Viking Empires, first published in 2005, is a definitive global history of the Viking World.

This book studies two Viking families who appear in the records of the Atlantic littoral as pagan raiders and reinvent themselves as established Christian rulers.

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 ten 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 Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken.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.

'In this fascinating, panoramic account, Levi Roach brings an expert eye and page-turning energy to the telling of their extraordinary story' Helen Castor, bestselling author of She Wolves 'A fresh retelling of the story of the Normans . . . written with enthusiasm and brio' Marc Morris, bestselling author of The Anglo-Saxons How did descendants of Viking marauders come to dominate Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East? It is a tale of ambitious adventures and fierce freebooters, of fortunes made and fortunes lost. The Normans made their influence felt across all of western Europe and the Mediterranean, from the British Isles to North Africa, and Lisbon to the Holy Land. In Empires of the Normans we discover how they combined military might and political savvy with deeply held religious beliefs and a profound sense of their own destiny. For a century and a half, they remade Europe in their own image, and yet their heritage was quickly forgotten - until now.

This book analyzes the nineteenth-century American fascination with what the author calls "narratives of imperial eclipse," texts that depict the surpassing of one great civilization by another. The central claim in this book is that historical episodes of imperial eclipse - for example, Incan Peru yielding to Spain, or the Ojibway to the French - heightened the concerns of many American writers about specific intranational social problems plaguing the nation at the time: race, class, gender, religion, and economics.

History of Vikings Thank you for purchasing “History of Vikings: An Epic Guide to the Viking Age and Feared Norse Seafarers. Such as Egil Skallagrimsson, Ragnar Lothbrok, Ivar the Boneless, and More’’ History is always filled with information, which describes different events that took place at different periods. As we read history books, we learn and discover about certain events. We learn what preceded those events or what caused them. We want to know why things were as they were (or how we learned). However, the main thing with history is that information we have can often be misleading or incomplete. The similar thing happened with Vikings. For many of us, the first picture that comes to our minds when we mention the word “Viking” is a savage, colossal man, wearing a beard, and carrying a huge axe in one hand. Many of us have at least heard of the Vikings. We think we know something about them. However, things we know are usually not in correlation with the real historical facts. This is where this book comes to the scene. “History of Vikings” is a book where we read about Vikings, their customs, their life, and more. Since the book is a collection of close historical facts, “History of Vikings” is written to educate its readers. If you wanted to know more about the mystical people from the Northern Europe then this book is just for you! Here is a Preview of What You Will Get: ⁃ A Full Book Summary ⁃ An Analysis ⁃ Fun quizzes ⁃ Quiz Answers ⁃ Etc Get a copy of this summary and learn about the book.