Empires of Faith

Drawing upon the latest historical and archaeological research, Dr Peter Sarris provides a panoramic account of the history of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East from the fall of Rome to the rise of Islam. The formation of a new social and economic order in western Europe in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, and the ascendancy across the West of a new culture of military lordship, are placed firmly in the context of on-going connections and influenceradiating outwards from the surviving Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from the great imperial capital of Constantinople. The East Roman (or 'Byzantine') Emperor Justinian's attempts to revive imperial fortunes, restore the empire's power in the West, and face down Constantinople's great superpowerrival, the Sasanian Empire of Persia, are charted, as too are the ways in which the escalating warfare between Rome and Persia paved the way for the development of new concepts of 'holy war', the emergence of Islam, and the Arab conquests of the Near East. Processes of religious and cultural change are explained through examination of social, economic, and military upheavals, and the formation of early medieval European society is placed in a broader context of changes that swept across theworld of Eurasia from Manchuria to the Rhine. Warfare and plague, holy men and kings, emperors, shahs, caliphs, and peasants all play their part in a compelling narrative suited to specialist, student, and general readership alike.

This book is a gem [...] Sarris avoids pomposity and instead employs the easy, relaxed style of the accomplished undergraduate lecturer. This is not to say that the material is dumbed down. In discussing such diverse and complicated subjects as law and the content of grave goods, the author provides older students with a wealth of subject matter that might ordinarily lie outside classroom readings., evoke[s], with a rare vividness, the world of the later Roman aristocracy, Peter Sarris' splendid new book is a defiant act of intellectual imperialism. Under the triumphant banner of 'The Oxford History of Medieval Europe' it annexes four academic kingdoms: Rome, the early Middle Ages, Byzantium and early Islam [...] It is easy for forget that this is hard-fought territory, disputed by fractious experts and partitioned between different university departments [...] Peter Sarris' signal acheivement is to impose an academic unity on the period., An epic, sweeping and ferociously clever history of the age of Justinian and Mohammed., a brilliant book about the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam, filled with insights and revolutionary ideas by one of the finest historians in Britain.

Peter Sarris was born in St Albans and educated at St. Albans School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he specialized in Medieval and Byzantine history. After Balliol, he was elected to a Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Late Roman, Early Medieval, and Byzantine History at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Trinity College. He has lectured and published widely on early medieval and Byzantine historyboth in the UK and abroad, and has appeared on historical programmes on television and radio and written on archaeological matters for The Times.