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

This book approaches the history of Europe in the High Middle Ages from one particular perspective, by concentrating on conquest, colonization and associated cultural change in Europe and the Mediterranean in the period 950-1350. It analyzes the establishment of states by conquest and the peopling of distant countries by immigrants along the peripheries of the continent: English colonialism in the Celtic world, the movement of Germans into eastern Europe, the Spanish Reconquest and the activities of crusades and colonists in the eastern Mediterreanean. It asks what developments in language, law, belief and habit accompanied warfare and settlement. In doing so it continually alternates its focus between phenomena that are truly 'frontier', born of the needs of new settlement or military confrontation, and forces and developments that are to be found within the heartlands of the culture. Hence the theme is not only colonial conquest and immigration, but also the foundation of an expansive and increasingly homogenous society.