The Dark Ages have long been cast as a murky, unknowable period – a void between the worlds of Rome and later medieval Europe. That picture is wrong.

In this sweeping history of Europe between 500 and 1000 AD, Oxford historian Alice Rio brings a long-obscured era into intimate focus. Told through the lives of twelve women who moved between different cultures, The Dark Ages reveals a world in motion: shaped by exchange across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, and alive with competing ideas about religion, power and gender.

Here is Balthild, an English girl enslaved in seventh-century Francia who rises to become queen and fights to free other enslaved women. In ninth-century Byzantium, Theodora becomes empress by winning a beauty pageant, and restores the worship of icons after decades of bloody conflict. And in tenth-century Muslim Spain, Subh – a Basque Christian enslaved into the Cordoban harem – rises through talent and intellect to become the caliph's closest partner.

These women moved mostly alone, coerced, and without armies. To survive, they had to adapt quickly to chaotic environments and dangerous people. Discovering Europe through their eyes – as they pieced lives together and tested the limits of their new homes – offers a fundamentally new perspective on the era.

Drawing on rich written sources and material culture, The Dark Ages overturns the idea of a period defined by obscurity. Instead, it reveals a complex, baroque, unfamiliar world whose richness is there in the records, if we know how to look for it.