The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 - 1350

From our twentieth-century perspective, we tend to think of the Europe of the past as a colonizer, a series of empires that conquered lands beyond their borders and forced European cultural values on other peoples. This provocative book shows that Europe in the Middle Ages was as much a product of a process of conquest and colonization as it was later a colonizer. Robert Bartlett concentrates on the establishment of states by conquest and the peopling of distant countries by immigrants along the peripheries of the European continent. He asks what developments in language, law, belief, and habit accompanied warfare and settlement, as he explores the formation of racially mixed societies on the edges of Europe and the ideological justification for aggressive expansion. This fascinating account shows how the expansionary power of this civilization sprang from its centers, even if it may be seen most starkly at its edges. Hence the theme is not only colonial conquest and settlement, the moving edge, but also the formation of an increasingly homogeneous society that by the end of the Middle Ages lay poised to enter a yet more expansionary phase of its history: one whose consequences are still around us.