In the first 303 pages of To Win and Lose, Andrew Villalon and Donald Kagay, who are both distinguished historians of late medieval warfare, lay out the broad background to, and the causes, conduct, and immediate consequences of the 1367 Nájera campaign. Once they have finished their extensive overview of the backstory of their main subject, they systematically raise and tackle key questions, rather than simply laying out the course of events. For example, in discussing the maneuvers prior to the decisive battle, the authors ask and attempt to answer five main puzzles. Why did the Black Prince open the campaign and move through the Pyrenees in February instead of waiting for better weather? Was the prince’s swing off the pilgrimage route, to Vitoria, a feint or a simple blunder? When the English army moved back to the pilgrim route, to Logroño, which of three possible routes did it follow? How large was each army? And why, after Enrique II shifted to block Prince Edward’s advance by occupying the banks of the Najerilla, did the Spanish usurper cross over the river and offer battle on an open plain?
The resulting text is so clear and engaging that I would recommend this book as the first thing to read for a student or scholar looking for an introduction to the Castilian civil war of 1366–69. I sometimes find the authors’ arguments unpersuasive: for example, I do think the evidence is strong enough to conclude with confidence that the prince’s route to Logroño was via Guardia, and that the English were indeed greatly outnumbered at Nájera. But it is a strength of the book that the authors make it easy for readers to draw their own conclusions on such questions—even just within the narrative section, and all the more so when taking into account the primary sources translated in the second half the book.
The sources section (nearly three hundred pages) offers a very valuable collection of newly translated chronicle texts, all thoroughly introduced. Most notably, Villalon and Kagay include nearly all of the relevant section of Pedro López de Ayala’s chronicle. Unfortunately, however, Ayala’s chapter 20, which deals with the important negotiations over paying the costs of the prince’s expedition, is omitted. The narrative poem of Walter of Peterborough and the excerpts from the Chronique des quatre premières Valois, the Chronique Normande du XIVe. siècle, the Grandes chroniques de France, John of Reading, the Anonymous of Canterbury, and a Polychronicon continuation were previously unavailable in English. The quality of translation—from Spanish, French, and Latin alike—is excellent, with the exception of the handling of personal and place names. A new translation is also provided of the relevant portion of the prose adaptation of Cuvelier’s chivalric biography of Bertran du Guesclin. This seems to have been done without reference to the original metrical version, which is fuller and clearer on many points than the prose adaptation (which was not Cuvelier’s own work). As a result, Villalon’s translation leaves out some valuable details and perpetuates several errors introduced by Cuvelier’s prose adapter. For example, on page 509 there is a puzzling mention of twenty thousand “Genoese crossbowmen” in Enrique II’s army; in Cuvelier’s original verses, these “Genevois” can be recognized as jinetes (javelin-armed Spanish light cavalrymen), not Italian crossbowmen.
In addition, the volume includes a number of translated documentary sources, and reprints several previously published chronicle translations: of Chandos Herald, Jean Froissart, Henry Knighton, Pere III, and Fernão Lopes. Somewhat surprisingly, the documents translated do not include the 1366 Treaty of Libourne between the Black Prince and King Pedro, though the text has been published in Rymer’s Foedera. It also does not include the unpublished English accounting of the total cost of the expedition (a staggering 2,720,000 florins, more than triple the initially anticipated amount), which would have been an extremely useful addition. It was, after all, principally the inability of Pedro to pay that debt that turned the whole expedition into a strategic fiasco for England—and ultimately for Pedro himself—despite the tactically decisive victory at Nájera.
Despite Brill’s poor copyediting, it will be worth its cost for colleges and universities where undergraduates are asked to write medieval history term papers using original sources. The combination of the book’s accessible writing, its approach to analytical narrative history, and its broad collection of primary-source material (much of it previously untranslated and all of it well introduced) makes it ideal for that purpose.
