The Burgundians
A Vanished Empire
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A masterful history of the great dynasty of the Netherlands' Middle Ages.
'A sumptuous feast of a book' The Times, Books of the Year
'Thrillingly colourful and entertaining' Sunday Times
'A thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy' Simon Sebag Montefiore
5 stars! Daily Telegraph
'A masterpiece' De Morgen
'A history book that reads like a thriller' Le Soir
At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. This is the story of a thousand years, a compulsively readable narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury and madness. It is about the decline of knightly ideals and the awakening of individualism and of cities, the struggle for dominance in the heart of northern Europe, bloody military campaigns and fatally bad marriages. It is also a remarkable cultural history, of great art and architecture and music emerging despite the violence and the chaos of the tension between rival dynasties.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Van Loo makes his English-language debut with a sparkling account of the House of Burgundy. He traces the dynasty's ancestral origins to a small island in the Baltic Sea and charts the Germanic tribe's westward journey to the Rhine River in present-day Worms, Germany, in the fifth century. An attempt to capture more territory led to a devastating defeat by Roman general Flavius Aetius in 436 and forced the remaining Burgundians to relocate south to France. From there, Van Loo briskly recounts 900 years of Burgundian history before diving into the empire's influence on European politics, in particular its role in the "invention" of the Low Countries in the 15th century. Throughout, he interweaves military and territorial pursuits with lighter fare, noting, for example, that Burgundian duke Philip the Bold banned winegrowers from using Gamay grapes in 1395, boosting the popularity of the pinot noir grape for which Burgundy is now known. Elsewhere, Van Loo details John the Fearless's feud with the Duc of Orlèans, which isolated Burgundy from the rest of France, and recounts how Philip the Good ransomed Joan of Arc to the British. Blending dogged research with striking imagery and energetic prose, this is a rewarding introduction to a powerful, yet lesser-known, empire.
