Ravenna

Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe

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In 402 AD, after invading tribes broke through the Alpine frontiers of Italy and threatened the imperial government in Milan, the young Emperor Honorius made the momentous decision to move his capital to a small, easy defendable city in the Po estuary - Ravenna. From then until 751 AD, Ravenna was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theoderic the Goth and finally the centre of Byzantine power in Italy.

In this engrossing account Judith Herrin explains how scholars, lawyers, doctors, craftsmen, cosmologists and religious luminaries were drawn to Ravenna where they created a cultural and political capital that dominated northern Italy and the Adriatic. As she traces the lives of Ravenna's rulers, chroniclers and inhabitants, Herrin shows how the city became the pivot between East and West; and the meeting place of Greek, Latin, Christian and barbarian cultures.

While Ravenna's palaces have crumbled, its churches have survived. In them, Catholic Romans and Arian Goths competed to produce an unrivalled concentration of spectacular mosaics, many of which still astonish visitors today. Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe brings the early Middle Ages to life through the history of this dazzling city.

Her magni?cent recent book Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe recaptures the excitement of discovering the history of a city where East Rome and Latin Europe joined for many centuries in ways that defy our neat divisions between ancient and medieval; Romans, Greeks, and barbarians; East and West.
Peter Brown, New York Review of Books

Herrin's claims for Ravenna are both sweeping and convincing. ... Herrin's book, then, is about a good deal more than its ostensible subject. It aims to answer some fundamental historical questions. How did the Roman empire in western Europe decay and mutate? What were the influences on the civilisation of medieval Christendom, and how did they interfuse? To what extent was Christianity touched by the trace elements of Greek and Roman civilisation? Notoriously problematic though these issues are, they are ones that Herrin has spent a distinguished career studying, and which Ravenna brilliantly serves to elucidate.
Tom Holland, Financial Times

The northern Italian city of Ravenna, with its wondrous mosaicked churches and gilded mausolea that miraculously survived the aerial bombardments of the second world war, was manifestly also a Byzantine city. Herrin shows how this was so in her scrupulously researched history of the city in its imperial heyday through the period Edward Gibbon chose to call the Dark Ages ... eminently worth reading. The colour plates are so sumptuous that the Ravenna mosaics fairly glow on the page.
Ian Thomson, Spectator

About Judith Herrin

Judith Herrin won the Heineken Prize for History (the 'Dutch Nobel Prize') in 2016 for her pioneering work on the early Medieval Mediterranean world, especially the role of Byzantium, the influence of Islam and the significance of women. She is the author of Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, The Formation of Christendom, A Medieval Miscellany and Women in Purple. Herrin worked in Birmingham, Paris, Munich, Istanbul and Princeton before becoming Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London until 2008, where she is now the Constantine Leventis Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Classics. She has excavated in Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, and served for thirty years on the editorial board of Past and Present.

Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 28/10/2021
ISBN: 9780241954454
Length: 576 pages
Dimensions: 197mm x 26mm x 129mm
Weight: 443g
Price: £16.99

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Ravenna

Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe

Format:

Buy the book from:

the book is absolutely gorgeous, with magnificent colour reproductions of Ravenna's churches and mosaics. Relics of an age that seems almost impossibly remote, they are the foundations on which modern Europe stands.

This book is a triumph of accessible, innovative, lively scholarship from one of the very best Byzantine historians we have. It casts an unexpected but deeply illuminating light on how the "European" political and religious mind became what it is.

Judith Herrin's Ravenna ... performs the seemingly impossible task of rescuing its subject from obscurity, charting an improbably journey from marsh-enfolded outpost to imperial capital and cultural dynamo.

Herrin tells the changing story of Ravenna as it unfolds from the end of the fourth century to the ninth in a series of short, accessible sections with the aid of luscious illustrations.

Herrin spent nine years researching her narrative of the three and a half centuries of Ravenna's ascendancy ... By the time we can easily visit Ravenna the city again it should be with the advantage of having read Ravenna the book

lively, startling ... The author evokes lost worlds in surprising anecdotes ... From chariot races to bust-ups between neighbourhood gangs, readers are vividly reminded that for all its grandeur, Ravenna was in its heyday a flawed and hectic place.

About Judith Herrin

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