Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[Robert Vermaat]

Hi Chris,

Well, I have by no means read the man's full body of work

Clearly. His standards of work must have improved since then, because Bachrach is held to be a good author when it comes to Early Medieval studies, an expert of Merovingian history etc. He wrote many historical studies since 1973, many of them military studies, and including plenty of source material. :wink: I have no doubt he would write a different study about the Alans these days.

His attempts to find Alanic or Sarmatian settlements in every western European place name that even remotely resembles these two ethnic names is notably shoddy (he doesn't even consider, no less mention other etymological possibilities for the names). Some of his statements about the Bretons are true head scratchers.

Bachrach is a historian, not a linguist. And again, he did his research in the same period when Alcock and Morris did theirs, with probably the same results.

For me, a much more useful resource on Alanic history is Agusti Alemany's "Source on the Alans" (if any of you haven't seen it, you can read a fair amount of it on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=8bZ4c5oZpNAC ). I prefer reading the primary sources, themselves, minus too much speculation (ala Bachrach).

Clearly, and no doubt he profited from the fact that his book was published 27 years after Bachrach's.
And even Alemany did not refrain from using Bachrach as a reference, so he can't have been all that bad.

I saw that you changed your article - I did notice spelling errors, though

Noted and changed. Happens when you're in haste. One misspelling was from CISP, I guess - should've checked.