This book mostly about Theoderic the Amal, Justinian, and Charlemagne was enjoyable and full of interesting analysis, especially about how Theodoric solidified his power base in the Italian peninsula, and the political structures in early medieval northern Europe when Charlemagne came into power. The last part of the book is about how the Catholic church became what he calls "a new kind of Roman empire."
What he means by "Rome" in the title is the Western Roman Empire, and now and again he would have been better served to spell that out, even though it's clunky. He does manage to avoid calling the Eastern Roman Empire "Byzantine" most of the time, which is progress in my book.
In this scholarly work, I was delighted to see the word "bullshit" three times.
Sorry for all the quotation marks in this review.
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