From the Library of European Civilization Series edited by Geoffrey Barraclough. This remarkable study in social and cultural change explains how and why the Late Antique world, between c150 and c750 AD came to differ from Classical civilization. These centuries were the era in which the most deep-rooted of ancient institutions disappeared for all time. By 476 the Roman empire had vanished from western Europe; and by 655 the Persian empire had vanished from the Near East. Brown examines these changed and men's reactions to them, but his account shows that the period was also one of outstanding new beginnings and defines the far-reaching impact both of Christianity on Europe and of Islam on the Near East. The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history; how the exceptionally homogenous Mediterranean world of c200 AD became divided into the three mutually estranged societies of the Middle Ages; Catholic Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam. We still live with the results of these contrasts...