Customer Reviews

A History of Medieval Spain

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The major problem with this book is that it tends to get bogged down in narrative without enough analytical insight. The result is that the reader is faced with hundreds of pages of which kings fought which, married whom and so on. While there is commentary on which events are more important than others and why, it is a little sparse. I read all but the last 100 pages or so as I just ran out of steam. However, as a person who is interested in Spain and Spanish history, I plan to keep it on my shelf for reference purposes.

The book is sensibly divided into major historical time periods (i.e. Visigothic, Caliphate, etc) that give a good organizational framework. Each time period typically has two chapters. The first is more or less a historical narrative and is usually the more difficult to get through. The second is an often interesting discussion of the social and political institutions of both Christian and Islamic Spain. For example, there is a chapter that outlines the major officials of the Umayyad caliphate, their roles, powers, prejudices and so on.

O'Callaghan provides us with an in-depth (728 pagess), well written survey of medieval Spain, starting with the Visigothic era in 415. The major sections of the book cover the monarchs, government, society, economy, culture and religion through the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella. The book includes numerous maps, illustrations and genealogical charts. I highly recommend this book for the historian, student and general public with an interest in medieval Spain.

This is the classic standard text and the best one volume overview of the period. Spanish history available in english tends to be broken down into ghetto sub-subjects making it difficult to arrange the period information relative to each other. This book will give you a general framework to organize the information of this period. Dry reading but useful to the thoughtful reader. This volume is inadeuqate as a sole source of medieval Spanish history but should serve as a base to branch out to the readily available historical alleys.

Previous reviews have decried this book for lack of readability; this is a pity, the purpose of this book was not to be for light summer reading, but to provide information on a previously obscure topic. Current authors writing about Medieval Spain still cite this book as the go-to reference, period.
The book encompasses the entire history of Spain from the fall of the Roman Empire to the reign of Fernando and Isabel. If you needed one book on this subject it would be this one, especially as a reference work.

One of the best history books I've ever read. You might expect a history of Spain, from the invasion of the Muslims in 711 to the unification of most of Spain (Roman Hispania) under the Catholic kings, around 1479, would be a hard indeed thing to narrate. And you'd be right, especially when that history covers different kingdoms, peoples of diverse languages, and of the three monotheistic religions, all living in one and the same peninsula. Also, if that book aspires to cover all aspects of the lives of these nations, from the governmental, social, cultural, economical, what have you... well, the author achieves a monumental success. The impression left on the reader is like the view you get from a plane flying not too high: you see perfectly what the country looks like and how it goes changing colors and shapes in just a matter of minutes. So I see Spain in this book that covers the medieval era. Do you need to know about Spain previous to reading this book? It would definitely help to have an idea of its geography and of its peoples, but not more than a few tourist notions and you're ready to go. But go slow. Go back if you have to, underline, take notes as I did. This book, however thick it is, is just an invitation to pick your favorite stories and go deep on them later on, in other books. I picked a lot of interesting subjects myself that I can't wait to find the right book to go into deeper. Just a few events and names for instance: the Mendoza, Castro or Lara families; the continuous struggle of the magnates with the crown for eminence is very interesting, especially in the beginning of the reconquest, when reconquest and colonization provided such a great time for opportunities for individual entrepreneurship, for acquiring fame, honor and advancing in life, perhaps even from rural poverty to nobility, in those times you made your own destiny; of course when the reconquest was over, the changes for individuals without means to progress (the progress that is real progress, not like getting more welfare, if you understand me) was also over. Exit the individual, enter the government.

As I was saying, there are plenty of things that will interest you to the point of encouraging you to do further reading and investigating. The lives of adventurers, Venetians, Genoese, mercenaries like the German Roger de Flor, who started the Catalan Company; the life and times of the Cid; the rivalries among members of the crown to inherit the thrones, to the point of brothers killing brothers and sons shunning their regent mothers; the political alliances between kingdoms; and the whole mingling of newcomers with the natives: Visigoths with Romans; European pilgrims and crusaders settling down here with native Spaniards; new African invasions of Muslims with previous waves; Christians who converted to keep their possessions and lives among the Muslim invaders, and vice versa... man there's a lot of amazing stuff in Spain's history to get a hold of.

The author deals very intelligently with all these issues. He goes by chronological stretches, first minding the main events, kings, main battles or events in each kingdom; then goes on to the economics, or the government, then the cultural stuff, and so on. Then goes again into another stretch of time and does the same. But he never gets you mixed up so as to not know if you are reading about Castile, Portugal, Navarre or about Aragón, and without having to break down the time stretch into too little subsections, which would make the reading confusing and hard to follow. The man has a knack for organization, I have to admit.

Finally, I saw no political bias, no applying our modern standards to older times. History for real, where the author goes unnoticeable.

For fans of history in general. A treat.

Impeccably sourced, this book provides insight not only on the history, but the culture and civic institutions too. Starting with Visigothic Spain, the book plows through a 1000 years of Spanish history. A tough read for pleasure, but as a research tool it is magnificent

O'Callaghan provides a highly approachable history that looks at the multiple invaders that helped define Spain's emerging national character in the post-Roman world. In the peninsula's south, the Andalusia cultural capital, Cordoba, rivaled Baghdad and laid claim to the foremost Muslim and Jewish scholars, who, amongst other things, safeguarded the works of the ancient Greeks; conversely in the north, the Castilian-Leon Roman Catholic kingdom, in broadening political franchise to include that of the emerging merchant class, developed one of the first representative governments in modern European history: the Cortes. In the end, Ferdinand and Isabella oversaw a societal transformation that cast aside a feudal past and set in motion a centralized empire and culture which soon came to dominate vast tracts of the world.

O'Callaghan's history of the Iberian peninsula, though exhausting in its detail, falls prey to typical western biases and employes the fallacious traditional historiography of Iberia, emphasizing the "Re"-Conquest and a supposed "move towards unity." This approach is woefully inadequate for understanding the events of Medieval Iberial, and fosters an unfair appraisal of the Muslim culture that flourished there for centuries. Additionally, O'Callaghan has managed to, through his exceedingly dry prose, completely emasculate this otherwise exciting and vibrant subject. In all my years as a history student, I have never read another text from which I retained so little; my classmates concur on the matter. Therefore, I wholeheartedly denounce this text.