Reviews for Napoleon the Little

The average rating for Napoleon the Little based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-31 00:00:00 Radka Geserick This book reads a bit like a love letter to bureaucracy. That's probably not going to be a ringing endorsement to many of you out there, so let me stress this right at the start: this is a really exceptional and impressive piece of scholarship, and John Baldwin is one of the best writers in the field of medieval history. This is a very, very good book. How much enjoyment you get out this book, though, is going to depend fairly heavily on how you feel about political and institutional history. The Government of Philip Augustus was a project that Baldwin undertook to address a gap in scholarship: plenty had been written about Philip Augustus's reign in terms of battles, marriage deals, and political machinations with the Henry, Richard, and John. However, very little had been done to explore the nuts and bolts that built all of this: the steadily growing and evolving governmental administration that Philip used to rule the realm. Baldwin places the key moment of Baldwin's reign between 1190 and 1203. Relatively speaking, the period seems uneventful - besides his brief participation in the Third Crusade, the 1190s feel more like the decade between Philip's initial struggle for control and the more action-packed wars with John in the 1200s. But Baldwin marks it as the key point in Philip's reign - and honestly, in the Capetian monarchy. The crusade was determinate in two ways. First, it forced Philip to set up administrative structures to run the country while he was gone, many of which continued to function even after his return. And, just as importantly, the Third Crusade marked the death of many of Philip's key early advisers, largely barons from his father Louis VII's administration. So the 1190s marked the rise of a new circle of key figures to advise the king, men who were frequently from the lower nobility and much more loyal to the king than members of the larger baronial families. With these two events set in motion, Baldwin then goes through to catalog an array of administrative reforms that resulted: increased documentation, the rise of baillis, as less ad-hoc justice system, and more reliable fiscal accounting system. They sound a bit dry, but Baldwin infuses them with importance, even going so far as to call the 1204 conquest of Normandy a 'prize' for earlier administrative successes. Again, your mileage will vary depending on how much you like legal / administrative / fiscal history. There are points in here where things get rather dry and technical. But Baldwin does a really nice job making it as interesting as he can. The section on the new men in Philip's court is loads of fun, particularly how they seemed to have formed the central advisory circle around Philip for years without any of the chroniclers taking note, just because most of them were of fairly low birth. It's like a slow-motion heist that takes 15 years to happen. The last chapters is also very interesting - Baldwin takes a look at how chroniclers portrayed Philip's birth, coronation, death, and victory at Bouvines and demonstrates how they illustrate early ideas of Capetian sacred kingship that wouldn't take full form until the reign of Philip's grandson, St. Louis IX. It's also an excellently organized book, which I always appreciate. Baldwin divides Philip's reign into four main sections (1179-1190, 1190-1203, 1203-1214, and 1214-1223), and begins each section with a brief-but-clear overview of political events. He then takes two or three chapters to describe the concurrent administrative developments, always taking care to relate them back to the narrative. In a lot of ways, The Government of Philip Augustus reads like the polar opposite of a book like The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350. It's focused on kings, and nobles, and famous battles. That's a bit of a harder sell in the field of history today, largely for good reason. But there's still plenty to be learned and taken away from political / administrative history, and Baldwin really highlights all of the potential the field still contains.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-07 00:00:00 Daniel Robinson I don't like politics, avoid everything that has to do with government structures, and I don't care about royal families so picking up a book on the subject felt difficult, and it took me several months to get through so much dense, tightly-packed information...But you know what? I learned so much about history in general that I'll never forget, and I can apply to any writing project I choose. Sometimes it's worth it to go outside of your comfort zone and chew on a difficult book. I recommend this if only to see the sheer depth of information is actually available from historical records, it's incredible. It's highly academic writing so it's best read a little bit at a time. I use it as a reference frequently for my worldbuilding project based on Paris in 1190 AD.