To tell the truth at first I found it hard to answer the question. The fact was I was just personally interested in the tenth century because it was so different to our own time. I had no grand theories about it. But friends were persistent and the question kept coming-up. And then one day I noticed Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West on my bookshelf and it suddenly dawned on me that I was actually writing about the birth of the West, the age when our culture first emerged. It dawned on me that it was precisely from the chaos of the tenth century that the Western World in which we now live was born. The story of the tenth century is the story of the emergence of our civilization into the light of day. And the “our” here includes not only all the peoples of Europe, but everyone of European extraction in the United States and Canada, Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and many other countries. That is about a third of the world’s present population. Remote as this era may seem, only about forty generations actually separate us from the erudite monks and blood-thirsty Vikings.