This is a sweeping tour of the Mediterranean world from the Atlantic to Persia during the last half-century of the Roman Empire. By focusing on a single year not overshadowed by an epochal event, 428 AD provides a truly fresh look at a civilization in the midst of enormous change--as Christianity takes hold in rural areas across the empire, as western Roman provinces fall away from those in the Byzantine east, and as power shifts from Rome to Constantinople. Taking readers on a jo...

How the ruthless contest among Julius Caesar’s heirs ignited a global war that raged far beyond the borders of RomeThe succession of civil wars that plagued the last years of the Roman Republic has often been portrayed as a settling of scores between Roman factions—Sulla against Marius, Caesar against Pompey, Octavian against Mark Antony—with foreign campaigns serving as a backdrop to the tragic spectacle. The Roman World War recasts the struggle for Rome ...

A military history of the campaigns of Flavius Belisarius, the greatest general of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Justinian.Back in the 6th century, Belisarius twice defeated the Persians and reconquered North Africa from the Vandals in a single year at the age of 29, before going on to regain Spain and Italy, including Rome (briefly), from the barbarians. This book discusses the evolution from classical Roman to Byzantine armies and systems of warfare, as we...

A military history of the campaigns of Stilicho, the army general who became one of the most powerful men in the Western Roman Empire.Flavius Stilicho lived in one of the most turbulent periods in European history. The Western Empire was finally giving way under pressure from external threats, especially from Germanic tribes crossing the Rhine and Danube, as well as from seemingly ever-present internal revolts and rebellions.Ian Hughes explains how a Vandal (...

History of three wars from the reign of Justinian, Byzantine emperor -- The Persian War, The Vandalic War, and The Gothic War. According to Wikipedia: "Procopius of Caesarea (Latin: Procopius Caesarensis, c. AD 500 c. AD 565) was a prominent Byzantine scholar from Palestine. Accompanying the general Belisarius in the wars of the Emperor Justinian I, he became the principal historian of the 6th century, writing the Wars of Justinian, the Buildings of Justinian and the celebrated Secret Hist...

The tenth century dawned in violence and disorder. Charlemagne's empire was in ruins, most of Spain had been claimed by Moorish invaders, and even the papacy in Rome was embroiled in petty, provincial conflicts. To many historians, it was a prime example of the ignorance and uncertainty of the Dark Ages. Yet according to historian Paul Collins, the story of the tenth century is the story of our culture's birth, of the emergence of our civilization into the light of day.The Birt...

J.B. Bury was a celebrated historian who wrote around the turn of the 19th century. His classics on the Roman Empire and Greece still stand among the best texts on the classical civilizations. The period between the 4th and 6th centuries A.D. was one of incredible upheaval for the Roman Empire. The West saw Rome sacked by invaders from the North, while the Eastern Empire flourished and saw much of the old Roman lands re-conquered during the conquests of Belisarius under Justinian I. Burys ...

Jordanes, also written Jordanis or (not common nowadays) Jornandes, was a 6th century Roman bureaucrat best known for writing histories. Jordanes wrote Romana about the history of Rome, but his best-known work is his Getica, written in Constantinople about AD 551. It is the only extant classical work dealing with the early history of the Goths. Jordanes was asked by a friend to write this book as a summary of a multi-volume history of the Goths (now lost) by the statesman Cassiodorus. He was ...

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the len...

The death of the Roman Empire is one of the perennial mysteries of world history. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Peter Heather proposes a stunning new solution: Rome generated its own nemesis. Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors it called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling the Empire that had dominated their lives for so long. Heather is a leading authority on the late Roman Empire and on the barbarians. In The Fall of the Roman Empire, he explores the extraordina...

'A masterly account of this first wicked century of the Roman Empire' Sunday Times'Holland does not just tell the story of the reign of the Julio-Claudian family. He knits the history of ancient Rome into his narrative - its founding myths, the fall of the republic, the religious superstitions - with a skill so dextrous you don't notice the stitching. Dynasty is both a formidable effort to compile what we can know about the ancient world and a sensational story' ...

A magisterial work of gripping history, City of Fortune tells the story of the Venetian ascent from lagoon dwellers to the greatest power in the Mediterranean - an epic five hundred year voyage that encompassed crusade and trade, plague, sea battles and colonial adventure.In Venice, the path to empire unfolded in a series of extraordinary contests - the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, the fight to the finish with Genoa and a desperate defence against the Turks. Under th...