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Franks, Moravians, and Magyars: The Struggle for the Middle Danube, 788–907. By Charles R. Bowlus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1995. Pp. xviii + 424. £48.95. ISBN 0-8122-3276-3.

This excellent book is an important contribution to several subjects currently of interest to historians of Europe in the Carolingian period, and of East-Central Europe in particular. It explores the approaches whereby Carolingian rulers extended, consolidated, and sought to maintain control over a frontier region, distant from centers of Frankish power—the Danubian basin, especially that lowland region of it which currently spans, roughly speaking, eastern Austria, northern Croatia and Slovenia, Hungary, and western Romania—and offers a compelling and lucid introduction to its early history. The title of the book encapsulates the importance of the region, and its general interest to medievalists. During the centuries that spanned the crisis of the Roman Empire, the expansion of Frankish power under the Carolingians, and the gradual weakening of the dynasty, the region was a scene of encounter of several peoples, or cultures, and a base from which some of them—especially the Avars, the Slavs, and the Magyars—threatened the Franks and their successors between the eighth and the tenth centuries. Securing the region was a central political concern of the Carolingians. The middle Danube therefore offers a case study in the interaction of several Eurasian peoples over time, and in the management of that interaction by the Carolingians. It emerges as an early setting of some of those processes that Robert Bartlett recently identified as the expansion of Europe between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries.