Freidrich Greer was a professor of the History of Ideas at the University of Vienna and in this book he looks at western european medieval history from 1150 - 1350 (the Early Middle Ages).
He integrates a lot of information very successfully - the Angevins, Italian banking, the Hanseatic League, but over it all he shows that this was still a time of fluidity in religion and the formation of states. Catholicism fought with revivalist religions (Cathars etc.) and dynastic control ebbed and flowed over the whole region ( e.g. the conquest of England by the Dukes of Normandy or later Angevin rule including England and Provence). Extreme religious and nationalist intolerance came in the later Middle Ages.