The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders [Kindle Edition] Author: Peter Heather | Language: English | ISBN:
B00I6I8MYY | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Download for free books Download The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link In 476 AD, the last of Rome's emperors, known as "Augustulus," was deposed by a barbarian general, the son of one of Attila the Hun's henchmen. With the imperial vestments dispatched to Constantinople, the curtain fell on the Roman empire in Western Europe, its territories divided among successor kingdoms constructed around barbarian military manpower.
But, if the Roman Empire was dead, Romans across much of the old empire still lived, holding on to their lands, their values, and their institutions. The conquering barbarians, responding toRome's continuing psychological dominance and the practical value of many of its institutions, were ready to reignite the imperial flame and enjoy the benefits. As Peter Heather shows in dazzling biographical portraits, each of the three greatest immediate contenders for imperial power--Theoderic, Justinian, and Charlemagne--operated with a different power base but was astonishingly successful in his own way. Though each in turn managed to put back together enough of the old Roman West to stake a plausible claim to the Western imperial title, none of their empires long outlived their founders' deaths. Not until the reinvention of the papacy in the eleventh century would Europe's barbarians find the means to establish a new kind of Roman Empire, one that has lasted a thousand years.
A sequel to the bestselling Fall of the Roman Empire, The Restoration of Rome offers a captivating narrative of the death of an era and the birth of the Catholic Church. Direct download links available for Download The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders
- File Size: 16342 KB
- Print Length: 488 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 1, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00I6I8MYY
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #63,940 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #18
in Books > History > Ancient > Europe - #22
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Europe > Western - #48
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > World > Medieval
- #18
in Books > History > Ancient > Europe - #22
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Europe > Western - #48
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > World > Medieval
Peter Heather is without doubt a great historian who has done much to revisit some of the theories that used to be common currency regarding the end of the Roman Empire. In this book, he seeks to demonstrate how, after three failed attempts by "imperial pretenders" to "restore" the Roman Empire, "barbarian popes" finally managed to succeed in the "Restoration of Rome", although in a quite different form.
Written with a large audience in mind, this book is an entertaining and, at times, a brilliant read backed up by the author's rather exceptional scholarship. The three first parts of the book are vignettes telling the stories of Theodoric, Justinian and Charlemagne, and, according to the author, how each of them attempted, and failed to restore the Empire. The fourth part is about the ascendency of the papacy and how it managed to dominate and become the head of the Church in the western part of what had been the Roman Empire.
This is where I started having some problems. One of the lesser ones is the use of profanity because this allegedly "people's prose" is supposed to make the book's contents more accessible or even more endearing to a large audience. One of the mildest is the author's rather sweeping judgement about Justinian being a "bastard", given the Nikea massacre that saved his throne (and his life) and his long wars which he pursued with little consideration about the sufferings of the populations. He even gets compared to Hitler, Staline and Pol pot. Needless to say, passing judgement on a historical figure in such an anachronistic way is quite amazing for a historian of this calibre who clearly knows better than to compare apples and oranges and call them fruit.
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