From the author of The Habsburgs and The Middle Kingdoms, a lively, 1,500-year history of the shifting borders, imperial conflicts, and cultural fusions on Europe’s eastern edge.

In Eastern Europe, historian Martyn Rady traces the long history of Europe’s eastern borderlands, showing how they have always stood apart as a place of conquest, exchange, and startling originality.

From the collapse of the West Roman Empire in the fifth century to the present day, the lands that stretch from the Baltic Sea to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea at times were the prey of empires, at others lay fallow and ungoverned, and sometimes spawned their own would-be imperial states. In Eastern Europe, peoples as different as the Huns, the Vikings, the Albanians, the Slavs, and the Ottoman Turks mingled and clashed, producing a remarkable mix of religious, political, artistic, and cultural traditions. Steppeland horse raiders, crusading Catholic ice warriors, and bomb-throwing nationalists all made their mark on this place, and in doing so, changed the history of the globe.

As Eastern Europe shows, the turbulence of the region’s last few decades—from wars in the Balkans to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—represent just the latest turn of the wheel in Eastern Europe’s extraordinary story.