War of the Wolf

War of the Wolf
pub. 2018 Bernard Cornwell
333 pages

Uhtred of Bebbanburg is called a priest-killer, a chief of devils. And yet when a distressed and scarred monk came to his gates and begged that he send help to Mercia, beset by civil war, the old warlord answered the call.  He once swore to protect a young man, then the son of his beloved friend Aetheflaed, Queen of Mercia. That young man is now an accomplished young prince, one of such potential that he might help realize King Alfred's dream: one England,  with one law, and one God.  That is a future Uhtred  does not want, for his own home is in the last pagan kingdom,  Northumbria -- the last to resist Edward, Anglorum Saxonum Rex.    And yet Uhtred is a man of oaths, and so true to his word he rides forth to rescue a man who one day by be his undoing.  When he arrives, however, he finds that the man,  though besieged by rebels,  is in no dire straights, and the monk who begged for his help is not what he seemed. Someone has lured Uhtred of Bebbanberg from his forbidding castle, but for what reason?  Although his pursuit of developments gives him greater reason to fear for the future than ever -- Edward is plainly dying, and his sons are all ambitious men who want to prove  and engorge themselves by attacking  Northumbria --  that kingdom has a more pressing enemy,   one who has already manipulated Uhtred and whose sorcerer draws men to his banner even as it frightensthose he stands against.  Though Uhtred can resist him with wiles and might, as he has taken countless enemies before, the aging war-prince also knows that fate is inexorable.   He can foil men, but not the gods.

The Saxon Stories are probably my favorite series of historical fiction to read, although after the first half-dozen the plots have gotten a little tiresome:  medieval Saxon politics punctuated with epic battles. It's great, but...people being as they are, even a diet of constant steak would grow tiresome.   In War of the Wolf, we appear to be approaching the endgame, as the poet who appeared early in the series putting Uhtred's life into verse appears here again,  complete with some borrowed Saxon poetry. Although Uhtred has an immediate enemy -- a young savage with a ferocious warband and a lust for power --  the political developments of this book also hint that the 'final battle' will be the defense of Northumbria against the south.   What made Uhtred so interesting from the start was that he was a Saxon princeling raised by the Danes, who much preferred the company of the latter but was compelled to fight against them to realize his dream of reclaiming his family land.  Uhtred in his youth was constantly torn between  his Christian countrymen of blood, and his Danish and Norse countrymen of heart. Old Uhtred has been a partially tamed wolf: one who is wild, but mostly cooperates with the king. If push comes to shove, however,  and Christian England invades Northumbria, it's almost certain that  the wolf will run wild again. 

The Arabian Nights

Tales from the Arabian Nights

“If you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely, little tales to while away the night.” Shahrazad replied, “With the greatest pleasure”:

Tales from The Arabian Nights proved an interesting challenge, because most collections of them in English are only selections, and their contents are highly variable. The first  set I started didn't mention Aladdin or Sinbad, the two stories which have the most name recognition in the west.  My reading of the Arabian nights was thus divided between two volumes, the respective translators being Hussein Hadaway and Edward William Lane.

The Arabian nights open with the framing story of two brother-kings in Persia and India visiting one another and discovering that both of their wives are cheating on them.  After retreating into the country to think things over,  they spy a demon who keeps his human wife locked in a box buried in the desert in an effort to keep her faithful,  only to have his efforts spoiled by her finding other men to sleep with  anyway. The brothers sleep with her before lamenting the unfaithfulness of womankind, and return to their respective realms, where one resolves to never keep a wife. Instead, each day he marries a virgin, sleeps with her, and then kills her after the fact. This goes on for quite some time until his vizier's daughter, Shahrahzad,  volunteers herself for marriage with a plan in mind.  Using her extensive knowledge of literature and poetry,  on her wedding night she begins telling a story that so ensnares the mind of her husband that he begs her to continue, and night after night puts the thought  of killing her away until he can hear the end.

The tales of the Arabian nights are not one long story with many chapters like War and Peace; instead, one story will unfold to have many stories inside it, or a character introduced in one story will then be followed in another story, ensnaring the reader in a multitude of threads.  They're replete with magic, of course; demons are as common as cattle, but I suspect the translation of that particular word  is awkward because the demons are not necessarily servants of a great evil power. The first one we meet is just a fellow burying his bride in a glass box in the middle of the wilderness, nothing diabolical there.  In the first collection I read, once the caliph Harun al-Rashid shows up in a story, most of the stories that follow involve his court.  (al-Rashid threatens his vizier Jafar with death every time they discover something untoward going on in the kingdom. Not exactly the happy little man from Disney's Aladdin.)  There are a lot of surprises here: Aladdin is set in China, of all places, but I suppose he could have been one of China's distant western minorities, like a Muslim  Uyghur.  Some of the stories are also far more salacious than I would have expected, given the image of Islam as straitlaced, but these stories emerge from popular culture which eludes heavy state censorship by its oral nature.

The Arabian Nights will probably rank among my favorite, or at least the most memorable, books in this Classics Club challenge.  The stories are rich in odd scenarios and characters, like the chance meeting of three one-eyed dervishes, or the discovery that the colorful fish in a pond introduced in one story are actually the citizens of a town which was cursed, and the stories-within-stories trick gets amusing, almost like a running joke. Of course each dervish, characters in a story, has to tell how they got there, and one of them has another story inside that story -- Shahrazad's ability to weave all these together is amazing.

Related:
The Canterbury Tales, G. Chaucer

The Prince

The Prince
© 1532 Niccolo Machiavelli
100 pages

Italy, circa 1500, was a rough neighborhood. Divided between powerful city-centered states and frequently threatened by outside empires,  few rulers could rest on their laurels and enjoy a prolonged peace. Even if someone outside didn't want to take over, someone inside might want to effect a little regime change.  In such an environment, Nichola Machiavelli chose to present his newly-acclaimed ruler with a gift of advice. The Prince is a brief, grimly realistic review of how states work and how best to manipulate them, drawing on Italian or Mediterranean  history for case studies.

I've grown up to associate the term Machiavellian with sinister calculation, usually of the wheels-within-wheels kind, and especially with cold-blooded calculation that doesn't hesitate to burn bridges, step on toes, and secure pointy knives in the back of friends who have outlived their use.  The Prince doesn't quite do that reputation justice,  but it's easy to see where it lies.   Most of the beginning advice is analytical, as Machiavelli reviews different types of states and ways to rise to power --   He argues that a feudal state like France is relatively easy to compromise and invade, but nearly impossible to consolidate because of the heavy local  basis of government.. An autocratic regime, on the other hand, where the weight of the state is on the ruler's shoulders and not supported or drawn from civil society, is harder to invade  because of the central power but relatively easy to subdue thereafter.   He appraises different sources of effective defense, from the best (a native, professional army) to the worst (foreign auxiliaries).   It's later on, though, that things get....interesting.

Machiavelli argues that morality has little place in politics;  politics is about what is rather than what should be. He does not equivocate: men are wicked. You cannot account on their affection, because it evaporates quickly. You cannot count on loyalty, because  everyone looks instinctively to their own interest  in the pursuit of power and wealth.   It is better, then, to be feared rather than loved -- so long as one is not hated.   Rulers should make and break their word with the same ease of a mechanic breaking down equipment to replace or mend its parts.  This should not done flippantly or obviously -- it's always important to maintain the appearance of virtue if not the substance of it --  but a prince is judged by his results and nothing else.  The best way for a prince to solidify his power,  in fact, is for him to make himself indispensable, a man whose fall would cause more trouble  than his continuing in office.  In weighing the virtues of generosity and parsimony,  Machiavelli concludes that it is far better for a prince to be faulted for stinginess than liberality:  recipients of gifts are never as grateful as they should be, and  the giving of gifts and favors only spurs resentment among those who do not benefit,  induces greater expectations for future, more fulsome giving, and empties the state's coffers. In a worst case scenario, the liberally-giving prince can earn the hatred of the people by taxing them to give them gifts they do not regard as favors but rather as entitlements. All  this advice is not intuitive: while one might expect advice to a dictator to urge disarming the rabble so they don't protest, Machiavelli instead maintains that keeping the population armed is a wiser choice. A ruler who disarms his subjects broadcasts his distrust of the people, and so cultivates their contempt. The strength of the ruler lays in his ability to defend against threats, and an armed populace is the best means of doing so.

The Prince has all kinds of related advice in it, from choosing wise-but-not-too-wise counsel, to squelching conspiracies. Some of the advice has modern application which anyone would applaud, like the avoidance of  sycophants and foreign auxiliaries (how much money did DC waste in Afghanistan trying to create a native security force?).  Some of this is material which I think we all suspect but rarely want to admit -- like the necessity for leaders to appear decisive and strong even if they are internally conflicted.  That can easily lead us into folly if leaders focus too much on appearances rather than reality, but it is possible to change one's mind in light of growing evidence and still appear decisive.  None of us would want to live in states where leaders lie and manipulate the people, but judging by the popularity of shows like House of Cards,  we suspect we do already.   Although I would not advocate The Prince as a way to government -- I put personal stock in virtue, honor, truth, all that dated and impolitic stuff --    I suspect even good, well-intentioned people who come into power find themselves enacting its lessons as they settle into office.  The Prince has enormous value for me in its naked view of man the political creature, admitting as it does the limitations of building societies from the crooked timber of humanity.

City of Fortune

City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas
© 2012 Roger Crowley
464 pages

In the north of the Adriatic grew a city built not on land, but upon the water -- whose fortune was earned in transit, by  running the ships that connected Europe with the Orient.  Already a powerful commercial entity at the time of the Fourth Crusade, Venice's actions there would catapult her to empire -- empire based on the broken back of eastern Rome, but empire nonetheless, and she would survive near-defeat and triumph again and again until finally she met her match in the Turks. City of Fortune is a history of the Stato da Màr, the empire of the sea that existed wherever waters run.  A highly narrative history  that focuses on Venice's peak and fighting decline,  City of Fortune is a treat for students of European history as it tells the story of this most singular state.

This book was a particularly rare treat for me because I had no idea how it would end. I knew Venice was built from a swamp and maintained itself through trade, and that it was extensively involved in the crusades as the provider of transportation. I had no idea how powerful it was at its peak, however, and knew nothing of the circumstances of its decline.   The story of Venice is one not of Europe, but of the Mediterranean: Venice, the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Turks are its primary actors.   In the beginning Venice was technically a vassal of the eastern empire, commonly called the Byzantine, but  as it made its living by trade the city rarely behaved like a subordinate, frequently engaging in commerce with the constantly-attacked empire's enemies in the middle east. When the Church organized another crusade to redeem Jerusalem from the rising Turks, Venice would become the key agent in derailing the crusade, ultimately sending it to conquer Constantinople instead of Jerusalem, and solidifying Turkic rule in Judea instead of repelling it. Venice's entire economy and much of its citizenry were consumed by the contract with the west to transport their men and material to Jerusalem:  when the west balked at paying in full, Venice decided to use their armies to redeem its gold in other ways, by sacking some of its rival-neighbors.  When some ambiguity over the Byzantine succession presented an opportunity for regime change and rewards in gold, naturally Venice took advantage and carried the crusade toward  Constantinople. Things didn't go as planned, and....well, long story short the west conquered the city, fractured the eastern Roman empire, and left it easy pickings for the Turks as they continued to march west. 

For a time Venice would flourish in its ill-gotten gains:  from the ruins it turned its commercial holdings into a genuine empire, and the wealth of the ancients and the east would pour into Venice.  When like proud Athens it found itself in bitter wars with its neighbors, even being surrounded by a  Genoese fleet, it somehow rebounded. But  nations reap what they sow as well as individuals,  and Venice's empire of the sea was no match for the Turks' increasingly vast holdings in the middle east,  marching through Asia Minor and soon pushing around Venice for possession of islands and seaways.  Venice would attempt to organized a general European defense of the Med, but her own prideful pushiness made her a pariah -- and her attempts at lifting high the cross were laughed at, considering Venice's long history trading with Christendom's foes.   Venice would lose her military might to the Turks in battle after battle, but ultimately it was Portugal who would see the city fall from commercial dominance. Faced with the Turkic domination of the west, the closing of access to India and China, the Portuguese would find new ways east -- and  as the Age of Discovery dawned, Venice's brilliant star would dim. But that's a story for Crowley's other book, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire.


Curiously, for a century or so there existed a lovely hotel in downtown Selma modeled after the Places of the Doges in Venice.  The building was destroyed in the late sixties to  make room for city hall.  A pox on politicians!

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
© 2008 Ian Mortimer
342 pages

Within minutes of being transported to the time of King Arthur,  Mark Twain's fictional Yankee found himself arrested and facing death.  If only he'd had a copy of Ian Mortimer's Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England,  he could have avoided such peril.  Mortimer's guide is a winsome social history of the 14th century,  which covers every thing from social structure to city smells to table manners. Herein we are told what to see, what to wear, where to eat, what to do (and more importantly, what not to do -- like enjoying a bit of mutton on Fridays).  Now, it's rather improbable that you or I or anyone else will ever actually have the chance to visit the 14th century, unless we're doing it at the side of Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.  But this book's real service to the modern reader is to bring the past alive, to guide readers through a remembrance of old England-- down its crowded, jostling, feces-strewn streets, through alleys of barking vendors, past parades of solemn clergymen, into hovels and palaces and across plains where knights joust and yeomen farm -- to encounter the very real and varied stories which memory has forgotten or abused.  What a delight!

Ian Mortimer is an nigh-unparalleled host to the past, filling a wide table with a treasure of information. What aspect of life are you curious about from the medieval epoch? You will find it here. Clothing? You're covered, literally, from head to foot, from young boys to old women. (Middle-aged men are not covered too well, wearing alarmingly short doublets that show off their expansive hosiery and ridiculously pointed shoes.)   Are you interested in justice, or the miscarriage thereof? Mortimer reviews the structure of law and order, from the neighborhood tithing-man up to the king's courts.  Or perhaps you'd like to poke into medieval medicine? ...well, you can, but you shouldn't. It involves treatments of boiled puppies. One of the more interesting and unexpected chapters was on the medieval character.  Medieval men and women lived much more closer to death than we did, but this manifest itself in different ways: a macabre sense of humor, a love for fleeting beauty, and a ready tolerance of heads on pikes outside the public gates.  There are some curious omissions, like religion:   the Church's social structure appears again and again, of course, from church courts to travelers' inns runs by monks, and  the bits on custom can't avoid religious discussion, whether we're eating fish during Lent or  going to court because it's always held on this-or-that holiday. The ways people worshiped, however, are not addressed.  Obviously Mortimer couldn't cover everything, and so much is tackled that it's a minor fault -- but considering how strongly interconnected religion is with everything else, it's a curious thing to not mention.

On the whole, I was enormously  pleased with this book.  Blame it on watching Men in Tights  as a lad or playing too much Age of Empires, but the medieval epoch is one that has fascinated me  for most of my life.  I used to have a dim view of it, but was cured by encountering Frances and Joseph Gies' medieval history works, books like Life in a Medieval City and Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel.   The Gies and Mortimer's works are obviously close kin, considering how much they intersect, but the Gies wrote several social histories of that sort and weren't as pressed for space as Mortimer. He delivers an amazing amount of material in just a few hundred pages, but the strength of  this book is not merely its content. Mortimer brings alive the intimate human experiences of the medeval epoch -- the despair of  parents losing their families during the Great Plague, the  passion and tenderness of poets and courtesans, and the inescapable sense of Belonging, as peoples' social ties were everything. Mortimer is also upfront about his sources, whether they're inklings from the Canterbury Tales, or art, or formal histories, court records, that sort of thing.

I look forward to reading the rest of the books in this series, possibly in April given the English connection.

Related:
The works of Frances and Joseph Gies, especially:
Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, Life in a Medieval Village,  Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, and The Knight in History.
The Other Side of Western Civilization. Articles on various workaday aspects of the ancient and medieval world.
The Age of Faith, Will Durant

The Canterbury Tales

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

*ahem*

If you've ever glanced at my Classics Club list, you'll see Canterbury Tales sitting there, and I've regarded it as one of the tougher ones on my list -- in the same tier as the Russians,  April is the ideal month for reading the Tales, in part because it's set during April ("Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote ..."),  but mostly because April is a month I've dedicated to England for the past several years.  With its girth in mind, I began early, on March 1st.   (That marked the first day of Lent, and I was amused by the thought of reading about a pilgrimage during a time inspired by pilgrimage.)

I will note from the beginning that I did not read the tales in Chaucer's original English. My library, happily, has a 900+ page volume that presents a column of Chaucer alongside one of 'modern' English, and it was the modern English which I largely read. I often compared the two columns, reading as much as I could of Chaucer before having to take a peek at the meaning of words, and I saw enough to realize -- based on the fact that certain words were suppose to rhyme - -that Chaucerian English really did sound much different from ours.

I assume most people are aware of the general premise of The Canterbury Tales, but just in case: a large group of people on pilgrimage to Canterbury (intent on honoring Thomas a Becket) converge on an inn. Since they're all headed the same way, they decide to engage in a little friendly competition: each person will spin a couple of tales there and back again, and when they all return to the inn they will decide who gave the best story, and all pitch in to give that person a free meal.  Such is the General Prologue,  after which various personalities step forward to give a story. The stories vary in length and in mood, as do the storytellers; some are noblemen, like Knights; others are commoners,  some are women, some are members of religious orders.  Some of the stories are noble, some tragic, some sad, and some very silly.

Rather than reviewing Chaucer (rather like reviewing Homer!), I want to share a couple of general comments and then recap some of the more memorable stories from the first half of the Tales, when I was still taking notes.  I was surprised by the varied settings of the stories; some are set as far afield as Russia, Syria, and Greece. As with The Merrie Adventures of Robin Hood, there are grievances aplenty against the landed nobility, including the church.  Lastly, while I've heard much about the medieval cult of courtly love, I never appreciated how fantastically silly medievals were for romance until I read through some of this preposterous goings-on.

And now, recaps of a few more memorable tales, complete with a moral:


Knight's Tale:  Two cousins imprisoned together fall in love with the same woman, and are violently jealous even though they're in a tower and there is zero chance of them courting her.    Naturally one escapes and the other is pardoned, and upon pursuing the girl they meet in a field and start fighting. Who should discover them but the king who imprisoned them in the first place, who -- persuaded by the girl, who turns out to be his sister -- allows them to meet one year hence, with their respective armies, and enter into trial by combat to see who shall win her hand.

The moral:   Finders keepers.

The Miller's Tale:  One woman is pursued by two men while still married to a third. The story involves two occasions of rear ends being kissed by mistake.

The moral: Wait until daylight to kiss people.

The Clerk's Tale:  A King is pressed by his people to marry and decides to marry a beautiful and virtuous peasant.  Despite her character, wisdom, and beauty, the King is constantly suspicious of her and inflicts a series of Job-like tests upon her which amount to (1) making her believe he's killed her children,  (2) making her believe he's going to annul their union and marry someone less controversial, and (3) having her PLAN THE NEW WIFE'S WEDDING.   When the wedding guests arrive, and lo! The "bride" is actually her long-lost daughter, with long-lost son in tow,  everyone enjoys a happily-ever-after moment. (Instead of "What the heck, Dad? moment.)

The moral:   What seems like psychopathic behavior may, in twenty years, turn out to be  a convoluted plan with a happy ending.  So uh, have patience.

The Wife of Bath: After entirely too much information about her five husbands, the Wife of Bath tells the story of a Knight who raped a woman and was brought on trial to the King's court, whereupon the Queen gave him one year to  solve the question: What do women want?   Having queried high and low to no avail, the Knight resignedly begins returning to the court to meet his death, only to chance upon a horribly disfigured old woman who will give him the answer if he promises to anything she wants.   He gives the answer to the Queen and is promptly confronted by the old woman, who bids him marry her.   He resists by recounting her faults (poverty, age, etc);  she rebuts them by praising poverty, age, etc, and finally he relents to marrying her.  She then asks him:  would he rather she be old and faithful, or young and tempting to others?   He leaves the matter to her, and  she -- happy that he has ceded his judgement to hers -- decides to become both young and faithful. (Oh,  and the answer to 'what do women want?' is 'to be in charge'.)  Hurrah for...resignation...?

The moral:   Rape is evil, but if you find a witch who wants a husband, you might get away with it.

Middle English prologue read at 1:14

Lost Enlightenment

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane 
© 2015 S. Frederick Starr
618 pages

Lost Enlightenment takes readers back to a time when Central Asia was the crossroads of the world, a hub of both commercial and activity. Here are celebrated the lives of cities which, in this time, were hosts to capitals, universities, and more.  Now they are dust, at best eroded columns in a desolate landscape. In Lost Enlightenment, readers follow Starr east to Baghdad, Merv, and a few other jewels. Though he touches on the political highlights of the region between the Arab conquest and the death of Tamerlane, they are important here only as far as their role in fostering the  arts and sciences.    Although diminished slightly by the complete lack of maps -- and in Central Asia, surrounded by the great mass of Eurasia, there are precious few borders to define the area --  Lost Enlightenment is a weighty accomplishment.

Most readers have heard of the 'silk road', though much more than silk traveled its routes. The sheer bounty of thinkers and creators here, many of them polymaths and 'renaissance men'  -- though with no need for the renaissance bit.  Starr marks the beginning of this enlightened period with the Arabic invasion, but not because the Arabs came bestowing wisdom among the poor benighted natives. The area was already culturally rich and commercially sophisticated, and its geography frustrated any attempt at sustained conquests. Thus the Islamic Arabs and Central Asians of diverse ethnicities and religions --  Buddhists, Christians ,and Zoroastrians just for starters --  lived with and engaged with one another, iron sharpening iron.   There, philosophies and religions from across Eurasia came together, drawn to the trade cities of Central Asia like a savanna water hole. (They were, literally, water holes -- most were near oases). Long used to weighing opposing ideas against one another, Central Asia even tolerated (at times) freethinkers who spoke out against virtually everyone. Here, in this intellectual marketplace of ideas, this constant mental competition, the arts and science flourished -- for a time.

What caused their end?  Something as complex as a society doesn't lend itself to easy answers, and there's no shortage of little things going wrong for the area of central Asia. The most obvious agent of downfall were the Mongols, who didn't merely raid civilization: they often destroyed it utterly.  Some regions lost an estimated 90% of their population, and those who were not murdered were driven away in fear.  Genghis Khan should be condemned by all mankind if only for his destruction of Baghdad,  then a shining city upon the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, but he cut a bloody path jut getting there, leaving behind him ashes and blood-soaked dust. Khan emptied Central Asia, but even before that the arteries were hardening, people receptive to arguments made by theologian-intellectuals like al-Ghazali, who rebuked philosophical materialism in his Incoherence of the Philosophers.  This hardening meant that even when the leaders stumbled upon something revolutionary, like the printing press, it never flared into potency as it did in Europe.

Lost Enlightenment is a considerable survey, mostly intellectual and cultural with a pinch of politics. I certainly welcomed it,  knowing virtually nothing about this area. It is astonishing to hear of places like Afghanistan being hubs of civilized thought, but such is the way of history. Civilizations rise and fall, flower and perish.


* "Central Asians" seems as clumsily artificial as "Yugoslavians" , but the author uses it in lieu of anything better. I suppose it's easier than "Iranian-Turkic peoples".

Dubh-Linn

Dubh-Linn: A Novel of Viking-Age Ireland
© 2014 James Nelson
326 pages

All Thorgrim Nightwolf wanted was to go home.But the gods and Irish women have a way of...complicating things.  Thorgrim has more sense than to tangle with this benighted island and its politics, but his son Harold and his captain are another story.  Both are besotted with a woman who claims to be the heir to the Irish throne; she's so vulnerable and lovely and in need of a protective hand, what with her story of having fled a murderous and now mysteriously stabbed-and-burned husband. But Brigit is playing them like a fiddle, and what's more -- she's in a contest with the equally beautiful and equally ruthless Morrigan, who hopes to rule through her brother's claim on the throne.  As Thorgrim tries to save his brethren from themselves from these deadly wiles,  the plot develops to a final battle involving four armies,  none of which have any idea who is pulling the strings.

When I read Fin Gall, the first book in this series, I noted that the two Irish women seemed interchangeable. To a degree, that's still the case here: they're both beautiful, dangerous, and manipulative. But one is pregnant, and the other is in power.  While Nelson isn't as comedic as Cornwell, his action scenes are utterly gripping, and he's even better than Cornwell at making the environment around his characters come alive. The gloom of clouds, the mists of forests, the odor of rotting hay -- it's all very effective. So far both of his books have involved his main characters stumbling through other people's schemes, but one here was an absolute beauty. What I especially like here is a main character, Thorgrim, whose main concern is protecting and guiding his son as he assumes more responsibilities and perils of manhood.

Definitely will continue in this series.  And Cornwell is coming again in November with the Flame Bearer!

Related:

• Vikings, season 3. (Trailer)  Ragnar's son Bjorn is rapidly becoming not just a man, but a leader of men. Also, dangerous women aplenty, especially in  Kwenthrith. Holy cow. (Also, they attack Paris and it is BRUTAL.)
• The Saxon Stories series, Bernard Cornwell. Lots of Saxon-Dane fighting and bountiful humor.
• Leofric, Sword of the Angles. An story of Angle politics from when they were still migrating into Britain. 

Inferno

Inferno
created 14th century Dante Alighieri
translated © 2002 Anthony Esolen
528 pages

If Dante's Inferno is to be believed, Hell is mostly populated by Italians.  The first piece in the Divine Comedy, Inferno takes the reader down into the depths of the infernal abyss,  through ring after ring of the damned. Fire is the exception, not the rule down here;  Hell is a vast geography of misery.  The ground is rocky and steep, the air filled with cold and lashing rain, or noxious fumes.  The reader, taking Dante's place as he wanders off the straight roads of life into the wilderness, is guided through Hell in safety by Virgil -- the greatest of all classical poets.

 Inferno contains two things in abundance:  classical allusions and Italian politics.  The world of the Inferno is peopled by characters, beasts, and places that draw on the rich vocabulary of the classical tradition. We see here not only the 'virtuous pagans' hanging around a medieval version of the Asphodel Plains, denied entry into paradise but not damned either, but more than a few heroes of the canon. Odysseus is here, condemned as a liar -- and so is Brutus, a traitor in the gnawing maw of an angry devil.  My original intent was to read the Inferno as part of a series of medieval history and medieval literature -- and considering the amount of Florentine politics here, that may have been helpful. Dante can't so much as move without tripping over a corrupt pope, an exposed friend, or some hapless Florentine giving a  dire warning about impending civil war. (And I do mean tripping -- people are stuck into the ground head first, or trapped in a frozen river with only their heads exposed..) The ranks of the traitors are especially Italian-rich. A little familiarity with medieval cosmology helps in understanding the text -- the idea that the universe is a series of spheres, each level nesting inside the other.  Dante also displays an intriguing imagination, creating poetic punishments. (Schismatics who create division within the church or society are themselves divided with an axe to the head.) At the bottom of the pit is a frozen wasteland, with the greatest of traitors entrapped by darkness and ice. The artic winds that create the ice are created by Satan's wings, constantly beating in his eternal attempt to rise.

When the year's young in season, 
and the spray washes the sun beams in Aquarius
and the nights dwindle south toward half a day
When the frost  paints a copy on the ground
of her white sister's snowy image, but
Her feather's sharpness doesn't last for long [...]   (Canto 24)

 Esolen errs on the side of accuracy rather than rhyme with his translation,  but he does achieve a certain lyric quality and uses footnotes judiciously, creating a text neither confusing nor cluttered. Esolen's appendices are unusually rich, containing textually similar lines from The Aenid, text from the non-canonical "Vision of St. Paul", which describes different  degrees of punishments for sinners, and theological writings from Aquinas and Boniface that would have informed Dante's view.  More extensive notes follow the end of Canto XXXIV, but of course that's not the end of the story -- it continues on the mount of Purgatory.

Fin Gall

Fin Gall: A Novel of Viking-Age Ireland
© 2013 James Nelson
290 pages

When a Danish longboat happened upon a small Irish craft on the rough seas , it found more than quick booty.  Onboard the boat was the Crown of the Three Kingdoms, a priceless artifact more precious for its political import than for its jewels. Whomever was granted the Crown gained the allegiance of the major kingdoms of Ireland; what price in gold or influence would the Irish tribes pay to have it restored?  Alas for the crew of the Red Dragon, the Irish weren't the only ones fighting among themselves-- for Dubh-linn, a booming Danish ship-fort, has been taken by the Norwegians!  So begins Fin Gall, a story of medieval war and adventure amid frantic infighting.

 In a surprisingly crowded field of Viking fiction,  Fin Gall distinguishes itself through its Irish setting and the well-crafted naval scenes.   The fractious nature of Ireland, made worse by competing Scandinavian clans crafting alliances with and against the Irish tribes, provides the basis of the plot. One Irish lord has been named chief, another resents it; one Norse lord wants to dominate Ireland,  an underling resents it;  much backstabbing ensues. The Red Dragons spend the book tripping over entangled alliances,  brawling, and hustling away.   The lead character, Thorgrim Nightwolf, is an interesting sort, so cunning that his men think he can transform into a wolf and gain a foretaste of the future through his dreams. His motives throughout the novel are refreshingly decent:  though he has come to Ireland to raid and plunder, he spends most of the book trying to keep his son Harold and an elder relation safe from Norwegians, Irish princes, and women. There's a lot of pungent boasting, though not quite as riotous as Cornwell's, and two back-to-back sex scenes which little changes but the name of the Irish lass involved.  Those Irish ladies are the weakest point here: they both encounter captive Danes, both help them escape for private motives, and both wind up randomly sleeping with the Dane in question.  The play-by-play is not especially awkward, but anything beyond "And they went to bed" is more information than I care to read.   After much danger has been out-lived, through both wit and luck, the book ends with a nice hook for the next novel: Dubh-Linn.

I'll definitely be pursuing this series, as both of its 'hooks' are well-set for me. Most Viking fiction I've read takes place far inland, but this had a multitude of maritime scenes, and they made the savage sea really come alive. I also appreciated the way the Irish were handled here in general,  aside from the two women who blurred together.  They will probably become more distinct in further books, especially considering that one is a princess with a Danish in the oven.



Related:

• Leofric: Sword of the Angles, S.J. Arnott
• The Saxon Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell

Warriors of the Storm

Warriors of the Storm
© 2016 Bernard Cornwell
320 pages

"May God strike me dead this moment if I lie!"
I drew Serpent-Breath, her blade scraping loud and fast on her scabbard's throat.
"Lord Uhtred!" Æthelflaed called out in alarm. "No!"

Uhtred of Bebbanburg is a lord of war, a Saxon prince raised by conquering Danes, a pagan who nontheless serves the sole remaining Christian kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia.  He is a man loyal not to tribes nor institutions, but to his friends, and for love of a woman -- Æthelflaed, Queen of Mercia --  he patiently waits for an opportunity to invade Dane-held Northumbria and return to his ancestral home. It has been a quest long frustrated by the constant scheming of both Danish and Saxon politics, but now....now, the Danes are quarreling, the Saxons are united ,and NOW is the time to seize Northumbria.  So naturally,  the Irish invade.

It's not really the Irish, of course, just a few hundred mercenaries accompanying an even larger horde of Danes who have recently quit Ireland in favor of easier takings and better fields in Britain.  Warriors of the Storm opens with an invasion and will see Uhtred again taking to the field despite his age, somehow wresting defeat from death by refusing to play his enemies' games and attacking them when it is plainly suicidal. But Uhtred isn't just lucky, he's long-seasoned.  He can see weaknesses in a shield wall or a political alliance hidden from everyone else, and he's daring enough to exploit them.  So when an Irish-Danish horde invades  Mercia, by the gods he invades them right back!

I didn't expect Warriors of the Storm. In the last novel,  The Empty Throne, Uhtred was withering away from age, gravely wounded on his deathbed, seeing shades of long-dead friends beckoning him to join them in the beyond to an eternity of sacking and feasting, and leaving his son Uhtred to do some of the narration. But now...he's back! He's grey, sure, but he's not weak, and the only long-gone friends showing up are those quite alive who have just been missing a good long while.  This series is plainly tacking toward the home port, however,  featuring the dispatch of old enemies and the re-appearances of both Uhtred's oldest son, who he disowned for becoming a priest;  and his first lover and companion, Brida. Another sign of the end,  is a bit of poetry as Uhtred rescues a boy who charges into battle to save his dying father.  The circle is now complete.  

Need I give the usual praise? Dramatic prose of thunder flashing as armies trudge through the mud to meet destiny,  quick wits amusing each other in conversation, bombastic speeches and a few sly jokes.  All the usual Cornwell strengths are here, though it's a quick book so they're over more quickly. The twists and turns aren't as sharp here, possibly because once the reader has marched with Uhtred for so long, one gets used to his sudden bolts of inspiration, like paying a visit to the Irish. The book ends poised for the conclusion, however, and unlike the old man standing on death's door from last book, Uhtred appears to be going into it strong and fierce. As much as I'll miss him, it is high time he went home.

Next stop, BEBBANBURG!

Ornament of the World

Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
© 2002 Maria Rose Menocal
315 pages

        

  Ornament of the World is the story of a unique civilization in medieval Europe, one which ultimately disintegrated but left a hopeful legacy. For hundreds of years, Europe hosted a distinctly Islamic polity: Andalusia, the last stand of the Umayyads. The inheritors of Muhammad’s empire, they were driven out by a palace coup and reestablished themselves across the Mediterranean, building a glorious realm of their own.  They brought the best of an ascendant civilization and combined it with the remnants of the classical world; theirs was a world of fusion which allowed not only Muslims, but Christians and Jews to flourish and contribute as well. Ornament covers a thousand years of Spanish history, mixing literature, art, and politics to deliver with flourish the story of a lost but golden age.  Though heavily romanticized, the author’s  lovestruck tone makes it an enticing introduction to medieval Spain.

 In subject and intent, Ornament is quite similar to A Vanished World, but much tidier. It begins, for instance,  with the rise of Islam, and from there moves forward in the time-honored chronological fashion. Following the death of Muhammad, leadership of the Islamic polity fell to a series of caliphs, one of whom – Ali – was especially consequential. Under his reign, the Umayyad caliphate,  Islam expanded in leaps and bounds. Success ever breeds resentment, however and Ali found himself murdered along with much of his family. A minor relation fled to Spain and there begins the story of Andalusia. Amid the first Muslim civil war, however, the princeling didn't come alone. He and his followers found Iberia ripe for the picking,  and in a matter of time had conquered most of the peninsula.  "Woe to the vanquished!" was not the case, however, as the resident Christian and Jewish populations found themselves officially protected by the new state- - for a small consideration, of course.  Al-andalusia and its capital of Cordoba would go so resplendent that a later successor would presume to claim himself the Caliph, the princeps of Islam..  Islamic politics would be their undoing however; another faction would rebel against the reigning Abassids and make their stronghold in Tunis, just a stone’s throw from Iberia.  When the Umayyads later sought help from the north African Muslims against the resurgent Christians, their allies found their Spanish brethren much too decadent and proceeded to wreck and take over the place, Fourth Crusade style.

The loss of unity following the Umayyads did not destroy the creative culture they established, however; instead, leading city-states competed to out-do the other to restore that glory, just as after the fall of Rome states like Venice, Genoa, and Florence competed against the other. While the Italians engaged in petty wars and magnificent frescoes, the Moors engaged in petty wars and mesmerizing poetry.  Menocal has done prior work on Arabic literature, so not surprisingly language, prose, and verse receive a lot of attention.  The emphasis on literature extends to the Christians and Jews;  Hebrew adopted elements of Arabic verse and flourished in its own right. This was a period of intercultural collaboration;  in Toledo, for instance, Arabic and Jewish scholars worked on translating Aristotelian texts, which then drifted into Europe, replete with commentaries. Just as Muslim mosques and fortresses in Iberia began with Roman bones -- so did resurgent Christian powers adopt elements of Arabic architecture, even in areas where the Umayyads and their successors never reigned.  Eventually the Castille-Aragon alliance would overwhelm the predominately Moorish south, effecting the Reconquest

Ornament compares well to its sister-rival, Vanished World;  for instance, the Muslim sack of Compostela,  which appeared rather randomly in Vanished, features here as part of the Umayyads’s  Iberian downfall.The same general who leads a military coup against them also attacked the Christian shrine. This same episode also accounts for the contrasting versions of St. James – one meek and mild, the other the Muslim-slayer.  After his shrine was desecrated and his pilgrims murdered, the peaceful James returned to have his revenge. Hell hath no fury like a saint scorned!  This covers nearly a thousand years of history in a mere three hundred pages, though, and a lot of that is taken up with swooning over literature and poetry;  this is utterly enjoyable, of course, but it does meant that the political sketch is an outline at best, so this is by no means a complete story. It is a loving tribute to the life of art and philosophy that found a home in Islamic Spain, however.

Sword of the Angles

Leofric: Sword of the Angles
© 2015 S. J. Arnott
412 pages

The days are dark for Angeln. Surrounded by enemies and increasingly depopulated as her people flee to more peaceful fields in Britain, her king has seen fit to enlist one-time enemies as allies against the Danes.  The outlook for Leofric is especially grim; his father is missing on campaign,  and himself so sickly that his grave has already been dug.  When the entire folk gathers at the king's city as a show of force to convince the Danes to keep their distance, matters grow far worse. A personal  grudge leads to a bloodfeud, and Leofric finds himself kinless, destitute, and declared outlaw. His village burned, he must flee to the wilderness and find refuge among others left for dead. In time the sickly boy will find the courage and strength needed to claim vengeance for his murdered uncle and restore his family's lands. 

Leofric: Sword of the Angles is a hero's-journey story set in dark-age Europe, at a time when Rome is dead but not buried, an age where the woods are dark and deep and home to monsters that require Beowulfs to slay them.  War looms, though the combat of Leofric is almost strictly personal, limited to Leofric and a companion or two fleeing, fighting, or ambushing those who will not be happy until the young man is dead.  Although the author acknowledges in his notes section that information on the Angles prior to their arrival in Britain is hard to come by, gaps are readily filled in by borrowing cultural references to the Franks and other Germanic tribes, and what details are available are worked in craftily; there is no awkward lecturing here, only a man pursuing his fate against a host of trouble. Some pieces of narrative are particularly mesmerizing, like the moment when Leofric's "dragon" awakes. This is his blood-heat, a surge of adrenaline and battle rage that allows him evade death and turn it on his enemies.  Although he triumphs in part by the end, some unfinished business --an enemy who escaped to Britain  -- begs for a sequel, and so do I. Considering that Bernard Cornwell's Uhtred is on death's door these days (hovering about in the doorframe, actually),  I would welcome more Leofric! 

Related:
Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories, especially #3, Lords of the North

Vanished World

A Vanished World: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval Spain
© 2005 Chris Lowney
320 pages

Vanished World sets medieval  Spain before the reader with the warning; we may be blessed or cursed by emulating its example. The Iberian peninsula is the very perimeter of western Europe, within a stone's throw of both the vast continent of Africa and the looming expanse of the Atlantic. Despite its apparent remoteness, Iberia was throughout the ages in the very thick of the action --  the pitch wherin civilizations clashed. In an earlier age, Rome and Carthage sparred; a thousand years later,  Visigoths and Muslims fought.  The invasion of Spain in 711 by the Umayyad caliphate made the former province of the Romans, then yet another ruin ruled by nominally Christian barbarians, into an outpost of a far larger, far more sophisticated civilization, where it enjoyed a golden age that was for Europe a preview of the Renaissance and enlightenment.  Here the gifts of the Greeks were preserved and built on; here  both Islam and Rabbinic Judaism grew in new directions.  Vanished World is a brief  and romantic history of medieval Spain, one brimming with hope that we can all just get along.

Until the triumph of Ferdinand and Isabella, who united their kingdoms and created a state commanding the peninsula, Iberia was home to a multitude of peoples and minor states. While many were drawn by commercial cross-traffic, others came to carve out kingdoms, like the Visigoths and their successors from Africa, the Umayyads. Iberia was fractured and destitute, lingering in a winter of civilization that was chased away by an eastern wind. Unlike the barely literate Goths,  the Muslim invaders were part of a vibrant, culturally rich civilization on the ascendant. Sweeping over the peninsula, they infused it with new life, creating a social order that allowed their new subjects to participate in it.  Although the calpihate would falter after the death of its leader, breaking into squabbling branches that were brushed aside by a Castillian comeback,  it reigned for several hundred years and created an environment that brought the best of human passion, creativity, and intelligence to the surface.  After an introduction which establishes an outline of Spain's political history.  most of the book is given over to sections which explore different aspects of the civilization that prevailed between the fall of the Goths and the rise of Castille.  These include chapters on the growth of science, as Muslim and Jewish scholars built upon Greek knowledge and advanced it considerably, as well as some on religious revolution; the Judeo-Muslim mystical traditions both flourished in the Iberian setting. Downey's vision for the book is made apparent in contrasting several pairs of legends. The patron saint of Spain. St. James, was remembered alternatively as either a humble and kind apostle who spread the Gospel to the furthest reaches of the continent, or as Santiago the Muslim-Slayer, who was said to have appeared and led a Christian army to victory. A similar contrast is offered by the Song of Roland, depicting Charlemagne as a Christian warrior fighting the fiendish Muslims, and the story of El Cid, who found honor and friendship among the ranks of both.   Christian and Muslim need not spar, Downey writes, offering various examples of cross-cultural pollination and episodes of historical cooperation, as when Christian and Muslim powers joined together to fight...other Muslim powers. 

Although the subject is fascinating and I wanted badly to like it, in truth the book is limited. Downey is a very casual historian,  chatty and informal.  That can work to a degree, but sometimes retards a reader's ability to take the text seriously. Assuming one is completely oblivious to intellectual life in the medieval epoch, Vanished World will be quite exciting. Personally, Spangenburg and Moser's history of science covered this ground too well for me to take much here, though I did find the bits about Sufism and Kabbalah of interest.  The history is also heavily sanitized in view of Downey's objection. It's a laudable goal, of course, and he does mention a few trifling incidents of unpleasantness, but haranguing Christians for the Crusades is hardly fair when no mention of the Battle of Tours is made.   Sixty years after the conquest of Spain by Moorish armies, the Umayyads advanced on France itself, meeting defeat scarcely 150 miles from Paris.  Humans will never cease to war with one another, though, regardless of religion; Christians may fight Muslims, but as this and countless other books demonstrate, they will happily dig into one another as well. We're a hot-blooded species given to destruction.  That considering, it's nice to review the many ways we are capable of working together, as Downey does here,  touching on science, art, medicine, and even the invention of cowboys.                

Look for a future comparison to Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. 

  

                                               

The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses
© 1996 Alison Weir
496 pages

The wars of the roses sounds like a gardening contest run amok, but no genteel horticulturists were involved.  The strange appellation refers to a series of dynastic crises in 15th century England, punctuated by mass violence, which leave one dubious about the merits of hereditary monarchy.  The "war" was never declared, and rarely prolonged: at most there were some sixteen weeks of fighting throughout the span of several English kings.  The version of this history I remember faintly from schoolboy days is that the wars erupted near the end of the Hundred Years War and ended with the rise of the Tudors. As Alison Weir's much more thorough political history indicates, however, the succession crises hastened the end of the English in France by keeping them busy bloodying the fields at home.

The story begins with a despot, Richard II, who ruled so badly that the peers of the realm revolted several times before one of his cousins decided to assume command of the family business, throwing dear Rich in prison and leaving him to die. (Not that killing him did any good, as the new king would be bothered with Elvis-like reports of the ousted monarch surfacing and raising an army for decades thereafter.),A loyal opposition being completely alienated and threatened with violence before taking preemptive action and deposing the monarch turns out to be a recurring theme in this narrative.  The new king, Henry IV, would die an early death, weakened by constant resistance and rebellion to his reign. His boy Harry was a godsend for the family, achieving a magnificent victory at Agincourt and eventually humbling the French before dying of dysentary. It is during the reign of his son, Henry VI, that the wars truly take flower.  Little Henry was a baby, and infants are notoriously bad at political decisions: the rule of England was left to politicking peers,  and their divisive bickering would continue to hold sway long after the king had reached his majority. Throughout his reign,  Harry's dismal successor would be dominated either by the nobles or his wife -- a charming princess of Anjou who ruled as though she were the Queen of France. She might have made a superb  French monarch were she not in England, surrounded by men who failed to appreciate being told what to do by a haughty French woman.  Even worse, the king began to have spells of insanity. As court bickering and royal bungling saw England  sink into financial destitution and lose all of its continental territory,  one previously faithful servant decided enough was enough. The king was a catastrophe, even when he was lucid -- he had to go.

When Richard II was made to abdicate his throne, he had an heir apparent -- one who was completely ignored by Henry IV's ambition, and almost forgotten. His heirs knew who they were, however, and one was Richard, Duke of York, sometimes-Lord Protector of England during Henry VI's less-sane periods.  The "sometimes" is crucial, because the duke was frequently on the outs with the Queen's court party, and where the queen was concerned being on the out sometimes meant that you vanished at sea until someone stumbled upon your beached corpse. Rather than falling to that fate during one especially hairy period, York took up arms against his sea of troubles and things get deucedly interesting.   In the turmoil that followed, eventually the Sorry Sixth and his French bride would be run off, and York's son Edward crowned king.   But the story only picks up from there, for he too would be undermined by his wife  -- a common woman he became obsessed about. Not only did he marry her in private and then surprise the court with her, but he insisted on inserting her family into English politics, arranging marriages between her kin and the peers'.   This caused a great deal of aggravation and a great many bloody battles.

At the book's height, things are gloriously complicated.  One king, Henry, is in prison, and his wife exiled to France.   Their existence is a fixation for intrigue by the kings of France and Burgundy, who are delighted to be able to meddle in English politics: after all, the English virtually annexed France by manipulating their own succession crises between the Dukes of Orleans and Burgundy for the French throne. Turnabout is fair play. Despite needing to consolidate his newly-taken hold over English affairs, Edward instead weakens his position by alienating the faithful men who supported him in ousting out the former queen, and in desperation some consider overturning their late friend-turned-king and sticking Henry back on. All this scheming is creates an edge-of-the-seat drama,  even when Weir sometimes makes the multiplicity of Henrys worse by referring to "the king" generically when there's several kings running about.  She draws the tale to an end before the ascension of the Tudors, but the afterword indicates the complete stupidity of everything that has preceded. After all that bloodshed and mental energy exhausted, the silly ass who prevails in the end dies soon thereafter, followed by yet another monster.  One of the early battles, Towton, consumed so many lives that it was proportionately worse than even the Battle of the Somme.

Weir succeeds in creating order, and a riveting story, out of a thicket of English politics. It's information-dense, but her hand keeps it from being overwhelming.

Agincourt

Agincourt: Henry V and the  Battle that Made England
better subtitled in the UK as The King -- The Campaign -- The Battle
© 2006 Juliet Barker
464 pages

In the fourteenth century, nation-states as we know them did not exist. There was a England, and a France, but their borders were more fluid -- and entangled.  The English crown held title to much of France through marriage and ancestry, and because the English royal house descended from a Franco-Norman duke,  the king of England was technically a vassal of France.  This created the kind of tension  released only with knights and massed formations of archers: the Hundred Years War, a series of conflicts between two nations and several royal houses.  One of the most memorable episodes of the war was the upset at Agincourt, in which a small English force triumphed against a larger French array. In Agincourt, Juliet Barker tells the story of the battle in such

Henry V's motives for invading France were varied. The old claim of Edward III which inaugurated the Hundred Years War was not his; Henry could barely claim kingship of England, let alone France. His own father was a naked usurper who died early fighting resistance to his claim, and though the cloud of scandal was mostly lifted by the time the handsome young Harry succeeded, it hovered still.  France needed addressing, however: it remained a nuisance to English interests on the Continent, not only around Aquitaine but in Flanders.  England's prosperity came from trade, lately the Channel had become dangerous for shipping. Securing the coast would make it easier for England to smother piracy, and if the lush interior of France became a crown possession, so much the better!

It was not to be, however.  Initial hopes for a display of overwhelming force against the French countryside fell apart during a siege of a French harbor, Harfleur. The port was taken eventually, but its defenders' obstinacy cost the English army dearly. By the time the gates opened,  the invading force's strength had been sapped by disease. His numbers too much for the battered city to sustain, Henry decided to retire to the English held-port of Calais. He could limp to safety only through a country of enemies, whose watch over the rivers prevented a quick dash north.  After watching the dwindling army for several days, the French finally checked the king's march near the tiny village of Azincourt. Grossly outnumbered and weakened by sickness, the English should have been crushed. Instead, the Battle of Agincourt turned out to be one of the greatest upsets in western history. The  section on the actual battle isn't enormous, this is a story of why Agincourt happened and why it was important, and while the full story of the battle is delivered with talent, this isn't a military history.  The reasons for victory are there:   Henry drawing the French into battle on ground of his choosing, in an area that undermined the French cavalry and allowed the English to make the most of their excellent longbows -- and when the French desperately pushed through the mud and rain of death to assail the archers,  the English knights pounced!    In later campaigns Henry would achieve his aims (briefly) against the French crown; history would see them reversed, however, squandered by less heroic successors. No one save historians can remember the Treaty of Troyes -- but Agincourt has achieved greater fame. Not only did it save Henry from capture or death, but the miraculous upset seemed to impress upon the English that regardless of the spurious actions of his father, Harry was God's own anointed.  Why else would he have been spared? It was a triumph of not just arms, but belief.

There are undoubtedly more detailed military histories of the battle, but Barker's narrative gives the reader both a heroic champion whose surprising victory comes as a delight, and a lot of background information on early 15th-century English society and trade. For an introduction to the battle, it's quite serviceable and easy reading.

In a Dark Wood

In a Dark Wood
© 1998 Michael Cadnum
256 pages

In a Dark Wood tells the story of Robin Hood, the merry thief of Sherwood Forrest, from the perspective of the sheriff whose peace he breaks. Sir Geoffrey of Nottinghamshire may be the High Sheriff, but he’s no villain given to dressing in black, kicking children, and shaking down widows for the king’s tribute.  He is a dutiful functionary of the Realm, obliged to administer the king’s business. Before him lives are weighed in the balance, arguments are settled, taxes taken in. It’s  soul-smothering work, really, and his wife is no relief, taken up as she is with a handsome falconer.  When a prankster takes up residence in the forest flanking the king’s High Way, demanding tolls, Geoffrey is at first annoyed,  and then – interested.  This Robin is no simple thief. He doesn’t seem to be interested in taking great hauls, sabotaging the king’s interest, or persecuting innocent travelers; he’s out to have fun. He must be stopped, of course; the king’s law is perfect and none who thumb their noses at it can get away scot-free.  But Geoffrey shies from becoming the man’s ruin, just as an overtaxed man might feel a pang of regret after suddenly roaring at a giddy child to stop singing. There is something wrong in the silence that erupts.  There are no heroes here, no villains, only men crushed by the burden of responsibility and those free of it finding ways to rescue one another from meaninglessness. It’s an interesting take on Robin Hood that restores the sheriff to his full humanity.

The Empty Throne

The Empty Throne
© 2015 Bernard Cornwell
320 pages

Uhtred of Bebbanburg is an impossible man. A Saxon prince raised by Danes,  he  has nonethelessbeen the architect of a great redoubt against them, the defender of Wessex a hundred times over.  A lone wolf in a court of civilized dogs, Uhtred is despised by the court, but admired by its warriors.  In his life, Uhtred has wrestled victory from the jaws of ruin a dozen times; he has presided over the ruin of armies that threatened devestation. In a country increasing ruled by religion and law, Uhtred is a pagan;  he is primal, a man loyal to blood and oaths, a man who lives life lustily. Time and again, Uhtred's irrational allegiances to people have gotten him into trouble, but they have led him to greatness. Now,after a life of strife, of love and war, he is aged, battle-worn, and sick -- but fate tasks him still.

The Empty Throne sees Uhtred struggling valiantly to defend his friends and innocents yet again, fighting not only against the energetic scheming of men now far younger than him, but against his own mortality. His body carries many wounds, some fresh, and one which refuses to hill. But the chief of Mercia has just died, and if the schemers get their way the kingdom could fall into Danish hands, and a woman Uhtred loves (always the women with Uhtred and Sharpe!)  relegated to a fate worse than death: a nunnery.  So he and his own must gird themselves up one more time and fight the good fight -- scheming, fighting, sailing -- even if it takes them into the great unknown: Wales. 

The battles in Empty Throne are more like brawls,  much smaller in scale (aside from a fleet being set on fire); the book is a prelude to the great climax of the Saxon-Norse struggles. What volume follows this will presumably see the end of Uhtred's career, too, given the many premonitions of death featured here, from Uhtred's son becoming a narrator to visions of long-dispatched foes and friends inviting Uhtred to dine with them in the beyond.  Unlike Uhtred, Cornwell's skills haven't diminished in writing:  his flair for the dramatic seems especially pronounced in these Saxon books, perhaps given the cultures'  devotion to oratory, or the sheer fun of writing Vikings.  Uhred spends most of this book wearily trying to sort schemes  while fighting pain, but even so there's humor -- witness his schooling his son in the fine art of backhanding priests.  (Uhtred has bearishly swatted clerics in virtually every book of this series; surely Cornwell's made a running joke out of it.)   Despite the contemplation of death,  there is the promise of life:  not only does his daughter Stiorra has a will of iron, like the blade she uses to dispatch a would-be assailant, but like her father she has embraced the old ways of heathenry. She's a genuine shield-maiden, and I hope she appears in the finale.)   Even once he goes to rest his bones in the hollowed ground of his forefathers (as yet unrecaptured), that spirit of Uhtred, that fierce strength, that awesome wildness -- will live on.





[2015 Reading Challenge: A Book Published This Year COMPLETED 1/52]

Sailing from Byzantium

Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
© 2005 Colin Wells
368 pages           

       Isaac Asimov referred to Byzantium as a forgotten empire, lost and dismissed to the western mind as a decayed remnant of a once-great power. But Byzantium had a greatness of its own that inspired civilizations around it, even its enemies. Sailing from Byzantium  examines the literary, political, scientific, and other influences the Eastern empire had on the western Renaissance,  Eastern Europe, and even the nascent Islamic civilization.  Though somewhat impaired by being name-dense and not giving sketch of the Byzantines in brief, Sailing  does deliver a sense of the eastern empire as an inspirational fount during the long millennium that followed its western antecedent's demise.  The three civilizations drinking from its waters took different elements of the Empire home with them, with some sharing; to the Italians, Byzantium was the temple of Greek civilization, its scholars the teachers of the first medieval humanists, including by extension Erasmus.  Islam cut its imperial teeth when it seized some of the East's richest provinces, and  Byzantine notions about politics, law, and the aesthetics of royalty became incorporated into the Islamic civilization as it came of age. This lessened somewhat after the conquest of Persia, pursued after Constantinople proved too tough to crack.  The Russians, too, were initially rivals of their southern neighbors, making their introduction with a good old-fashioned Black Sea raid;   having common enemies and rivals, however, pushed the two together, and  as the tribe of Russians matured into a state of their own, their religion was that of Byzantium's. Later, once Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, Russia would even claim to be the inheritors of the Empire; just as it moved from Rome to Constantinople, so it now had moved to the third Rome, Moscow.  The marriage of a Russian potentate to a Byzantine princess even attempted to give such a claim practical validation. In examining the Byzantine influence on these three powers in turn, Wells not only demonstrates the richness of its culture, but pries open worlds probably mysterious to western readers,  connecting exotic history with some slightly more familiar. It's quite fascinating, though readers would be better served reading an overview of Byzantine history before launching in. 

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc: A Spiritual Biography
© 1998 Siobhan Nash-Marshall
176 pages

In 1429, France in her darkest hour was startled by the sudden appearance of a shining star -- a teenage girl from a minor village, wielding a standard and claiming that God had ordered her to  lead the nation to victory. The Hundred Years War,  the long struggle between the French and English nobility over Guyenne, Normandy, and the French crown, had left France seemingly nothing but a lost dream.  France had no leader; her last king had gone mad, his queen denounced the heir, and now civil war between the Dukes of Orleans and Valois paved the way for English triumph. But Joan answered the call, raised an army, and within twenty years the war was over. She is one of the most remarkable characters in European history, and this brief biography is a highly complimentary if slightly restrained story of her life.  Though it avoids being too mythical -- the author discounts stories of animals sounding off in happiness at her birth, and does not attempt to make her out to be a poor peasant girl when her father was a fairly well-established landowner --  it avoids being critical as well. The voices and the miracles attributed to Joan -- her foresight in ordering men to move a bit to the left so they wouldn't be stricken by a cannonball, her raising an infant to life long enough to be baptized so its wee soul would be saved, and not linger in limbo -- are repeated here, without either affirmation or skepticism.  [Author]'s focus is on Joan's drive and intelligence,  whpch imparted courage to the French people and struck a blow to build a victory upon. Even when in the custody of her enemies, assailed and jeered at by a hostile court, she maintained  the presence  of mind and the strength of spirit to deliver enigmatic answers that mocked their wrath --  the fury of a band of warriors, priests, and kings focused on a teenage girl.  [Author] provides solid context, however, demonstrating how the Hundred Years War was less an English invasion of France, and more of a French civil war, and an exercise of feudal peculiarities in which the English king was a vassal to the French king, despite legitimately controlling more of France (through inheritance and marriage) than le roi himself.  It's not the strongest of biographies, but delivers a feeling of Joan that is saintly, strong, and sweet.

Related:
Joan of Arc: Legend and Reality, Frances Gies