History

Troy and Homer — Joachim Latacz

Published on October 18, 2011Leave a comment

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.

The Wars of the Roses — Christine Carpenter

Published on September 29, 2011Leave a comment

Cover of The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses
Christine Carpenter
293 pages including index
published in 1997

I’m not really that familiar with English history of the kings, queens and battles variety, neither having been taught it in school nor having had much interest in it during my own dabblings in history. So all I knew about the Wars of the Roses was that they were what got the Tudors their start. Most of my current historical interests lie in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, but that doesn’t mind I wouldn’t be interested in this particular period, if the right book comes along. Christine Carpenter’s The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437-1509 was that book.

Though this isn’t quite a history of the Wars of the Roses as such but rather, as the subtitle indicates, more of a look at how the politics and the constitution of England evolved during this period. Carpenter attempts to show how governance was supposed to work in the fifteenth century and how and why it went wrong, how it was put right again and what the effects of this restoration were. It’s in this context that Carpenter then discusses the wars themselves, having first build herself a firm theoretical foundation. This approach makes for some abstract and frankly dry reading at times, especially in the first chapters, with Carpenter even recommending that readers new to the period should start with chapter four.

I didn’t follow that advice however, so I got to struggle with the first chapter, an overview of the available sources on the Wars of the Roses and the historiography that has evolved around them. This is to bring the reader up to speed of how the thinking about the causes of the wars has shifted from the simplistic ideas about bad kingmanship as well as to show how understanding of these causes is still lacking. Carpenter follows this up with two chapters on how the governance of England worked during this period, the first chapter on kings, kingship and political society, the second on the nobility and gentry, and local governance. Together these three chapters from the heart of Carpenter’s thesis. The idea is that previous attempts to explain the wars had become too “privatised”, too focused on the personalities of the kings, their relationships to their noblemen, but had neglected the political structures, the body politic within which these relationships werew formed, what was and wasn’t expected of the monarch.

Which is why it is so important for Carpenter to get the realities of governance and politics in the fifteenth century right before she can even begin to examine the wars themselves. What she concludes and attempts to prove is that these wars ultimately arouse because of a vacuum at the heart of government, a crisis of kingship when Henry VI was incapable of ruling. Under the medieval political structure which England operated, the king was the person in which all power and legitamicy came together and came from. If that king went bad and alienated enough of the nobility and gentry he could be deposed, substituted with a more acceptable candidate. But if a king was just passive, like Henry VI, this consensus wasn’t there. Instead you had a small group of powerful nobles trying to work around the king’s limitations, but without his legitimacy; in the end this proved impossible not in the least because several of them had different ideas of what needed doing and who was to profit.

In the rest of the book Carpenter shows how the ideas she has worked out in the first three chapters influenced and guided the course of this crisis of legitimacy as it turned into a civil war, how the restoration of a proper king in Edward IV did a lot to restore the English political system, but still left seeds for the next conflict. It was the unfortunate accident of Edward’s death that made possible that conflict, which in the end led to the triumph of Henry Tudor and the final end of this crisis.

The Wars of the Roses at times is hard going, but worthwhile.

The Last Valley — Martin Windrow

Published on September 27, 2011Leave a comment

Cover of The Last Valley

The Last Valley
Martin Windrow
734 pages including index
published in 2004

Dien Bien Phu is the battle which as The Last Valley‘s front cover blurb succintly puts it, “doomed the French empire and led America into Vietnam”. An European army, equipped with the most modern weaponry it could field and superior in firepower was defeated by a peasant guerilla army in exactly the sort of standup fight all the experts said such a guerilla army could never win. It was proof that France could never win this war and all it could do now was withdraw with honour. At the same time Dien Bien Phu was both the proximate cause for the United States to get itself deeper involved in Vietnam as well as a terrible warning, a warning that was not heeded, that its involvement would not be succesful. Finally, for those so inclined, it was yet more proof of France’s inherent incompetence at waging war, the way its army allowed itself to be caught in a trap and destroyed. For all these reasons Dien Bien Phu is one of the few post-war battles that have stayed in the general public’s consciousness.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean that this image of the siege is accurate of course. As The Last Valley shows, Dien Bien Phu wasn’t a trap the French just blundered into, but part of a deliberate strategy to get an elusive guerilla enemey to stand down and fight. It was a strategy that had worked before and had been designed to make the most of the limited resources the French forces in Vietnam had available. Because unlike the Americans after them, the French neither had the money nor the men or material to go after the Viet Minh, so had to find some way to get them out where they could be got at. Dien Bien Phu wasn’t lost because the French were dumb or cowardly, but because the Viet Minh were smarter, had prepared better and had learned from their experiences at earlier battles.

Martin Windrow is a military historian who has been mostly working for the various Osprey series on war and warriors, contributing entries on the French Foreign Legion to the Men-at-Arms series for example. Anybody familiar with that publisher and its catalogue should therefore not be surprised that Windrow’s sympathies are firmly with the French and has written his history largely from their point of view. To be fair, this is partially forced on him, as French sources on the battle are more easily available than their Vietnamese counterparts, for a number of reasons. So while he relocates Dien Bien Phu the battle in the context of the French’s grand strategy in Vietnam, he is less able to do so for the Viet Minh, though he is careful to not present them as whollly reactive.

But the main focus remains on the French experiences in Vietnam and Windrow takes the long view in sketching the road that took them to Dien Bien Phu and to explain why this defeat was so conclusive, when it only involved a relatively small part of the French army in Vietnam. The battle itself therefore only appears more than halfway down the book, as Windrow first sets out the geopolitics of the conflict, the political background in France against which this war was fought, the composition of the French Expeditionary Force and the Viet Minh/People’s Army, as well as the development of the socalled air-ground base concept which led to Dien Bien Phu.

As Windrow gradually makes clear, while the French had far from lost their war before Dien Bien Phu, they were slowly starting to lose, having had to abandon large parts of northern Vietnam to the People’s Army already and lacking the strength to take them back. In France the war, mainly fought with professional rather than conscript soldiers, was unpopular and barely supported. Thanks to the instability of the Fourth Republic, with governments lasting on average only six months, there was no political leadership of the war, no context in which a military strategy could be developed.

Which eventually led to the development of the air-ground base concept. The idea behind the air-ground base is to develop a strong base on a strategic spot, which could be supplied by air, have its own artillery and tank support and function as a jump off point for raids against the Viet Minh, while being strong enough to not just survive a siege, but function as an anvil against which to smash the enemy. This concept was tried and tested at a base called Na San, where the Viet Minh’s commander, general Giap, first tried to fight the French on their own terms, and failed. This experience gave the French the confidence to try it on a much larger scale at Dien Bien Phu, in the Northern Vietnam highlands bordering Laos. This way they hoped to lure more of Giap’s forces to their doom and reduce pressure on Laos and the French delta heartland in Vietnam. In turn, the hope was that this would pressure the Vietnamese to be serious in their peace talks in Geneva and make peace on acceptable terms to France.

The French strategy at Dien Bien Phu worked in as far as Giap took the bait and went for it. Where it failed was in underestimating the forces Giap could put together for this. Giap had more units, more men, but above all much more artillery available at Dien Bien Phu than anybody could’ve guessed and the Viet Minh was as well or better prepared for the battle as the French were, building up their forces there at the same time as the French were building their base.

Though most of the French units and soldiers who fought at Dien Bien Phu — and French is a bit of a misnomer, as some of these units were Thai, some French Foreign Legion soldiers including German WWII vets, some from Algeria and other French African colonies– were qualitatively superior to most of the Viet Minh, the latter’s numerical superiority was telling in the end. Windrow is very good at describing the battles once he finally gets to them, switching from unit to unit as required, keeping track of what happened where and who were involved, leading the reader through the confusion of the battlefield as clearly as possible. He puts you in the thick of it and you have to be made of steel not to start feeling for the poor soldiers caught up in it…

Though there was a strategy behind Dien Bien Phu, it was one born of military necessity and a certain desperation as the overall sitution was not changing for the better from the French point of view. With its fall therefore went the last hope of the French to be able to get peace on their terms, even though objectively the strategic military situation in Vietnam wasn’t changed all that much by it. Dien Bien Phu made clear that the Viet Minh was now capable of defeating French forces in open combat, that the air-ground base concept was a failure, while the French no longer had the resources or will to come up with a new strategy. The Last Battle is excellent in explaining this, but just as good in showing the gory details of the battle itself and the heroics of the defenders of Dien Bien Phu. Remains only for someone to write the same history from the Vietnamese point of view…

Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West — Guy Halsall

Published on August 14, 2011

Cover of Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West

Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
591 pages including index
published in 2007

I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with my parents in Middelburg and took advantage of this visit to check out the town’s library, which used to supply most of my reading back before I moved to Amsterdam. It turned out to be an wise decision as less than an hour browsing found half a dozen excellent history books to read, including this one. Guy Halsall is an author I had just seen slagged off by Peter Heather in his book Empires and Barbarians for being Completely Wrong about the impact of barbarian migrations on the late Roman Empire. This piqued my interest to see how exactly Halsall’s interpretation of the end of the Roman Empire differed from Heather’s views and if Halsall’s explanations make any sense on their own.

To my not inconsiderable surprise, it turned out that the story Halsall puts forward in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 does not differ quite so much as Heather made it seem. They don’t so much disagree on what happened as on why it happened and on where the emphasis should be placed. To keep it simple, Heather believes barbarian invasions are the cause the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, while Halsall argues they are an effect of the collapse. It was the weakness of the western empire that made possible the barbarian takeover of various provinces. Another major point of disagreement is on the composition of the “barbarian hordes”: Heather has argued that the more classical image of entire population groups invading the empire is largely correct, with caveats, while Halsall sees them more as proper armies rather than tribes. Ultimately these differences in intepretation however for me were less important than the sheer quality of Halsall’s history.

For my money, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 is the best one volume history on the end of the Western Roman Empire I’ve read so far. It’s not the only book on the subject you should read, because there is so much disagreement between historians about just exactly what happened and why, but it’s an excellent start. What Halsall does well is to put his history in the context of the continuing historiographically debate taking place about the Fall of Rome and how the world of the Western Roman Empire was transformed in the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Middle Ages. In this debate we’ve long since moved on from the classical ideas about huge massess of barbarian invaders overrunning the west of course, as well as from the backlash against this that got under way in the sixties with readings of history that stressed the continuities between the late Roman world and the Early Middle Ages. Halsall stands sort of midway between these two approaches.

In Halsall’s own words, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 “presents the end of the Roman Empire and the barbarian migrations as a dramatic, bewildering, massively important and comparatively short-term sequence of events, whose results were all the more dramatic and bewildering for being unintended”. It wasn’t inevitable in other words, but largely caused by the actions of the rulers and important actors within the Roman Empire responding to specific, internal crisises rather than barbaric hordes hammering the gates, but these crisises did open the door for new political entities to take over parts of the empire in the end.

Like Gaul, Halsall’s book is divided in three parts. In the first part, Halsall describes the world of the (Western) Roman Empire and its neighbours. This part also serves as an introduction to the whole problem of the Fall of Rome and the role “barbarians” played in this. He also goes into detail on the thorny question of identity, not an unimportant topic in a period where the boundaries between “barbarian” and “roman” were suddenly much more fluid. Finally, this part also shows how interconnected the Roman and barbarian worlds were.

The second part depicts in detail the period of transition, from 376 CE to 550 CE and is the most traditionally chronological part of the book. So we get the Gothic wars in 376-382 in the Eastern Empire, the crisis in the west and the sack of Rome in 410, the sidelining of the western emperors and the take over of the old provinces by new political elites, which eventually evolved into separate kingdoms. Halsall shows here how much these processes were done with the support and active involvement of the local elites, rather than having been imposed on passive Roman populations by foreign conquerors.

Finally, in the third part, Halsall surveys the post-Roman world, looking at how Roman provinces transformed themselves into Frankish, Visogoth, Lombardian kingdoms, how the political and provincial elites reinvented and reorientated themselves and how much the successor kingdoms still considered themselves to be part of a Roman world. Here he also looks at what ultimately caused the failure of the Roman empire in the west, how the loss of a monopoly of political legitimacy in the end meant that people no longer bought the pretence of empire, but went on to make their own policies as rulers no longer needed the legitimacy of Rome to rule their countries.

Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 is a tough book to digest, a book you need to read with your full attention. If you do so, it will reward you. This is a hard book to read not because Halsall makes it hard to read, but because this is a difficult subject, which he does his very best to make understandable not just for the expert, but for interested novices to the period as well.

The Early Middle Ages — Rosamond McKitterick

Published on July 8, 2011

cover of The Early Middle Ages

The Early Middle Ages
Rosamond McKitterick
308 pages including index
published in 2001

I spotted this book at the local library and got it out because it contained a contribution by Chris Wickham, whose Framing the Early Middle Ages and The Inheritance of Rome impressed me quite a lot when I read them earlier this year. The Early Middle Ages is one of the entries in The Short Oxford History of Europe and intended as an introduction to this particular period, what the editor Rosamond McKitterick called “the Boeing 767 view of early medieval Europe”, quite a different sort of book from the two Wickham books. I therefore didn’t expect to learn much news from this, but rather wanted to read it as an introduction to the other historians involved, none of whom I’d read before.

The Early Middle Ages attempts to give a broad overview of the evolution of Medieval Europe between 400 CE and 1000 CE and tries to evaluate this period on its own terms, rather than as a transition period between the Roman Empire and the “real” Middle Ages. Doing this in less than 250 pages, or some 80,000 words is a real challenge and of course means that a lot of history is elided. Ironically, if you are already familiar with the period, it helps a lot to understand some of the developments that are sketched out here, at least to put them into a chronological context. I’m not sure how much I would’ve understood of some the chapters had I come to this book as a complete novice. This feeling was the strongest in Chris Wickham’s chapter, which felt as an extract of his two books mentioned above…