Books by Justin Marozzi

In Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, celebrated young travelwriter-historian Justin Marozzi gives us a many-layered history of one of the world's truly great cities - both its spectacular golden ages and its terrible disasters'Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians' - Sunday TelegraphOver thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the history of its storytellers and its tyrants, of its philosophers and conquerors.Here, in the first new history of Baghdad in nearly 80 years, Justin Marozzi brings to life the whole tumultuous history of what was once the greatest capital on earth.Justin Marozzi is a Councillor of the Royal Geographic Society and a Senior Research Fellow at Buckingham University. He has broadcast for BBC Radio Four, and regularly contributes to a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, for which he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. His previous books include the bestselling Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year (2004), and The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus.

The story of the seventh- and eighth-century Muslim conquests, when armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to build the Islamic Empire. 'This book delivers drama through sublime writing, but mainly through marvellous images... As sharp as the Arabian desert in the midday sun' Gerard DeGroot, The Times, Books of the Year'An excellent prelude to Marozzi's previous books' Spectator'Thoroughly good fun... The narration moves swiftly but gracefully from episode to episode' Sunday TimesBy the time of his death in 632, the Prophet Mohammed had united the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. In the decades that followed, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest and Central Asia, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula.The Arab Conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Muslim armies had carved out an Islamic empire, soon to be centred on Baghdad, which in size and population rivalled that of Rome at its zenith, extending from the shores of the Atlantic in the west to the borders of China in the east. In the process they had completely crushed one great empire (the old empire of Byzantium), and hollowed out another (that of the Iranian Sasanids).These conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries represent one of the greatest feats of arms in history. Justin Marozzi charts their lightning progress across the Middle East and vast tracts of Asia and explains how an unknown and radically militant faith swept out of the Arabian desert to change the world for ever.

A sensational blend of travel and history in the spirit of the man who invented it.