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Drawing upon the latest historical and archaeological research, this work provides a panoramic account of the history of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near East from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam. The formation of a new social and economic order in western Europe in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, and the ascendancy across the West of a new culture of military lordship, are placed firmly in the context of on-going connections and influence radiating outwards from the surviving Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from the great imperial capital of Constantinople. The East Roman (or ‘Byzantine’) Emperor Justinian’s attempts to revive imperial fortunes, restore the empire’s power in the West, and face down Constantinople’s great superpower rival, the Sasanian Empire of Persia, are charted, as too are the ways in which the escalating warfare between Rome and Persia paved the way for the development of new concepts of ‘holy war’, the emergence of Islam, and the Arab conquests of the Near East. Processes of religious and cultural change are explained through examination of social, economic, and military upheavals, and the formation of early medieval European society is placed in a broader context of changes that swept across the world of Western Eurasia from Manchuria to the Rhine. Warfare and plague, holy men and kings, emperors, shahs, caliphs and peasants all play their part in a compelling narrative suited to specialist, student, and general readership alike.

From 550 to 750 monastic culture became more firmly entrenched in Western Europe. The role of monasteries and their relationship to the social world around them was transformed during this period as monastic institutions became more integrated in social and political power networks. These collected essays focus on one of the central figures in this process, the Irish ascetic exile and monastic founder Columbanus (c. 550–615), his travels on the Continent, and the monastic network he and his Frankish disciples established in Merovingian Gaul and Lombard Italy. The post-Roman kingdoms through which Columbanus traveled and in which he established his monastic foundations were made up of many different peoples. As an outsider and immigrant, how did Columbanus and his communities interact with these peoples? How did they negotiate differences, and what emerged from these encounters? This volume aims to explore further the strands of this vibrant contact.

Jonas of Bobbio, writing in the mid-seventh century, was not only a major Latin monastic author but also a historic figure in his own right. Born in the ancient Roman town of Susa in the foothills of the Italian Alps, he became a monk of Bobbio, the monastery founded by the Irish abbot Columbanus, soon after the saint’s death. He became archivist and personal assistant to successive Bobbio abbots, traveled to Rome to obtain the first papal privilege of immunity, and served as a missionary on the northern borderlands of the Frankish kingdom, where he wrote his Vita Columbani, one of the most influential works of early medieval hagiography. As abbot of a community in the far north of the Frankish kingdom, Jonas was part of an extensive monastic network that stretched from the English Channel to the Italian Apennines. By the time of Jonas’s death toward the end of the seventh century, the monastic landscape of this region had been transformed. This was the result of a socioreligious revolution, initiated by Columbanus (d. 615) and continued by his Frankish disciples in the decades after his death. Columbanus established a cluster of monasteries in the Vosges forests of Burgundy in the last decade of the sixth century, chief among them Luxeuil. During the seventh century, Luxeuil, its abbots, and the Merovingian royal court in Paris spearheaded an unprecedented monastic movement in Merovingian Gaul that would transform the interrelationship between religious and secular authorities in the Early Middle Ages.