The Inheritors of Rome

The Inheritors of Rome concludes the series with the centuries from roughly 700 to 1000, when the former Roman world was reorganised into competing Christian and Islamic states. Holmes follows the fragmented societies of western Europe, the consolidation of Frankish power and the empire of Charlemagne, while also examining the resilience of Byzantium and the political, commercial and intellectual strength of the Islamic caliphates.

The book places Viking expansion, religious conversion, long-distance trade and changing systems of landholding within a connected history of Europe and the Mediterranean. Roman institutions and identities did not disappear at a single moment: they were adapted by rulers, churches, cities and legal traditions. Holmes argues that the upheavals conventionally called the Dark Ages produced the Carolingian, Byzantine and Islamic worlds that shaped medieval history.