Millennium

The book opens with the 'Road to Canossa' - the meeting between Emperor Henry IV of Germany and Pope Gregory VII where the precedent of church and state separation was established, in 1077. The author goes to some lengths to make the reader aware of how momentous this was, and then the book returns to the start of the 900s, and gives a winding account of the various events, changes, and trends that occurred over the two hundred years on either side of the millennium.

Two threads are attempted as a means of binding all this together - the millenarian worries of the people at the time that the end of the world was coming, and the culmination of events in Canossa. However these don't really manage to make the disparate series of things cohere into any particular narrative. The Millennium doesn't really have any major effect on events, and you mostly forget about Canossa until it is brought up again at the end.

Turn-of-the-Millennium Europe is an interesting subject, marking the origins of most of today's states as it does, but it is difficult to get away from the sense that the book is just an endless list of stuff that happened. This hardly seems to be the fault of the author - there just isn't a single narrative thread running through this period, because history does not really owe us any such convenience - and the two he picked are as good as any.