The Dark Ages A New History for Our Times

<p><b>The Dark Ages have long been cast as a murky, unknowable period – a void between the worlds of Rome and later medieval Europe. That picture is wrong.</b><br><br>In this sweeping history of Europe between 500 and 1000 AD, Oxford historian Alice Rio brings a long-obscured era into intimate focus. <b>Told through the lives of twelve women</b> who moved between different cultures, <i>The Dark Ages</i> reveals a world in motion: shaped by exchange across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, and alive with competing ideas about religion, power and gender.<br><br>Here is <b>Balthild</b>, an English girl enslaved in seventh-century Francia who rises to become queen and fights to free other enslaved women. In ninth-century Byzantium, <b>Theodora</b> becomes empress by winning a beauty pageant, and restores the worship of icons after decades of bloody conflict. And in tenth-century Muslim Spain, <b>Subh</b> – a Basque Christian enslaved into the Cordoban harem – rises through talent and intellect to become the caliph’s closest partner.<br><br>These women moved mostly alone, coerced, and without armies. To survive, they had to adapt quickly to chaotic environments and dangerous people. Discovering Europe through their eyes – as they pieced lives together and tested the limits of their new homes – offers a fundamentally new perspective on the era.<br><br><b>Drawing on rich written sources and material culture, <i>The Dark Ages</i> overturns the idea of a period defined by obscurity. Instead, it reveals a complex, vibrant, and unfamiliar world whose richness has been hidden not by a lack of evidence, but by the limits of how we have chosen to see it.</b></p>