The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

I enjoyed The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade, very muchI bought the three book series (pictured) after completing the Ancient World, and have now finished the first two with great pleasure. Ms. Bauer moves the history chronologically while she also moves the history around the world. One chapter you might be in India, the next a young Korea or Japan, and the next in China or Constantinople.What I find intriguing is Ms.Bauer maintains a scholarly element to each story, keeping it with high grade information while maintaining a flowing, assessable, engaging story in each area of the world.Speaking for myself, it was not as easy of a read as say a straight narrative of the Roman Empire or even Ancient Mesopotamian life, but Ms. Bauer is able to keep the flow extremely interesting and captivating in the areas she has chosen to illuminate. In that sense it is every bit as enjoyable as only a few writers like her could pull it off, and she has done so here.It is so captivating that I bought a number of books on topics she discusses while reading the first two volumes. She dragged me into time periods and dynasties I had not considered in the short term.After reading her varied stories I went and bought Ancient China by Harold Tanner and India in the Persianate Age 1000-1765 by Richard M. Eaton. I did a ton of research to choose followup books that were affordable as Ancient China can get quite expensive and India can get bogged down with writers with Marxist ideals, which surprised me as I had never known that. I plan to find additional books on India from the Vedic period forward, up to say the Persianate period..I prefer to read history though clean lenses, without modern day parallels to distract from the past, nor ideals molding the perspective of the writer.Susan Bauer is an outstanding story teller and gifted writer and I can highly recommend this series. You might learn a whole lot of the inner intricacies of these empires, that are outside normal research, I did

Great book with a narrative style text. Lots of info.Perfect addition to the homeschool library!

I spent a few years reading American History and then decided to try European, starting with the Middle Ages. I am no historian and I have minimal prior knowledge, so I was looking for a good introduction to the Middle Ages. I tried Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age and quickly set it aside. It contained errors even an amateur like me could spot. I then tried Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 (The Penguin History of Europe) and less quickly set it aside. Wickham is a well researched book but definitely not for beginners, despite its marketing. Then I found this book by Bauer, which was perfect for my needs.Let me start by saying something critical that actually is a positive. This is the reason I give the book just four stars. It is also the reason I like the book so much and highly recommend it:This is old fashioned history, the way our grand parents learned history. The focus is on kings, queens, emperors and the generals who served them. I am half way through the book and long ago lost track of all the wars, assassinations and uprisings. Discussions of how the common people lived? There is none of that. There is no mention of developments in science, commerce, the arts, philosophy, etc. Slavery? Taxation? The treatment of women? You will have to look elsewhere.I say this is a strength because the Middle Ages spans an enormous period of time. I could read ten books on the period and still feel I was only scraping the surface. But you have to start somewhere just to get "oriented" to the period, and learning about rulers, wars and shifting borders is an excellent orientation. Who were the Franks? Who was Justinian? Who were the Vandals? Who were the Persians? Who was Leo the Great? These are the sort of things you need to know before you can delve more deeply into other aspects of the history, and these are the sort of things Bauer covers.OK, let me tell you what is awesome about this book.1. It is highly readable. The book is broken down into short chapters that are like "episodes." Each episode is almost like a short story, but they fit together into a complete history. The writing is engaging, with enough focus on rulers' foibles, adventures and intrigues to fill a bookshelf of novels.2. Maps!!! There is a map accompanying almost every chapter. I haven't been paying close attention, but I don't recall a single chapter without one. These aren't generic maps the publisher dropped in, with place names unrelated to what is discussed in the accompanying chapters. No. Each map is drawn specifically to clarify the text. My only problem with the maps is that, in the Kindle edition, they are very low resolution. If you can't read a place name in one of the maps, zooming in probably won't help. The zoomed name will be pixelated.3. World view: Bauer does not limit herself to Europe. She also covers North Africa, the Arab world, Persia, India, Tibet, China, the Eurasian Plains, Korea, Japan and even, briefly, the Americas. Most people will read this book because they are interested in Europe, but you would miss much focusing exclusively there. Reading Bauer, you see Islam and the Tang Dynasty rising simultaneously as the Byzantine Empire falters. What happens in one part of the world does impact others. For example, the rise of Islam places pressure on Byzantine, which gives the Lombards the chance they need to evict most of the remaining Byzantine troops from Italy — and hopes of restoring the Western Roman Empire quietly fade.Let me close by qualifying one thing I have said. While topics such as science, commerce or the lives of common people receive little mention, religion is covered extensively and well. You can't understand the Middle Ages if you don't understand the role of religion. Bauer covers Christianity, the religions that preceded it, heresies, ecumenical councils, the rise of Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism and more, all with insights into how rulers exploited religion to unify or control subjects. I have learned much. For example, I never knew Islam was built on a pre-existing Arab religion that already embraced a deity called Allah and a holy city Mecca.Overall, this is a highly readable introduction to the Middle Ages. It is not history at its best, but that flaw is its strength.

"The History of the Medieval World" professes to achieve a serious objective indeed. It is a history of the populated world from the early 4th C. AD to the beginning of the 12th C. Given that goal, Bauer's text has to navigate between the Scylla of bloodless generalizations that present merely a lifeless frame and the Charybdis of rich detail that allows no coherent picture of the epoch to develop. I'm happy to say that neither whirlpool claims her narrative.Contributing to her success in achieving that balance are 100 maps and 85 "Timelines" (one per chapter). Both devices contribute substantially to the book's interest. Although it is engagingly written, it is not, as reviewers often delight in asserting, an "easy read." I'm not a partisan of that perspective on non-fiction books. "Medieval World" is not easy to read; it is, on the other hand, a challenging read. That's why I like it. (Of course, the fact that it contains more than 700 pages may automatically take it out of contention for the category, "easy to read.")I'm also grateful to Bauer for her willingness to acknowledge religion to be a powerful influence on cultures (as, manifestly, it is) without feeling the need to demean faith as a belief system unable to rise above superstition. To have, for example, Christianity taken seriously simply because it merits consideration is highly unusual in a work of this level of scholarship.One of my criteria for judging books is the answer to the question, Would I like to know the author personally? For this work, my answer is strongly affirmative.