Conville & Walsh
literary agency
Millennium
The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom
- Author: Tom Holland
- Category: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Little, Brown (UK)/ Doubleday(US)
- Pub date: September 2008
- Length: 512 pages
About Millennium
Tom Holland’s galloping history of Europe in the centuries on either side of 1000AD confirms both his mastery and his originality
- INDEPENDENT
The scholarly author writes about it as freshly as though it were just the other year, so for a moment we seem to experience again the unspeakable fears that attended the approach of the almost universally dreaded first millennium
- SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
At a time when the cultural identity of Europe has become so hotly debated an issue, MILLENNIUM looks back to the eleventh century, to the period when the boundaries and character of Western Christendom were first being firmly set.
The century begins amid millennial panic, fostered by a widespread sense that the world is coming to an end: the Christian kingdoms of the Mediterranean are being attacked by Saracen raiders, those of the north by Vikings; the kingdoms themselves are fragmenting; disease and anarchy are increasingly rife. It ends with the First Crusade, and a Christendom that has not merely endured, but proved itself triumphantly expansionist, with its banners planted in the Muslim heartlands, on the ramparts of Jerusalem itself. A century fundamental, in other words, to the whole future course of European history – for it ensures that the very notion of Christendom will survive.
About the Author
Tom Holland was born near Oxford and brought up in Salisbury, England. He obtained a double first in English and Latin at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He is the author of RUBICON: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (Little, Brown, 2003) and PERSIAN FIRE: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (Little, Brown, 2005), and MILLENNIUM: The Eleventh Century and the Making of the West (Little, Brown, 2008). He has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio, and lives in London with his wife and two small children.