Category Archives: Medieval

Posts on events in the late first and early second millenia CE

Cross-Post: Oxbow Books Sale

01 Monday Jun 2020

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Pavel Vaverka reminds me that Oxbow Books has its usual spring sale right now. Here are some of the ones that my gentle readers might be interested in:

  • Thomas Fischer and M. C. Bishop, Army of the Roman Emperors: Archaeology and History (Oxbow Books, 2019) £45 ISBN: 9781789251845
  • Paul R. Sealey, EAA 118: A Late Iron Age Warrior Burial from Kelvedon, Essex (2007) £5 {I have this one, its very good on a grave from roughly the time of Caesar’s invasion of Britain}
  • Rebecca Angharad Dean, Warfare and Weaponry in Dynastic Egypt (Pen & Sword, 2017) {where earlier books on New Kingdom warfare focus on texts and art, this has lots of experiments}
  • Ian Shaw, Ancient Egyptian Warfare: A Brief Introduction (Casemate Publishers, 2019) £10
  • Carolyn Willekes, Greek Warriors: Hoplites and Heroes (Casemate Publishers, 2017) £4
  • Edward Burman, The Terracotta Warriors (Pegasus Books, 2018) £8 {talks about what the ongoing Chinese excavations may uncover}
  • Fernando Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors, and Battle of Ancient Iberia (Pen & Sword, in press) £40 {by an excellent archaeologist of warfare}
  • Sarah E. Bond, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (University of Michigan Press, 2016) £46 {funeral workers, criers, tanners, mint workers, and bakers in the Roman imperial period to Justinian}
  • Susan W. Katsev and Laina W. Swiney (eds.),The Kyrenia Ship Final Excavation Report, Volume 1: History of the Excavation, Amphoras, Pottery, and Coins as Evidence for Dating (Oxbow Books, in press) £45 {the best preserved Hellenistic ship, a small roundship from Rhodes with a crew of roughly four sunk off Cyprus c. 294-291 BCE … I am sure Harry Turtledove had fun with the preliminary reports when he was writing his Hellenic Traders novels}
  • Susan Rose, The Wealth of England: The medieval wool trade and its political importance 1100–1600 (Oxbow Books, 2020) £28 {in the year 1500, England and Scotland were places of no significance except that they produced the best wool in the world … if you want to understand medieval and rennaisance England you have to understand wool}

They have the usual load of books on ancient textiles if you want something really estoeric from Oxbow! I had not heard that Quesada Sanz has a big broad book in English with nice drawings coming out.

Sue Brunning and the Quest for the Perfect Sword

11 Saturday Apr 2020

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the cover of Sue Brunning's book "the Sword in Early Medieval Northern Europe"

Archaeologist Sue Brunning has a new book on the sword around the North and Baltic Seas. In an interview she brings up a way of thinking about the parts of a sword which is worth pondering:

There are common features that all swords had to have in order to be swords.

First, a blade – which I describe in the book as the “body” of the sword because it is the part that “does the work”, from a physical point of view; it is usually concealed beneath “clothing” (the scabbard) and only those most intimately acquainted with the sword would see and come to know its finer details. The blade also, like a body, became the repository for history, reputation, character…

Second, a hilt (or handle), which I describe as the “face” because this was the focus of a sword’s visual identity – it was the part that most people could see and come to recognise, as it was not concealed by “clothing” like the blade was. Hilts, like faces, had unique features manipulated by their owners; they could be altered to shape their identities in a desired way; and eventually, as we all know, they would show signs of ageing – wear patches, like wrinkles.

Next, the scabbard – the early medieval sources disagree to some extent over how essential this component was, but in reality it was quite important. It enabled you to carry the sword on your body, as well as keeping it bright and sharp thanks to the fur lining.

Within these three basic components, there was huge scope for customising your weapon in how it was decorated, the materials that were used and so on. This was a way to make your sword your own, or – I would argue – its own!

– Sue Brunning, “Sue Brunning on early medieval swords,” un trabajo tartamudo, 31 January 2020

I think that thinking about all three parts lets you understand swords much better than focusing on just one. If you aren’t a sword person, you might be surprised to learn that the standard typologies of Viking swords and rapiers just consider the hilts- which is like assigning cars a typology based on the bumper and paint, but the hilt is the easiest part to divide into groups and the people writing the typologies had never used a sword.
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Cross-Post: Roland Warzecha Workshops 2020

09 Monday Mar 2020

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A bout with Viking shields and blunt swords. One fenceruses the strange palm-up cut which was taught in late medival marital arts but not most other traditions.

Roland Warzecha is teaching five (!) workshops this year on his interpretation of fighting with Viking Age shields, and on the sword-and-buckler system of Royal Armouries MS. I.33. The living-history related workshops include:

April 4/5, Viking Museum Haithabu: Viking shield (cancelled due to insufficient enrolment)

June 13/14, History Park Bärnau: Viking shield

August 1/2, History Park Bärnau: Sword & buckler. You are welcome to bring your 13th/14th century shields, too.

September 12/13, Viking Museum Haithabu: Hedeby Bouts

September 7–13, Viking Museum Haithabu: Hedeby Viking Week

All of these events except the Berlin Buckler Bouts are on the margin of ‘enough students to justify it and not, so if you are able to travel to Germany and interested in Viking Age or c. 1320 living history, check them out!

You can find more information about equipment and about the 2020 workshops on Patreon. He is very close to reaching his next fundraising milestone!

What is a Martial Art?

07 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by in Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Not an expert

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A display of wicker shields, helmets and face-masks, bows in bowcases, and sabres on a whitewashed wall

Captured Turkish arms from the 2. Rustkammer, Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, July 2013

Back when I started historical fencing, I thought about what is a martial art and came up with a definition which worked for what I was doing (ie. trying to learn to fight a particular way). Someone interested in martial arts communities might chose a different definition: someone is an Olympic wrestler or SCA heavy fighter because they participate in a certain kind of event, and how they move is irrelevant.

Definition: A martial art is a subset of all the possible ways of moving effectively in combat which works well together and is sufficient to solve a martial problem.

We shall divide this sermon into six parts.
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A Correction on Lists of Empires

29 Saturday Feb 2020

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Two peacocks with their tails down walking across gravel with a snowbank and a holly or ivy hedge in the background

Somebody’s tail is not very flufffy this February

I would like to make two corrections to my post on Rein Taagepera’s study of the size of empires.

When I compared the 2006 and 2009 updates to Taagepera’s lists, I missed one new empire in the 2009 article: Scythia. I have added it to the original post.

I said that the 2006 article added eight empires to Taagepera’s lists. I was wrong. I trusted a note on page 221 of the 2006 article by Turchin, Adams, and Hall:

Our list of large historical states was based on the compilation by Taagepera, which has been systematized and posted on the web by Chase-Dunn and coworkers http://irows.ucr.edu/. We checked the Taagepera list with all major historical atlases in the library of the University of Connecticut and found eight additional empires that fit our criteria (Axum, Hsi-Hsia, Kara-Khitai, Srivijaya, Maurian, Kushan, Gupta, and Maratha).

Four of their eight empires (Axum/Aksum in the Horn of Africa, Srivijaya in Indonesia, the Hsi-Hsia/Western Xia who were rivals of the Song Dynasty in China, and Maratha in South Asia) appear to be absent from Taagepera’s articles, but the other four are present and accounted for: Kara-Khitai (as W. Liao in Taagepera 1997), Gupta (Taagepera 1979 p. 132), Kushan (Taagepera 1979 p. 132), Maurian (as Maurya in Taagepera 1979 p. 132).
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Be Careful with Rein Taagepera’s Lists of Largest Empires

25 Saturday Jan 2020

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A map of Eurasia and Africa with biomes and ancient and medieval states marked

Isn’t this a cool map? The places where states which controlled at least a million square kilometers before 1800 were founded, from Turchin, “A Theory for the Formation of Large Empires.” Look how many there are in North China and Southwest Asia, and how few in Southeast Asia or Europe! (Although part of that is the fact that we treat the long history of the Byzantine and Roman empires as one thing, but each Mongol or Chinese dynasty as different)

After a chat with T. Greer of The Scholar’s Stage, I read an interesting article by Peter Turchin called “A theory for formation of large empires” (2009). He is curious whether other world regions show the same pattern as China of empires beginning in the steppe or in the neighbouring farmland not the richest and safest agricultural districts. As he says, a lot of research focuses on the decline and disintegration of empires, not so much how a single king can come to rule millions or tens of millions of people in the first place: why do some empires last centuries when most fall to pieces within decades?

Turchin catalogued 64 states until the year 1800 CE with an area of at least a million square kilometers, and found that “over 90% of historical mega-empires were located next to or within the Old World arid zone extending from the Sahara desert to the Gobi desert” (which is a slightly different claim than the one about steppe frontiers, but never mind). When I read his list, one line popped out at me:

A table with statistics on empires including Assyria, Media, Achaemenid Persian, Alexander's (Hellenistic), Seleucid, and Parthia

The table lists a Median empire with 2.8 million square kilometers in -585 (which is 586 BCE in Julian astronomical years with a year 0, but I think he means 585 BCE). That would have been as large as Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan combined. And the trouble is that such an empire probably did not exist, and if it did exist we don’t know its area.

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2019 Year-Ender

28 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Not an expert

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A crowd gathered in a rainy street in the medieval centre of Innsbruck

A rainy Christmas Eve concert in Innsbruck, 2019

Books are precious things, and Doctor Manning finally has time to read them for fun again (and to really read them, not just skim them looking for facts or quotes). At the end of this year and the start of another, as I sit in rainy Innsbruck, I would like to tell my gentle readers about some of the ones I read in 2019.

I read Victoria Corva’s very relatable young adult fantasy Books and Bone (self-published, 2019) about a town cartographer trying to follow a vocation which she can’t prove is more than a myth.
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Some Thoughts on ‘Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day’

09 Saturday Nov 2019

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Brian Hughes and Fergus Robson (eds.) Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) circa 80 Euros on Bookfinder

I borrowed this volume in hopes that it would have more clues as to the oldest source for Good King Robert’s Testament (it did not, although Alastair John MacDonald very kindly helped me with modern editions of the Scotichronicon). But I ended up reading about half of it (skipping the chapters on 20th century warfare such as Julia Welland on NATO’s unlucky intervention in Afghanistan and Raphäelle Branche on French Algeria).

The book is in reverse chronological order, but lets begin with Tim Piceu describing an outbreak of small war in Flanders as the Dutch Republic and Hapsburgs wrestled for control (p. 160, 164)

Freebooter raids generally started in a tavern in one of the above-mentioned frontier towns or in a town in the island of Walcheren (Zeeland). There a group of around a dozen men- no women are known to have been freebooters- discussed a tip received by a local informant who knew of booty. Although frebooter bands acted under the guidance of an experienced marauder, the conducteur, and some friends raided together, there seemed to be no regular composition of the crew. Everybody who had the courage could join in. If the value of the booty outweighed the risks, the group would decided to leave for enemy territory. They packed their weapons and victuals for some days, dressed themselves like peasants, and slipped past enemy posts to a hiding-place in enemy territory. The sources mention freebooters carrying a vaulting-pole to move across the many Flemish creeks, ditches, and tidal inlets. Travelling happened mostly at night and the band avoided major roads. … Most freebooters probably used their takings for living expenses, paying off debt or, to quote a Dutch civil servant, ‘to indulge for a little time in a bad and godforsaken life of drunkenness and whoring.’

You all meet in a tavern, forsooth! And every gamer agrees with that Dutch civil servant about the proper way to spend the spoils of an adventure, even if they have not read sources from the Wars of the Low Countries or the Yukon Gold Rush.
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Cross-Post: Thott Talhoffer MS Facsimile

24 Thursday Oct 2019

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Michael Chidester of Wiktenauer is crowdfunding to make a high-quality facsimile of a famous fencing manual from the second half of the 15th century, Hans Talhoffer’s MS. Thott 290 2º. Like many of the German manuscripts, it contains other secret lore including a copy of Konrad Keyser’s engineering manual Bellifortis and a treatise on astral science (but in newfangled languages like German and Hebrew not cuneiform, so reader beware!): unlike most, it is lavishly illuminated. The price of a copy will be around 150 USD. If you want to learn more, you can check out his IndieGoGo Manuscript Facsimile Project.

(warning! IndieGoGo is full of tracking scripts from Facebook and Google, and the page appears blank unless you enable half a dozen Javascript libraries!)