Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West

Peter Heather

John Rapley

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Great historical book for study or review! Great story of Rome! Very well written and full of fresh ideas.

The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders

History

Europe

Macmillan

In AD 378, the Roman Empire had been the unrivalled superpower of Europe for well over four hundred years. And yet, August that year saw a small group of German-speaking asylum-seekers rout a vast Imperial army at Hadrianople, killing the Emperor and establishing themselves on Roman territory. Within a hundred years the last Emperor of the Western Empire had been deposed. What had gone wrong?In this ground breaking book, Peter Heather proproses a stunning new solution to one of the greatest mysteries of history. Mixing authoratative analysis with thrilling narrative, he brings fresh insight into the panorama of the empire's end, from the bejewelled splendour of the imperial court to the dripping forests of "Barbaricum". He examines the extraordinary success story that was the Roman Empire and uses a new understanding of its continued strength and enduring limitations to show how Europe's barbarians, transformed by centuries of contact with Rome, eventually pulled it apart.'a colourful and enthralling narrative...an account full of keen wit and an infectious relish for the period' - "Independent On Sunday". 'provides the reader with drama and lurid colour as well as analysis...succeeds triumphantly' - "Sunday Times". 'a fascinating story, full of ups and downs and memorable characters' - "Spectator". 'bursting with action...one can recommend to anyone, whether specialist or interested amateur' - "History Today". 'a rare combination of scholarship and flair for narrative' - Tom Holland.

The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

Ancient Civilizations

Pan Books

BRAND NEW, Exactly same ISBN as listed, Please double check ISBN carefully before ordering.

Empires and Barbarians

For half a millenium the empire of Rome stretched from Hadrians Wall to the river Euphrates, a massive fortified state founded on military might and the pilllars of civilizationwritting, the city, and the rule of law. But beyond these frontiers lay other lands, the lands of seemingly anarchic warrior tribes, the land of the Barbarians. The opening scenes of Gladiator are based on the victories of Marcus Aurelius over one such tribe, the Marcommani. Two hundered years later the Romans still seemed invincible, routing 30,000 Alamanii at the battle of Strasbourg. However, within a generation, the foundations of this order were shaken to their core, and Roman armies, as one contemporary put it, "vanished like shadows". What had happened? Covering the last 100 years of Empire, a period full of great battles, treachery, and characters as wild as Attila the Hun, Peter Heather shows how the Empire gave way before the relentless and deliberate onslaught of the Huns, Goths and Vandals. These tribes, originating in Eastern Europe, finally conquered large tracts of the old Empire, sacking Rome itself and defeating Roman armies on land and sea.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

At the start of the first millennium AD, southern and western Europe formed part of the Mediterranean-based Roman Empire, the largest state western Eurasia has ever known, and was set firmly on a trajectory towards towns, writing, mosaics, and central heating. Central, northern and eastern Europe was home to subsistence farmers, living in wooden houses with mud floors, whose largest political units weighed in at no more than a few thousand people. By the year 1000, Mediterranean domination of the European landscape had been destroyed. Instead of one huge Empire facing loosely organised subsistence farmers, Europe from the Atlantic almost to the Urals was home to an interacting commonwealth of Christian states, many of which are still with us today . This book tells the story of the transformations which changed western Eurasia forever: of the birth of Europe itself.

This is a history of the Huns in Europe from their first attacks on the Goths north of the Black Sea to the collapse of their central European empire after the death of the legendary Attila. In the only connected narrative account of the rise and fall of the Huns in English, Professor Thompson reconstructs their campaigns in detail from disparate and often fragmentary sources. In the process, there emerges a clear picture of their dramatic successes, and failures, against the non-Roman peoples of central and eastern Europe, and of their many invasions of the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire.

The Huns (The Peoples of Europe Series)

E. A. Thompson

Wiley/Blackwell

In AD 476, the last of Rome's emperors, known as "Augustulus," was deposed by a barbarian general, the son of one of Attila the Hun's henchmen. With the imperial vestments dispatched to Constantinople, the curtain fell on the Roman empire in Western Europe, its territories divided among successor kingdoms constructed around barbarian military manpower. But, if the Roman Empire was dead, Romans across much of the old empire still lived, holding on to their lands, their values, and their institutions. The conquering barbarians, responding to Rome's continuing psychological dominance and the practical value of many of its institutions, were ready to reignite the imperial flame and enjoy the benefits. As Peter Heather shows in dazzling biographical portraits, each of the three greatest immediate contenders for imperial power—Theoderic, Justinian, and Charlemagne—operated with a different power base but was astonishingly successful in his own way. Though each in turn managed to put back together enough of the old Roman West to stake a plausible claim to the Western imperial title, none of their empires long outlived their founders' deaths. Not until the reinvention of the papacy in the 11th century would Europe's barbarians find the means to establish a new kind of Roman Empire, one that has lasted 1,000 years. A sequel to the bestselling Fall of the Roman Empire, The Restoration of Rome offers a captivating narrative of the death of an era and the birth of the Catholic Church.The accompanying reference guide is included as a PDF on this disc.

Restoration of Rome, The

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

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: Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors Rome called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling an Empire that had dominated their lives for so long. A leading authority on the late Roman Empire and on the barbarians, Heather relates the extraordinary story of how Europe's barbarians, transformed by centuries of contact with Rome on every possible level, eventually pulled the empire apart. He shows first how the Huns overturned the existing strategic balance of power on Rome's European frontiers, to force the Goths and others to seek refuge inside the Empire. This prompted two generations of struggle, during which new barbarian coalitions, formed in response to Roman hostility, brought the Roman west to its knees. The Goths first destroyed a Roman army at the battle of Hadrianople in 378, and went on to sack Rome in 410. The Vandals spread devastation in Gaul and Spain, before conquering North Africa, the breadbasket of the Western Empire, in 439. We then meet Attila the Hun, whose reign of terror swept from Constantinople to Paris, but whose death in 453 ironically precipitated a final desperate phase of Roman collapse, culminating in the Vandals' defeat of the massive Byzantine Armada: the west's last chance for survival. Peter Heather convincingly argues that the Roman Empire was not on the brink of social or moral collapse. What brought it to an end were the barbarians.

Fall of the Roman Empire, The

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 10 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.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Peter Heather. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Peter Heather

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Peter Heather. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West

The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders

The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

Empires and Barbarians

The Fall of the Roman Empire

Empires and Barbarians

The Huns (The Peoples of Europe Series)

Restoration of Rome, The

Fall of the Roman Empire, The

Empires and Barbarians