Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a
recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD.
With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of
migration and social and economic interaction that changed two
vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the
sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and
states.
The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the
Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a
politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally
developed civilization--one with philosophy, banking, professional
armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection.
The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers
living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers.
Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly
illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone.
The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools
and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later,
from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned.
Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central
and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread,
and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken.
Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together,
and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny
role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the
destruction of the ancient world order in light of modern migration
and globalization patterns.
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