As a rule, I don’t usually review books that I didn’t finish. This does somewhat tilt my reviews in a more positive direction, since I rarely finish books that I genuinely dislike. I don’t think it would be entirely fair to classify Bart Van Loo’s The Burgundians in that latter group, but I ultimately decided it was not worth finishing. The reasons for that say more about why I personally read history and what makes a book worthwhile to me, so I figured I’d write a little about The Burgundians and why it disappointed me in the end (or, to be completely accurate, in the first hundred pages).
While its cover proclaims that it is a history of over a thousand years of Burgundian history, that is a little misleading. The period from the 5th century to the late 14th is covered in the opening fifty pages, only a tenth of the book’s total length. Really this is a history of the Valois dukes of Burgundy and their relationship with the Low Countries. That was fine with me – I prefer a more focused history and as an avowed Hundred Years War nerd I’m more invested in the Valois era than any other. I also did not expect very much from the book’s first fifty pages, since when you’re covering nearly half a millennium in so few pages you can only be so detailed. However, there were warning signs here of what ultimately led me to abandon the book.
If I were to describe Van Loo’s approach to history in The Burgundians in one word it would be romantic. It is chock full of anecdotes and stories to humanize its characters and provide fun little moments. I don’t necessarily have anything against a romantic view of the past, but it often goes hand-in-hand with glossing over important details and, in my experience, rarely leads to good history. The thread of the book’s narrative is about telling a story, not really making you understand the period, events, or people. Major characters are dropped into the narrative the moment they first become relevant, so if you don’t know who they are then their actions don’t really make sense, but the structure of the book keeps things moving in such a way that I imagine many readers won’t mind. The flow of the story takes precedence over context and explanation.
Van Loo declares a distinct fondness for Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and I can see it in The Burgundians. Tuchman’s book, while popular, is a fundamentally flawed attempt to draw parallels between the fourteenth century and the twentieth that said far more about the author and how she viewed the present than it does about the medieval past. Van Loo is also inspired to frequently draw parallels to the modern era, especially the French Revolution, which have no real basis in fact and serve only to flatten complex topics for the sake of making the stakes seem higher in the story. The Flemish revolts of the fourteenth century were not about to trigger a French Revolution style complete restructuring of society and to imply that does a disservice to the events and people of the time.
Worse, to me anyway, are the too numerous interpretive errors and mistakes I found throughout the book. If you’ll indulge me, here are a few that stuck in my maw from the first hundred pages:
On pages 40-41, his explanation of why the French lost at Crécy is that they were too dependent on the crossbow and refused to fight on foot – characterizing the knights as swaggering drunks. This has no basis in fact and is the sort of interpretation one would expect to find in English propaganda from several centuries ago.
When describing the aftermath of the Battle of Courtrai and the looting of the golden spurs from the French knights, Van Loo writes (on p. 65) “From then on, the golden spurs plundered from the battlefield would hang as glittering war trophies in the Church of Our Lady in Kortrijk”. He then goes on to say that some Flemings today remain proud of this achievement and cites some nineteenth century historical fiction novel. From reading this, you would think that the spurs still hang in Kortrijk. But they don’t. They were recaptured by the French less than a century after the battle, and Bart Van Loo knows this. On page 91 he describes the sack of Kortrijk by Charles VI in 1382, when the spurs were reclaimed, and he mentions the spurs explicitly.
The section where the first claim is made is during a narrative piece about the tutoring of John the Fearless, so within the fictional chronology of his narrative the spurs were still hanging which is maybe what Van Loo was going for, but it generates needless confusion and only makes sense if we assume that John the Fearless was learning about the Battle of Courtrai before he turned 11 – which is how old he was when the spurs were returned to France. It’s an entirely artificial construction that serves only to confuse or mislead. At first it made me wonder if the author knew that the spurs currently hanging in Kortrijk are modern replicas and not the historical originals.
On page 73 he describes the schism between the popes as something “….that no one could have predicted.” This only really makes sense if you view this moment in church history in a vacuum. Papal schisms had happened before, popes had been in exile from Rome before, and anti-popes were nothing new by the fourteenth century. That’s not to say that this was not a crisis for the papacy and the church – disputes over the rightful claimant to the papal curia where never a good thing for the church – but Van Loo instead overhypes the moment by ignoring the historical precedent and thus fails to provide the reader with useful context. Instead, these sections feel overly reminiscent of early modern Protestant historiography that sought to demonise the Middle Ages and ridicule papal disputes as a way of undermining and mocking contemporary Catholics.
On page 86 he writes that Froissart “seemed to have a warmer spot in his heart for Flanders” than his contemporary Deschamps did. This begs the question: does Van Loo not know who Froissart was? Froissart was from Hainault, which bordered Flanders, served in the court of the Queen of England for many years (a notable Flemish ally), and at the time of the events being described was probably working for the Duchess of Brabant, another neighbor to Flanders. Froissart’s sympathies to Flanders could not be more easily explained – he’s all but Flemish himself! Van Loo also says that both Deschamps and Froissart were in Charles VI’s camp during the 1382 invasion of Flanders. I tried to verify this but I couldn’t find any evidence that Froissart was in Charles’ camp for the Battle of Roosebeke and based on my understanding of his life it seems highly unlikely that he would have been. However, Buonaccorso Pitti, who was an eyewitness to the battle, seems to be absent from the book.
Beyond the basic biographical facts, though, I think this is representative of the book and my problems with it. Rather than explain who Froissart was, his background and general allegiances, Van Loo goes for the romantic option of Froissart just having a warmer spot in his heart for Flanders. The Burgundians lacks the desire to provide context and explanation, and in doing so it creates a narrative that frequently irritates me with its lack of curiosity.
I’ll fully admit that these are nitpicks, minor problems that a don’t necessarily render a work of popular history worthless but would be highly troubling in something more academic. The thing is, if I can’t trust the history I’m reading I don’t see a reason to keep reading it, and I don’t think I can trust The Burgundians. I can spot errors in the sections on topics that I am already very familiar with, which makes me concerned for all the errors I can’t spot because I’m not as knowledgeable on those subjects. I would not feel comfortable citing this book in my work and given how slowly I read I would be better served spending my time reading something else rather than the remaining 400 pages of The Burgundians. I am disappointed as I was looking forward to this book. We could use more modern books on the Valois dukes and their role in shaping late medieval Europe, but sadly this book isn’t it.