Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Saved from oblivion. One mans extraordinary story, October 21, 2001
Gabriel Ronay is one of the few people qualified to write this account. Born in Transylvania he graduated from Edinburgh and Budapest universities where he read history and studied Russian, German, Romance Languages and Finno-Ugrrian philology. He continued his medieval researches while working for the Times and BBC in London.While studying the annals of Matthew Paris, the learned St Albans chronicler of thirteenth century events, he chanced upon a report, dated 1243, on the capture of the Tartar Khans chief diplomat, together with a group of Tartar officers participating in the siege of Wiener Neustadt in Austria. Astonishingly the envoy was a "native of England". This chance discovery led Mr Ronay on a 3 year quest to discover the identity of this mysterious Englishman and how he got to be in such an unlikely place. Based on his extensive research Mr Ronay has uncovered reports on three men, all English, all with the same name and all related to the church. It is Mr Ronays hypothesis that these three men are in fact the same person. The evidence is of course sketchy and would not stand up in a court of law but for at leat one of the cases it seems convincing. If you believe Mr Ronays evidence then this story recounts an extraordinary life. The Englishman was present at Runnymede for the signing of the Magna Carta as the personal chaplin of Robert Fitz Walter the leader of the rebellious Barrons. He was excommunicated from the chiurch and banished from England for his part in the rebellion. He became a Templar traveled to the Holy land on the 5th Crusade and was present at the siege of Damietta in Egypt. He was expelled from the crusade by the Templars for gambling and wandered through the middle east ending up in Iraq where he was adopted by Monguls in need of literate men with multilungual skills for thier diplomatic core. He rose through the Mogul diplomatic core and became the great Khans envoy for the European Invasion. Even if you do not accept Mr Ronays evidence you will learn a great deal about Europe between 1200 and 1240. From the destruction of greater Hungary to the complicity of the Venetians in the Mogul invasion. All in all a superb book that stretches the limits of professional historical analysis without breaking them.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of my favorite books, May 21, 1999
By A Customer
A fascinating collection of chronicles and accounts of a mysterious Englisman turned Templar who was an envoy, spy, and diplomat, for Batu Khan's invasion of Europe. All of this occurred a generation before Marco Polo and a dozen years before the papal envoys made their visits to Karakorum.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
One of a modern genre: airplane history, May 13, 2007
One of the things I have noticed recently in the publishing industry; there is an entire genre of "history" books designed to be read on transcontinental airline flights. A couple of hours, even in the noisy confines of an airplane, and you're done. As such, these books do not contain much in the way of "meat" -though they will doubtless contain a 'zinger' of a topic; generally phrased as a historical detective novel.
This is one of those books. The subject is interesting: Batu Khan had an englishman as his chief negotiator and diplomat. How did the englishman come to be in the service of the Khan? That's the subject of this book. Unfortunately, we only know about this englishman because of one or two documents. While the author does a remarkable (or at least, believable) job of reconstructing who the Englishman was, and what some of his experiences may have been like, the actual material he has to work with is pretty spare. Like other examples of the "airplane history" genre, this could have been a chapter in a book, or a nice article in a journal (it probably originated as such). Most of it is filler. Since the topic is a fascinating one: including the Mongol invasion of Hungary and Iraq, the Magna Charta and King John, the filler is generally good stuff. It is marred by a few things. Despite the lurid nature of the topic, some of the passages are excessively dull. In fact, the first 100 pages, which should be fascinating (dealing as they do with the crusades and the Magna Charta rebellion), require some determination to get through. Considering it is only around 200 total pages, this is unacceptable. There are also passages which envince a naivete which is unbefitting a historian. Perhaps Mr. Ronay is pandering to his audience (i.e. tired mid-level executives flying across the country), but the idea that some exiled priest in the 1200s displayed some kind of complexity of character by "choosing" to be ambassador for the Khan and aiding in the destruction of christendom seems rather unsophisticated to me. Such characters and choices were more the norm in that time than the exception. Finally, the book doesn't seem to know what it is. Is this a serious work of scholarship? If so, why no detailed footnotes? Is it an airplane history book? If so, why quotations in french and latin (aka how many sleepy mid level executives on a 767 speak latin)?
Still, this is worth a bleary eyed read if you're stuck in an airport somewhere.
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