This book was conceived more than twenty years ago as a series of pictures of Europe at a sequence of periods in European history, each to be linked with the one which follows by an historical narrative. It grew in size until first, it had to be divided into two parts: classical-medieval, and modern, and then the linking narratives had to be omitted. As it stands now, this volume attempts to reconstruct the physical scene at five widely separated periods of time. The choice of periods has necessarily been influenced by the availability of sources. In general, however, sources are most abundant for those periods which have most continuously interested historians: the fifth century B.C., the age of the Flavian and Antonine emperors, the Carolingian period and the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In a sense these mark climaxes in the flow of European history. It is the scene at these periods, together with – since it is a long haul from about A.D. 800 to 1300 – the early twelfth century, that this book seeks to reconstruct.

The principal elements which made up the geographical scene at any of these periods of time were, in addition to the physical environment itself, the people, the forms and distribution of their settlements, their agriculture, their crafts and industries, and their trade. The purpose has been to present the distribution of each of these elements at each period, with a backward glance over the previous centuries to see how they had come to assume the pattern described.