Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0582251117, Paperback)

"If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West: and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour." Edward Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

• Looks beyond Western Europe and Britain to North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East.
• Draws on a very wide range of material - literary, archaeological, linguistic, numismatic, legal an artistic.
• Written in an engaging and easy to read style and is generously illustrated throughout.

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire has transfixed readers of history for centuries. This important new account looks at what happened after the power of the once mighty empire was swept away. Smaller states founded by Slavs, Arabs, Germanic peoples and others moved in to fill the void and laid the foundations for the later histories of western Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and north Africa. John Moorhead looks at how these fundamental changes were influenced by other social, economic and political developments taking place at the same time. Using a fascinating array of evidence he weaves the numerous threads into a convincing and lucid narrative and shows how, by the end of the eighth century, the civilization of the ancient world had been replaced by a series of units which had very little in common with each other. Unmatched in its chronological sweep, and with an impressive and unusual geographical range, this ambitious history offers a new and vital interpretation of the post-Roman world.

John Moorhead is the McCaughey Professor of history at the University of Queensland.- Australia. He has published widely in the field and has walked the pilgrim route from Le Puy to Santiago de Compostela.