Van Loo is historicus noch kunsthistoricus, hij is romanist. En 'auteur/conferencier'. Dat alles blijkt een gelukkige combinatie op te leveren. De Loo vertelt ons eindelijk eens exact hoe wij ooit bij Willem van Oranje, Alva en Philips de Tweede zijn uitgekomen. Want daar begint (na de onvermijdelijke Hunebedden en Romeinen, en een gat van 1568 jaar vage volksverhuizingen) voor de meeste Nederlanders pas hun herinnering aan de geschiedenisles. Maar wat die 'Bourgondiërs' hier nou precies deden, en van waaruit zij opereerden... het was mij een raadsel. Dat kan je natuurlijk even opzoeken, maar dat doe je niet. Als geschiedenis niet meer dan een belangstelling is, dan wacht je tot je tegen Bart van Loo aanloopt. Of tegen Maarten van Rossem over het Romeinse en Amerikaanse imperialisme, of tegen Mary Renault over het Minoische Kreta. In de onbeklimbare berg van goedgeschreven geschiedenisboeken moet je forse keuzes maken, en ik laat het toeval dat werk vaak doen. It's quite telling that what I enjoyed the most about the book are the direct quotes from first hand accounts, reenforcing my preference for primary sources. I had no issues reading those but once I dived again into the author's storytelling it turned into a chore.

It tells the tale of the Burgundians from its beginnings in the mist of the 4th century to its heyday in the 14th and 15th century. The focus lies on the four Valois Dukes (+-1363-1477) and on the Burgundian rule of the Low Countries, with Bruges, Ghent and Brussels as the main cities. You basically get four biographies in one: Philips the Bold, John the Fearless, Philips the Good and Charles the Bold. And they are all the stuff of legends. Legends that we don't know, or at least I didn't, despite being Dutch. Our history classes tend to start with the 80 years' war against the Spanish that started in the 16th century. To use modern terminology, the dukes were a bit 'bling', and were adept at milking their rich territories to fund their ostentatious tastes. Clothing covered in jewels and rubies and insanely over the top feasts feature prominently. One such feast included 48 courses, a statue of a naked women with wine pouring from her nipples and one of a naked boy peeing rose water (presumably a prototype for the Manneken Pis), a giant pie with musicians in the middle, diamond-encrusted crystal table fountains and a lion (a real one). Indigestion beides ist nicht korrekt, aber immer noch besser als Flandern, Brabant, Hennegau, Geldern, Seeland und Holland sagen zu müssen, A long time ago, there was a Germanic tribe which originated (possibly) in Bornholm, now a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. Over the centuries they migrated their way across Europe until they reached the River Rhine sometime in the 3rd century AD. Act 2: Kingdom of the BurgundiansThe average American worker, one study shows, is distracted once every three minutes. In Johann Hari’s fourth book Stolen Focus, he notes that the phrase “multitasking” was originally used exclusively by computer scientists, until we created a damaging myth: that the human brain has the neurological capacity to work on more than one problem at a time. The history of art is stuffed with irreparable losses, but few of them can be more mournable than the destruction of the Burgundian Chartreuse de Champmol. Founded in 1383 at the behest of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, the monastery was one of the most artistically significant in all of medieval Europe. Van Loo arouses interest in the past among thousands of readers, spectators and listeners in an inimitable way But Champmol, like the dynasty that founded it, proved less than durable in early modern Europe’s tussles for power. Suppressed by French revolutionaries in 1791, the monastery’s contents were destroyed or scattered, and the name all but forgotten. The remains of Sluter’s Well of Moses – perhaps the most significant single sculpture of the Middle Ages – now stand in the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, a ready-made metaphor that seems almost too apt to be true.

He mentions being inspired as a child by an illustration in 's Lands Glorie of Charles the Bold dead in the snow sorry, bit of a spoiler there . The last few chapters and epilogue - repeated endings all concentrating on the dramatic end of Charles the Bold, the marriages of his daughter (1482) and grandson (1496), and a brief survey of Charles V as ruler over the seventeen provinces which were finally created under his rulewhich were the best parts of the book, colourful and focused.Het boek beschrijft de vele uitvoerige banketten waarvoor de Bourgondische leefstijl zo bekend staat. We lezen over de verschillende vermaarde huwelijken met banketten met complete deegwerken, met daarin verstopte zangers en complete orkesten: The political and the personal, economics and culture, belief and violence, success and failure, major developments and spicy details – it’s all there. The Burgundians expertly draws on the latest scientific insights, but is also told with lightness and elegance’ ― Frits van Oostrom A reader gets the impression that, for the author, history (particularly, in this case, the history of the Low Countries) is principally driven by the marriages and child bearing abilities of a handful of powerful people. Is that true? The author himself gives plenty of evidence of the Low Countries amounting to a lot more than this. It is clear that they were forged by geographic, linguistic and economic factors quite independent of the dukes which acquired them. Furthermore, the rich cities of the Low Countries, in particular those of Flanders such as Ghent, clearly had strong civic identities, and these manifested themselves repeatedly in conflict between those cities and the dukes. Told with bounce, sprinkling his narrative with many entertaining asides. It’s never less than fascinating.” ― The Times, Best Books of 2021 Thereafter, the Burgundian holdings disintegrated piece by piece until, divvied up between France and the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century, what had once been a nascent northern kingdom existed only as a splintered set of titles argued over by Habsburgs and Bourbons.