Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

‘All Gaul burned as a single funeral pyre.’

One reason that the label ‘the Dark Ages’ has proven so hard to untie from the neck of the Middle Ages is that for hundreds of years – between the sixth century and the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the late thirteenth – the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west.

Urban had produced a new and enduring spiritual calculus. Those who committed to leaving home and slaughtering other human beings thousands of miles away would earn the wages of heaven. It went down a storm.