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Thomas Neijman - Battle of Visby 1361 and Its Contemporary Heritage, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

Battle of Visby 1361 and Its Contemporary Heritage

Av Thomas Neijman

Del i serien War and Conflict in Premodern Societies

2092 kr

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Beskrivning
In summer of 1361, the Danish king conquered the island of Gotland, the centre of Baltic communication and trade. The invaders clashed with local forces outside the walls of Visby. The battle is well known from the excavated mass graves with human skeletons and large quantities of armour, which reveal the savage reality of the medieval battlefield. How was victory possible? Did Danish hyper-professional armies with mercenaries slaughter ill-equipped Gotlandic peasants, while German merchants were passive spectators from the walls of the main city, as historians have claimed? This book challenges traditional interpretations by investigating the human remains and equipment from their societal position, and puts the conquest of Gotland into a broader historical context of the medieval battle for dominium over the Baltic. It also discusses contemporary interpretations of the battle in museums, literature, media, and legends.
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Thomas Neijman is a doctoral student at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm, and a specialist on the invasion of Gotland in 1361. He is the founder of the Battle of Visby re-enactment event. Kurt Villads Jensen is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm and a specialist on crusading history in the Baltic and in Iberia.

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The reviewed volume, published in 2025 by the young Swedish researcher Thomas Neijman in collaboration with Kurt Villads Jensen, one of the leading figures in Scandinavian medieval studies, represents the first attempt in historiography to provide a comprehensive and genuinely interdisciplinary examination of the military operations conducted in the late spring and summer of 1361. Building upon the findings of Thordeman and his collaborators, it substantially broadens both the source base and the scope of the inquiry. The result is a concise and relatively compact, yet highly substantial and well-structured study that addresses archaeological, arms- and armour-related, social, economic, military, and, ultimately, historical issues. Considered together within an interdisciplinary framework that emphasises their mutual contextual interconnections, these perspectives produce a successful and valuable historical and cultural study of late medieval military campaigns on the periphery of Latin Europe – namely, the Baltic region, understood as both Scandinavia and the southern coast of the Baltic Sea. Moreover, the concluding section of the volume examines the campaign and the battle as elements of the collective memory of the inhabitants of Gotland and, more broadly, of Scandinavians. The book thus presents itself as an attempt to offer a genuinely comprehensive examination of the historical phenomenon that was, and remains, the campaign on Gotland in 1361.[...]In conclusion, the book by Thomas Neijman and Kurt Villads Jensen is a well-conceived, methodologically rigorous, analytically perceptive, and intellectually valuable study of late medieval warfare, examining it both as a sequence of historical events and as a phenomenon of collective memory, as well as a subject of historiographical inquiry. This genuinely multifaceted approach to the subject deserves particular emphasis. The publication is undoubtedly a valuable and significant contribution not only to scholarship on the Gotland campaign of 1361, but also, from a broader perspective, to the study of late medieval warfare in its widest sense and, more generally, to historical and cultural research on war.

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