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readallthenewberys2012-09-06 08:41 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-09-06 08:41 pm
Newbery Medal: The Story of Mankind (Hendrik Willem van Loon), Part 3
Apparently it's National or International Read A Book Day - I didn't quite catch the modifier - so I decided I'd post this tonight, though I meant to get to the Crusades in this section.
(On the other hand, maybe it's as well; I seem to be picking up some of Mr van Loon's speech patterns. *g*)
******
Enter the Middle Ages! For the record, everything up through the Fall of Rome has taken the first quarter of the book by number of pages (I'm on page 130 out of 482).
* Assertion: the ancient Romans weren't much into gods. This made them tolerant. Honor the Emperor - whose statue in the temples is compared to having a picture of the President in an American post office (do we do that anymore? I can't recall seeing a picture of President Obama the last time I went to mail a package) - and you could pretty much do what you liked other than that, religion-wise.
* Christianity shows up. It's portrayed first as the "new doctrine of a universal brotherhood of man", and then as including "dreadful stories of the fate" of non-Christians. Also, Christians are nice people. Thus the new religion grew. ;-)
* Christianity becomes powerful. Mr van Loon seems to judge it rather, with sentences like "The Roman Empire... insisted that the different sects keep the peace among themselves and obey the wise rule of 'live and let live'. The Christian communities, however, refused to practice any sort of tolerance."
* BWAHAHAHAHA. If this kind of stuff was fairly common in the 1920s (I have no idea if it was or it wasn't), I'm really not surprised that a certain class of modern American Christians are all about the "anything that makes us look bad and non-Christian government look good IS A LIE!" Have a quote: "The Christians... were more than willing to suffer death for their principles. The Romans, puzzled by such conduct, sometimes killed the offenders, but more often they did not. There was a certain amount of lynching during the earliest years of the church, but this was the work of... the mob..." I'm aware there's a lot of complex history behind the oversimplified I IZ NERO/DIOCLETIAN/WHOEVER, I KILLZ ALL TEH CHRISTIANS portrayal in pop culture, but - wow, he's pretty much playing a straight-up Romans Good, Christians Bad trope here.
* A little later Justinian founds the Hagia Sophia (Church of Holy Wisdom), whose name is given merely as "the church of Saint Sophia" in the text. That's important because the founding of Hagia Sophia is paired with the shutting-down of "the school of philosophy at Athens which had been founded by Plato. That was the end of the old Greek world, in which man had been allowed to think his own thoughts and dream his own dreams according to his desires." I knew the '20s were, well, the Roaring Twenties and nowhere near as conservative as post-WWII America, but I'm still kind of startled this is... mainstream. O_O
* Holy Hannah, what. About half a page sums up the rise of the Papacy to authority over western Europe - with the very peculiar term "Dukes of Rome" for the bishops of Rome before the term "Pope" is introduced - then we have a page about Eastern/Orthodox Christianity (based in Constantinople) that jumps suddenly to 1453, Sack of Constantinople, and THEN claims the Tsars took over the status of... okay, WHAT. He's claiming that Eastern Christianity kept the combination of Emperor with High Priest - I don't know if that's true or not, off the bat - and then he claims that because the niece of the last ruler of Constantinople, one Constantine Paleologos, married Ivan III of Russia, the Tsars took over the status of Emperor And High Priest. The use of "grand-dukes of Moscow" shows that he's... I think... deliberately paralleling them to the Popes, given "Dukes of Rome" (what).
* And THEN we have a paragraph on the death of the last Tsar, Nicholas! Which ends "All his ancient rights and prerogatives were abolished, and the church was reduced to the position which it had held in Rome before the days of Constantine." Which, um, given the anti-Christian stance of early Bolshevism in Russia, is certainly ARGUABLE but I don't think any of the implications are accurate! O_O
* Uh. And now apparently the next chapter is about Mohammed and the threat of Islam.
* You know, a big part of this book's fascination for me is that I just never know what tack he's going to take next. Does he dislike Islam, as he does Christianity, for its "there is only one Godand he doesn't dress like that, all others must go" aspects? Does he like it for preserving the legacy of Aristotle et alia? Will there be random tonal whiplash, as with the Spartans at Thermopylae? I DON'T KNOW. Join me as I turn the page and find out! ;-)
* (I just got to use the expression "as with the Spartans at Thermopylae" IN CONTEXT. I love this project. :D)
* The first paragraph of the chapter on Mohammed is all about how We Can Has Moar Semites Nao and we hadn't mentioned Semites since Carthage. Not so auspicious.
* Apparently the Arabs "had roamed through the desert since the beginning of time without showing any signs of imperial ambitions", until Mohammed got hold of them and gave them a God to go force on people. This is very consistent. *head-tilty of really quite perplexed*
* Not that he's much nicer about the pre-Islam pagan gods of the Arabs - the Kaaba was "full of idols and strange odds and ends of Hoo-doo worship". (You're othering again, Mr van Loon.) Does Hoodoo differ from Voodoo? ...now I have to google that.
* Okay, apparently Hoodoo is a set of techniques of folk witchcraft associated specifically with African-American tradition, with strong links to West and Central Africa. It is not a religion or form of worship. The word is first known from 1875; it applies as a noun to a magic spell or potion, to the craft of Hoodoo in general, to the practitioner (a hoodoo doctor), and as a transitive verb "to hoodoo someone". Vodoun is a specific West African religion, practiced in modified forms in the Caribbean and Louisiana under the name Voodoo. Neither Hoodoo nor Voodoo are related to Arabia in any way I can find out with a few minutes' googling.
* Anyway. Mohammed "decided to be the Moses of the Arab people", married his rich widowed employer, announced himself as the Prophet, and got chased out of town. 622 and the importance of the Hegira are mentioned, anyway, and Islam is accurately defined as "submission to the will of God".
* ...um. What. I realize I know very, very little about Islam or its history, but this whole paragraph about the success of Islam is claiming that it had no "restrictions or regulations of an established church" beyond the five-times-a-day prayer, no priests, etc etc. Which may or may not be true, I don't know! But promptly he finishes this paragraph, he starts on one about how Mohammed started putting more and more "regulations which could appeal to those of wealth" in - like polygamy - and transforming Islam from a religion for "the hardy hunters of the high-skied desert" (even when he's talking bilge, it's gorgeous writing) to a religion for "the smug merchants who lived in the bazaars". If Mohammed died, as is stated, ten years after the Hegira, I don't see how much of Islam's success can be attributed to the first paragraph.
I DON'T KNOW. This is not the kind of writing my experience has prepared me for! :P
* The other cited reason for Islam's success is the thing where if you die in battle against the infidel you go straight to heaven. Which I don't argue with, until he brings in how the Christian Crusaders, ON THE OTHER HAND, were "in constant dread of a dark hereafter, and stuck to the good things of this world as long as they possibly could". Which, again, may well have been the case! But the last time we saw Christians in this book, THEY were the ones being all willing to die for their principles and stuff, so you need a bit more foreshadowing if you're going to run that sort of a contrast.
* Oh bahaha. Um. LOLWUT. He talks about how submission to the will of Allah led devout Muslims to accept calmly whatever fate brought to them... but then adds "Of course such an attitude towards life did not encourage the Faithful to go forth and invent electrical machinery or bother about railroads and steamship lines." :P I'll just be over here with my algebra and my star maps, my Aristotle and my incessant squee over dhow rigging... WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT MR VAN LOON. If anyone was too interested in the hereafter to bother poking the sciences, it was Christians. (Be it known, I'm not dissing medieval Christians. They did come up with the most incredibly consistent system of rationally thought-out religion based on the first principles in their holy book. Believe me, I've been trained in it. That was what they were interested in, and they did it well. But Islamic scientists did a lot more invention of mechanical stuff during the Middle Ages, and laid a lot more of the groundwork for "electrical machinery", than Christians did AFAIK.)
* Okay, and again we're into "really fast overview" territory. The split between the Sunni and Shi'ite groups is just barely touched upon; if I didn't already know approximately when it happened, I wouldn't catch it. Then the Muslim empire spreads across North Africa almost by implication - here we go, across the Gibraltar Strait, across the Pyrenees, up toward Paris... BAM! Charles Martel, 732, just 100 years after the death of Mohammed, drives the Muslims out of France but leaves them in Spain, where Cordova "became the greatest center of science and art of medieval Europe". And one more paragraph notes that seven centuries later, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain is destroyed and Columbus gets his grant to go explore for America, after which the Muslims *handwave* "soon regained their strength in the new conquests which they made in Asia and Africa, and today there are as many followers of Mohammed as there are of Christ".
* New chapter! Charlemagne! And the people leading up to him.
* Haha, the Popes of the mid-700s "were not only very holy but also very practical". So, feeling his terrestrial status a little wobbly, "the Pope who was a practical person" (no comma, heehee) allied himself with Pepin the Short and *koff* encouraged him to politely take over the throne from Childeric, last of the Merovingians. Pepin was crowned "King by the grace of God", Dei gratia, and van Loon notes that while it was easy enough to slip those words into the coronation service it took almost fifteen hundred years to get them out again. ;P He certainly doesn't lack for snark.
* Quick reference to Charlemagne fighting the Moors - actually, I'm going to google this.
* HAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh my word. Okay, this is substantially the same as what Hendrik van Loon says, but I've got to quote it; it's from the only contemporary historical reference to Roland, of the Song of Roland etc. Okay, Charlemagne invaded Spain, fought the Moors, received the surrender of all the places he attacked... "He was returning [to France] with his army safe and intact, but high in the Pyrenees on that return trip he briefly experienced the Basques."
BRIEFLY EXPERIENCED THE BASQUES. Sorry, that might be funnier if (like me) you're part Basque or familiar with them; suffice to say, it gives me a hilarious mental image of Charlemagne fleeing in terror from a family Christmas with some of my relatives. XD Anyway, the "wild Basques" (cf. van Loon) killed the rearguard led by Roland at Roncesvalles and gave Europe a Thermopylae-style heroic legend of its own. (Sorry, I'm really on about Thermopylae, aren't I? You can probably blame the translated Chanson de Roland I had as a kiddie, actually. DESPERATE LAST STANDS FOR ALL. ;P)
* Anyway, and then Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III, after which we have another sudden transition - to the time of Pope Leo VIII, who crowns one Otto the "Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation". I'm not familiar with Otto. *googles*
* WAIT WHAT THAT'S NOT TRUE. According to Wiki, Otto I was first proclaimed emperor on the field of battle by his soldiers after defeating the Magyars, then went to Rome and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope John XII in 962. In 963, Otto deposed John and PUT LEO VIII ON THE PAPAL THRONE. TWICE. O_O Why is he leaving out the really interesting stuff?!
* Heehee, though. The next paragraph - last of this chapter - posits that the Germanic Empire lasted until Napoleon Bonaparte had himself crowned heir to Charlemagne in 1801. "For history is like life. The more things change, the more they remain the same." Which ending I think is rather adorable. :D He's very good at concluding his chapters.
* Flipping forward, I see that there's going to be quite a long section on The Medieval World, and an even longer one on the Renaissance; together they're going to take up half the book. I'm just noting.
* I really have to wonder: how many crazy little stories am I missing by only googling stuff when it seems straight-up contradictory or I never heard of it? ;P I once had the idea of doing 1000 Awesome Stories From History, but got frustrated on the second one when my mom scolded me for cheering on the Dutch against the Spanish at the Battle of Leyden. But I'm willing to bet there's plenty of material.
* I am absolutely not majoring in history; it doesn't pay the bills, but I might take up Compiling A Really Good History Book as a hobby. Goodness knows I'm getting a fair collection of material right here, not to mention what I'd picked up while dealing with other impressively bad history books in high school.
* Now we have an overview of the Vikings, raiding and later settling all over the place. (Ooh, he doesn't mention that they got as far east as Constantinople. Did he know yet, I wonder?)
* Rollo the Walker, first Duke of Normandy! (Someday I've got to figure out if any of my ancestors weren't known as annoying and barbaric warriors - we've had Basques, Magyars, and now Normans all in this section of the liveblog. Huh. I think the Cherokees were fairly peace-loving, anyway? *g*)
* Anyway. Yep. The Normans settle down in Normandy for a bit (giving it its name, obvsly), and then cross the English channel. Ooh, here's a very pretty map of all the places the Norsemen went to - the pictures are still the best part of this book. I'm so glad I didn't settle for the pictureless Gutenberg version.
* SNORT. "I have told you how in the year 800 a German chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognized as King of England. Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?" ...I'm so sorry to do this to you, Mr van Loon, but: *points and laughs* WHY INDEED.
******
*grins* Well, I am reading these fairy-tales because they're beautifully written, because they're occasionally hilarious, and because they give me a lot of search terms I never would have thought of on my own. On we go! Next chapter: Feudalism.
* The year: 1000 AD. Europe is under attack from three sides - the Moorish empire on the south, the raiding Norsemen from the north, and the jumble of East Eurasian horse-lords from the east. The feudal system is organized! *tarantaraa* Pagelong overview of the feudal system, focusing essentially on how the knights / lords protected the common people from danger.
* The year: 1500 AD. Kings no longer need the feudal system to keep things tidy (why is not explained), so the knights - he's using "knight" and "feudal lord" interchangeably, as far as I can figure - turn into country squires, who are a mere nuisance. ;-) There were some bad knights! There are bad people today! But mostly the "rough-fisted barons" were awesome and good.
* This is very Eurocentric, saying that if European civilization had disappeared during the Dark Ages, the whole human race would have had to start again from caveman level... ;P
* New chapter. "Chivalry". Seriously, there are a lot of excellent and beautiful bits of writing here that I'm just not quoting because I'd quote the whole book. Admittedly, he does seem to have a knack for being EPICALLY WRONG when he's wrong, but I'm waffling between giving it three and four stars (depending on what happens later on; I'm only a third of the way through).
* Aww, the last couple paragraphs of this chapter are so cute, waxing eloquent about how the metaphorical sword of chivalry fell into the hands of Washington at Valley Forge and of Gordon at Khartoum (I do not know his story at all)... and then suddenly "And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable strength in winning the Great War."
The Great War. Seriously. Chivalry. *makes incommunicable faces*
Remember when I was reviewing Cedric the Forester and complimenting Bernard Gay Marshall on not writing warfare like an armchair adventurer? This is... definitely armchair adventure time. World War I wasn't won with anything resembling When Knighthood Was In Flower (a line I actually get to quote in 1958, hee /OT) - as far as I can figure out nearly a hundred years after the fact, it was straight-up won with the Grim Reaper's scythe. Nations wanted to fight, and they did fight, and they kept fighting until they'd just lost so many of their best young men that they couldn't politically defend fighting any more. It was a pointless blood sacrifice to the god of war... or Discord, or even Chaos.
Or to the rat kings. That works too. ;P
(On the other hand, maybe it's as well; I seem to be picking up some of Mr van Loon's speech patterns. *g*)
******
Enter the Middle Ages! For the record, everything up through the Fall of Rome has taken the first quarter of the book by number of pages (I'm on page 130 out of 482).
* Assertion: the ancient Romans weren't much into gods. This made them tolerant. Honor the Emperor - whose statue in the temples is compared to having a picture of the President in an American post office (do we do that anymore? I can't recall seeing a picture of President Obama the last time I went to mail a package) - and you could pretty much do what you liked other than that, religion-wise.
* Christianity shows up. It's portrayed first as the "new doctrine of a universal brotherhood of man", and then as including "dreadful stories of the fate" of non-Christians. Also, Christians are nice people. Thus the new religion grew. ;-)
* Christianity becomes powerful. Mr van Loon seems to judge it rather, with sentences like "The Roman Empire... insisted that the different sects keep the peace among themselves and obey the wise rule of 'live and let live'. The Christian communities, however, refused to practice any sort of tolerance."
* BWAHAHAHAHA. If this kind of stuff was fairly common in the 1920s (I have no idea if it was or it wasn't), I'm really not surprised that a certain class of modern American Christians are all about the "anything that makes us look bad and non-Christian government look good IS A LIE!" Have a quote: "The Christians... were more than willing to suffer death for their principles. The Romans, puzzled by such conduct, sometimes killed the offenders, but more often they did not. There was a certain amount of lynching during the earliest years of the church, but this was the work of... the mob..." I'm aware there's a lot of complex history behind the oversimplified I IZ NERO/DIOCLETIAN/WHOEVER, I KILLZ ALL TEH CHRISTIANS portrayal in pop culture, but - wow, he's pretty much playing a straight-up Romans Good, Christians Bad trope here.
* A little later Justinian founds the Hagia Sophia (Church of Holy Wisdom), whose name is given merely as "the church of Saint Sophia" in the text. That's important because the founding of Hagia Sophia is paired with the shutting-down of "the school of philosophy at Athens which had been founded by Plato. That was the end of the old Greek world, in which man had been allowed to think his own thoughts and dream his own dreams according to his desires." I knew the '20s were, well, the Roaring Twenties and nowhere near as conservative as post-WWII America, but I'm still kind of startled this is... mainstream. O_O
* Holy Hannah, what. About half a page sums up the rise of the Papacy to authority over western Europe - with the very peculiar term "Dukes of Rome" for the bishops of Rome before the term "Pope" is introduced - then we have a page about Eastern/Orthodox Christianity (based in Constantinople) that jumps suddenly to 1453, Sack of Constantinople, and THEN claims the Tsars took over the status of... okay, WHAT. He's claiming that Eastern Christianity kept the combination of Emperor with High Priest - I don't know if that's true or not, off the bat - and then he claims that because the niece of the last ruler of Constantinople, one Constantine Paleologos, married Ivan III of Russia, the Tsars took over the status of Emperor And High Priest. The use of "grand-dukes of Moscow" shows that he's... I think... deliberately paralleling them to the Popes, given "Dukes of Rome" (what).
* And THEN we have a paragraph on the death of the last Tsar, Nicholas! Which ends "All his ancient rights and prerogatives were abolished, and the church was reduced to the position which it had held in Rome before the days of Constantine." Which, um, given the anti-Christian stance of early Bolshevism in Russia, is certainly ARGUABLE but I don't think any of the implications are accurate! O_O
* Uh. And now apparently the next chapter is about Mohammed and the threat of Islam.
* You know, a big part of this book's fascination for me is that I just never know what tack he's going to take next. Does he dislike Islam, as he does Christianity, for its "there is only one God
* (I just got to use the expression "as with the Spartans at Thermopylae" IN CONTEXT. I love this project. :D)
* The first paragraph of the chapter on Mohammed is all about how We Can Has Moar Semites Nao and we hadn't mentioned Semites since Carthage. Not so auspicious.
* Apparently the Arabs "had roamed through the desert since the beginning of time without showing any signs of imperial ambitions", until Mohammed got hold of them and gave them a God to go force on people. This is very consistent. *head-tilty of really quite perplexed*
* Not that he's much nicer about the pre-Islam pagan gods of the Arabs - the Kaaba was "full of idols and strange odds and ends of Hoo-doo worship". (You're othering again, Mr van Loon.) Does Hoodoo differ from Voodoo? ...now I have to google that.
* Okay, apparently Hoodoo is a set of techniques of folk witchcraft associated specifically with African-American tradition, with strong links to West and Central Africa. It is not a religion or form of worship. The word is first known from 1875; it applies as a noun to a magic spell or potion, to the craft of Hoodoo in general, to the practitioner (a hoodoo doctor), and as a transitive verb "to hoodoo someone". Vodoun is a specific West African religion, practiced in modified forms in the Caribbean and Louisiana under the name Voodoo. Neither Hoodoo nor Voodoo are related to Arabia in any way I can find out with a few minutes' googling.
* Anyway. Mohammed "decided to be the Moses of the Arab people", married his rich widowed employer, announced himself as the Prophet, and got chased out of town. 622 and the importance of the Hegira are mentioned, anyway, and Islam is accurately defined as "submission to the will of God".
* ...um. What. I realize I know very, very little about Islam or its history, but this whole paragraph about the success of Islam is claiming that it had no "restrictions or regulations of an established church" beyond the five-times-a-day prayer, no priests, etc etc. Which may or may not be true, I don't know! But promptly he finishes this paragraph, he starts on one about how Mohammed started putting more and more "regulations which could appeal to those of wealth" in - like polygamy - and transforming Islam from a religion for "the hardy hunters of the high-skied desert" (even when he's talking bilge, it's gorgeous writing) to a religion for "the smug merchants who lived in the bazaars". If Mohammed died, as is stated, ten years after the Hegira, I don't see how much of Islam's success can be attributed to the first paragraph.
I DON'T KNOW. This is not the kind of writing my experience has prepared me for! :P
* The other cited reason for Islam's success is the thing where if you die in battle against the infidel you go straight to heaven. Which I don't argue with, until he brings in how the Christian Crusaders, ON THE OTHER HAND, were "in constant dread of a dark hereafter, and stuck to the good things of this world as long as they possibly could". Which, again, may well have been the case! But the last time we saw Christians in this book, THEY were the ones being all willing to die for their principles and stuff, so you need a bit more foreshadowing if you're going to run that sort of a contrast.
* Oh bahaha. Um. LOLWUT. He talks about how submission to the will of Allah led devout Muslims to accept calmly whatever fate brought to them... but then adds "Of course such an attitude towards life did not encourage the Faithful to go forth and invent electrical machinery or bother about railroads and steamship lines." :P I'll just be over here with my algebra and my star maps, my Aristotle and my incessant squee over dhow rigging... WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT MR VAN LOON. If anyone was too interested in the hereafter to bother poking the sciences, it was Christians. (Be it known, I'm not dissing medieval Christians. They did come up with the most incredibly consistent system of rationally thought-out religion based on the first principles in their holy book. Believe me, I've been trained in it. That was what they were interested in, and they did it well. But Islamic scientists did a lot more invention of mechanical stuff during the Middle Ages, and laid a lot more of the groundwork for "electrical machinery", than Christians did AFAIK.)
* Okay, and again we're into "really fast overview" territory. The split between the Sunni and Shi'ite groups is just barely touched upon; if I didn't already know approximately when it happened, I wouldn't catch it. Then the Muslim empire spreads across North Africa almost by implication - here we go, across the Gibraltar Strait, across the Pyrenees, up toward Paris... BAM! Charles Martel, 732, just 100 years after the death of Mohammed, drives the Muslims out of France but leaves them in Spain, where Cordova "became the greatest center of science and art of medieval Europe". And one more paragraph notes that seven centuries later, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain is destroyed and Columbus gets his grant to go explore for America, after which the Muslims *handwave* "soon regained their strength in the new conquests which they made in Asia and Africa, and today there are as many followers of Mohammed as there are of Christ".
* New chapter! Charlemagne! And the people leading up to him.
* Haha, the Popes of the mid-700s "were not only very holy but also very practical". So, feeling his terrestrial status a little wobbly, "the Pope who was a practical person" (no comma, heehee) allied himself with Pepin the Short and *koff* encouraged him to politely take over the throne from Childeric, last of the Merovingians. Pepin was crowned "King by the grace of God", Dei gratia, and van Loon notes that while it was easy enough to slip those words into the coronation service it took almost fifteen hundred years to get them out again. ;P He certainly doesn't lack for snark.
* Quick reference to Charlemagne fighting the Moors - actually, I'm going to google this.
* HAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh my word. Okay, this is substantially the same as what Hendrik van Loon says, but I've got to quote it; it's from the only contemporary historical reference to Roland, of the Song of Roland etc. Okay, Charlemagne invaded Spain, fought the Moors, received the surrender of all the places he attacked... "He was returning [to France] with his army safe and intact, but high in the Pyrenees on that return trip he briefly experienced the Basques."
BRIEFLY EXPERIENCED THE BASQUES. Sorry, that might be funnier if (like me) you're part Basque or familiar with them; suffice to say, it gives me a hilarious mental image of Charlemagne fleeing in terror from a family Christmas with some of my relatives. XD Anyway, the "wild Basques" (cf. van Loon) killed the rearguard led by Roland at Roncesvalles and gave Europe a Thermopylae-style heroic legend of its own. (Sorry, I'm really on about Thermopylae, aren't I? You can probably blame the translated Chanson de Roland I had as a kiddie, actually. DESPERATE LAST STANDS FOR ALL. ;P)
* Anyway, and then Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III, after which we have another sudden transition - to the time of Pope Leo VIII, who crowns one Otto the "Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation". I'm not familiar with Otto. *googles*
* WAIT WHAT THAT'S NOT TRUE. According to Wiki, Otto I was first proclaimed emperor on the field of battle by his soldiers after defeating the Magyars, then went to Rome and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope John XII in 962. In 963, Otto deposed John and PUT LEO VIII ON THE PAPAL THRONE. TWICE. O_O Why is he leaving out the really interesting stuff?!
* Heehee, though. The next paragraph - last of this chapter - posits that the Germanic Empire lasted until Napoleon Bonaparte had himself crowned heir to Charlemagne in 1801. "For history is like life. The more things change, the more they remain the same." Which ending I think is rather adorable. :D He's very good at concluding his chapters.
* Flipping forward, I see that there's going to be quite a long section on The Medieval World, and an even longer one on the Renaissance; together they're going to take up half the book. I'm just noting.
* I really have to wonder: how many crazy little stories am I missing by only googling stuff when it seems straight-up contradictory or I never heard of it? ;P I once had the idea of doing 1000 Awesome Stories From History, but got frustrated on the second one when my mom scolded me for cheering on the Dutch against the Spanish at the Battle of Leyden. But I'm willing to bet there's plenty of material.
* I am absolutely not majoring in history; it doesn't pay the bills, but I might take up Compiling A Really Good History Book as a hobby. Goodness knows I'm getting a fair collection of material right here, not to mention what I'd picked up while dealing with other impressively bad history books in high school.
* Now we have an overview of the Vikings, raiding and later settling all over the place. (Ooh, he doesn't mention that they got as far east as Constantinople. Did he know yet, I wonder?)
* Rollo the Walker, first Duke of Normandy! (Someday I've got to figure out if any of my ancestors weren't known as annoying and barbaric warriors - we've had Basques, Magyars, and now Normans all in this section of the liveblog. Huh. I think the Cherokees were fairly peace-loving, anyway? *g*)
* Anyway. Yep. The Normans settle down in Normandy for a bit (giving it its name, obvsly), and then cross the English channel. Ooh, here's a very pretty map of all the places the Norsemen went to - the pictures are still the best part of this book. I'm so glad I didn't settle for the pictureless Gutenberg version.
* SNORT. "I have told you how in the year 800 a German chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognized as King of England. Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?" ...I'm so sorry to do this to you, Mr van Loon, but: *points and laughs* WHY INDEED.
******
*grins* Well, I am reading these fairy-tales because they're beautifully written, because they're occasionally hilarious, and because they give me a lot of search terms I never would have thought of on my own. On we go! Next chapter: Feudalism.
* The year: 1000 AD. Europe is under attack from three sides - the Moorish empire on the south, the raiding Norsemen from the north, and the jumble of East Eurasian horse-lords from the east. The feudal system is organized! *tarantaraa* Pagelong overview of the feudal system, focusing essentially on how the knights / lords protected the common people from danger.
* The year: 1500 AD. Kings no longer need the feudal system to keep things tidy (why is not explained), so the knights - he's using "knight" and "feudal lord" interchangeably, as far as I can figure - turn into country squires, who are a mere nuisance. ;-) There were some bad knights! There are bad people today! But mostly the "rough-fisted barons" were awesome and good.
* This is very Eurocentric, saying that if European civilization had disappeared during the Dark Ages, the whole human race would have had to start again from caveman level... ;P
* New chapter. "Chivalry". Seriously, there are a lot of excellent and beautiful bits of writing here that I'm just not quoting because I'd quote the whole book. Admittedly, he does seem to have a knack for being EPICALLY WRONG when he's wrong, but I'm waffling between giving it three and four stars (depending on what happens later on; I'm only a third of the way through).
* Aww, the last couple paragraphs of this chapter are so cute, waxing eloquent about how the metaphorical sword of chivalry fell into the hands of Washington at Valley Forge and of Gordon at Khartoum (I do not know his story at all)... and then suddenly "And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable strength in winning the Great War."
The Great War. Seriously. Chivalry. *makes incommunicable faces*
Remember when I was reviewing Cedric the Forester and complimenting Bernard Gay Marshall on not writing warfare like an armchair adventurer? This is... definitely armchair adventure time. World War I wasn't won with anything resembling When Knighthood Was In Flower (a line I actually get to quote in 1958, hee /OT) - as far as I can figure out nearly a hundred years after the fact, it was straight-up won with the Grim Reaper's scythe. Nations wanted to fight, and they did fight, and they kept fighting until they'd just lost so many of their best young men that they couldn't politically defend fighting any more. It was a pointless blood sacrifice to the god of war... or Discord, or even Chaos.
Or to the rat kings. That works too. ;P
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For compiling your awesome stories for history, do not overlook Horrible Histories. They have all the really good stories plus absurdly catchy songs about the Tudors being terrible, terrible people. They're very England-focused, understandably since they're a BBC show/series of books, but they're still very worth a watch/listen/read.
* This is very Eurocentric, saying that if European civilization had disappeared during the Dark Ages, the whole human race would have had to start again from caveman level... ;P
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Muslim Spain was still alive and well then, buddy. And that's actually in Europe. What about the Chinese, or the Incan and Mayan civilizations, or the proto-Ottoman Empire, or... maybe India? I can't recall if they were a cohesive civilization or just sort of hanging out. I mean, really.
The Romans ruined everything, it's all their fault.
I know about Gordon at Khartoum! It's a rather depressing story, actually, more about idiocy than chivalry but then some might argue that the two terms are interchangable.
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