The Knight

Attempting to cover the entire history of the horseback fighter from the late Dark Ages to the Renaissance, Alan Baker (The Gladiator: The Secret History of Rome's Warrior Slaves) is forced to limit itself to selected high points in The Knight: A Portrait of Europe's Warrior Elite. A good part of the chapter on castles and siegecraft, for example, is devoted to a somewhat Anglocentric history of fortification in the British Isles, before providing a solid account of the classic siege of Chateau Gaillard in 1204. Similarly, the chapter called ""The Fall of Jerusalem"" does not go beyond the First Crusade-though the account is useful, as is the biography of Godfrey of Bouillion. The chapter on the knight's equipment is oversimplified (although many of the controversies covered could not be resolved in a six-volume work), but balancing this is the fine account of the tournament at St. Inglevert, in which most of those weapons were called into play without anyone being killed. Indeed, the real strength of the book is its rummaging out anecdotes about knightly prowess from chronicles not available in most libraries.