"Peter Heather's book is an important contribution to the field-the first up-to-date book that compares the Germanic and the Slav migrations of the early middle ages. He neatly sets his thinking about first-millennium migration against modern experiences of the lure of the New World or the desperate flight of Kosovar or Rwandan refugees."-Christopher Kelly, Literary Review One of Heather's most attractive strengths is his eye for comparision. A jaunty, man of the people prose style masks a sure and scholarly grip on the history and archaeology of the first millenniem A.D. "Most immediately impressive is Heather's easy command of detail. The result is a book which richly merits reading by those interested in the future of Europe as well as its past."-Tom Holland, BBC History Magazine
Heather is a wonderfully fluent writer, with a consistent ability to grab hold of his reader's attention. "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. "An amiable and learned companion through the centuries of migrations."- Library Journal "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was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.īringing 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. And yet 10 centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. 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. 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. Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD.
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