Medieval Books

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Jack Weatherford

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 127 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Genghis Khan: benevolent despot? 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the most engaging books on a historical figure that I've ever read. I like the fact that Jack Weatherford boldly states a radical theory --that Genghis Khan and the Mongols literally gave birth to the modern world. When I first saw the title, I was a little taken aback. How could such a dramatic fact be so little known? I was already aware that the Mongols had created the largest empire in history, but not about their many innovations and contributions to the world as we know it.

Appreciating this book and Weatherford's very lively style does not mean I agree with everything in it. I would not presume to argue historical facts, but it seems that Weatherford is highly biased in favor of the Mongols and goes out of his way to compare them favorably to others, especially the Europeans of the time. I prefer an openly biased history to a dull, pseudo-objective one (as pure objectivity probably does not exist), but it's still good to be aware of the biases.

As Weatherford explains it, Genghis Khan was the first true universalist. His empire had the distinct feature of allowing conquered peoples the right to keep their native religions and, at times, even their political systems, so long as they submitted to Mongol rule. Most likely this was done out of a shrewd understanding of politics and power rather than any commitment to a liberal world culture in the modern sense. Still, the result was that trade routes opened up, cultures communicated to an unprecedented degree and disciplines from medicine to warfare advanced as different ethnic groups pooled their knowledge. The Mongols even used paper money, which certainly made trade more efficient and helped to create the modern world economy.

Weatherford presents Genghis Khan as a noble, heroic figure -a kind of benevolent despot. I could not help but wonder how much of Genghis' character and the events of his life are conjectural. Much of the information in this book, as Weatherford tells us, is based on documents only recently translated into modern languages. Scholars have had a hard time over the centuries piecing together Mongol history, as a lot of what we know about them was written by their enemies. I am no historian, but this book did not make clear to me how much we should believe concerning the details of Genghis Khan's life. Historical figures tend to be mythologized. I am talking mainly about details here, such as stories about his childhood; the larger issues are more clear-cut, such as the results of battles and the many innovations that came about during the Mongol empire.

This book can be seen as the flip side of earlier, more conventional perspectives that dismiss the Mongols as mere barbarians. The fact is, Weatherford does describe Mongol behavior that is rather barbaric; he has a tendency to present it in a way that almost makes it seem acceptable --as in (to paraphrase, not quote), "The Mongols only slaughtered a few thousand soldiers and aristocrats, but let the rest of the people who surrendered live." It's true that Europeans, Muslims and Chinese of that time (or ours, for that matter) were ruthless and bloodthirsty in many ways, but the Mongols were not exactly humanitarians either.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in history and the way culture has evolved over the centuries. As I said, I like Weatherford's style and the fact that he states his case strongly, even if I sometimes have reservations about his conclusions. This is actually an exciting and entertaining book to read, which is not typical of subjects like this.

Editorial Review:

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-?ve years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.

Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu (Vintage)

Laurence Bergreen

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Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Drawing on original writings and walking in the footsteps of Marco Polo himself, Laurence Bergreen's Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu is the most definitive biography of the legendary traveler to date, separating the man from his considerable myth.

Look inside Marco Polo (Click on thumbnails to see a larger image):

Marco Polo: a traditional portrait; Granger	Frontispiece of an early published edition of Marco Polo’s Travels, Nuremberg, Germany, 1477; Granger	Kublai Khan, emperor of the world’s largest land-based empire; Granger
Marco Polo commanded a Venetian galley similar to this in the Battle of Curzola; Granger	Stone carving on the Marco Polo bridge; Laurence Bergreen	Marco Polo’s vivid and occasionally misinterpreted descriptions of his travels inspired this medieval artist to depict dragons in China; Granger

Marco Polo timeline (All dates given in the Julian calendar):

1215 - Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan and Marco Polo's mentor, is born.

1254 - Marco Polo born in Venice, although one tradition locates his birthplace in the Venetian colony of Dalmatia.

1260 - Kublai Khan becomes leader of the Mongols and in 1271 founds the Yuan ("Origin") Dynasty.

1271 - Young Marco Polo leaves Venice with his father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo, bound for the court of Kublai Khan.

1274 - Kublai Khan oversees a failed Mongol invasion of Japan, as the Mongols, masters of the Steppe, meet their match at sea.

1275 - The three Polos arrive in Shang-du, Kublai Khan's summer palace immortalized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as Xanadu; Marco begins his years in the service of the Khan.

1276 - 1293 - Marco travels throughout Asia, reaching the coast of India, and possibly Zanzibar, gathering intelligence for Kublai Khan and serving as a tax collector for the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty.

1281 - Kublai Khan's second failed invasion of Japan, a serious blow to his prestige.

1292 - The Polos escort Princess Kokachin to Persia to marry, their last formal service to Kublai Khan before departing.

1294 - Kublai Khan dies, freeing the Polo family, who undertake a dangerous return voyage by sea.

1295 - Marco, his father, and uncle, arrive in Venice after their 24-year absence. They have been away for so long that their fellow Venetians do not recognize them.

1298 - Marco is captured by the Genoese in the Battle of Curzola, according to some accounts, and confined to a cell in Genoa with a romance writer, Rustichello of Pisa, to whom he dictates his adventures in China, his reminiscences of Kublai Khan, his life among the Mongols.

1300 - Safely back in Venice, Marco Polo marries Donata Badoer; the couple has three daughters.

1324 - As manuscript versions of his exploits spread throughout Europe, Marco Polo dies in Venice, claiming that he did not reveal the half of his experiences in his remarkable Travels.

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Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000

Barry Cunliffe

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Europe is, in world terms, a relatively minor peninsula attached to the Eurasian land mass. Yet it became one of the most innovative regions on the planet, generating restless adventurers who traversed the globe to trade, to explore, and often to settle. By the fifteenth century Europe was a driving world force, but the origins of its success have until now remained obscured in prehistory.

In this magnificent book, distinguished archaeologist Barry Cunliffe views Europe not in terms of states and shifting political land boundaries but as a geographical niche particularly favored in facing many seas. These seas, and Europe’s great transpeninsular rivers, ensured a rich diversity of natural resources while also encouraging the dynamic interaction of peoples across networks of communication and exchange. The development of these early Europeans is rooted in complex interplays, shifting balances, and geographic and demographic fluidity.

Weaving together titanic concepts while remaining sensitive to specifics, Cunliffe has produced an interdisciplinary tour de force. His is a bold book of exceptional scholarship, erudite and engaging, and it heralds an entirely new understanding of Old Europe.

(20080808)

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Barbara W. Tuchman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 107 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A good, but not great, book 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Tuchman builds a wonderful mental picture of the 14th century, and what it must have been like to live back then. She follows the 14th century through the life of a French nobleman (but not a king). This led to a book that isn't a great story - she purposely picks someone who has some historical info, but not a king or queen whose life would be too far removed from the "common" life. Unfortunately, that means there isn't a lot of detail about this guy's life, and she is too much of a historian to make anything up. So the story is kind of sketchy. And (this is probably endemic in any 14th century booK) she spends a lot of time talking about relationships between royalty across Europe, which for some reason bores me silly. All that said, I have a completely different view of medieval Farnce and England than previously, and I learned a lot. A worthwhile read that sometimes bogs down.

Editorial Review:

In this sweeping historical narrative, Barbara Tuchman writes of the cataclysmic 14th century, when the energies of medieval Europe were devoted to fighting internecine wars and warding off the plague. Some medieval thinkers viewed these disasters as divine punishment for mortal wrongs; others, more practically, viewed them as opportunities to accumulate wealth and power. One of the latter, whose life informs much of Tuchman's book, was the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, who enjoyed the opulence and elegance of the courtly tradition while ruthlessly exploiting the peasants under his thrall. Tuchman looks into such events as the Hundred Years War, the collapse of the medieval church, and the rise of various heresies, pogroms, and other events that caused medieval Europeans to wonder what they had done to deserve such horrors.

A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age

William Manchester

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 199 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

The flavor of the middle ages 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I was expecting a history book. I love history books. This was more of a history story, a fireside tale of history. That's ok -- I can take that. It reminds me of Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose -- about the Lewis and Clark expedition.

While *not* a comprehensive history of the Middle Ages, this was a great read. Manchester sketched the time period so clearly. And through this portrait, he brings some of the major thinkers and ideas that quickened into the Renaissance.

The book gives you context for all else you may read about the fall of Rome, the crusaders, the Moors, the scientists, and the explorers. I thought the most memorable character highlighted was Magellan.

And throughout, I considered the book very aptly titled: a world lit only by fire. What can human imagination, human passion, human determination not accomplish?

Editorial Review:

It speaks to the failure of medieval Europe, writes popular historian William Manchester, that "in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent." European powers were so absorbed in destroying each other and in suppressing peasant revolts and religious reform that they never quite got around to realizing the possibilities of contemporary innovations in public health, civil engineering, and other peaceful pursuits. Instead, they waged war in faraway lands, created and lost fortunes, and squandered millions of lives. For all the wastefulness of medieval societies, however, Manchester notes, the era created the foundation for the extraordinary creative explosion of the Renaissance. Drawing on a cast of characters numbering in the hundreds, Manchester does a solid job of reconstructing the medieval world, although some scholars may disagree with his interpretations.

Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World (Hinges of History)

Thomas Cahill

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, a fascinating look at how medieval thinkers created the origins of modern intellectual movements.

After the long period of decline known as the Dark Ages, medieval Europe experienced a rebirth of scholarship, art, literature, philosophy, and science and began to develop a vision of Western society that remains at the heart of Western civilization today, from the entry of women into professions that had long been closed to them to the early investigations into alchemy that would form the basis of experimental science. On visits to the great cities of Europe-monumental Rome; the intellectually explosive Paris of Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas; the hotbed of scientific study that was Oxford; and the incomparable Florence of Dante and Giotto-acclaimed historian Thomas Cahill brilliantly captures the spirit of experimentation, the colorful pageantry, and the passionate pursuit of knowledge that built the foundations for the modern world.

The Return of Martin Guerre

Natalie Zemon Davis

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer's day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago.

Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French film on Martin Guerre, has searched archives and lawbooks to add new dimensions to a tale already abundant in mysteries: we are led to ponder how a common man could become an impostor in the sixteenth century, why Bertrande de Rols, an honorable peasant woman, would accept such a man as her husband, and why lawyers, poets, and men of letters like Montaigne became so fascinated with the episode.

Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers. Here we see men and women trying to fashion their identities within a world of traditional ideas about property and family and of changing ideas about religion. We learn what happens when common people get involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the ancien régime, and how judges struggle to decide who a man was in the days before fingerprints and photographs. We sense the secret affinity between the eloquent men of law and the honey-tongued village impostor, a rare identification across class lines.

Deftly written to please both the general public and specialists, The Return of Martin Guerre will interest those who want to know more about ordinary families and especially women of the past, and about the creation of literary legends. It is also a remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning stops and lying begins.

God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215

David Levering Lewis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this panoramic history of Islamic culture in early Europe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian reexamines what we once thought we knew.

At the beginning of the eighth century, the Arabs brought a momentous revolution in power, religion, and culture to Dark Ages Europe. David Levering Lewis's masterful history begins with the fall of the Persian and Roman empires, followed by the rise of the prophet Muhammad and the creation of Muslim Spain. Five centuries of engagement between the Muslim imperium and an emerging Europe followed, from the Muslim conquest of Visigoth Hispania in 711 to Latin Christendom's declaration of unconditional warfare on the Caliphate in 1215. Lewis's narrative, filled with accounts of some of the greatest battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished—a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—while proto-Europe, defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery. A cautionary tale, God's Crucible provides a new interpretation of world-altering events whose influence remains as current as today's headlines. 8 pages of color illustrations; 4 maps.

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

Judith Herrin

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Byzantium. The name evokes grandeur and exoticism--gold, cunning, and complexity. In this unique book, Judith Herrin unveils the riches of a quite different civilization. Avoiding a standard chronological account of the Byzantine Empire's millennium--long history, she identifies the fundamental questions about Byzantium--what it was, and what special significance it holds for us today.

Bringing the latest scholarship to a general audience in accessible prose, Herrin focuses each short chapter around a representative theme, event, monument, or historical figure, and examines it within the full sweep of Byzantine history--from the foundation of Constantinople, the magnificent capital city built by Constantine the Great, to its capture by the Ottoman Turks.

She argues that Byzantium's crucial role as the eastern defender of Christendom against Muslim expansion during the early Middle Ages made Europe--and the modern Western world--possible. Herrin captivates us with her discussions of all facets of Byzantine culture and society. She walks us through the complex ceremonies of the imperial court. She describes the transcendent beauty and power of the church of Hagia Sophia, as well as chariot races, monastic spirituality, diplomacy, and literature. She reveals the fascinating worlds of military usurpers and ascetics, eunuchs and courtesans, and artisans who fashioned the silks, icons, ivories, and mosaics so readily associated with Byzantine art.

An innovative history written by one of our foremost scholars, Byzantium reveals this great civilization's rise to military and cultural supremacy, its spectacular destruction by the Fourth Crusade, and its revival and final conquest in 1453.

The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme

John Keegan

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Total reviews: 69 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Reads like a PhD Thesis 2 out of 5 stars.
4 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I have read many recent historical works of John Keegan including has book on WWI and the Price of Admiralty. I enjoyed them both. So, I was very disappointed when I tried to get into the Face of Battle. The language was so stilted, the use of commas and long run-on sentences going in differnet directions was so painful that I almost stopped reading it. The book has an excellent premise: how to describe three important battles in three very differnt centuries from the perspective of the soldiers actually doing the fighting rather than the 10,000 foot view employed by contemporary military historians who were not participants in the battle. Unfortunately, Keegen spends the first third of the book explaining what a good military historian (like himself) can or should do, focusing on the unique quality of British military historians (they are less biased because the wars were mainly fought on someone else's soil. The book improves as he gets into the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, but a good editor could have made this a much better read. I realize this book was written in 1978, so perhaps it was, at the time it was written, in line with Keegan's academic proclivities. Not a book I would recommend to anyone other than an academic.

Editorial Review:

Although he has never fought in a war the author creates a realistic picture of the fears, pressures, and mechanics of fighting a battle, emphasizing three particular campaigns.