tells a very different story of many kingdoms emerging to the north of the Alps out of the obscure confusion of the migrations, of the acceptance of Christianity and Charlemagne's attempt to revive a western empire which was again to be disrupted by the Viking invasions. That newly expansive northern world in the period after 900 is the subject of David Whitton's chapter, which describes the new forms of life emerging among the knightly classes and the new religious orders in a world dominated by the kings of Germany and its dukes, the kings of France, and the Norman and Angevin rulers of England. In this chapter we see Europe as we know it beginning to appear. Rosemary Morris has described the decline of the Byzantine and Arab empires in the central medieval period and the southwards expansion of the northerners in the crusades, the Norman conquests in Italy, and the Reconquista in Spain. Peter Denley outlines the complex movements of states and peoples in the Mediterranean basin in the last medieval centuries with the splendid flowering of thought and culture which we now call the Renaissance arising in the central position of the north Italian cities. Finally, Malcolm Vale carries us into northern Europe in the age of the Hundred Years War between England and France, the Valois dukes of Burgundy and the Flemish cities. He argues convincingly that, in spite of the temporary decline of population, this was a period in which secular civilization, which we might call a northern Renaissance, was growing stronger. If we want to pick out the most distinct features of European civilization which have now appeared we should look to the courts of Paris and Brussels and to the cities of Flanders and Tuscany.

The movement of the centres of civilization from south to north and from east to west during the medieval centuries involved a change from the empires of Rome, Byzantium, and the Arabs, empires of vast geographical extent and great military power but which were relatively loosely controlled. We move in western Europe to a system of smaller, more tightly organized, and more differentiated political units. Modern Europeans contemplating the ancient world have naturally tended to look back to the Greek cities of the fifth century BC rather than to larger states, because they seem to represent the

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