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This is an introduction to the history of the Muslim East from the rise of Islam to the Mongol conquests. It explains and indicates the main trends of Islamic historical evolution during the Middle Ages, and will help the non-Orientalist to understand something of the relationship between Islam and Christendom in those centuries

Professor Russell was the first historian to try to apply statistical methods to analysis of the effects of epidemic plague on the composition, not just on the total size, of medieval population. He argues now that general plagues differed from the type of the disease that became epidemic after the crop failures of 1315–1317, in sharply lowering the sex ratio and in greatly increasing the burden of child-rearing.

One of the problems of urban history is the fearsome range of expertise that the urban historian is supposed to appreciate, if not master. Belaboured, rightly, by archaeologists, geographers, and architectural historians, we have begun to open our eyes to the evidence of the physical environment of medieval towns, but that is not the half of it. In order to understand urban institutions one needs to be a religious historian, an economic historian, a legal historian; and if one were ever to make sense of everything that is included in the 'social history' of towns, then social anthropology, historical demography, and sociology are only three of the battery of foglamps that would be needed to penetrate our cloud of unknowing. The subject which I now wish to add to the list of those we are supposed to cover does not even have the attraction of sounding new and modish and exciting. The history of political thought has, after all, formed a part of undergraduate history courses in this country ever since they began, and it is traditionally one of the least popular and least satisfactory parts of them, especially for the sort of students who may go on to be interested in urban history: those who relish the exact, the local detail, the reality of topography, the ability to connect the documents of the past with visible phenomena in the present.

On various occasions civilized man has found himself marching side by side with men at lower (or different) levels of social and cultural development. The great civilizations were accustomed to compare themselves quite favorably with these barbarian neighbors, whom they viewed with varying degrees of condescension, suspicion, scorn, and dread. Civilized man, with his urban institutions, his agrarian way of life, his technological and economic sophistication, and his conspicuous literary and plastic artistry, conceived of himself as superior to these other folk with whom he sometimes competed for domination of the richer parts of the world. Long before the ancient Greeks invented the word 'barbarian' to describe the Scythians and other peoples who differed from them in not subscribing to the ideals of Greek culture, other civilized men had expressed similar sentiments toward alien peoples with whom they came into contact. This was the point that the old Akkadian author was trying to make when he spoke of neighboring tribes as people 'who knew not grain' and who 'had never known a city'.* Subsequently, both in Asia and Europe the spokesmen of a civilized style of life expressed their dislike or distrust of the barbarian by means of a stereotyped image of him which was couched in terms favorable to civilization. A Chinese chronicler, for example, remarked of the fierce Hsiung-Nu, who troubled the peace of the Middle Kingdom, that 'their only concern is self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety and righteousness'.

Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe was first published in 1977. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This is the first study of early medieval Jewish policy in the West which examines the nature of this policy from the perspective and aims of its formulators. As the author points out, most specialists in Jewish history have been dominated by what the historian Salo Baron has called the "lachrymose conception, ' a view which emphasized persecution and suffering as a fundamental theme of Jewish history. Professor Bachrach challenges this view and attacks what he calls the myth of Christian church domination of the early medieval world