This is a dense, highly interesting and entertaining book about a period that we know so little about, that we call it the Dark Ages, roughly from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Middle Ages.
At the end of this period the Church and especially the Papacy emerge as the most important factor in Europe while the three successive attempts to recreate the Roman Empire, under Theoderic (the author persists in so calling Theodoric throughout the book), Justinian and Charlemagne end up in fighting and splits.
It is a long and winding story which begins when a young man is sent to Constantinople as a sort of hostage. Instead of moaning, Theoderic examines all there is to see in the great city and later shows how much he has learned.
At that point he was one chief among many but courage and innovative tactics lead him westward and he ends up in Ravenna where he is buried.
His succession is a complicated one and soon the western side of the Roman Empire split up under the attacks of the Visigoths in Spain, the Goths in Lombardy, Franks in France and the Emperor in Constantinople.
Next comes Justinian whose wife Theodora is immortalised in one of Ravenna's most important buildings San Vitale as a saint. But according to a book only discovered in the Vatican Library in the 17th century, written by Procopius who otherwise is adulatory towards Justinian, she was certainly no saint.
"Many times she would go to a feast with 10 youths, all experts in formication and she would lie with them all night long. And when they were all too exhausted to go on, she would go to their attendants and pair off with them.
"Her most famous stage act involved chickens, grains of barley and such private parts as she did have, although according to Procopius, private is about the last thing they were."
After a beginning in which he focused on collecting laws and precedents, Justinian faced his moment of truth in what are called as the Nika riots, caused by the intense rivalry between the Greens and the Blues over horse racing.
Justinian was overwhelmed but it was here that Theodora proved her mettle. She forced him to resist and with help he turned back the assault.
Freed from the danger of insurrection he sensed the time had come for a showdown with the Vandals. He sent Belisarius his valiant general to attack Tripolitania and was successful. (Belisarius stopped in Gozo and Malta on his way). The Vandal capital was destroyed, which later on would help the Islamic advance overwhelm North Africa.
The next big moment in European history took place on Christmas Day 800 when Charlemagne was crowned as the first Holy Roman emperor. A whole amount of spin surrounds this event. It is not true this was sprung by the Pope on an unsuspecting Charles. This event was preceded by another spin, the so-called Donation of Constantine, a fake document which purported to give the Bishop of Rome all the territory previously held by the Roman Empire.
Although we have been taught that the Holy Roman Empire lasted till last century, this too is spin. Charlemagne's descent petered out in a huge lot of descendants.
Ultimately it was the popes who saved Europe and the Holy Roman Empire but even so it was not a linear progression. There had been some outstanding popes in the first centuries of Christianity, like Gregory the Great, but there were rascals too.
"In January 897, Pope Stephen VII formally opened a synod in St John Lateran to try his predecessor Pope Formosus who had died the previous year. Stephen had the putrescent corpse dug out and decked in the papal vestments. Stephen then led the prosecution especially the charge that Formosus actively sought to become pope. Unsurprisingly, Formosus was found guilty. His occupation of the papal throne was declared illegal, his name struck from the records, the corpse was stripped of its papal vestments, the three fingers of the right hand with which he used to impart blessings cut off and the body dumped in the Tiber.
"Stephen himself did not last long - by August of that same year he was removed from office and was dead by the end of the month, silenced by strangulation."
The ninth and 10th centuries saw a sequence of violent struggles for control of the papacy. There were no less than nine different popes between 896 and 904. Often there would be multiple claimants for the post. One third of all the occupants of the papal throne between 872 and 1012 died in suspicious circumstances, such as the suffocation of John X and the mutilation of the Greek antipope John XVI who nevertheless survived.
There was an endless dogfight for control of the Roman see, which was stigmatised by a contemporary as "pornocracy" - rule of whores for the amount of influence over papal succession by female members of the Roman nobility.
Pope Paschal I was so unpopular among sections of the people of Rome that they did not want him buried in St Peter's. To hold on to power, he had to blind and decapitate two of his most senior officials.
In Pope Hadrian's reign his daughter was possibly raped and certainly kidnapped along with her mother and then killed. Hadrian himself was bludgeoned to death by his own retinue when they got impatient at how long the poison they had given him was taking to work.
Alberic II appointed his own son as John XII who took up the office at the uncanonical age of 18 but died of a stroke only nine years later, reputedly in bed with a married woman. Benedict IX showed not the slightest interest in anything religious and occupied himself with sex. His first term of office came to an end when he was driven out of Rome in 1044. He then forced his way back in the following year before deciding to sell the job to his godfather so that he could get married (the only Pope known to have sold his own position) but then reoccupied it again briefly before finally being deposed.
By the year 1000, the two really hot issues within the Western Church were simony (the purchase of ecclesiastical office) and clerical marriage. The successors of Charlemagne, despite their failings, came to see reforming the Church as their task. Slowly, the infrastructure for reform was put in place with the development of cathedral and monastic schools, the proliferation of copied volumes and texts and generally what was called "correction" reform in general.
Then came a fortunate run of reform-minded popes - Leo IX and the great Hildebrand (Gregory VII). These popes brought in like-minded clerics from all over Europe and sent them out as a sort of inspectors to reinforce clerical discipline.
They were not always successful - Gregory ended his life in Salerno despite the investiture battle with the emperor who ended up asking pardon barefoot in the snow outside Countess Matilda's castle at Canossa.
Meanwhile a new development came into being - an organic and developed Code of Canon Law gave the Church the edge over the emperor. The way was open to Innocent III.