دانلود کتاب Medieval Europe 400-1500

First published 1987 by Pearson Education Limited.

"Medieval Europe 400-1500" is the first volume of a major new three-part illustrated history of Europe from the collapse of the Roman Empire to modern times, written for upper school, college and university students, and for the general reader The two authors, H. G. Koenigsberger and Asa Briggs, have collaborated closely on the planning of the sequence, the second of which, "Early Modern Europe 1500-1789", is again by Professor Koenigsberger, and the third, "Modern Europe 1789-1980", by Lord Briggs.

Medieval Europe launches the enterprise in fine style. H. G. Koenigsberger's rich and absorbing account starts with the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, which had been centred on the Mediterranean, and traces across the millennium of the Middle Ages the gradual crystallization of a new and distinctive European identity in the lands to the north of it.

This development is comprehensible only when it is seen in its relation both to Europe's neighbours, and also to the Europeans' perception of their own past as deeply rooted in the earlier civilization of Greece and Rome. Professor Koenigsberger therefore sets his account in the broader context of the Islamic, Byzantine and Central Asian worlds; and he also explores the successive renaissances' by which the Europeans sought to recapture and renew the traditions, values and achievements of their classical inheritance.

It is a crowded, compelling story, and it has a splendidly lucid and readable guide in Professor Koenigsberger. In his pages the early history of modern Europe comes vividly to life in all its social, political, economic and cultural manifestations. He depicts a society divided in its allegiances and attitudes, and often violent and crude, yet also uniquely creative and dynamic. The thousand-year development he surveys here starts in disintegration and disorder; but by its end the Europeans were set to impose their rule, and much of their value system, on the rest of the world. How they did so, and to what effect, is one of the themes of the succeeding volume.