The Roman Empire Divided: 400-700

by John Moorhead

Book Overview

In 400 the mighty Roman Empire was almost as large as it had ever been; within three centuries, advances by Germanic peoples in western Europe, Slavs in eastern Europe and Arabs around the eastern and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0582251117
• ISBN13: 9780582251113
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

good, not great

Definitely geared to the college textbook survey, Moorhead is a strict "gradualist", viz. he holds that the end of Antiquity was a gradual not necessarily a traumatic or violent process (witness the barbarians). See Peter Brown and Henri Pirenne for this concept. A caption to one of the illustrations tells it all: "A villa of the fourth century in a rural setting, depicted in a mosaic at Carthage. Its fortified appearance (it shows high walls around the villa) may have been a matter of style rather than necessity"; seems a bit disengenous, after all, who builds walls around their place just for style? Overall, not bad: he takes account of some archaeological evidence, which is sorely needed in histories of this period and takes a region by region approach in his chapters. So they are named: "South of the Danube"; "The East to 661" ; "From Gaul to France", etc. The writing is not great and sentences like this can use some help: "Such events were a reminder that the surviving Empire hovered like a gigantic cloud to the east of the first post-Roman states around the western shores of the Mediterranean, and there were voices encouraging any imperial ambitions to recover lost ground." There are better books but the 2001 publishing date definitely takes account of later research. Worth a look.