Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

One of Africa’s longest-standing trades was in human slaves,

History does not have to be made by nice people; in fact our tour of the Middle Ages to this point probably demonstrates that it very rarely is.

although many places remained unknown and unexplored by westerners – including the Australasian continent, much of central Africa, the Amazon rainforest, the American interior, Antarctica and the Himalayan peaks – charting these places had become a question that began with the word ‘when’, not ‘if’ or ‘how’. The line from Magellan and Elcano’s circumnavigation to Captain Cook’s arrival in Australia, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mount Everest and our current age of satellite surveys and Google Earth was long, but it was direct.

The advantages to the Church in selling it were equally clear: profit, and authority, since cultivating a market in guilt and repentance had obvious implications for social control.

Hus or someone in his circle produced a Latin polemic known as the Anatomy of the Antichrist, which explained at painstaking length why the pope was in fact the devil: an ‘abomination of desolation’, the ‘angel of the bottomless pit’, a ‘he-goat’ and a ‘wicked and profane prince’.

indulgences took on a life of their own, helped significantly by the invention of purgatory – which developed as a Catholic doctrine between 1160 and 1180.

‘one pays for confession, for mass, for the sacrament, for indulgences, for churching a woman,e for a blessing, for burials, for funeral services and prayers. The very last penny which an old woman has hidden in her bundle for fear of thieves or robbery will not be saved. The villainous priest will grab it.’

Calculating that the market could be grown exponentially if indulgences were available to all souls, wherever they might reside, Sixtus was the first pope to state that indulgences could be bought on behalf of the dead.

If all one had to do was believe, repent, love one’s fellow humans and pray for grace, it was hard to see the point of papal indulgences

The nature of the agreement between these three was broadly thus: Albert, who was already archbishop of Magdeburg, had been permitted by the pope to become archbishop of Mainz at the same time – which made him the most senior churchman in Germany, and meant he controlled two of the seven electoral votes which determined the identity of the German emperor. (His brother already controlled a third.) Vast fees were due to Rome as a tax on taking office as an archbishop – but Albert could afford these, thanks to a loan from Fugger, who advanced the money on the basis that he would have the Hohenzollern and their electoral votes in his pocket. Albert, for his part, promised Leo he would do all he could to make sure that German Christians bought as many indulgences as possible, partly because his share of the proceeds could repay his debt to Fugger and partly so that funds would flow rapidly to Leo in Rome for the completion of St Peter’s. For the parties involved this was a neat arrangement by which they all got what they wanted – so long as the faithful did their part and kept pumping money into pardons.