Question of the Week: Favorite Historical Period?

I haven’t had time to do a Question of the Week since July, so let’s do one now! Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics.

If you enjoy reading about history, what is your favorite historical period to read about? No wrong answers, obviously.

For myself, it’s hard to pin down, since it will be whatever catches my interest at any given time. Like, when I visited the battlefield of Chickamauga in 2022, I went on a long reading spiral about the US Civil War. When I watched Season 4 of THE CROWN, I wound up reading a lot about Thatcher-era Britain to see all the (many) details the show got wrong. When I recently read GHOST ON THE THRONE about the Diadochi, I did a lot of supplemental reading about Alexander the Great and the wars of the Diadochi as well. Back in 2010, I beat MEDIEVAL 2: TOTAL WAR as the Byzantine Empire faction, so after that I kind of did a deep dive on Byzantine history.

All that said, I think two historical periods I read the most about are the second half of the Roman Republic, specifically from the Second Punic War to the victory of Augustus, and the High Medieval period from about the Norman Conquest to the Black Death in Europe.

I had to laugh when the “how often does your boyfriend think about the Roman Empire” meme was popular last year, because I do think about the Roman Republic/Empire a lot, but mostly to mine it for inspiration for fantasy novels. Obviously the High Medieval period also provides a lot of potential ideas for fantasy books.

That said, those two historical periods often a lot of examples of a fascinating riddle that has no answer: can a good person also be an effective leader who acts in the best interests of the people? Like, Caesar Augustus and King Henry I of England were unquestionably very bad men who did a lot of very bad things. Yet they’re rated among the more effective Roman Emperors and English kings because they brought peace and order to their respective realms, whether their realms wanted it or not. Monastic chroniclers said that in King Henry’s day a virgin girl carrying a bag of gold could travel unharmed across England, and while this is obviously a poetical exaggeration, Henry did impose peace and order.

Of course, a bad man can often be a bad leader as well, but I’m afraid one of the unfortunate realities of the human condition is that effective leadership does require a good deal of ruthlessness, and you see a lot of that in both the Roman and the medieval periods – bad men who were good leaders, and bad men who were also bad leaders.

-JM