Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. 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. 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. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. Bringing 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.

"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.... Heather is a wonderfully fluent writer, with a consistent ability to grab hold of his reader's attention.... 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

"Most immediately impressive is Heather's easy command of detail. 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. One of Heather's most attractive strengths is his eye for comparision. 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

"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. It is lucid and it has a complex argument, but it is grippingly written." - Chris Wickham, author of The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

"This is a major work on the political and ethnic shaping of Europe during the first millennium A.D., embracing not just the Germanic and sub-Roman peoples, but also the Slavs and the Vikings. No one interested in the formation of European states and identities will be able to ignore this book." - Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization

"Empires and Barbarians is a significant accomplishment and a welcome gateway for the curious as well as the deeply informed."" - HNN.com