Now in its fifth edition, The Italian City Republics illustrates how, from the eleventh century onwards, many Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth century, when the regimes of individual ‘tyrants’ took over in most towns, these communes were the scene of a precocious, and very well-documented, experiment in republican self-government.In this new edition, Trevor Dean has expanded the book’s tre...

From the divine right of kings to the political philosophies of writers such as Machiavelli, the medieval city-states to the unification of Spain, Daniel Waley and Peter Denley focus on the growing power of the state to illuminate changing political ideas in Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spanning the entire continent and beyond, and using contemporary voices wherever possible, the authors include substantial sections on economics, religion, and art, and how develop...

Based upon Machiavelli's first-hand experience as an emissary of the Florentine Republic to the courts of Europe, The Prince analyses the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power. This fluent new translation is accompanied by comprehensive notes and an introduction that dispels some of the myths associated with Machiavelli, and considers the true purpose of The Prince. - ;'A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought...but war, its institu...

A "serious and thoughtful" interpretation of Machiavelli's life and thought—and its relevance today—from the acclaimed author of Terror and Consent ( The Times, London).Constitutional scholar Philip Bobbitt turns his expert attention to the life and work of Niccolo Machiavelli, the sixteenth century political philosopher whose classic text The Prince remains one of the most important and controversial works of political theory ever writte...

Histories of medieval Europe have typically ignored southern Italy, looking south only in the Norman period. Yet Southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries was a complex and vibrant world that deserves to be better understood. In Before the Normans, Barbara M. Kreutz writes the first modern study in English of the land, political structures, and cultures of southern Italy in the two centuries before the Norman conquests. This was a pan-Meditteranean society, where the Roman p...

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-FictionWinner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-FictionOne of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late...

The Reformation was the seismic event in European history over the past 1000 years, and one which tore the medieval world apart. Not just European religion, but thought, culture, society, state systems, personal relations - everything - was turned upside down. Just about everything which followed in European history can be traced back in some way to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which it provoked. The Reformation is where the modern world painfully and dramatically began, and...

The idea that with the decline of the Roman Empire Europe entered into some immense ‘dark age’ has long been viewed as inadequate by many historians. How could a world still so profoundly shaped by Rome and which encompassed such remarkable societies as the Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian empires, be anything other than central to the development of European history? How could a world of so many peoples, whether expanding, moving or stable, of Goths, Franks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs,...

**'A gripping work, and a gripping translation' Nicholas Lezard, GuardianNiccolò Machiavelli's brutally uncompromising manual of statecraft, The Prince is translated and edited with an introduction by Tim Parks in Penguin Classics**As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notori...

What is Europe? Firstly, of course, it is a continent made up of countless disparate peoples, races and nations, and governed by different ideas, philosophies, religions and attitudes. Nonetheless, it has a common thread of history running through it, stitching the lands and peoples of its past and present together into one fabric and held together by the continent's great institutions, such as the Church of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, the European Union, individual monarchies, trade orga...

From bestselling historians Frances and Joseph Gies, authors of the classic “Medieval Life” series, comes this compelling, lucid, and highly readable account of the family unit as it evolved throughout the Medieval period—reissued for the first time in decades.“Some particular books that I found useful for Game of Thrones and its sequels deserve mention. Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval City, both by Joseph and Fra...

Why did Rome fall?Vicious barbarian invasions during the fifth century resulted in the cataclysmic end of the world's most powerful civilization, and a 'dark age' for its conquered peoples. Or did it? The dominant view of this period today is that the 'fall of Rome' was a largely peaceful transition to Germanic rule, and the start of a positive cultural transformation.Bryan Ward-Perkins encourages every reader to think again by reclaiming the drama and violence of the last days of the Roma...