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[bwv 1080]

There was no real equivalent of the Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition or the religious violence of the Reformation in Moslem history.

The Muslim invasions of India at least equivalent - unlike Christians or Jews, Hindus were considered Pagans and subjected to persecution as bad as any dealt by Medieval Christian groups
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_India#Pre-colonial_India

[kishnevi]

The Muslim invasions of India at least equivalent - unlike Christians or Jews, Hindus were considered Pagans and subjected to persecution as bad as any dealt by Medieval Christian groups
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_India#Pre-colonial_India

Thank you, I had forgotten about that. Possibly a result of the Eurocentric viewpoint Frankopan campaigns against.

[Ken B]

A very good book, that avoids the PC BS noted above, sparing neither the Comanches, Mexicans, Texans or Americans



The Comanches weren't monsters or noble savages, just raiders who acted no better or worse than Mongols or Vikings did back in their day.  Fascinating story of how in about 200 years with the introduction of the horse, the Comanches went from pitiful root-grubbers in Wyoming to the most militarily dominant Native American group, one that took nearly 50 years to subjugate

Merci. I have wanted a book on this period, but don't trust anything written after 1970 , or before 1970, on this kind of thing.

[Florestan]

Europe's distinctive character as more aggressive, more unstable, and less peace-minded than other parts of the world

Oh yes, the world would have been far more quiet, stable and peace-minded, and generally a far better place, without Europe.

What a wanker.

[nodogen]

Oh yes, the world would have been far more quiet, stable and peace-minded, and generally a far better place, without Europe.

What a wanker.

Couldn't have put it better myself. 👍

[Florestan]

[Peter Frankopan] dismisses European art of the 17th and 18th centuries as having been "forged by violence," a mark of opprobrium he withholds from most of the art produced under tyrants of the Eastern world clear to the Mughals in India.

This guy is either a dimwit or he has a heavily ideological axe to grind. Either case, definitely not worth my time. I'll pass too.

[Ken B]

Oh yes, the world would have been far more quiet, stable and peace-minded, and generally a far better place, without Europe.

What a wanker.

Couldn't have put it better myself. 👍

Note my tag line!

[Jo498]

He could have admitted to Moslem persecution of minorities while pointing out that Christian Europe was far less tolerant. There were some episodes like the Almohads in Spain, but far less often than what occurred in Europe. There was no real equivalent of the Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition or the religious violence of the Reformation in Moslem history. 

I have heard people arguing that rough equivalents of the religious conflicts following the Reformation are taking place NOW in the islamic world. I have heard orientalists and historians speak of the near/middle east situation as similar to the 30 years war. Of course, like around 1600 religion is only one factor among many; there are external forces and interests as well (like France and Sweden in the 1630s who became more powerful while Germany/Bohemia etc. were plundered and devastated for decades).

This may not concern the Silk Road region but while "the crusades" are mentioned all the time, it is frequently not mentioned that the crusades were preceded by 400 years of islamic expansion, capture of the Iberic peninsula and virtually constant harrassment of southern Europe, up to the Alps by islamic raiders and pirates. Even long after the crusades and the Spanish reconquista, the Ottoman Empire was a real danger for Europe and the Barbary coast pirates even more so. It is estimated that from the 16th to the late 18th century more than a million Europeans (mostly from captured ships, so not only from the Mediterranean region) were captured and sold as slaves by the barbary pirates. (The maltese knights and others did some raiding, capturing and slaving of their own but on a far smaller scale.) Mozart's Abduction comes at the tail end of this period but it was by no means an outlandish scenario.

These were hard conflicts that lasted centuries and only because the West "won" after centuries of such struggles in the early 19th century (the barbary coast piracy only stopped when France began conquering Algeria in 1830) it does not at all follow that this was due to special ruthlessness or unilateral aggressive expansion of the "West". (The reason for the West winning in the Mediterranean was probably more overextension of the Ottoman Empire that had been on the decline since the late 17th century.)

[Jaakko Keskinen]

[Karl Henning]

"An unparalleled achievement of imagination"?  Some days, I feel that such hyperbole is practically a catalogued allergen.

[nodogen]

Note my tag line!

Well, I'm shocked.

[Florestan]

while "the crusades" are mentioned all the time, it is frequently not mentioned that the crusades were preceded by 400 years of islamic expansion, capture of the Iberic peninsula and virtually constant harrassment of southern Europe, up to the Alps by islamic raiders and pirates.

Bravo, bravissimo! Hear, hear!

Islamic violent and brutal expansion, let the truth be told.

The Crusades, for all their faults and crimes --- which were actually neither greater nor lesser than those of the non-Christians of that time --- were originally a defensive move taken only after centuries of Islamic aggressive expansion in Christian / Jewish territory.

Even long after the crusades and the Spanish reconquista, the Ottoman Empire was a real danger for Europe and the Barbary coast pirates even more so.

Once again: bravo!

People like Frankopan and their ilks, who in the protected privacy of their homes write works freely printed and distributed, much to the applause of some academic corners, can and will never be grateful enough to those "aggressive", "violent" and "war-minded" Europeans such as the Romans (aka the Byzantines), the Austrians (both Spanish and Germans), the Venetians, the Wallachians, the Moldavians and the Poles who valiantly and nobly fought the Islamic expansion towards the very heart of Europe. Without these people and their determination and sacrifice, Frankopan and the likes would have been today no more than some dhimmi kissing the feet of the Sultan as a token of gratitude for being allowed to practice their religion and trade; as for writing peer-reviewed, academically praised books, that would not have happened even in their wettest dreams.

[Ken B]

The Crusades, for all their faults and crimes --- which were actually neither greater nor lesser than those of the non-Christians of that time --- were originally a defensive move taken only after centuries of Islamic aggressive expansion in Christian / Jewish territory.

They were particularly daft. The 4th especially was self-destructive ...

They were a much bigger deal in Europe than in the Islamic world, where they were a large scale nuisance rather than a serious threat.

[Florestan]

They were particularly daft. The 4th especially was self-destructive ...

The 4th was an unmitigated disaster (for which the Romans themselves were partially responsible) --- but with respect to Islam the 1st was a defensive, long belated move.

[Spineur]

On the suject this is quite a nice read



Amin Maalouf was elected at the french academy a couple years back.  He wrote the libretti of many K. Saarahio operas

[Florestan]

On the suject this is quite a nice read



Amin Maalouf was elected at the french academy a couple years back.  He wrote the libretti of many K. Saarahio operas

Haven't read it but I have read and enjoyed many of his books. He has an eminently readable style and touches upon interesting cultural, historical and social topics, wrapping them in adventure-and-mystery sort of novels. Recommended.

[Ken B]

Haven't read it but I have read and enjoyed many of his books. He has an eminently readable style and touches upon interesting cultural, historical and social topics, wrapping them in adventure-and-mystery sort of novels. Recommended.

I have read it and liked it.

[Christo]

Haven't read it but I have read and enjoyed many of his books. He has an eminently readable style and touches upon interesting cultural, historical and social topics, wrapping them in adventure-and-mystery sort of novels. Recommended.

Read it and did'nt like it at all.  Of course his sources are very much worth reading, but everything is commented in the most stereotypical fashion ('what the West doesn't know nor will ever understand'). The only other historian I ever encountered with such an extremely naive perspective is the member of the Knights of Malta, Desmond Seward, who writes about the Crusades in similarly apologetic terms - but from the opposite perspective.

Haven't read it but I have read and enjoyed many of his books. He has an eminently readable style and touches upon interesting cultural, historical and social topics, wrapping them in adventure-and-mystery sort of novels. Recommended.

You would be appalled by the political correctness that informs his whole account - and wouldn't like this one at all (whatever the merits of his artistic writings).  If ever there was an 'ideologically distorted' book on the crusades, it is this over-naive and amateurish paraphrasing of Arab sources without any analytical merit. A pity, because these sources are of course very much worth knowing.

[aligreto]

Not long begun.

[Christo]

Promised to return on the stunning book - yes, it is - by Oxford historian Peter Frankopan and will do so in a few lines. I read a review in The Guardian by William Dalrymple, himself the author of From the Holy Mountain, the most inspiring and eye-opening account of the world the Christian minorities of the Middle-East that I ever read (visited many of these forgotten places myself over the years and wish I'd written as he did, though I wrote a few articles). Fully recommended to start with:
     

Now on The Silk Roads. Dalrymple, who's certainly as well at home in the subject, writes that Frankopan is the true heir to the legacy of Steven Runciman. Now that read Silk Roads myself, I can fully support his findings on this 'brilliant history of the world as seen from the east':
    Runciman's great insight was that the real heirs of Roman civilisation were not the crude chain-mailed knights of the rural west, but instead the sophisticated Byzantines of Constantinople and the cultivated Arabs of Damascus, both of whom had preserved the Hellenised urban tradition of antiquity long after it was destroyed in Europe: "Our civilisation," he wrote, "has grown ... out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident."
   This is history on a grand scale, with a sweep and ambition that is rare. I learned a huge amount about subjects I thought I knew well: who would have guessed that Indian Buddhist monasteries once reached as far as Persia, Syria and the Gulf; that the Romans sent embassies as far as China; that Kashgar had a Christian cathedral before Canterbury; that the Chinese were the first to use toilet paper; that the "exceedingly savage" Huns wore robes made of field mice and ate raw meat "partially warmed by being placed between their thighs"; or that the Roman emperor Diocletian's proudest achievement was the size of his cabbages?
   Undaunted by the complexity of the material, and the scale of the subject he has taken on, Frankopan marches briskly through the centuries, disguising his erudition with an enviable lightness of touch, enlivening his narrative with a beautifully constructed web of anecdotes and insights, backed up by an impressively wide-ranging scholarly apparatus of footnotes drawing on works in multiple languages.

IIR correctly, some here responded negatively (without actually having read the book) for two reasons:

- the factual errors that are mentioned by some reviewers, Dalrymple including.
Re: True, and I observed a few myself that were not mentioned yet; e.g. Frankopan mistaking the badly documented revolt of North-African Jewish communities under Trajan (115-117, the so-called Kitos War) with one of the two well-known revolts in Roman Palestine. But on the whole, these slips of the pen dwindle in the light of the overwhelming abundance of the story, and, as often, 'factual errors' mostly serve the self-esteem of jealous, out-classed reviewers (and readers). 

- what Jeffrey Smith calls the 'political' and tendentious scheme underlying the story, in his eyes.
Re: I can see the point, but, with your permission, largely disagree. The book is certainly not as one-sided or apologetic as your first impressions suggest. Of course this is far too big an issue to discuss here, but reading Ken's response it became clear to me that it's probably rather the other way around: some readers will not endure too much history. Because it would not fit into a political scheme of the world that's being promoted with remarkable ease in some circles nowadays, namely one in which good and evil are simply identified as 'us' versus 'them', Mani redivivus. In the case of JS, I'm well aware that the sensitivity lies in things related to Jewish history and for good reasons (that I share myself). However, I read to many factual errors in the few lines you devote to the theme to be completely convinced.  Hope people will be able to read Silk Roads with less ideological ballast and more joy of discovery.

BTW, here's the Guardian review by William Dalrymple: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/06/silk-roads-peter-frankopan-review