In this immensely readable history that couldn't be more timely, award-winning historian Richard Fletcher chronicles the relationship between Islam and Christianity from the time of Muhammad to the Reformation. With lucidity and sound scholarship, Fletcher demonstrates that though there were fruitful trading and cultural interactions between Muslims and Christians during the period when the Arabs controlled most of the Mediterranean world, each group viewed the other's religion from the beginning as fundamentally different and suspect. Eschewing moral judgments and easy generalizations,...

Rodrigo Diaz, the legendary warrior-knight of eleventh-century Castile known as El Cid, is remembered today as the Christian hero of the Spanish crusade who waged wars of re-conquest for the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent. He is still honored in Spain as a national hero for liberating the fatherland from the occupying Moors. Yet, as Richard Fletcher shows in this award-winning book, there are many contradictions between eleventh-century reality and the mythology that developed with the passing years.
By placing El Cid in a fresh, historical context, Fletcher shows us an...

A treacherous murder in northern England on an early spring day in 1016 is used to introduce readers to the world of the aristocratic men and women of Anglo-Saxon England, their violence, their piety, their assumptions and experiences, their hopes and fears. In this book, award-winning author Richard Fletcher illuminates British society and politics in the years around the Norman Conquest, threading together scanty documentary evidence to produce a rich narrative.

In a work of splendid scholarship that reflects both a firm mastery of difficult sources and a keen intuition, one of Britain's foremost medievalists tells the story of the Christianization of Europe. 36 illustrations. 10 maps.

Beginning in the year 711 and continuing for nearly a thousand years, the Islamic presence survived in Spain, at times flourishing, and at other times dwindling into warring fiefdoms. But the culture and science thereby brought to Spain, including long-buried knowledge from Greece, largely forgotten during Europe's Dark Ages, was to have an enduring impact on the country as it emerged into the modern era. In this gracefully written history, Richard Fletcher reveals the Moorish culture in all its fascinating disparity and gives us history at its best: here is vivid storytelling by a renowned...

Makes available, for the first time in English translation, four of the principal narrative sources for the history of the Spanish kingdom of Leon-Castile during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Three chronicles focus primarily upon the activities of the kings of Leon-Castile as leaders of the Reconquest of Spain from the forces of Islam, and especially upon Fernando I (1037-65), his son Alfonso VI (1065-1109) and the latter's grandson Alfonso VII (1126-57). The fourth chronicle is a biography of the hero Rodrigo Diaz, better remembered as El Cid, and is the main source of information...

Few years ago small and medium enterprises would have needed to invest significantly to contemplate moving out of their domestic environment into the global arena. The advent of the Internet has changed all that. This book focuses on Global Marketing in the Internet age.