The Making of Europe

Medieval Europe, Robert Bartlett argues, was itself formed by conquest and colonization, before it became a colonizer of other lands. He concentrates on the founding of states by conquest and the settling of distant countries by immigrants along the edges of the continent, asking what changes in language, law, belief and habit came with warfare and settlement. He also looks at the racially mixed societies that formed on Europe's peripheries and at the ideas used to justify aggressive expansion. That expansionary power, he shows, sprang from the centers of the civilization, which by the end of the Middle Ages had become an increasingly homogeneous society poised for a still more expansionary phase.

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