Dan Jones is an award-winning historian of the Middle Ages and the New York Times bestselling author of The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses.

A charismatic television presenter, he has narrated Britain’s Bloodiest Dynasty, a four-part series based on The Plantagenets, as well as another series about castles in England and France. He is a columnist at the Evening Standard and has contributed to Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Smithsonian, and many other outlets.

The medieval world was forged by the big forces that still occupy us today: climate change, pandemic disease, mass migration, and technological revolutions. This was the time when the great European nationalities were formed; when our basic Western systems of law and governance were codified; when the Christian Churches matured as both powerful institutions and the regulators of Western public morality; and when art, architecture, philosophical inquiry and scientific invention went through periods of massive, revolutionary change. At each stage in this story, successive western powers thrived by attracting—or stealing—the most valuable resources, ideas, and people from the rest of the world.

The West was rebuilt on the ruins of an empire and emerged from a state of crisis and collapse to dominate the region and the world. Every sphere of human life and activity was transformed in the thousand years of Powers and Thrones.