Book Review: Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 2

This second volume of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, covering chapters 33 to 63, was just as awesome as the first. The breathlless pace of the action seems to move faster than the story, as each chapter is still crammed with detail, and so it's often hard to judge how much time is passing within or between scenes, but the expansion of the storyline to include the real beginnings of the infamous division into three kingdoms unfolds in a logical and seemingly inevitable way, one stratagem, double-cross, and blood oath at a time. Despite the inclusion of the most epic battles yet, it's a study in decision and indecision as well, as more powerful warlords like Liu Biao and Sun Quan risk repeating the fate of Yuan Shao in the face of Cao Cao's relentless ambition. It starts off with Cao Cao consolidating the north, his son Cao Pi marrying Yuan Shao's widow Lady Zhen, and ends with Liu Bei riding off west into the Riverlands to found his own kingdom, but there's seemingly entire books in between.

This volume made me think more about the problem of leadership, specifically of how the characters attempt to enforce or encourage loyalty. This has been one of the underlying themes of the book from the very beginning, of course, but it's in this stretch of the story that the Emperor fades into the background and the three kingdoms begin to solidify, and loyalty is no less important in the destruction of one regime than in the creation of another. In an environment like the collapse of the Han dynasty, where there's a nominally all-powerful Emperor but in practice a nearly unlimited amount of autonomy for essentially independent petty warlords, individuals are confronted by an extra layer of moral choice that informs their actions. How should one balance allegiance to the sovereign with filial duties, and obedience to liege lords against an oath sworn to brothers? Watching the many characters grapple with their moral compasses in the face of all the momentous decisions they make in life-or-death situations each chapter is a real pleasure, even if they're unsure of the right course themselves, and even through Luo's determined editorializing between the Big Two. Liu Bei, the hero who, we're continually told, draws men to him through his virtuous nature and noble deeds, has the same problem of winning his own place in the world as his duplicitous antagonist Cao Cao, who's universally derided as a crafty yet corrosive force, yet it's often difficult to see a principled difference between them.

For example, towards the end of the volume, at a crucial moment in the balance of power between the north and the south, Zhang Song travels to Cao Cao near the end to offer him the vitally strategic area of the Riverlands, but he gives up because they're each too stubborn and prideful, and he simply offers the territory to Liu Bei instead. This momentous decision is presented as right and proper, a result of the magnetic attraction of Liu Bei and repulsion of Cao Cao, yet it's not so different than Pang Tong's disagreement and reconciliation with Zhang Fei, and in fact it's also quite similar to the many minor instances where a governor will surrender a town, or a general will defect at the end of a battle, and the decision to reward or execute them for their shift in fealty seems arbitrary rather than appropriate. There's probably literature out there on how Confucianist or Legalist ethics, or prestige and dominance leadership styles, could be formulated in game-theoretic terms, and how each individual conundrum of whether to keep an oath or do the most expedient thing fits into a coherent framework of morality; ultimately I decided to just sit back and enjoy my suspense and outrage cycles as the two decided whether the latest hapless provincial commander would be rewarded for switching sides or beheaded for his treachery as the circumstances above and beyond him shifted.

The real breakout star of this volume isn't Liu Bei or Cao Cao, however, but Kongming. The legends of his sagacity are so great that Liu Bei travels three times to convince him to come work for him, to the consternation of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, whose jealousy at Kongming seeming to supplant them in Liu Bei's heart is a nice bit of character development. And the legends are true! If ever there was a character calculated to delight and entertain audiences, it would be the Sleeping Dragon, an impossibly clever advisor who can concoct ruses subtle enough to fool even Cao Cao and has a handy ability to summon up powerful winds to aid in battle. My favorite example of his ridiculous skill was the scene where Sun Quan's henchman Zhou Yu wants to offer Liu Bei a sham marriage to Lady Sun in order to take him hostage and force him to surrender the strategic province of Jingzhou, which Liu Bei was dragging his heels on relinquishing after the death of his kinsman Liu Biao. This is a dangerous trip for Liu Bei, but no worry: Kongming not only arranges matters so that Liu Bei keeps Jingzhou, but that he successfully marries Lady Sun for real, via the hilarious mechanism of literally giving general Zhao Zilong three sacks with instructions to open each one at the right time to get Liu Bei out of each of Zhou Yu's traps. The buddy comedy friendship between Kongming and fellow wizard Pang Tong is also a real highlight, as each occasionally drops in to make fun of the other before revealing their latest scheme.

Of course, Kongming is far more famous for his deceptive prowess at the Battle of Red Cliffs, which takes up a substantial portion of this volume. Once again I was left marveling at the skillful pacing and ingenious plotting: almost more space is devoted to the feints, deceptions, and betrayals leading up to the battle than to the action itself, and yet as Cao Cao's ill-fated expedition to conquer the south is left routed and shattered, thanks to Kongming's wheels-within-wheels ploys and last-minute conjuration of an east wind, you are never lacking for excitement. You're almost spoiled, too, since right before that is an equally-exciting chapters-long running fight as Liu Bei's retreating army and mass of villagers try to cross the Yangtze for safety in the south, and Cao Cao's forces are only barely held off in the Battle of Changban, where the (in my opinion underrated) Zhang Zilong makes one of his many clutch saves by rescuing Liu Bei's son against great odds (and not for the last time). The heroism and dramatic tension don't let up for a bit, and while there are many points where the ratio of clearly fictional "how could he have known?" strokes of impossible genius against more plausible Nth dimensional chess moves that real people might make gets a bit much, it's all so much fun you don't mind for a minute.

Now's no time to stop reading.

Book Review: Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 1

I'm not sure if the term "epic fantasy" applies to this work, since the standard line is that it's "70% history, 30% fiction", but whether it's shelved in "epic fantasy", "historical fiction", or even "magical realism", it's undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of literature. It's almost overwhelming in how full of everything it is: the whirlwind of characters, the unyielding pace of the action, and the seamless integration of so many little human details and emotions that give the many side-plots and minor characters a resonance far out of proportion to their brief page time. Like with all great literature, even those diversions are pure pleasure thanks to clever storytelling. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, each analeptic or proleptic excursion adds valuable depth and context to the main narrative, and the consistent treatment of the ways that individual honor, personal loyalty, and political duty overlap and conflict continuously give each and every decision by the main characters a real weight. Luo's account of the struggle to build a new world out of the decay of the old is as powerful as any modern work I can think of.

My edition of the Moss Roberts translation is split into 4 volumes for ease of reading. This volume begins with the immortal incipit "Here begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." and the oath in the peach orchard between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, and ends with Cao Cao's defeat of Yuan Shao at the battle of Jizhou (chapter 32 out of 120). You could spend a long, long time exegizing every aspect of the novel - its elastic grounding in the historical record and subsequent authorial "improvements"; its biases of heroism and colorations of personality that turn these real people into Homeric archetypes; the slight supernatural touches like the summoning of convenient storms, fatal hauntings of vengeful ghosts, or complex portents and astrological divinations; the way the actions of individuals recapitulate the recurrent patterns of imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis in Chinese history - but a few specific observations came most readily to mind as I finished the first quarter of the tale.

First, imperial power is a fascinating contradiction here. As the saying goes, "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder", and the slow disintegration of the Han dynasty amid the famines and religious fervor of the Yellow Scarves movement (interestingly, this colored clothing rebellion will be echoed several times more at similarly turbulent junctures in Chinese history) is reminiscent of a hollow, gradually rotting tree. While the Emperor's authority is nominally unlimited and he commands (nearly) universal respect, in practice the various warlords, rogue generals, and aristocrats seem to rule with complete independence, and the actual personage of the Emperor is treated somewhat like the puppet Roman Emperors after the Crisis of the Third Century (which by historical happenstance took place only a few decades after the events here), meaning that control of the military is paramount, and to be a successful general is almost synonymous with being a potential imperial claimant yourself. Many years later during the Yuan dynasty, in fact just as Luo was writing the collection of plays that this novel was compiled out of, someone coined the saying that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away" as a way of highlighting how notional autocracy and practical independence can coexist simultaneously in the vastness of the Chinese landscape when a failing dynasty surrenders power to the court bureaucracy and a succession of generals.

Military strategy is also pretty thought-provoking, both for its realism and for its more whimsical moments. Many novels, even ones that make real efforts at military realism, often skimp on mundane details, like the importance of supply line logistics, the need to post sentries at night, how important the disposition of your troops are in pitched battles, or the finer points of besieging cities. Often lazy authors will describe their heroes as strategic geniuses, but leave the actual demonstrations of their acuity up to the reader's imagination. Not here! All the ingredients of military prowess are on full display, with Cao Cao in particular shown as a true mastermind of deception and consistently able to turn seemingly any setback into an opportunity thanks to his cleverness and willingness to listen to sound advice. The sheer quantity of his cunning feints and countermoves would be truly impressive even if they weren't (mostly) based on real history; both his wit and his opponents' foolishness are very convincingly rendered, as Luo also faithfully depicts the many ways that superior forces can be defeated by a leader's ill-timed vacillation, inconvenient bouts of drunkenness, stubbornness and inflexibility, or by just plain better tactics and superior hustle.

The flip side is that all of the major characters are all invincible superheroes with plot armor that would make the most hack fanfiction writers blush. Take a drink every time one of the protagonists kills an opponent with a single mighty blow, or fights through a crowd of enemies miraculously unscathed, or gets out of a jam by the impossibly convenient arrival of reinforcements just in the nick of time, and in just a few chapters you will be drunker than Zhang Fei himself! It's one of the fictional scenes, but when Guan Yu slays a series of six generals on a single journey to reunite with Liu Bei, it feels like you're reading a novelization of the Dynasty Warriors video games, which are based on this material, and not the other way around. Even when a main character finally dies, it's invariably in a protracted, grandiose boss battle. And yet somehow the comic book-like action sequences, or the occasional appearances of magic, never feel out of place or untrue to the broader story, as malefactors like Dong Zhou appear and then are vanquished according to the inscrutable dictates of the heavens as well as the familiar laws of villainous peril and heroic resolution.

And thanks to Luo's consistent editorializing to let you know who's good and who's bad, the main characters are all memorable and sympathetic to the point where you can't help but get emotionally invested in their fates like the worst kind of nerd fanboy. Luo's obvious cheerleading for Liu Bei and his oath-brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei comes off as almost charming, even though I can't be the only person who got a bit sick over how exaggeratedly noble and virtuous Luo makes him appear at every opportunity. And by the same token, Cao Cao really doesn't seem like as bad a guy as Luo tries to paint him; not only is he the smartest guy around and sincerely reluctant to seize the throne illegitimately, he consistently tries to persuade his enemies over to his side and forgive their past enmities whenever possible. His occasional ruthlessness is of the "it's all in the game" variety, and his "big transgression" of honestly taking credit for killing the deer on the royal hunt when the Emperor missed it is so laughably petty that, when the rest of the imperial court flipped out, I wanted him to just take power right then and there. We're reminded that the Han dynasty is rotten and corrupt every single chapter; might as well let someone with some talent take the reins. I'm firmly on Team Cao Cao, for now at least.

I can't imagine anyone reading this far and not continuing to the next volume as quickly as humanly possible.

Book Review: Warren Treadgold - A History of the Byzantine State and Society

Surely the best single-volume history of the late Roman and Byzantine Empire I've read, and perhaps the best one out there, despite being published in 1988. Copiously researched and well-organized, Treadgold balances alternating military/political chapters with economic/social chapters, so there is extensive coverage of not only the expected battles and dynastic cycles, but also the more humanistic aspects, with plentiful maps and tables of statistics on everything from military strength to budgetary woes to population distribution to help the reader keep track of how the Byzantines continuously tinkered with their society for over a thousand years in the face of continuous waves of plagues, invasions, and civil wars. 

While the Roman Empire will forever be more highly esteemed by laymen for how they steadily assembled their pan-Mediterranean state (everyone loves watching winners conquer one enemy after another), over the course of the book I developed a grudging and then unabashed respect for how the Byzantines did their best to adapt that rigid, ethnocentric, coup-prone Roman governance model to maintain a surprising amount of coherent identity in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multifariously-threatening world. They may have failed eventually, but you try creating an empire that lasts for over a millennium!

One of my main thoughts when reading was that I'd been previously been underrating the Great Man theory of history, or at least the ability of powerful individuals to redirect nations on different courses. Treadgold is scrupulously polite towards even plainly inept rulers - he will refrain from more than a few mildly critical adjectives of inarguably terrible emperors, and well-meaning emperors who had events beyond their control wreck their reigns get "he did as best as could be expected given the circumstances" - but it's striking how even the vast machinery of an ancient empire could be utterly upended by the whims of its leader. Peter Turchin's Seshat project, as well as his structural demographic theories of imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis in books like War and Peace and War, remain invaluable for understanding broad historical trajectories and "inevitabilities", but as I read the various expansions under successful emperors like Justinian I, Constantine VII, and Basil II, and the following contractions under unsuccessful emperors like Valens, Phocas, Romanos IV, and many others who ruled for about 10 minutes, I started trying to construct a mental model of the empire's varying health, with the ruler at the top of the pyramid:

• "hard" quantitative factors like GDP, population, territory
• "soft" qualitative factors like religious concord, social unity, "asabiya"
• random accidents and enigmas of chance
• personal qualities of rulers

Obviously no ruler, no matter how personally gifted, could completely prevent a plague, a revolt, or an invasion of Persians, (or Bulgarians, or Serbs, or Arabs, or Turks, or Crusaders, or...), and plenty of perfectly capable individuals suffered grievous misfortunes, yet it was striking how frequently, given the nearly unlimited authority vested in the emperor, their mistakes had vast consequences that took decades or even centuries to correct, if at all. In this the Byzantines were hardly unique, of course, but their exceptionally long existence gives you many more opportunities to watch one emperor carefully save money, reconquer land, and heal religious divisions, only for his idiot son to ruin everything and waste golden opportunities to defend against their enemies. This fundamental instability was exacerbated by their tendency towards conspiracy, famously memorialized today in the adjective "byzantine". Here was one of my favorite incidents of conspiracy, from the year 780 AD, in the midst of the Iconoclasm debate:

Irene, an orphan in her mid-twenties from the shrunken provincial town of Athens, had keen political instincts, a strong will, and some devoted allies in the bureaucracy. The precariousness of her position seems to have given her a sense of urgency. A month and a half after her husband's death, she foiled a plot, led by the postal logothete and the domestic of the Excubitors, to put Constantine V's second son Nicephorus on the throne.

There's no exact contemporary parallel, but imagine how we'd react if, in the middle of a near-civil war over whether to make flag-burning unconstitutional, Donald Trump suddenly died, leaving Melania as regent for Barron (ignore Ivanka and Tiffany for a moment), and she thwarted a scheme by the head of the Secret Service and the Postmaster General to put Don Jr in the White House by having them all declared felons and exiled to Guam. 

Now imagine that tended to happen every few decades! Every other major power struggled with the same issues of succession and legitimacy to some degree, but despite their impressive longevity the flaws of the Roman governance model were clearly key to Byzantine difficulties. They may not have ever been able to reconstitute the Roman Empire of old (and in fact they wisely stopped trying to reconquer obviously unattainable lands after a while), but while experiments like the senior/junior emperor system, the creation of the Themes, and professionalization of the bureaucracy gradually made the empire more resilient, up until the very last minute they perpetually had multiple claimants for the throne inviting foreign powers to aid them by promising vast rewards, and these allies would of course then immediately turn on the empire for protection money or simple plunder. It's no way to run a country.

The Byzantine religious controversies, which have earned the rightful scorn of scholars going back to Gibbon, are another great example of unnecessary conflict, given the sheer amount of time wasted and blood spilled over them. Diarmaid McCullough's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years has a lot of great details on how the idea of a single "Christianity" has always been a fiction, as the Biblical material has been layered on top of an enormous variety of existing Mediterranean religious traditions (for a modern analogy, see the way that indigenous Mexican religious elements like the Virgin of Guadalupe, Santa Muerte, or Maximón have been smoothly and syncretically incorporated into a Catholicism that's not quite the same as in Europe or Africa). So to some extent you would have to expect some major disagreements as diverse traditions chafed under a single unified theology, particularly as the Patriarchs determined orthodoxy more or less independently from the geographically and culturally distant Popes in the west. 

But to a modern reader it's striking how frequently the empire was nearly brought to its knees at key moments by violent conflicts over arcane controversies that, one thinks, a calmer scholar like Thomas Aquinas would have wasted barely a few pages resolving with some choice Aristotle quotes. Here's a vastly oversimplified cheat sheet I kept for some of the major heresies, in chronological order:

• Arianism - Christ had a separate nature from God, though the two also share one nature in the Trinity, somehow differently than in "correct" Trinitarianism
• Nestorianism - Christ had two natures
• Monophysitism - Christ had one nature
• Monoenergism - Christ had one energy
• Monothelitism - Christ had one will
• Iconoclasm - Images of Christ/God/etc are blasphemous
• Paulicianism - Armenian Gnosticism, taking Christianity back to its mystical roots
• Bogomilism - Bulgarian Gnosticism, taking Christianity back to its mystical roots
• Palamasism - Performing hesychasm (meditative prayer) allows direct experience of the "uncreated" light of the Transfiguration, which is of God yet not the Trinity

Many of those theological controversies acted as synecdoches for those larger questions of cultural identity, of course (as I type this, the Russian Orthodox Church has momentously severed from the Patriarchate of Constantinople over their recognition of a separate Ukrainian Church in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is the biggest split since the Great Schism in 1054), yet I would love to be able to ask the various religious figures of the era exactly what they thought they were accomplishing by launching one acrimonious empire-wide quarrel after another over these openly meaningless nitpicks while various hostile powers slowly closed in; the phrase "quibbling while Rome burns" comes to mind. 

And that doesn't even cover the political, non-theological controversies that had consequences for religious unity, such as the alternations of strong Patriarch/weak Emperor and weak Patriarch/strong Emperor, or the Patriarch and the Pope fighting over bishop appointments and excommunicating each other out of spite. It's poignant to watch the East and West churches slowly squabble each other into the permanent Great Schism for no real theological reason, periodically attempting half-hearted reunions like a broken-up couple that can't quite bring themselves to move on, repeated Crusades and ecumenical councils achieving nothing but greater recrimination.

But again, whatever criticisms you have of the Byzantines, you have to be impressed by their surprising resilience in the face of continuous threats from all directions. While the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed and faded fewer than two centuries after the division under Diocletian, the eastern half maintained its heritage for a millennium. And what the Byzantines did was arguably harder than what the Romans did: it's very common for a single high-asabiya warlike group to expand their empire until there are no more worlds left to conquer, but it's far more difficult to then stably administer that empire, particularly if it's much more heterogeneous (as it should be, if your wars have gone well), particularly if you're not interested in further expanding your territory, and particularly in a high-risk area with multiple vulnerable frontiers. The Byzantines never really tried to conquer outside of what the Romans had built during the Augustan Age, and aside from occasional attempts like Justinian's to reclaim parts of the ancient west, for the most part they simply tried to maintain their territorial integrity against fairly staggering odds. 

In some ways the flexibility of Byzantine identity was actually a strength; most but not all Byzantines were Greek, or Orthodox, or followed Byzantine law, or were even necessarily under Byzantine rule, so the movement of the frontiers back and forth was not as immediately traumatic as it could have been. When Greece finally won its eventual independence in the 20th century, that its capital was not at Constantinople and its borders excluded the Ionian coast was due to the expulsion of the Greeks after the 1922 war with Turkey, which easily could have turned out differently, and thus had the collapse of the Ottoman Empire unfolded slightly differently, the entire Aegean might still reflect the political, cultural, and ethnic boundaries of a thousand years ago. There are also other legacies, less prominent but just as enduring, in Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Armenia, Italy, and everywhere else that was once part of the empire.

There's too much more to say about the Byzantine Empire, so I will just compliment Treadgold on his intensive research (many of the photos of Byzantine churches are credited to him and his family) and skill at presenting a coherent narrative out of nearly a millennium and a half of history, much of which was built out of inherently unreliable ancient accounts. The analyses of how art, architecture, and literature were affected by the political upheavals were great, my primary complaints being that I wanted more, even if the book would have been swollen to many times its already considerable length. 

In fact at many points I wished he had digressed a bit more, such as on how Islamic resistance to religious images affected the Christian iconoclasm debate, or the downstream effects of Byzantine missionaries inventing the Cyrillic alphabet, or political relations with the western states, etc, even if those were tangential to the main story. An updated edition would be nice after 30 years, but his history seemed fairly solid, and I'd bet that newer research would only enhance his conclusions. Treadgold is vivid enough at presenting the power struggles to the point where I frequently found myself doing that history nerd thing where you look up from the book and start making completely spurious analogies. This is as good as history gets for me.