthesis accesible to a lay audience. Though Latacz does his best to illuminate this research with carefully chosen examples, you have to take a lot on trust as a reader, more so than in the first part of Troy and Homer. Despite this, the general outlines of how this question can be and is answered are made clear. Latacz starts with the discovery of the setting of Homer’s story, then looks back at the historical debate about the reality of the tale itself, before moving on to the new evidence having been discovered in the last two decades that ended the debate. He looks at the Tale of Troy as it can be found independent of Homer, as it can be found in other sources, at the question of when exactly the story was conceived and how it reached Homer, to reach the ultimate conclusion that there probably was a war over Troy.

It’s always difficult as a lay person to make up your mind about these sort of complicated questions based on having read just one book on the subject, no matter how convincing. I want to be convinced by Troy and Homer and am, if tentatively, but reserve the right to change my mind. Ultimately, as Trevor Bryce argued in The Trojans and their Neighbours, the question of how real the Homeric Troy was is an interesting question, but even a negative answer does not diminish the splendour of the historical city found at Hisarlik.