The book was designed as a manual in two parts for the course of the history of the West European Middle Ages; its main aim was to give a survey of the historical evolution of Europe during the Middle Ages — from the fall of the Roman Empire till the shaping of national states. Those transformations were analyzed by R. in various aspects: from economic, cultural, religious, and social and political points of view. The manual was completed with a text-book for deeper studies of students.
The author declares that the medieval economic system was characterized with the dominating of a closed structure of the natural household — typical also for monasteries, cities, and private manors. But that characteristic was available for the Early Middle Ages only; in the part on the Late Middle Ages, the author describes another model connected with the development of trade. It led to the growing of cities, which became centers not only in economic and political sense, but also cultural ones — opposing monasteries. Noteworthy, R. defines those chronological frames as the eleventh — sixteenth centuries, i.e. he does not classify a separate period of the High Middle Ages.
The author notes that the evolution of political systems was connected with the transfer from the feudal fragmentation, where the Church played a significant role, to the parliament monarchies, and to the absolute power, which R. interpreted as a political tool of the trade capital. An important feature of the author was his opinion, that it was the religious raise which could serve a border between two periods of the Middle Ages. He meant the Crusades, which made a significant impact at the shaping of the trade capital, according his concept.