Petr Charvát (doc. PhDr. DrSc., 1980) is Associate Professor of Near eastern Studies at the University of West Bohemia in Plzen (Pilsen). He is the author of Long-distance trade in early medieval Europe (in Czech, Brno: FFUK 1998), and Birth of the Bohemian state (in Czech, Praha: Vysehrad, 2007), of which the present book is a substantially re-worked and enlarged version, translated into English.