I’ll save you some time, it’s boring and terrible. If you want to know more click through, but be warned what lies within contains discussion of some pretty vile stuff (and a really quite terrible game).
[Malta Month] 1565 Siege of Malta by Maurice Suckling
![[Malta Month] 1565 Siege of Malta by Maurice Suckling](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/620919b2fcf26676329427ee/1654439247065-5YUC9R78LMWO0E4H99DY/IMG_20220515_213851.jpg)
Making a game about a siege is challenging. Sieges are often by their very nature filled with long stretches of time where one side has little to do but endure. A siege like the Great Siege of Malta, which lasted most of a year, can be a long, slow, tortuous, and brutal event that doesn’t lend itself immediately to being turned into a game. Capturing the scale of a siege while also giving players plenty of choices and things to do to keep them engaged is a challenge. Even when you do find an element to gamify, if the game is multiplayer, you will need something for both sides to do. It’s not very exciting if one player is taking lots of actions and the other player just has to wait until something happens. You can design the best system ever for the attacker to try and topple his opponent’s walls, but if the defender has nothing to do you haven’t made much of a game. This may be why many wargames about sieges seem to be solitaire games. When you only have to create a game for one side and can entirely abstract the other it simplifies the challenge of making a game from the history.
Trial by Battle by Jonathan Sumption
Jonathan Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War is nothing short of epic. This volume is 600 pages long and only covers the first ten years of the war, ending with the Siege of Calais in 1347. For the rest of the war, you’ll need to read the next four volumes, all equally massive, the final of which is still not finished. Research projects of this scale are exceedingly rare these days, and that makes this a particularly interesting and important book, but there are also reasons people rarely tackle projects this large. It’s hard to know where to begin when tackling something as enormous in both scope and impact as Sumption’s series and there’s a lot to talk about with this book, both its context and its contents, so let’s jump into it!
John Talbot and the War in France by A.J. Pollard
There is a dearth of scholarship in English covering the end of the Hundred Years War. If you want to know what happened in France after the Treaty of Arras in 1435, you’re going to have a hard time. That was partly why I was so excited to get my hands on A.J. Pollard’s book about John Talbot. Talbot was a legendary English military figure; the bulk of whose career was career was spent in France between the years 1435 and 1450 – with a brief but disastrous return in 1452-3. Talbot is probably most widely known to medieval history enthusiasts for his dramatic death at Castillon in 1453, the final battle of the war where French commander Jean Bureau’s artillery obliterated the English charge – often seen as a turning point in European warfare. John Talbot was more than just the man who died in an arguably reckless charge in southwest France and A.J. Pollard’s account of his extensive military career both fleshes out the man and fills in a large historiographical gap in our understanding of the Hundred Years War.
The Battle of Poitiers 1356 by David Green (Tempus Publishing, 2002)
While hardly unknown or obscure, I’ve generally been of the opinion that the Battle of Poitiers is unfairly overshadowed by Crécy and Agincourt. While Crécy is noteworthy for being the great early English victory that reinvigorated a too expensive war, Poitiers and its aftermath really set the foundation for what would come next in the Hundred Years War. Still, there are far fewer books dedicated to Poitiers than to either Crécy or Agincourt, which is why I was interested to see that David Green had written one. David Green wrote what is probably my favourite general history of the Hundred Years War but before that he was best known as a scholar of Edward, the Black Prince, which makes it only logical that he would have written a short history of the prince’s most famous victory. The Battle of Poitiers 1356 is an excellent overview of the battle and its most famous participant, fitting quite a lot of information into a relatively short book.
Review: The Shores of Tripoli by Fort Circle Games
I first became aware of the Barbary War when I was around fourteen years old. I was in my hometown’s Barnes and Noble and saw a book that covered the career of William Eaton, focusing on his role in the Barbary War and eventual conflicts with Thomas Jefferson. It had been granted a prominent place in the bookshop since it involved TJ – our local hometown hero, of sorts, and yes, we do call him TJ – and while I didn’t buy it at the time it stuck with me. Later I convinced my parents to buy a copy of the audiobook on CD and after one failed attempt, eventually listened to it with my father on a road trip somewhere. It is perhaps not the most ringing of endorsements that I remember almost nothing from that book, not even its title. I tried looking it up, but it turns out that several books on the Barbary War were published in the mid-00’s. Still, while my first encounter with the Barbary War was not the most engaging it has sat in the back of my head all these years as one of the more interesting, and forgotten, American wars.
The Agincourt Campaign of 1415: The Retinues of the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester by Michael P. Warner (Boydell, 2021).
The research on the prosopography of English armies during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is easily one of the most fascinating and rewarding bodies of historical research of the last twenty years. Pioneered by scholars like Andrew Ayton, Adrian Bell, and Anne Curry, this work has now been taken up by many more researchers and expanded beyond what the three of them could have managed on their own. Michael P. Warner’s book examines the Agincourt campaign through the lens of the retinues of King Henry V’s younger brothers. This is very much a work of academic scholarship that is in conversation with a wider pool of research, not an introductory book. That said, it is also remarkably approachable for a book of this kind and while an awareness of the work of Ayton, Bell, and Curry will assist anyone who wishes to read it, having actually read everything that came before is not a requirement.
Murder During the Hundred Years' War: The Curious Case of Sir William Cantilupe by Dr. Melissa Julian-Jones (Pen and Sword, 2020)
At first glance, the murder of William Cantilupe by what appears to be his entire household in 1375 feels like something straight out of Agatha Christie. His body was discovered by the side of a road, but upon initial inspection the coroner determined that he had been positioned there so as to appear as if he was murdered by highwaymen – his clothes were undamaged despite him having been stabbed multiple times in the torso. An initial visit to his nearby residence found it entirely empty – his wife and staff all having relocated very soon after his last reported sighting. Suspicions and accusations abound, and eventually two servants would be executed for the crime and several others declared outlaws for failing to turn up to court. His wife was eventually acquitted of the murder – history, however, has been less kind to her. The dominant narrative of William Cantilupe’s death has long been a salacious story of an adulteress wife having an affair with the local sheriff using her position of security to off her husband and marry her lover. Dr. Melissa Julian-Jones book discusses the Christie-esque aspects of the story, but also picks apart that traditional narrative to explore alternative explanations, and in the process reveals a fascinating story of elite and common society in late fourteenth-century England.
When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History by Matthew Restall (HarperCollins, 2018)
I only very recently began improving my knowledge of the history of Spanish colonisation of the Caribbean and Mexico and must confess to still being quite the novice on the subject. My interest was spurred by intermittent brief references to the use of crossbows by Spanish conquistadors. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more, but I also knew that I couldn’t just dip a toe into the subject. The colonisation of Central and South America is a heavy subject and includes some of the worst genocides in human history. Even if what I was interested in was some niche facts about an old weapon, I couldn’t completely ignore that side of the history.
Matthew Restall has published many books on the Spanish in sixteenth-century America. I had previously read his Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, which is a great introduction to the subject of Spanish colonialism, and I would recommend it to anyone. That was a large part of why I was inclined to pick up When Montezuma Met Cortés, that and a Google Books search indicated that he at least mentioned crossbows a few times so I could be killing two birds with one stone.
Peacemaking in the Middle Ages: Principles and Practice by Jenny Benham (Manchester University Press, 2010)
Peacemaking in the Middle Ages is a truly phenomenal book, the kind of book that excites me as a historian and fills me with energy for my next project. The title would suggest that this is a very niche book without a wide appeal, but I think that anyone with an interest in medieval history should buy a copy and read it – it’s barely over two hundred pages and the paperback edition retails for a fairly reasonable £25 so you really don’t have an excuse!
Bear with me here, but the structure of this book is an impressive thing to behold. Jenny Benham’s writing is direct and purposeful, it never says more than it has to, and each point is well structured and supported without being didactic or boring. It is a master class in efficient and engaging writing throughout. I wish I could write a book this well. Benham is wading through some fairly dense material and writing about subjects that it would be trivial to make boring, but she avoids getting lost in the weeds and delivers her book in just the length it needs to be. It’s phenomenal.
Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe by Robert Bartlett (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for two of the lectures where Robert Bartlett presented some of the initial drafts of the work that would become Blood Royal. In particular, his discussion of the use of regnal numbering in medieval Europe, from its origins in the papacy to its later adoption by various monarchies, was one of the most interesting talks I’ve ever attended. I’d been looking forward to this book ever since it was implied at the final talk that one would be forthcoming, and while I had to wait quite a while the final product did not disappoint.
Review: Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)
I was a huge fan of Jon Peterson’s earlier book Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012) when I read it back in either 2014 or 2015 – I was finishing my PhD and records from that time are hazy at best. I managed to sneak it into my thesis, so I must have read it before August 2015. I also really enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana (Ten Speed Press, 2018), which Peterson contributed to. Given this pedigree of past works, I was very excited when I discovered that he was revisiting the subject of the early history of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in his new book, and I’m happy to report that it did not disappoint.