"The Burgundians" by Bart Van Loo

This is a big book, over 500 pages. It tells the story of the Burgundians, from their beginning on Bornholm Island in the Baltic as a Germanic tribe who invaded the Roman Empire and fought Atilla the Hun (as commemorated in the Nibelungenlied) to their days of glory during the Hundred Years War when the Dukes of Burgundy (who now also owned large tracts of the Flanders) acted as power brokers between the French and the English. It's a huge canvas on which the author paints ... but he does it by focusing his attention very much on the period between 1369 to 1467. The more than 900 years before then receives about 50 pages, this century receives 300 pages and the ten years after receives 70 pages. This corresponds, I suspect, with the available material but it nevertheless presents a strangely lop-sided feeling. The first section seems to be written for the general reader and the second for the specialist ... and yet this section is presented with a less objective, almost playful air, in which the author repeatedly speculates eg about whether John the Fearless was at all worried when he walked across the bridge to his doom.

Nevertheless, there is plenty here of interest, whether it is minutely recounted assassinations or carefully described feasts. There are battles, there are rebellions, there are lots and lots and lots of executions, and there is even some literary history. There's also quite a lot of etymological explanation for words such as 'knight', 'Fleming' and even 'mustard'; I adore a good etymology.

And there are some unforgettable characters (mostly bloodthirsty tyrants) including a King who thought he was made of glass.

Selected quotes:

• “The Celts had been living in Gaul since time immemorial. The Romans regarded them as rather hot-tempered, macho people and mockingly called them Galli (roosters)” (1.1)
• “In around 1300 ... the first mechanical clocks soon graced the bell towers in all the major cities ... because peasants, labourers and burghers often made mistakes in counting the strokes and weren't sure whether it was roughly nine or ten o’clock, it soon became fashionable to ring four preliminary chimes. This forerunner of the carillon was called a ‘quadrillon’ in French (literally a foursome).” (2.3)
• “The megalomania in Sluis rolled in in waves.” (2.5)
• “For a long time, Catholicism had been mainly the business of priests and monks, but over the course of the fourteenth century it found its way into the hearts of ordinary people, and on a grand scale. Itinerant preachers managed to move great crowds with their gripping and spectacular stories.” (2.6)
• “While the Burgundian Crusade may have been born of Christian and propagandistic ambition, once it had been set in motion the whole enterprise quickly turned into an extravagant display of valour. Bravado proved to be more important than tactics and reconnaissance. Swaggering trumped pragmatism. This exaggerated Cult of heroism had led to one disaster after another ... without bringing about a change in mentality. ... overconfidence remained persistently fashionable.” (2.7)
• “When Orleans and his retinue passed through the Barbette gate on 23 November, a handful of masked men leapt out of the shadows. One of them cried, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ and struck Orleans with his axe. It wasn't enough to knock Louis from his mule. Indeed, he still had enough strength to call them to account by shouting, ‘I am the Duke of Orleans!’ as if he was sure the brigands would quickly change their minds. Their answer prove just the opposite: ‘He's the one we're looking for!’ After a second blow he fell from his mount. The thirty-five-year-old duke scrambled to his knees and cried, ‘Who is that? Who is doing that?’ They responded by bludgeoning him with sticks and axes and chopping off his clenched left hand.” (2.8)
• “History, great glutton that it is, could hardly get enough to satisfy its hunger in those days.” (2.10)
• “The winter that followed was especially severe. The Seine froze solid. Food provisions vanished. In their despair, gangs of wandering children sought one last spark of warmth in the piles of manure that lay in the streets. There was no bread, no grain, no firewood. People died of cold, of hunger. Wolves invaded Paris and dined on the dead.” (2.10)
• “While the sea and the great rivers kept proving themselves enemies to be feared, a final evolution was taking place: that of the transformation of farmland into pasturage. Pastures do much better on peaty soil, which is not an ideal substrate for cereal crops. The resulting lack of bread made famine a real possibility, but the cows that soon began grazing there triggered a boom in dairy production. This led to a rise in cheese making, which required a great deal of salt. Clever entrepreneurs ... began specialising in the digging of salt-laden peat, from which they extracted salt by means of drying and burning. Cattle breeding required less manpower but the workers who are now available quickly found employment ... in the fishing industry or in merchant shipping. ... The hostile sea had grown into a source of economic prosperity.” (2.11)
• “The more languages you speak, the more human you are.” (5)

I can't imagine there's anything left to be said about this subject. January 2023; 515 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God