Well I'm slooowly going through the book.
But first of all, I don't understand all the upset replies to @altidiya. I guess we were all quite excited about this book and being disappointed by it is harsh enough as it is to also have a bunch of people coming to argue with you about your opinion.
(Which from where I got (halfway through the mythic history) I mostly agree)
The mundane history chapter was like reading Wikipedia but without the cross-references. At some point I skipped ahead saying "ok, enough of the history lesson reminder, let's go straight to 1220" and there were only two pages describing the default age setting. Yeah yeah, I'd read that the book is supposed to be planned as if you could play it at any time in hermetic history, but for me that's a weird explanation. First of all I'm not really aware of the existence of that crowd of we spaniards wanting to play in an earlier century. Second, if I wanted to do so I think I could take any other tribunal book and adjust it without needing 40 pages of mundane context around. Thirdly the mundane history chapter is mostly a text wall crowded with names and dates pretty irrelevant from an hermetic perspective and I just don't see how that would help me play a saga in an earlier century.
Then I think there is some lack of editing and revision. I remember reading at some point that a certain king A had two songs, B and C, and then C died leaving his three years son D as his heir, and then it is pointed that B is the uncle of D. Yeah, I know how family works, thank you very much. Also reading that the improvement in medicine made at some point the average age of the population in Cordoba (or somewhere else, I'm not quoting) to be 70 years. So the whole kingdom was crowded by old dudes!? Shouldn't that be the average life expectancy? (and still I think it's quite high for the period given child mortality rates, but anyway).
Then there are odd things here and there. I found quite odd a reference to the Dahman-Allaidh crisis to say that a maga from Iberia got there to fight the spider. I mean, there is actually no need to try to build such a connection between that chapter of history and Iberia, is it? There was Pralix and that flambeau happy-trigger magus and all the british sorcerers that Pralix enlisted, to suddenly drop that there was a spanish Diedne also deeply involved seems odd to me. I think the new book should had been build into canon, not trying to squeeze its place into it by saying "oh yeah, there is also this maga which is quite important in Iberia but hadn't ever been mentioned in any canon book. All of that just for a couple of paragraphs? I'm not sure it's worth it, really. Also at some point it is mentioned than when the tribunal was finally established there were 16 covenants and 30 magi. So what, an average of 1.9 magi per covenant!? Or the vis tax depending of the type of covenant, 1 for Spring covenants, 5 for Summer, 8 for Autumn and 2 for Winter. Covenant's seasons aren't really an in-game categorization, there isn't really anyone going around expending seasons' certificates to covenants. I think we are turning an abstraction into a mechanic there and that seems just weird.
Anyway I'm really hoping to get to the covenants chapter, which I hope will get me some tools to play around. What I don't think I'm going to get and I would have love to find is a characterization of the kingdoms and cities around. A book containing tools like these suggested by Justin Alexander to play into cities would had been just so great. Imagine some of these for Córdoba, Granada, Cádiz, Toledo, Barcelona... I'm partly afraid party excited thinking that probably if I want that I'd have to build it myself.
So, so far, way too many data textwalled and so few useful tools to play with. Let's hope it gets better once I past the history chapters.
