By translating the sections on pre-Islamic Persia in three Muslim Arabic chronicles how knowledge about ancient Iran was transmitted to Muslim historians, in what forms it circulated and how it was shaped and refashioned for the new Perso-Muslim elite that served the early Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad.

Of Gothic descent, Jordanes wrote a unique set of histories. The Getica narrates the history of the Goths from their earliest origins until the middle of the sixth century. Building on the lost history of Cassiodorus, it is the earliest example of a history told from the perspective of one of the barbarian peoples establishing kingdoms in the fifth and sixth centuries. It had great influence on later medieval historians, on national histories of the nineteenth century and on modern accounts of Gothic history. The Romana is a survey of world and Roman history. Whilst largely dependent on...

The Codex epistolaris Carolinus preserves ninety-nine letters, dated between 739  and 791 and sent by the popes to the Frankish king Charlemagne and his predecessors. The compilation was commissioned by Charlemagne in 791, but the sole surviving medieval manuscript of the letters was made at Cologne in the later ninth century and is now in Vienna (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 449). The headings or lemmata provided for each letter by the Frankish compilers in 791 and faithfully preserved in the codex, add a distinctive Frankish commentary on events in Rome and Italy in the second...