The creator of the hit podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn.

In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term.

As told through the lives of ten real people–from famous figures like Christopher Columbus and wealthy banker Jakob Fugger to a ruthless small-time merchant and a one-armed mercenary captain–The Verge illustrates how their lives, and the times in which they lived, set the stage for an unprecedented globalized future.

Over an intense forty-year period, the seeds for the so-called “Great Divergence” between Western Europe and the rest of the globe would be planted. From Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic to Martin Luther’s sparking the Protestant Reformation, the foundations of our own, recognizably modern world came into being.

For the past 500 years, historians, economists, and the policy-oriented have argued which of these individual developments best explains the West’s rise from backwater periphery to global dominance. As The Verge presents it, however, the answer is far more nuanced.

Everywhere around us are echoes of the past. Those echoes define the boundaries of states and countries, how we pray and how we fight. They determine what money we spend and and how we earn it at work, what language we speak and how we raise our children. On Tides of History, we prove that the key to understanding our modern world is in our past.

Barbarians, political breakdown, economic collapse, mass migration, pillaging and plunder. The fall of the Roman Empire has been studied for years, but genetics, climate science, forensic science, network models, and globalization studies have reshaped our understanding of one of the most important events in human history. PhD historian and specialist Patrick Wyman brings the cutting edge of history to listeners in plain, relatable English.