Themes in European History

Lecture 1

 The Fall of Rome. (1) The Roman Empire (as opposed to the Republic) was established in 30 B.C., by Octavian, Julius Caesar’s adopted son ...

Lecture 2

The Fall of Rome (2). Last week we were looking at some aspects of the Roman world during the first four hundred years of the first millennium. ...

Lecture 3

The Dark Ages. Gibbon claimed that the fall of the Roman Empire in the West represented "the triumph of barbarism and religion". The religion he was ...

Lecture 4

Justinian.  We have already seen how Constantine founded a new capital for the Roman Empire at Byzantium, renamed Constantinople. From Constanti...

Lecture 5

 THE KINGDOM OF THE FRANKS Recently we have been looking at events in the East - in Byzantium and the Arab empire. These two civilisations were ...

Lecture 7

The Plunge into Chaos. The Empire of Charlemagne was like a flash of light in the midst of a dark age. But it was soon extinguished. Charlemagne fail...

Lecture 8

FEUDALISM The word "feudalism" is one of the most overworked words in the language . It was originally coined by lawyers in the 18th Century&nb...

Lecture 6

  Charlemagne and the Pirenne Thesis. In the last lecture I traced in barest outline the rise and fall of the Merovingians in the Frankish ...

The Early Middle Ages - Introduction

The Early Middle Ages. Introduction. This short course of eight lectures surveys some of the most significant developments in the millennium from th...