The best books on the end of Antiquity and the early Middle Ages

Guy Halsall has a comprehensive knowledge of the history and archaeology of the early Middle Ages as well as a firm control of all of the centuries of debates and controversies about this period.

He cuts through a lot of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations of this crucial period of history. Often opinionated but never dull, he provides the best general narrative guide to date in English on the transformation of Western Europe.

Rather than following a chronological order or a political narrative, Wickham, the leading British historian of the Early Middle Ages, takes a thematic and regional approach to the transformation of the Roman world across the Mediterranean.

His dense comparisons of the economic and social structures of specific regions, both some like Denmark and Ireland that were never part of the Roman Empire, as well as core regions around the entire Mediterranean, highlight the diversity already existing within the Roman Empire and the differing fates of these regions as they emerged from its disappearance.

For two centuries, Europeans have tried to find in the peoples of the early Middle Ages the ethnic origins of their own nations.

The Franks were the most successful of these peoples, appearing first as a minor group along the lower Rhine but ultimately, under Charlemagne, creating a vast empire that encompassed much of what had been the Roman Empire in the West.

However, in this extraordinary book Reimitz shows how protean Frankish ethnic identity was across this period.

Relying on close readings of historical texts and their manuscript transmission, constantly amended, re-edited, and transformed, he shows how Frankish identity was constantly disputed and renegotiated, ultimately moving far from classical notions of ethnicity to an imperial identity and then to a notion of the Franks as one of a number of Christian peoples chosen by God to rule the West.

Everyone has heard of the Franks, but few have any knowledge of the Avars, mounted warriors originating in Steppes of eastern Asia who created a vast empire between the Frankish and Byzantine worlds that endured longer than either the better-known Hunnic or Mongol empires.

Pohl’s book takes us out of the usual world of Germanic barbarian kingdoms and into a radically different kind of post-Roman world.

Drawing on Latin and Greek sources as well as vast amounts of archaeological research conducted over the past century, he introduces us to this multi-ethnic empire that stretched from the Vienna woods to Belgrade and which formed the crucible out of which emerged the South Slavic peoples and nations whose names persist until today.

And now for something completely different: my other recommendations are dense, scholarly volumes, well written but demanding for a general audience.

It is often hard to imagine the people who appear in their pages, based as they are on the scarce and laconic chronicles of the early Middle Ages, as flesh and blood humans.

In this novel, Puhak breathes life into two of the most remarkable women of the period, the Visigothic princess Brunhild, married off to the Frankish King Sigebert, and her sister-in-law Fredegund, who began as a Frankish slave and rose to become a rival queen to Brunhild.

Their story of rivalry, assassination, murder, seduction, but also of governance and diplomacy as two isolated women wielded unheard-of power across the decades, makes the world of seventh-century Gaul come alive.

The ways that the memory of these two women were twisted and manipulated by both contemporary and subsequent male historians likewise paints a vivid picture of the misogyny of the age.