
Ravenna
Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe
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Narrated by:
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Phyllida Nash
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By:
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Judith Herrin
About this listen
This riveting audiobook narrated by Phyllida Nash traces the history of the city that led the West out of the ruins of the Roman Empire
At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. For three centuries, the city attracted scholars, lawyers, craftsmen, and religious luminaries, becoming a true cultural and political capital. Bringing this extraordinary history marvelously to life, Judith Herrin rewrites the history of East and West in the Mediterranean world before the rise of Islam and shows how, thanks to Byzantine influence, Ravenna played a crucial role in the development of medieval Christendom.
Drawing on deep, original research, Herrin tells the personal stories of Ravenna while setting them in a sweeping synthesis of Mediterranean and Christian history. She narrates the lives of the Empress Galla Placidia and the Gothic king Theoderic and describes the achievements of an amazing cosmographer and a doctor who revived Greek medical knowledge in Italy, demolishing the idea that the West just descended into the medieval "Dark Ages."
Based on the latest archaeological findings, this monumental book provides a bold new interpretation of Ravenna's lasting influence on the culture of Europe and the West.
©2020 Judith Herrin (P)2020 Princeton University PressListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Magisterial - an outstanding book that shines a bright light on one of the most important, interesting, and under-studied cities in European history. A masterpiece." (Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World)
"This is a masterful study as splendid as Ravenna's mosaics. Bringing to new life the city and the people who shaped it, Herrin explores Ravenna's role as a rival of Rome, a Byzantine outpost in the West, and a model for Charlemagne's imperial aspirations - in short, as a crucible of Europe." (Claudia Rapp, author of Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual)
"A masterwork by one of our greatest historians of Byzantium and early Christianity. Judith Herrin tells a story that is at once gripping and authoritative and full of wonderful detail about every element in the life of Ravenna. Impossible to put down." (David Freedberg, author of The Power of Images)
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Story
The Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe.
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Well researched but narrator is terrible
- By John M. on 01-17-21
By: Barry Cunliffe
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The Scythian Empire
- Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China
- By: Christopher I. Beckwith
- Narrated by: Jim Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook narrated by Jim Lee provides a rich, discovery-filled account of how a forgotten empire transformed the ancient world.
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Demystifying the mysteries of the Ancient Worlds through a common source
- By cpdb on 02-10-23
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Mussolini's Daughter
- The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe
- By: Caroline Moorehead
- Narrated by: Kathleen Gati
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce’s Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy’s fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy’s aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling Fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Moorehead’s fascinating history.
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Mind Blowing
- By Greg on 01-27-23
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Heart of Europe
- A History of the Holy Roman Empire
- By: Peter H. Wilson
- Narrated by: Napoleon Ryan
- Length: 34 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Holy Roman Empire lasted 1,000 years, far longer than ancient Rome. Yet this formidable dominion never inspired the awe of its predecessor. Voltaire quipped that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Yet as Peter H. Wilson shows, the Holy Roman Empire tells a millennial story of Europe better than the histories of individual nation-states.
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Mixed feelings on this one.
- By Stuart Seymour on 09-19-17
By: Peter H. Wilson
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Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood
- The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade
- By: Anthony Kaldellis
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. Yet this imperial project came to a crashing collapse fifty years later, when political disunity, fiscal mismanagement, and defeat at the hands of the Seljuks and the Normans brought an end to Byzantine hegemony. By 1081, Byzantium's very existence was threatened.
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Very Detailed but Tedious
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-24
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The Rise of Western Christendom (10th Anniversary Revised Edition)
- Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000
- By: Peter Brown
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 26 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power.
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Mind-expanding book
- By ABC on 06-15-23
By: Peter Brown
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The Thirty Years War
- Europe's Tragedy
- By: Peter H. Wilson
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 33 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.
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Less caffeine, narrator
- By Jeff Joyner on 02-12-24
By: Peter H. Wilson
A Great Take on Oft-Neglected History
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history will help us appreciate the many treasures.
Terrific Book
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brilliant, beautiful, important
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But this book isn't really about the city - Ravenna is just the context on which the author hangs a dense and lovingly embellished hagiography of the christian elements of its history, delivered in numbing and repetitive detail - its bishops, its archbishops, its prominent christian residents and donors, its monks, its priests. Did I mention donors. On and on. Did I mention bishops.
Unfortunate. Ravenna is surely a gift to a writer with a sense of history. For the city to be used as just an ante room where the writer can endlessly introduce and waffle on about bishops, archbishops ... ugh. Did I mention donors.
I have to close by acknowledging that I didn't finish the book so I can't tell you who were the Archbishops and bishops and donors in the tenth century. But I'm very sure you can find out more then all you want to know about them, much more, by reading the book.
James K
If Only It Was About Ravenna
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She did not disappoint. By focusing on the city of Ravenna, she was able to explain much of the very complex and confusing world of this era. Her style of writing is easy to read, while also being well documented and researched. I learned a lot about my beloved Ravenna, but I also gained a greater perspective and understanding of the whole of Europe during this most formative time of European history.
My favorite history book ever
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Fascinating accout of the hidden history
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Worthy book, stingy production.
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Illuminating
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Too much. Too boring. Too many unnecessary detail. Too many mentions of the no doubt indispensable Galla Placidia! Too many wars between the ruling dynasts and too many cat fights between the Christian sects. Soul sick am I and weary. This story could have been told in so many better ways.
This audiobook really needed a better editor, a narrator who can correctly pronounce the words, and a pdf file so we can, for example, keep track of the endlessly named Theodores.
The chronology is difficult to follow as the author switches between timelines and themes.
James Frankenberg wrote: “We should never be too clear.” Perhaps that can serve as a epithet for Ms. Herrin’s book.
Ms. Herrin has a simple faith in complexity.
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