Bohemund by Duggan

In exile from a Book Thread, here's Count Bohemund. Me mum had this from Alfred Duggan, whose publishers emitted it 1964.

Duggan had died by 1964. This is a posthumous production, like Arabs and Others and Before Orthodoxy. If I'd been his editor I'd have offered a number of suggestions, but dead men don't get editors they get proofreaders.

My copy came with a foreword by coreligionist Evelyn "Brideshead" Waugh. I am unsure to what degree Waugh was interested in women; Duggan married, happily by all accounts; but his subject Mark "Bohemund son of Duke Robert the Norman" didn't get around to that, at least not over the course of this novel. Waugh, amusingly, didn't like this manuscript so his foreword directs the reader to other work. Not a good sign!

It's difficult to classify this particular work as a novel, in the way of, oh, a Gary Jennings production. It is a step-by-step narrative of Mark's career up to the conquest of Antioch, followed by an epilogue in Jerusalem. The outline is finished but the prose is not. This is particularly notable in the dialogue which is naught but expo.

Much of now-Bohemund's thought is in conversations with nephew Tancred who just sort of shows up in the novel a third of the way through. Tancred is spawned from one of Bohemund's half-siblings. Tancred is a youth, perhaps daring perhaps headstrong. How did such an important character end up the way he did? Did Bohemund see any of his upbringing? Was Sigilgaita involved?

Sure, Duggan's story isn't "Tancred". Its focus is on its stated protagonist: Mark Bohemund. The narrative reads like Thucydides when he discusses his own (failed) activities in the Archidamian War. Everything Bohemund does is right: either because he wins (which he usually did) or because someone else did him wrong. One could just as easily write such a novel about Godfrey or Adhemar. Success has many fathers, as they say. That said, the chapter which centers some other protagonist does not fit this narrative (this could perhaps be saved as Donaldson saved third-party accounts in The Power That Preserves).

As history goes, it's pre-Runciman normie tier for Catholics. We can definitely see a difference with Runciman on which side are the Good Guys; Runciman, Anglican, preferred the Greeks. Duggan blames the Greeks' problems on Manzikert. And sure - as a massive check against Greek ambitions - Manzikert matters, but I think modern consensus calls that Manzikert simply laid bare the rot in Byzantine society at the time. The manpower shortage under Alexius Comnenus came not from Turkish arrows but from the civil strife and general demoralisation. The Comnenus dynasty fixed most of the problems except for its new problem, with the Crusade it had summoned. Here I might concede to Duggan the mulligan on account his book expounds Bohemund's perspective on Manzikert.

On a high note, I like that the book informs us of certain quirks of society at the time. For feudal Europe, the dux outranked the comes. For Diocletianic Greece, that rank went the other direction. Oh and especially in the East, the dukes and counts of the Crusade had whatever resources they had at the time, which didn't always correspond with their rank back home. So it was always negotiable which dukes and which counts had pride of place; enabling a near-dispossessed knight like Bohemund to improve his station. A purer meritocracy would be hard to find in history.

Also of interest is that these Normans had come through Italy to the Magna Graeca with the Carolingian bipartite manor. The northwesterners ruled their new dominions with much less caprice and with more regard for their smallfolk than had the Greeks, and the Arabs for that matter. So Greek peasants rather preferred Norman rule. Hence why Bohemund's line in Antioch would actually outlive the Norman empire across the English Channel. Here's something to present to Michael Hudson, against his brief for the Macedonian system. Also: I don't know if the Comneni ever considered the reforms what King David did in lowland Scotland.

If you wish to use this book as a guided tour into the First Crusade, be my guest. As a novel, I side with Waugh.

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