Little, Brown Book Group Millennium

Subtitled, }The End Of The World & The Forging Of Christendom{. An account of the birth of the new Western Europe, which emerged in the year 1000. But compared to the glittering empires of Byzantium and Islam, the empires on the edge of the Atlantic were impoverished, fearful and backward, so why did they go on to dominate the next 1000 years?