The Oxford History of Medieval EuropeGeorge Holmes This is the most authoritative account of life in Medieval Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the coming of the Renaissance. Full coverage is given to all aspects of life in a thousand-year period which saw the creation of western civilization: from the empires and kingdoms of Charlemagne, the Byzantines, and the Hundred Years War, to the ideals of the crusades, the building of great cathedrals and the social catastrophe of the Black Death; the cultural worlds of chivalric knights, popular festivals, and new art forms. The chapters show the movement of the centre of gravity in European life from the Mediterranean to the north; and the authors explore the contrast between Byzantine and Renaissance cultures in the south and the new, complex political and social structures of north-west Europe, which by 1300 had the most advanced civilization the world had ever seen. |
Contents
The Mediterranean in the reign of Justinian | 8 |
Visigothic and Arabic Spain | 14 |
Movements of peoples in the fifth century | 58 |
The Northern World in the Dark Ages | 59 |
Northern Europe c 600 | 81 |
The Carolingian Empire at the treaty of Verdun 843 | 92 |
Viking routes | 100 |
The Society of Northern Europe in the High | 109 |
The Christian Reconquista in Spain | 191 |
Latin power in the Near East | 207 |
Western trade with Islam in the ninth to eleventh | 214 |
The Mediterranean in the Age of | 222 |
The Balkans a in 1216 b in 1400 | 238 |
Italy after 1454 | 259 |
The Civilization of Courts and Cities in | 276 |
The states of the west in the later Middle Ages | 284 |