Read an excerpt from “Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages”

Comparisons to the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages are perhaps not welcome to everyone right now.

But then again, there could be a message of hope — that humanity continues to rise from times of upheaval, or that things could actually be far worse. (At least we have indoor plumbing.)

The former view is what historian Dan Jones takes in his new book, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages.

To get there, though, we have to endure the catastrophic: the fault lines undermining the Roman Empire, which are the subject of an excerpt of Powers and Thrones.

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