"The First Crusade" by Peter Frankopan

When, in November 1095, Pope Urban II preached at Clermont, France, in about the need for a crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Muslims, it was partly to boost his own standing (he was one of two alternative popes, the other having control of Rome) and partly in response to a call for help from Byzantine emperor  Alexios I Komnenos. This book rewrites the myths to show how important Alexios was to the ultimately successful campaign to retake Jerusalem. Even though he was never physically present, preferring to lead from Constantinople, and was therefore accused of cowardice (unfairly, as a soldier before he became emperor and subsequently as emperor he often led his armies in the field) and sidelined by a history mostly written by the westerners, nevertheless his contribution to the logistics, ensuring that the armies were almost always well-provisioned, was crucial. 

This book is therefore an important contribution to the history of those times, as well as being immensely readable. Of all the characters, my favourite is the immensely brave and hugely talented soldier Bohemond who decided to keep Antioch for himself thus provoking a crisis in the leadership of the allies. When Bohemond returned home to the west he needed to pass through waters controlled by Byzantium. “Bohemond was so convinced that the emperor would take revenge for his treachery during the Crusade that he travelled home in secret. He even spread reports that he had died and had a coffin designed which purported to be carrying his corpse. As his ship passed through imperial waters, he lay in his sarcophagus alongside a dead chicken whose rotting carcase lent the coffin a powerful and unmistakable smell of death.” (Ch 10)

Readable and interesting. June 2024; 206 pages

Peter Frankopan also write The New Silk Roads

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

"The Venetian Empire" by Jan Morris

Morris travels through the places colonised by the Venetians and provides a history as she does so. This book thus forms a sort of sequel to her Venice.

She has used this combination of travelogue and history before, such as in the brilliant Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and I'm not sure why this book wearied me. Certainly there were plenty of fascinating facts and vivid characters, from the war over the ownership of a donkey to the narrow channel that experiences fourteen tides a day, from the original of Othello, surnamed Moro, which is probably why Shakespeare assumed him to be a Moor to the dreadful Uskoks of Dalmatia: “The Uskoks were originally Christian refugees from the eastern side of the mountains, who had escaped from the Turks by guile and violence, and set themselves up to prosper by similar means on the Dalmatian shore. They were epic villains. ... Uskoks liked to nail the turbans of Turkish prisoners to their heads and sometimes cut out the hearts of their still living captives (we read of a Venetian commander whose heart, in fact, was the piece-de-resistance of a celebratory banquet.)” (Adriatica). I learned a lot: we get our word 'argosy' from the fact that Dubrovnik, once called Ragusa, was famous for its merchants and the word 'syncretize' is derived from Crete.

But the glory of a Jan Morris book is her way with words. Her descriptions are stunning:

• “The tumult of it all (fragrance of frying fish from the floating restaurant by Galata Bridge, tinkle of brass bell from the water-seller outside the Egyptian Bazaar, swoop of dingy pigeons around the mosque of Yeni Cami)” (O City, City!)
• “Humped and speckled, lush or rocky, hefty or insubstantial, littering the waters between the Dardanelles and the Sea of Crete are the islands of the Aegean Sea.” (Aegeanics)
• “During the bitter winter it [Crete] can be magnificently awful. Then the clouds which hang so often round the mountain summits spread over the whole island, swirling above the passes in mists and rainstorms, and sometimes then, when the driven vapours are tinged with southern sunshine too, the place looks all afire. Crimson clouds scud by! The winds rush up those valleys like jets, and if it thunders the crash of it sounds among the highlands as though caves are there and then being split in the rocks.” (The Great Island)

Other selected quotes:
“Going home weary after the making of the world, God took with him a sack of unused stones, but the sack burst on his way across the skies, and so Montenegro was made.” (Adriatica)

August 2022; 187 pages

Other Jan Morris books reviewed in this blog include Coronation Everest.

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

"Ravenna" by Judith Herrin

Ravenna is a fascinating town. Founded as a safe retreat for the Roman emperors when Rome became vulnerable to barbarian attacks (a little like how Venice was founded as a refuge from later barbarian attacks), and the capital for Theodoric the Gothic king who held it as a more or less independent fief under Constantinople's hegemony it became the centre for the Italian foothold of the Byzantine emperor until it was eventually taken first by the Lombards and later by the Franks under Charlemagne. It thus spent four hundred years being the meeting place for the developing Latinate culture associated with the Roman Catholic papacy and the developing Byzantine culture associated with Constantinople. This culture clash led, as so often, to learning; it was the centre for an important early medieval medical school as well as the city in which Boethius flourished (and later died). 

Famous names kept appearing. As well as those above were Byzantine emperors Justinian, Leo the Iconoclast, and Irene, and others including Belisarius and Stilicho, Pope Gregory the Great , Gerbert of Aurillac and "the famous Queen Radegund" who is presumably the same as the saint celebrated in Canterbury's St Radegund's Car Park.

I found it hard going. As with many books such as this, I found that there was too much information. Ravenna is a fascinating city and there are some compelling personalities but to condense four hundred year into as many pages means that the canvas is overcrowded with incident. This happened and then this and then this; it was history as an overwhelming flood.

Furthermore, sometimes the sequencing seemed awry. For example, in chapter 28 Herrin tells us that the death of Johannicis was "monstrous" (when the emperor who ordered it is deposed) but it is not until chapter 30 that we revisit what happened and find out the manner of the death. I was frequently confused.

But in these books there are always little nuggets. I didn't realise that the Lombards were identified by their long bears (longobardi). Nor did I know that, according to the "Anonymous Cosmographer of Ravenna" "the sun does not hide behind huge mountains during the night, or sink belowe the waters of the Ocean, but returns to its seat in the East ... from Germania and Britannia, via the Baltic islands of the Fini, to the Caucasus, Scythia, Sarmatia and the Caspian Gates to Bactrian India." (Ch 27). And the iconoclasts in 726 were prompted by "a terrifying subaquatic volcanic eruption in the Segean [which] threw up a new island between Thera and Therasia ... [in which] monstrous deposits of ash and solid lava were borne to the shores of the Aegean in a tsunami" (Ch 32)

Selected quotes:

• "The pattern of son following father into the same priestly profession is one common to early medieval Europe; popes Boniface, Felix III and Agapitus were all sons of priests, and Silverius (the short-lived pope of 536-7)was the son of Pope Hormisdas." (Ch 15)
• "Two canons were devoted to appropriate Christian art, the first stipulating the human depiction of Christ rather than his symbolic representation as the Lamb of God, and the second forbidding any artistic representation that might generate improper feelings." (Ch 28)
• "The first Christian icons adopted the same format of small wood panels, similar to the portraits of ancient gods that have survived in the dry conditions of Egypt." (Ch 32)
• "The veneration of images of Christian holy figures ... had always been distinguished from idolatry ... The invisible God could never be represented and was always to be worshipped spiritually." (Ch 32)
• "A particular Byzantine institution, a bride-show ... Officials were duly sent around the empire to find only the most beautiful girls, who had to conform to particular measurements - the Cinderella story of the shoe that fits makes its appearance here." (Ch 36)
• "Irene ... removed her son from power by having him blinded." (Ch 37)

Ultimately I felt that this book failed to do justice to an absolutely fascinating period of history, with the establishment of the Christian church and the early battles for orthodoxy, with the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and with the arrival of the Islamic caliphate.

November 2021; 400 pages

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

"The Road to Miklagard" by Henry Treece

 The sequel to Viking's Dawn.

Harald Sigurdson sets off a-viking in charge of his own ship. He travels to Ireland, seeking fabled treasure. Battles and adventures ensue. With a variety of companions including Haro, Radbard and Giant Grummoch, Harald's travels take him to Jebel Tarik (Gibraltar) and thence to Miklagard (the Viking name for Byzantium, also known as Constantinople, now Istanbul). 

This is a classic picaresque except that the main character is not a humorous trickster who survives on his wits but a defiant fighter whose main strategy is to threaten and bluster. Strangely, this seems to work. He is, perhaps, a typical Viking hero but I found him charmless.

There is a great deal of action in this book which presumably appealed to the young me (I first read this book as a pre-teen). The chronology moves in spurts: some days are treated in great detail, in other places weeks pass in a paragraph. This made the narrative feel jumpy and the adult me thought that much of the story was treated superficially. This, combined with my adult reaction to the character, made me rather indifferent to the story.

But I loved it as a kid!

One magic moment:

• "The black beetle climbs up the table-leg, but there is a hand waiting to crush him when he reaches the top." (Ch 8)

This book is followed by the third in the trilogy: Viking's Sunset.

A fast-paced adventure story for boys' a quick and easy read. August 2021; 223 pages

Other books by Henry Treece:

• Horned Helmet: more Vikings
• Legions of the Eagle: Romano-British adventure
• The Golden Strangers: A story from prehistory

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

"In the shadow of the sword" b y Tom Holland

This is my fourth Tom Holland book. Rubicon was brilliant, Persian Fire and Millennium were excellent. This is the weakest so far yet it is still a good read.

It charts the birth of Islam. The chronology is a little confusing: we open with the defeat in battle and death of the king of a Jewish kingdom in what is now the Yemen. Holland then takes us back to the recent histories of the Persian Empire and Constantinople. When we are back up to date we rush through Mohammed and on into the Ummayyads finishing with their annihilation by the Abbassids.

His thesis seems to be that this was the time when people of this region began to write down their religious beliefs; possible to protect them since they lived largely in the border area between the continually feuding Persian and 'Roman' empires. So he shows how the Zoroastrian priests of Persia start to write things down and then the project is enthusiastically taken up by the Jews of the area who develop the Torah. Justinian writes his laws, carefully based on scholarship to demonstrate their ancient provenance. The Bible is collected as a way of imposing orthodoxy on the feuding Christian sects of Constantine's empire although the hadiths amplifying the Koran (largely developed in a town thirty miles from the centre of Jewish learning) seem to be rather an attempt by the religious community to have an authority separate from the say-so if the Caliph.

What I found far more interesting (and frustrating) was the way he challenged the conventional view of Islamic history. Thus is a footnote on page 304 he claims that the concept of their being only a single version of the Koran dates back to 1924; before then it was largely accepted that there were seven 'readings'. The first mention of Mecca outside the Koran was in 741 (Mohammed died before 634). 'Mecca' is described as a significant trading town which presumably required significant agricultural resources: impossible for this remote part of the desert. The Koran itself is unmentioned in the early Islamic writings; it only mentions Mohammed four times.

And so he develops his thesis although he does little more than hint at it (whether this is because there is so little evidence in any direction or he is afraid of a Moslem backlash is not clear). The context for Mohammed's life and the development of his thought is on the borders of Palestine, perhaps in the Negev desert, where Arab tribes lived who were paid by the Romans to guard the borders of Palestine from the Persians. The holy city was originally in this region and was moved to Mecca well after Mohammed's death (there is evidence that the direction of prayer and the alignment of mosques moved). There were a number of ka'bas; the Arabs rather liked worshipping at cube-shaped shrines. Mohammed's teachings were originally thought to be a refinement of the Torah; thus the punishment for adultery changed from the Koranic prescription of 100 lashes to the Jewish stoning. A number of Islamic ideas came from Zoroastrians: for example Moslems were originally required to pray three times a day, Zoroastrians five.

And these revelations are shocking and exciting. However, Holland never really explains the chronologies carefully. Exactly when was the Koran first mentioned by another witness? And when was Mohammed first described? I wanted more dates and details even if certainty is impossible.

A fascinating appetiser. July 2012; 432 pages