In the most ambitious and ground-breaking survey of the early middle ages ever written, Chris Wickham moves away from the fragmentary tendency to view the history of the period as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. Instead he provides a comparative history of the years 400-800 systematically analysing each of the regions of the early middle ages, from Denmark to Egypt. In doing so he creates aframework for early medieval social and economic history in Europe that is both innovative and authoritative.