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 10 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 Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic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.