Stephen Morillo

A General Typology of Transcultural Wars — The Early Middle Ages and Beyond

This article attempts to develop a general typology of transcultural wars in as broad and theoretical way as possible. My examples will be drawn primarily from early medieval European warfare (up to c. 1200, and sometimes from beyond Europe in this chronological era), but as the references to other articles in this collection will try to show, I aim at a general typology that transcends this chronological limit.1 Terms and Concepts

Firearms: A Global History to 1700, and: Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (review)

example: in Male Colors, I note, referring to the first Japanese shogun (who reigned 1193–1199), that “Yoritomo made his young lover, Yoshinao, a captain in the Imperial Guard . . . .” Citing this, Crompton, having stated that Yoshitomo “has been described as an ‘unloved figure’ in Japanese history,” suggests that “One of the few humanizing touches in the story of [Yoshitomo’s] triumph was his relation with his lover Yoshinao, a young officer in the Imperial Guard” (p. 420). This is quite a stretch, and in fact there’s not much of a story there to tell. Even within sections on regions Crompton knows best, I find significant omissions. For example, while there is some discussion of homosexuality in Norman England and its “much-publicized prevalence among the Normans” (p. 186) in the Holy Land during the Crusades, there is no discussion of Normandy itself, or why that Franco-Viking kingdom developed such a tradition of aristocratic homosexuality. How might it relate to such phenomena as feudal land holding, the idealized lord-vassal bond, and chivalry? Late medieval France, John Boswell tells us in his Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, was “a center of gay subculture.” (Crompton says little about France before Calvin, other than to detail the scandalous appointment of an archbishop’s boy lover as bishop of Orléans in 1096.) If Normandy was the bridge between an elite French tradition and the British one, it might be worth investigation. A work of this magnitude, brimming with discernment won from decades of scholarship, naturally affords grounds for criticisms here and there. But the achievement is staggering, all the more so because Crompton’s prose is elegant, reader-friendly, and time and again genuinely moving. gary p. leupp Tufts University