In my various meandering
readings of books and stuff, I have also had time to become a keen devourer of
history. Back at the start of this year, eleven months ago, I had to receive a
filling at the dentist. Leaving the surgery on a cold winter morning with half
my face numb and feeling rather sorry for myself, I decided to tarry in the
bookshop for a while before I braved the walk back to my place of employment, and drifted about
the history shelves in search of something to cheer me up. I ended up leaving
with a number of books which I have since dutifully read from cover to cover,
and all of which I can recommend for your good self to acquire should you have
a craving for such things.
Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies
Throughout history, many
states/nations/countries have disappeared or been conquered, or destroyed,
resulting eventually in the modern framework of countries in place today. Such places
are largely forgotten by people nowadays, and rarely get whole books to
themselves on the shelves of a high-street bookshop, but this book by Norman
Davies seeks to correct that oversight. Each of the fifteen chapters is devoted
to a separate vanished nation, recounting a brief history of places such as the
Visigothic kingdom of Tolosa (Toulouse), the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Prussia,
Aragon, and the various kingdoms, duchies and counties that have all borne the
name ‘Burgundy’. By focusing on such a broad category as this, Vanished Kingdoms is actually, weirdly
enough, a history of Europe as a whole as seen through the eyes of states that
eventually lost out in the bid for survival; with the Kingdom of Aragon, we get
to see an overview of Spanish unification from the point of view of a mediaeval
Mediterranean maritime power, while with Burgundy, a barbarian kingdom
established on the ruins of the crumbling Roman empire becomes a pawn in the
games of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire which splits into the precursors of
France and Germany, Burgundy falling and being revived many times over the
course of nearly a millennium until it becomes instrumental in the unification
of the Low Countries, a grand nation sitting right between France, Germany, and
England, before it was finally finished for good in a series of disastrous
conflicts following the Hundred Years’ War. In Etruria we get to witness the
French Revolution and Napoleonic attempts to redraw the map of Europe by seeing
their effects on a small French client-state in Italy. The chapter devoted to
Byzantium (the later, mediaeval Roman empire in modern-day Greece and Turkey) was
disappointingly brief, and was more focused on subsequent historical slurs and
recent revival of interest about the thousand-year period than about the state
itself, but it was still a well written section that outlines some very
important points on the nature of history itself.
I can thoroughly recommend this book. It’s long and
detailed, but is clear and easy to read, and will drastically broaden the
horizons of anyone to read it. If you have money, then use it to buy this book
– or if you’re the sort to go to a library, there might even be a copy there
somewhere. Either way, you will become a better and more interesting person for
having read it.
The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire – 28 Selected Chapters
by Edward Gibbon
Sometimes cited as one of
the greatest works of history ever written, this immense six-volume behemoth
was published at the tail end of the 18th century. Yes, it’s that
old. Edward Gibbon was a Georgian bibliophile who one day made the decision to
devote his life to writing a full and complete history of the decline and
eventual fall of the Roman empire, a period which spans 1,200 years of history,
and witnesses the rise of Christianity and Islam, the barbarian invasions and
the establishment of the European kingdoms, the slow dwindling of the
later/Byzantine-Roman empire, the Crusades, the incursions of the Turks and
Mongols, the lives and reigns of hundreds of emperors, and starts of and
finishes up in Gibbon’s own Europe of the 18th century before the
French Revolution and subsequent wars ever took place. Out of a total of 71
chapters, I found this edition sporting 28 of the things for exactly four
pounds. There was no way I could leave it there.
Each of Gibbon’s 71 chapters is like a short book in
itself, constructed of immense paragraphs and many line-sprawling sentences
that take the utmost concentration to read, but if one can stomach the
near-impenetrably aristocratic language and the driest sense of humour I’ve yet
seen printed on a page, the rewards are certainly worth it. He does not dwell
on any one thing longer than necessary, and his authority and character is turned
to so many different people, ideas, events, periods and processes that you feel
well and truly enlightened for having experienced it. He practically invented modern
history, and his attempt to remain as objective as possible and his frequent
use of primary sources makes him still highly relevant in the study of history
today, though his overly scathing view of just about everything he writes about somewhat undermines this. Basically, he was the 18th century equivalent of Charlie Brooker or Yahtzee Croshaw. Sadly, like many Enlightenment thinkers, he was adversely biased
against Byzantium (the eastern portion of the Roman empire that survived the
so-called ‘Fall of Rome’ in the fifth century by a further millennium), but
that he devoted volumes four, five and six to its study and that of the other
nations and people at work at the time makes him a thoroughly inclusive
historian, near unparalleled in the scope of his writing, and was one of very
few writers to actually consider such things worth writing about in detail before the 20th
century.
Most of the selected 28 chapters in this copy concentrate
on the empire of the second, third, fourth and fifth centuries, with a few
later chapters devoted to the rise of Islam, the Turks, the Crusades, and the
fall of Constantinople in 1453, but those which are not included are still
summarised adequately, and should one wish to research further then the missing
chapters can easily be found on the internet. I wouldn’t recommend this book to
anyone who is not very interested in this subject, but I hope that you now feel
sufficiently informed about one of the most important works of history ever
written, and may wish to have a taste for yourself.
Byzantium by Judith Herrin
In case you have not
worked it out yet, based on the references in the previous two history-book
reviews, I have a keen interest in something called Byzantium or, as it is
erroneously known, the ‘Byzantine Empire’. The Roman empire survived in the
eastern Mediterranean for much longer than most people are even aware of, ruled
from the grand city of Constantinople, and has subsequently become known as
Byzantium in order to arbitrarily distinguish it from the larger and more
philosophically inclined ‘Classical’ Roman empire, and as such it has received
little but contempt and derision from western academics for centuries, or else
has been entirely ignored. Judith Herrin’s book seeks to put that right, by
presenting an accessible and informative picture of something which, for most
people, is completely new and unheard of.
Rather than being a chronological account of the
thousand-year history of this state, which can get tedious and repetitive very
quickly, she instead writes about particular aspects to the empire; its
religion, culture, technology, interactions with other nations and peoples, and
the most significant events of its long and incredible history. This little
parachute-diving approach to history is a good way to get an introduction into
the subject, and I can heartily
recommend this book as the best way to experience something dramatic and new. Learn about the Eunuchs who all but ran the government, the history of the great
cathedral of Hagia Sophia which still stands majestic and proud in modern-day
Istanbul, the beautiful mosaics and art that lay hidden in Turkish mosques for centuries,
and about the genesis of that most useful piece of western tableware, the fork.
A Short History of
Byzantium
by John Julius Norwich
I won’t talk for long
about this one, as unless you enjoyed Judith Herrin’s excellent book then this title
will be of little interest or use to you. This is essentially a piece of
old-fashioned blah-blah narrative history, telling the story of events, emperors, wars,
and stuff in a chronological order, and with some pieces of
anecdotal diversion to try and make it saucy to the casual reader. While it is fully accessible to the average human, I
feel it gets a little lost in its own millennia-long story, and takes a delight in the perverse sidelines and gossip that makes it feel vaguely insulting to the civilisation it pertains to be telling a history of. Like I say, the best way to get into Byzantine history is to go for
Judith Herrin’s Byzantium instead,
although I will admit that there are some good stories to be found in
Norwich’s history, and it is a way of filling in some of the gaps and
details in the chronology that Herrin’s parachute technique leave out.
Bibliotism
Davies, Norman. Vanished Kingdoms. Penguin: St. Ives.
(2012 [First Published 2011])
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire – 28 Selected Chapters. Wordsworth Editions Limited: St. Ives.
(1998 [First Published in Six Volumes 1776-1788])
Herrin, Judith. Byzantium – The Surprising Life of a
Medieval Empire. Penguin: St. Ives. (2008 [First Published 2007])
Norwich, John Julius. A Short History of Byzantium. Penguin:
St. Ives. (1998 [First Published 1997])
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