A work of genius
Aug. 14th, 2010 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbA work of genius in history is something which takes a subject and gives a view of it that is comprehensive, penetrating, and novel. Of the three, being comprehensive and penetrating are the more important requirements, but novelty - not in the sense of cleverness, but in the sense of making you feel as though everything you are looking at is new, surprising, unexpected - is the quality that most impresses the idea of genius on the reader.
Professor Aldo Angelo Settia of the University of Pavia has produced at least one such work, probably more. I haven't even finished his Rapine, assedi, battaglie: la guerra nel Medio Evo (in English: Robbery, sieges, battles - warfare in the Middle Ages) and I already feel certain that this is an indispensable work, which nobody who wants to deal with the subject from now on will be able to avoid. And I say that, mind you, from a viewpoint of at least partial disagreement with him, both in ideology and interpretation.
To begin with, there is the style. Modern Italian, especially academic Italian, is a hard language to write well in. Although the recent example of some great journalists - Citati, Montanelli, Bocca, Fruttero & Lucentini - has resulted in a set of templates for decent modern prose, the gravitational pull of bureaucratese, artificiality, obscurity for its own sake, and professorial flatulence, is still terribly powerful and imperfectly resisted. Professor Settia writes as though no bad example of Italian ever existed, as though mental lucidity and verbal clarity were the natural state of man, let alone of Italian man. There is an amazing sense of effortlessness about his prose: he simply brings to the reader's attention, time after time, each and every fact and datum that his argument requires. That makes his prose, not only clear, but deceptively formidable: everything he says is grounded in facts and examples. His advocacy is of that effortless kind that makes you feel that the facts are as he presents them, and that's it. His learning is awesome. Luckily, as an Italian, he is alien to that bad habit of disregarding the history of Italy as though it had not been, for most of modern European history, one of the cultural and political foci, and, until 1500 or so, by far the richest area. But he is just as capable of giving spirited and accurate accounts of events on the borders of Byzantium, in Spain, France, the Netherlands, or just about anywhere.
Best of all, however, he has an overall thesis to present, and does so admirably. His thesis is that, however widely different the practice and technology of war may have been in the long period he deals with (in Italian usage, the Middle Ages go from 476 to 1492 AD), they have a common basic factor that unifies them and that allows them to be discussed as a whole; and that factor is robbery. He argues that the basis of warfare across Europe in the period concerned is the raid (he distinguishes between raid and razzia, which seems to me a bit pernickety) intended for loot, and that sieges and set-piece battles only amount to a deceptively loud but small minority of what war was actually about. He quotes a study that suggests that of all war activities known, 80% of the total amount to raiding and looting; and he shows that raiding and looting tended to happen more or less seasonally, so that the borders between states, large or small - this was true even of little Italian Communes - tended to become lawless frontiers, like the Scottish Borders. Professor Settia argues that Western European states were essentially set up for war, and that this was the result of that.
I am not a military historian, but I have had plenty to do with them in the preliminary reading for my Dark Age Britain work, and I feel sure that this is both novel and entirely justified. In my experience, medieval military history is still in the grip of the "war of states - great battles and sieges" paradigm. Early twentieth century writers such as Delbrueck and Oman, writing in the shadow of the First World War, inevitably saw war as primarily the effort of states and kings to destroy or subjugate each other; and I have on my desk as I write a recent (1999) collection of essays - The circle of war in the Middle Ages, ed. D.J.Kagay and L.J.A.Villalon - which is exactly and exclusively still about nothing but battles, sieges, wars of conquest, and royal armies.
The good done by Professor Settia's work, in this context, is twofold. It enlarges immeasurably our understanding even of "real" wars such as the Hundred Years' War, making their agonizing duration easier to understand and interpret; and it brings the study of war in closer contact with the social and economic concerns of modern historians. Professor Settia insists on the economic (and legal) significance of war and raiding, underlining the way that loot literally motivated soldiers to fight and risk death; and that, nevertheless, clear and serious limits were placed on looting and other ways of profiting from war. War had thus far mainly been the concern of specialists among historians; Professor Settia places it at the disposal of the historical mainstream, as a main feature of society and an important economic activity.
Now for my criticism. Professor Settia's work is essentially a work of debunking; true, in the most thoughtful, wise and discriminating way possible, but debunking nonetheless. And as such, it has a levelling if not destructive tendency. He says in so many words, for instance, that there was no discernible difference between the kind of raiding warfare carried out by Muslims on the borders of Byzantium, and the same kind of warfare in Europe. Ah, but there was, and it was discernible, and could be discerned by contemporaries, and was. Asia's own version of Marco Polo, Bishop Rabban Bar Sawma, who travelled from Mesopotamia to Bourdeaux from 1287 to 1291, noticed with astonishment that lands in Italy that had recently suffered from war were not devastated or desertified. The widely travelled Bishop had seen the effects of Muslim warfare from the borders of China to Syria, and he found it simply astonishing that a country where war had been just fought should not be reduced to a wilderness. This, I should say, speaks by itself, and is confirmed by succeeding history. One just has to compare the two shores of the Mediterranean.
By the same token, I wish the Professor would tackle the evident difference between the image of war in high culture and the reality he represents. Medieval epic, especially Arthurian epic, has no interest in war as looting (the Song of the Cid is an exception, and it is so because it is historical, eyewitness material); the knights of Charlemagne or of the Round Table do not go to war to enrich themselves, but because it is their duty. Indeed, a favourite activity of Arthurian knights is to trash or kill rogue knights who robbed, looted, or persecuted defenceless ladies. How did this attitude to war as a duty, often even as a Christian duty, fit in with the practice of the period? How was it seen? It seems to me that Professor Settia's work raises this question, but does little to answer it.
Having said all that, this is still a masterpiece. Professor Settia, who is now 78 and still active, was 74 when this splendid work was published. To quote myself: There are no prodigies in history. Music, mathematics, the arts, sports, are all full of people who performed with immortal genius before they were old enough to vote; history is not. To the contrary, if there is one thing that can be generalized about historians, is that the best will get better as they get older, and will generally die in harness. Gibbon in Lausanne, tired, sick with a hundred ailments, revolted by contemporary politics, and still scribbling away, is the model; dozens of others, from Thucydides to Cesare Baronio to Mommsen to Dumezil and beyond, have died with their pens in their hand. Professor Settia belongs to that noble band. It is desperately urgent that this product of the high maturity of a great scholar should be translated into English, and put at the disposal of historians worldwide; because, as long as they remain unaware of it, they risk wasting their time on a way of doing history that is already dead without their realizing it.
Professor Aldo Angelo Settia of the University of Pavia has produced at least one such work, probably more. I haven't even finished his Rapine, assedi, battaglie: la guerra nel Medio Evo (in English: Robbery, sieges, battles - warfare in the Middle Ages) and I already feel certain that this is an indispensable work, which nobody who wants to deal with the subject from now on will be able to avoid. And I say that, mind you, from a viewpoint of at least partial disagreement with him, both in ideology and interpretation.
To begin with, there is the style. Modern Italian, especially academic Italian, is a hard language to write well in. Although the recent example of some great journalists - Citati, Montanelli, Bocca, Fruttero & Lucentini - has resulted in a set of templates for decent modern prose, the gravitational pull of bureaucratese, artificiality, obscurity for its own sake, and professorial flatulence, is still terribly powerful and imperfectly resisted. Professor Settia writes as though no bad example of Italian ever existed, as though mental lucidity and verbal clarity were the natural state of man, let alone of Italian man. There is an amazing sense of effortlessness about his prose: he simply brings to the reader's attention, time after time, each and every fact and datum that his argument requires. That makes his prose, not only clear, but deceptively formidable: everything he says is grounded in facts and examples. His advocacy is of that effortless kind that makes you feel that the facts are as he presents them, and that's it. His learning is awesome. Luckily, as an Italian, he is alien to that bad habit of disregarding the history of Italy as though it had not been, for most of modern European history, one of the cultural and political foci, and, until 1500 or so, by far the richest area. But he is just as capable of giving spirited and accurate accounts of events on the borders of Byzantium, in Spain, France, the Netherlands, or just about anywhere.
Best of all, however, he has an overall thesis to present, and does so admirably. His thesis is that, however widely different the practice and technology of war may have been in the long period he deals with (in Italian usage, the Middle Ages go from 476 to 1492 AD), they have a common basic factor that unifies them and that allows them to be discussed as a whole; and that factor is robbery. He argues that the basis of warfare across Europe in the period concerned is the raid (he distinguishes between raid and razzia, which seems to me a bit pernickety) intended for loot, and that sieges and set-piece battles only amount to a deceptively loud but small minority of what war was actually about. He quotes a study that suggests that of all war activities known, 80% of the total amount to raiding and looting; and he shows that raiding and looting tended to happen more or less seasonally, so that the borders between states, large or small - this was true even of little Italian Communes - tended to become lawless frontiers, like the Scottish Borders. Professor Settia argues that Western European states were essentially set up for war, and that this was the result of that.
I am not a military historian, but I have had plenty to do with them in the preliminary reading for my Dark Age Britain work, and I feel sure that this is both novel and entirely justified. In my experience, medieval military history is still in the grip of the "war of states - great battles and sieges" paradigm. Early twentieth century writers such as Delbrueck and Oman, writing in the shadow of the First World War, inevitably saw war as primarily the effort of states and kings to destroy or subjugate each other; and I have on my desk as I write a recent (1999) collection of essays - The circle of war in the Middle Ages, ed. D.J.Kagay and L.J.A.Villalon - which is exactly and exclusively still about nothing but battles, sieges, wars of conquest, and royal armies.
The good done by Professor Settia's work, in this context, is twofold. It enlarges immeasurably our understanding even of "real" wars such as the Hundred Years' War, making their agonizing duration easier to understand and interpret; and it brings the study of war in closer contact with the social and economic concerns of modern historians. Professor Settia insists on the economic (and legal) significance of war and raiding, underlining the way that loot literally motivated soldiers to fight and risk death; and that, nevertheless, clear and serious limits were placed on looting and other ways of profiting from war. War had thus far mainly been the concern of specialists among historians; Professor Settia places it at the disposal of the historical mainstream, as a main feature of society and an important economic activity.
Now for my criticism. Professor Settia's work is essentially a work of debunking; true, in the most thoughtful, wise and discriminating way possible, but debunking nonetheless. And as such, it has a levelling if not destructive tendency. He says in so many words, for instance, that there was no discernible difference between the kind of raiding warfare carried out by Muslims on the borders of Byzantium, and the same kind of warfare in Europe. Ah, but there was, and it was discernible, and could be discerned by contemporaries, and was. Asia's own version of Marco Polo, Bishop Rabban Bar Sawma, who travelled from Mesopotamia to Bourdeaux from 1287 to 1291, noticed with astonishment that lands in Italy that had recently suffered from war were not devastated or desertified. The widely travelled Bishop had seen the effects of Muslim warfare from the borders of China to Syria, and he found it simply astonishing that a country where war had been just fought should not be reduced to a wilderness. This, I should say, speaks by itself, and is confirmed by succeeding history. One just has to compare the two shores of the Mediterranean.
By the same token, I wish the Professor would tackle the evident difference between the image of war in high culture and the reality he represents. Medieval epic, especially Arthurian epic, has no interest in war as looting (the Song of the Cid is an exception, and it is so because it is historical, eyewitness material); the knights of Charlemagne or of the Round Table do not go to war to enrich themselves, but because it is their duty. Indeed, a favourite activity of Arthurian knights is to trash or kill rogue knights who robbed, looted, or persecuted defenceless ladies. How did this attitude to war as a duty, often even as a Christian duty, fit in with the practice of the period? How was it seen? It seems to me that Professor Settia's work raises this question, but does little to answer it.
Having said all that, this is still a masterpiece. Professor Settia, who is now 78 and still active, was 74 when this splendid work was published. To quote myself: There are no prodigies in history. Music, mathematics, the arts, sports, are all full of people who performed with immortal genius before they were old enough to vote; history is not. To the contrary, if there is one thing that can be generalized about historians, is that the best will get better as they get older, and will generally die in harness. Gibbon in Lausanne, tired, sick with a hundred ailments, revolted by contemporary politics, and still scribbling away, is the model; dozens of others, from Thucydides to Cesare Baronio to Mommsen to Dumezil and beyond, have died with their pens in their hand. Professor Settia belongs to that noble band. It is desperately urgent that this product of the high maturity of a great scholar should be translated into English, and put at the disposal of historians worldwide; because, as long as they remain unaware of it, they risk wasting their time on a way of doing history that is already dead without their realizing it.
