The instant Sunday Times bestseller A Times, New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year ‘Simply the best popular history of the Middle Ages there is’ Sunday Times’A great achievement, pulling together many strands with aplomb’ Peter Frankopan, Spectator, Books of the Year’It’s so delightful to encounter a skilled historian of such enormous energy who’s never afraid of being entertaining’ The Times, Books of the Year’An amazing masterly gripping panorama’ Simon Sebag Montefiore’A badass history writer… to put it mildly’ Duff McKagan’A triumph’ Charles SpencerDan Jones’s epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built. It is a thousand-year adventure that moves from the ruins of the once-mighty city of Rome, sacked by barbarians in AD 410, to the first contacts between the old and new worlds in the sixteenth century. It shows how, from a state of crisis and collapse, the West was rebuilt and came to