Millennium - Tom Holland

(Abacus, 2009)
It's been probably ten years since I wrote a book review, so I've decided to start attempting to do so. This first effort is on the latest offering from popular historian Tom Holland, a wide-ranging overview of what is commonly known as the 'Dark Ages'.
'Millennium' attempts to illustrate the emergence of unified, Christian, kingdoms in the time period surrounding the first Millennium AD. The general tone of the book lends itself to narrative, as Holland portrays each historical figure, be they king, Pope or emperor, as a character in the overall scheme of things, and how each character shaped the future of the world as they knew it. The major overarching theme of the book focuses on the doom and gloom felt by European Christians in the lead-up to the first Millennium, when many people started looking at the world around them, and seeing signs of decay, violence and death, feared the Day of Judgement was at hand. The conviction of this that many people felt was set in stone by the Church, and each particular failure of Armageddon to arrive was followed by disappointment, then excuses, and finally a new 'Day of Judgement' would be seized upon. I personally enjoyed the way Holland closes the book with a sort of closure upon this theme. He has, early in the text, set the dates which he will deal with between AD 900 and AD 1100. In the final chapter, he deals with the immediate lead-up to the First Crusade, yet does not go into detail on the Crusade itself. Instead he merely states, in a succint summary, that "Antichrist did not appear."
At first I found this to be an anticlimax, after the rather rushed final chapter (in which he deals with about 20 years of pan-European history in 80 pages), but upon reflection, realized that this one short line summed up the entire book. Despite detailing the evolution of the Holy Roman Empire, France, England, Scandinavia and Kievan Rus in the course of the book, the major theme of the book is closed with that final line, and the reader can move on, because the author had given them enough information to understand much more about these 'Dark Ages'.
This review is only partial, but Mr. Holland has also added a detailed timeline, notes section, and index, which provide a LOT of further in-depth reading. I enjoyed the book very much. I suppose that's probably the best review I could have written at all...