Dan Jones

Dan Jones's epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built.

A New History of the Middle Ages

Powers and Thrones

Bastien Vaucher

Nicola Sarah Brooks

I haven't read any of the authors other books but I'm a total history junkie (Discovery & History Channels are my faves). I loved the series he did on British Castles so this was a no-brainer for me.

I do have a degree in History and Classical Studies but you could be just a bored lay-person or military veteran and you could get a great deal of knowledge and enjoyment from this book. It does encompass a vast time period (from 400AD-Renaissance). It has a distinct focus on Western Europe and the peoples that they were directly in contact with/influenced by. It's not your day in the life of kind of read -it concentrates more on the forces that can be outside factors on the power bases- such as the movement of people, diseases and ideas, and the big game-changer - religion.

The sections are broke down into easy to manage chunks and you could easily just go to whatever chapters interested you most. I'm more of a Classical History buff so I loved the earlier chapters dealing with the decline of the Roman Empire in the West.

There are great maps that help you to track shifting borders/powers and a HUGE selection of further reading in various topics contained within the book for anything which might have piqued your interest. 

I received an ARC via NetGalley and I'm volunteering to leave this review for a wonderfully informative book.

"An audacious, entertaining page-turner. Dan Jones covers a thousand years of history with elegance and panache."--Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History The New York Times bestselling author returns with an epic history of the medieval world--a rich and complicated reappraisal of an era whose legacy and lessons we are still living with today. When the once-mighty city of Rome was sacked by barbarians in 410 and lay in ruins, it signaled the end of an era--and the beginning of a thousand years of profound transformation. In a gripping narrative bursting with big names--from St Augustine and Attila the Hun to the Prophet Muhammad and Eleanor of Aquitaine--Dan Jones charges through the history of the Middle Ages. Powers and Thrones takes readers on a journey through an emerging Europe, the great capitals of late Antiquity, as well as the influential cities of the Islamic West, and culminates in the first European voyages to the Americas. The medieval world was forged by the big forces that still occupy us today: climate change, pandemic disease, mass migration, and technological revolutions. This was the time when the great European nationalities were formed; when the basic Western systems of law and governance were codified; when the Christian Churches matured as both powerful institutions and the regulators of Western public morality; and when art, architecture, philosophical inquiry and scientific invention went through periods of massive, revolutionary change. At each stage in this story, successive western powers thrived by attracting--or stealing--the most valuable resources, ideas, and people from the rest of the world. The West was rebuilt on the ruins of an empire and emerged from a state of crisis and collapse to dominate the region and the world. Every sphere of human life and activity was transformed in the thousand years of Powers and Thrones. As we face a critical turning point in our own millennium, the legacy and lessons of how we got here matter more than ever.

Powers and Thrones A New History of the Middle Ages

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