“The First Crusade had just ended–and with it, an age.”
This third history from Susan Wise Bauer takes us from the late middle ages to the conquest of Constantinople. Bauer tells us early on that this is not a history of the Renaissance, but simply uses the Renaissance as the time signature that the history comprises. There’s plenty to say about using a primarily European event (especially one that ushers in the height of European Imperialism) as the marker for a world history, but in general this history, like her two previous, tries to cover wide territories in both time and space and does provide a lot of information on non-European cultures. It primarily focuses on Japan, China, Mongolia, India, Central and South America, and parts of Africa when it’s outside Europe and Asia Minor. The focus is almost exclusively on monarchs and rulers, empires and warfare, and major political and civil rights progressions. If you take that as given, and focus on what the book does, it’s easier to understand what the book cannot or does not do. The history is lateral mostly and then moves in time in chunks, so you might end up looking at a Scottish rebellion in 1300 and then jump back in time to discuss a particular Khan in 1250 or so.
It’s history of breadth and not depth, but I do think it offers up an consumable basic introduction to further reading later on. This is all more or less what I would have said about the previous two histories. Probably the biggest shift, and this was also true about the Medieval history compared to the Ancient history is that as we approach our era, the sources become more reliable and less apocryphal, but I do like the use of unofficial and cultural histories as sources as well, because where cultures might not have the most accurate facts, the ways they see and talk about themselves are quite important.
