Introduction

Europe was still a centre for learning and development despite the fall of Western Rome over 100 years earlier. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius made fundamental reforms to enable his successors to avoid total conquest. Peoples with Celtic heritage were being pushed westwards on the British Isles by Germanic migrants in the form of angles and sexes. Islamic expansion against European lands was not just isolated to the Byzantine Empire in the southeast, but also across to the Iberian Peninsula in the southwest.