Status Updates From La caballería

Last chapter, on chivarly and war, was the most gripping. Did it make the whole book worth it?

How you make a book about knights fighting for glory and/or Christ boring is an achievement in itself.

Nobility solidified into a legal class, but still there were young men joining it through skill in war and virtue, adding to an Aristotilean argument that nobility cannot be civic, but only manifests in the individual.

Kind of dry, when not talking about what the knights got into, adventures and wars and whatnot. How did I just read 20 pages on how shields were designed?

Chapter on Tournaments reminds me of something GK Chesterton said. Roughly, "Rome was degenerate because it forced slaves to fight to the death. But there is a certain romance to the Medieval Era, in which the nobles fought to the death for the serfs."

Good chapter. Had no idea that early tournaments were just lowkey war, without the burning of villages or the sieging of castles. Probably used as training.

A medieval king was not a dictator. He was like a judge picked by all the other noblemen (and the church) and assigned the responsibility of settling disputes between powerful men, and leading the nation in wartime.

And in medieval times, Christendom was under assault from the North, the East and the South. There was a distinct need for a leader and it had to be someone who was willing and capable of going to war.