Book Review: Great Commanders of the Medieval World, 454-1582
★★☆☆☆ (2/5, Didn't Like It)
My Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Intro & Summary
Roberts, Andrew. 2011. The Great Commanders of the Medieval World. London, United Kingdom: Quercus Publishing.
Great Commanders of the Medieval World is an anthology of 24 chapters, each about a historical figure from between 454 and 1582 CE, each written by one of 15 contributors (2 of which are women), and edited by Andrew Roberts. It’s part of a series starting with the ancient world all the way through modern times (“present day” or… 1975).
While the book title claims to cover commanders of the medieval world, over half chapters cover figures from Europe, and most of the non-European figures will still be familiar to a typical Western audience. The more general world history you’re familiar with, the more of these figures you probably know.
Readability
This was a rough start to 2024, but honestly I’ll be pretty pleased if this is the worst book on my list and we’ve just gotten it out of the way right off the bat.
On the whole, the writing of this book is not very good. Most of it is either boring at best and poorly written at worst, with a few stand-out exceptions that I’d be happy to read more from.
My friend M asked me at one point, as I complained to her over Discord, why I didn’t just DNF (did not finish) it and move on. But I kept pushing through because the poor-quality contributors were no guarantee that all the chapters would be bad. In the end, only a third of them were actually enjoyable. And thankfully the final chapter, on Oda Nobunaga, was one of the good ones. So at least I got to end on a high.
From the outset, it’s difficult to tell who this book was written for. And indeed I think the target audience was either poorly communicated to, or poorly understood by, many of the contributing authors. The back of the book describes it “As accessible and informative as it is rigorous and scholarly…” Maybe that should have been my first hint, really.
One might reasonably assume from the format of the book, two dozen chapters by individual contributors covering nearly a thousand years of history, that this is a book for “the masses.” And I mean that kindly. This is the sort of book for people who like history but haven’t studied it with any rigour. There’s no time to go into more detail than a broad overview of each historical figure’s life. There are no footnotes or end notes, nor even a proper bibliography. The best it’s got is a pretty lean “Further Reading” section and a hefty index at the back. There’s nothing wrong with a book like this in principle; this one just wasn’t handled well.
There’s this “thing” in history scholarship where the writer assumes the reader, as a historian themselves, has a certain amount of knowledge on a particular subject or area already. This means they can reference people or events as context without having to take the time to explain them. Heck, I have at least one book that quotes primary sources in the original languages, meaning the author expects the reader to know not only English, but Latin, French and Italian. That’s actually a bit of a weird one, but this assumption of knowledge is fine if your target reader is a scholar and not just Average Joe who likes history. Foot- or end notes are helpful in showing you where to look things up, too, if the reader does not in fact have that assumed knowledge.
This book has no notes, though, and some of the authors throw out names and places they assume the reader is familiar with. Often these provide important context to whatever is being written about, but… Now you have to stop and go look them up I guess? It was frustrating even when I did know what the writer was talking about, because most of the time they only needed a few extra words or a single sentence to fill in those blanks. And don’t get me started on the author of the Gonzalo de Córdoba chapter defining half the Spanish terms he used but not the others, seemingly arbitrarily.
I could go on, but the short version is that I wouldn’t recommend this book to historians or “the masses.” It’s just confusing and frustrating for both types of reader.
Learning
Enough complaining. Did I learn anything?
Not really. Most of the chapters were just boring lists of events, and my Late Antique and Early Medieval specialty means I’m pretty familiar with a good handful of these figures. I’ve probably read or referenced the same sources the contributors did in those cases. Even though there were no citations, I definitely identified a few.
Aside from the chapters on Oda Nobunaga and Gonzalo de Córdoba, the interesting and well-written chapters were all figures I know. And given the broad-brush style required by this format, I didn’t really learn anything new about them.
So here are a few highlights from my notes, specifically on things I learned:
Clovis (Haywood): Good discussion and illustration of attitudes toward religion and heresy [in the late 5th century] (pp 19-21)
Charlemagne (Haywood): Great explanation of central vs. tribal powers as relates to conquest (pp 63-4)
Alfred the Great (Pollard): internecene - destructive to both sides in a conflict
Genghis Khan (Marozzi): We usually only hear about Christian Europe’s reactions to the Mongol invasions, but Marozzi also references Muslim sources from South Asia and the Middle East
Mehmet II (Norwich): bastinado - a method of inflicting pain and humiliation by beating the soles of a person’s bare feet
Gonzalo de Córdoba (Capponi): I learned a good handful of Spanish historical and military terms that would take a bit too long to list here
Oda Nobunaga (Turnbull): Nobunaga’s horse guards are called o-uma mawari in Japanese, which literally (and roughly) translates to “the horses that go around,” and I just think that’s funny
Honestly I enjoyed the interesting, and sometimes weird, vocabulary I learned.
I also made lots of notes about the authors themselves. My biggest complaint is that, on the whole, the white European figures were portrayed in a very heroic light (even Hastein the Viking), whereas the Muslim and Asian figures were often portrayed as monstrous and violent. The phrase “orgy of blood” shows up in the Genghis Khan chapter.
There were also some figures I didn’t think really belonged in this book after reading about them. Do we glorify them so much even though they don’t actually qualify as “great commanders,” or were their chapters just not well written? Who can say? I just know what the book told me.
Personally, I was wondering where Saladin’s chapter was, especially after the chapter on Alexander Nevsky that basically ends with (paraphrasing) “but none of these battles were actually recorded in reliable sources and we think they might not have happened at all.” I finished that chapter very confused why I’d read it at all and not actually learned why he’s such a revered warrior and saint.
Would I Read It Again?
That’s a big ol’ NOPE.
This book is going into the donate pile, and I hope its next owner is at least mildly amused by all the times I incredulously wrote “what?” in the margins.