Unfortunately, the way most history texts are structured, you're better off reading the history of the various peoples you want to portray in the early medieval period. The first 2-3 chapters of books on the Slavs, Finns, etc. are often a better way in to looking at these peoples than generalized texts on the period.
Also, searching by subject area may be necessary, especially when designing a magic system.
One strategy I recommend for finding good texts is using libraries that employ the library of congress cataloguing system. This type of subject sorting allows you, once you have found a text you like, to simply look right and left on the shelf to find good related texts.
The other problem I have in recommending books for you is that I can't really tell what you want to know. There is a lot of accessible, popular military and political history out there but that stuff may not be what you need to construct a game world. More important than who is king where or how big someone's army is are things like:
- what were popular views of how magic worked?
- how did people travel?
- how available were various goods and how much did they cost?
- how wild and unknown were wild areas in a particular region?
- what kinds of people left their communities to do exceptional things and what motivated them?
These kinds of questions, unfortunately, are rarely answered in popular books on military and political history. While such books can give you a general narrative of a region or state (for Eastern Europe, I recommend Julius Norwich's Byzantium), which you'll need to know before working out how the characters are living and what they can do, they don't really provide you with the kind of data you need to make the world come alive for your players. Unfortunately, to get that kind of stuff, you'll need to work with less accessible, drier academic texts.
I don't know about libraries where you live but often public and academic libraries have highly underutilized research staff. Many of the questions you are asking us, you could ask your local professional librarian for free with considerably more success.
The most overwhelmingly common form of early medieval literature was hagiography -- saints' lives. Many saints' lives have been translated from Latin and are available at religious books stores (especially those with Roman Catholic clientelles). A good way to dive in and see how differently people thought in that time and how they perceived the world around them is to read one or two of these.
I will recommend one book you can probably find at your local university library is The Carolingian Reader by Paul Dutton, a former professor of mine. This book is a densely-packed sampling of 8th and 9th century primary documents including saints' lives, laws, correspondence and all sorts of things that can give you a very tangible sense of everyday life; it is, however, best-used only after reading a brief political history of the Carolingian Empire.
EDIT: I forgot to mention how many saints' lives and other primary documents from the early medieval period are available on the Fordham.edu history sites.
Also, searching by subject area may be necessary, especially when designing a magic system.
One strategy I recommend for finding good texts is using libraries that employ the library of congress cataloguing system. This type of subject sorting allows you, once you have found a text you like, to simply look right and left on the shelf to find good related texts.
The other problem I have in recommending books for you is that I can't really tell what you want to know. There is a lot of accessible, popular military and political history out there but that stuff may not be what you need to construct a game world. More important than who is king where or how big someone's army is are things like:
- what were popular views of how magic worked?
- how did people travel?
- how available were various goods and how much did they cost?
- how wild and unknown were wild areas in a particular region?
- what kinds of people left their communities to do exceptional things and what motivated them?
These kinds of questions, unfortunately, are rarely answered in popular books on military and political history. While such books can give you a general narrative of a region or state (for Eastern Europe, I recommend Julius Norwich's Byzantium), which you'll need to know before working out how the characters are living and what they can do, they don't really provide you with the kind of data you need to make the world come alive for your players. Unfortunately, to get that kind of stuff, you'll need to work with less accessible, drier academic texts.
I don't know about libraries where you live but often public and academic libraries have highly underutilized research staff. Many of the questions you are asking us, you could ask your local professional librarian for free with considerably more success.
The most overwhelmingly common form of early medieval literature was hagiography -- saints' lives. Many saints' lives have been translated from Latin and are available at religious books stores (especially those with Roman Catholic clientelles). A good way to dive in and see how differently people thought in that time and how they perceived the world around them is to read one or two of these.
I will recommend one book you can probably find at your local university library is The Carolingian Reader by Paul Dutton, a former professor of mine. This book is a densely-packed sampling of 8th and 9th century primary documents including saints' lives, laws, correspondence and all sorts of things that can give you a very tangible sense of everyday life; it is, however, best-used only after reading a brief political history of the Carolingian Empire.
EDIT: I forgot to mention how many saints' lives and other primary documents from the early medieval period are available on the Fordham.edu history sites.
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