Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe - Hardcover

Heather, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333989759 ISBN 13: 9780333989753

Publisher: Macmillan, 2009

Synopsis

At the start of the first millennium AD, southern and western Europe formed part of the Mediterranean-based Roman Empire, the largest state western Eurasia has ever known, and was set firmly on a trajectory towards towns, writing, mosaics, and central heating. Central, northern and eastern Europe was home to subsistence farmers, living in wooden houses with mud floors, whose largest political units weighed in at no more than a few thousand people. By the year 1000, Mediterranean domination of the European landscape had been destroyed. Instead of one huge Empire facing loosely organised subsistence farmers, Europe – from the Atlantic almost to the Urals – was home to an interacting commonwealth of Christian states, many of which are still with us today . This book tells the story of the transformations which changed western Eurasia forever: of the birth of Europe itself.

About this title

Review:

`an awesomely ambitious work: an attempt, in the heroic tradition of Pirenne, to make sense of nothing less than the reshaping of antiquity, and the origins of modern Europe...Heather is a wonderfully fluent writer, with a consistent ability to grab hold of his reader's attention....The result is a book which richly merits reading by those interested in the future of Europe as well as its past.'
--BBC History Magazine

`Peter Heather is a Big Historian...his prose is unfailingly clear and bright, and he laces it with enough nutty summaries and moments of dramatic action to cheer the reader along.
--Tribune

Book Description:

The epic story of the creation of Europe by the bestselling author of The Fall of Rome

About this edition

• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0333989759
• ISBN 13: 9780333989753
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 752