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As ever, Osprey has produced another good book looking outside of the usual Anglophone center of western Europe.

The general focus in this volume is the Russian response to the Mongol conquest. There’s the usual pair of decent maps showing the political evolution of the region. The campaigns and battles section is all too short, and provides a fair number things I’d like to see expanded on in Campaign books. The arms and armor section is up to the usual standards of Osprey, with plenty of photographs and illustrations. There’s also a good siege warfare section, including diagrams of typical wooden stockades, and then followed by a section on the arrival of gunpowder in the area.

The color illustrations are done by the late, great, Angus McBride, and are up to his usual standard. As ever, they provide good visual reference and inspiration, with explanatory commentary at the end of the book.

As with most Men-at-Arms books, there isn’t nearly enough room to go into the kind of detail two and a half centuries need, but it makes a good introduction to a subject that gets too little attention here.