Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

on March 23, 543, the emperor declared “God’s Education” over. But this was the same wishful thinking that has traditionally accompanied any political statement about pandemic disease delivered with certain authority. Bubonic plague in fact continued to sweep and swirl around the Mediterranean world for the rest of the decade, resurfacing time and again all over the world until 749.

But the economic disruption was real: wildly fluctuating wheat prices, rapid wage inflation as ready laborers vanished, an overwhelmed inheritance system, and a near-total crash in construction.

The Old Testament prophesied Ishmael’s life in memorable terms: “He shall be a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.”17

Pragmatic acceptance of local practices—at least in the short term—has always been an effective way of pursuing military expansion without provoking long insurgencies. Yet in the seventh century the offer of religious tolerance may have had particular appeal. Given the poisonous sectarian violence that had swirled around the Christian world in Byzantium, the arrival of a new ruling power that cared little for the tortuous debates over reconciling Christ’s spiritual and human natures—one that taxed unbelievers, rather than persecuting them—may have come as blessed relief.

Making manuscripts was as important in Aachen as reading them, and during the early ninth century the school’s scribes began a massive program of knowledge preservation, creating a super-archive of information passed down from the classical world. During the ninth century perhaps one hundred thousand manuscripts were produced there, preserving what today represent the earliest surviving copies of texts by writers and thinkers ranging from Cicero and Julius Caesar to Boethius.

By founding monasteries—as Duke William did at Cluny—the landowning warrior classes of Europe could effectively offset their sins by paying for monks to beg forgiveness their behalf in the form of masses.* The result was that from the ninth century onward, founding, endowing, or donating to monasteries became a popular pastime for rich men and women. And like all rich-people pastimes throughout history, it quickly became the object of fashion, competition, and one-upmanship.

performing the offices was what most Benedictine monks spent most of their time doing.

To supply and sustain a single knight for one year cost approximately as much as sustaining ten peasant families for the same period.17 It was an astronomically expensive career, and one that could only be contemplated by those who were born rich or else could be made so.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in the twentieth century, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

The civil war in which he was caught up as a child was the Anarchy—a struggle for the English crown between King Stephen and his cousin, Matilda, the widowed former empress of Germany. This war had been raging for a decade when William was born in 1146–47, but it was settled in 1154, when Stephen died and Matilda’s son Henry II became the first Plantagenet king of England.

a campaign known as the Livonian Crusade, in which all Christian warriors, including the newly formed Teutonic Knights, could claim forgiveness for their sins in return for colonizing new lands around the Baltic.

Teutonic Knights put down roots in frontier country and led annual raids into pagan lands around the Baltic regions known generically as Prussia, to convert unbelievers by force and carve out new estates for Christian secular lords and bishops. This was a slow but ultimately successful process, which for a time created a military crusader state in the Baltic,

To predators, everything looks like prey, and there was still plenty for the Mongol generals to feed on. After subjugating Persia, Genghis divided his forces. He himself worked slowly eastward toward his homelands, raiding and plundering Afghanistan and northern India. Meanwhile, his two finest generals, Jebe and Subedei, headed farther west and north, skirting the Caspian Sea and pushing into the Caucasus and the Christian realms of Armenia and Georgia.

This was the start of a lasting partnership between Venetian doges and Mongol khans, which endured well into the fourteenth century, paving the way for the famous adventures of Marco Polo (see chapter 10) and making the Republic of Venice very rich. Devils, it seemed, could ride together.

“God has given you the Scriptures, and you do not observe them,” said Möngke, “whereas to us he has given soothsayers, and we do as they tell us and live in peace.”

In the Far East, the Yuan dynasty had completed its transformation from a lean, snarling steppe nomad culture into a stereotypical Chinese imperial autocracy: tyrannical, paranoid, and beset by allegations of hopeless loucheness and endemic buggery within the palace walls.

Red Turban uprisings, which took place between 1351 and 1367, finally destroyed the Yuan dynasty as a regional force. In 1368 a new dynasty—the Ming—came to power,

Mongol methods of conquest, pioneered and perfected by Genghis Khan, and imitated ably by Temür, prefigured the terror autocracies of the twentieth century, in which millions of civilians could be thoughtlessly murdered to service the demented personal ambitions of charismatic rulers, and the goal of spreading an ideology as far around the globe as it would go.

They allowed Christian merchants to get around the Roman Church’s strict prohibition on usury—for when money was changed between currencies, exchange rates could be manipulated artificially in the lender’s favor, effectively allowing profit to be baked into the trade

De Nogaret was a tough man who demanded to be taken seriously. Yet now he told the Parisian academics a story so scandalous as to strain all credulity. It was a tale of sex and sin, blasphemy and heresy. It concerned the Knights Templar—the military order that had been at the front line of the Crusades for nearly two hundred years.

the basic syllabus taught in Seville and all other schools like it dated back more than one thousand years, to long before Christ was even born. It was a classical program of study that would have been just as familiar to Aristotle in the fourth century b.c. as it would have been to Cicero in the first century b.c., Marcus Aurelius in the second century a.d., or Boethius in the sixth century a.d. Its pillars were the so-called seven liberal arts (“liberal” because they were once considered suitable for free people rather than the enslaved). These were subdivided into two groups. First came the trivium, the arts of expression and argument: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Then came the quadrivium, which consisted of the arts of calculation: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

Among a number of the controversial ideas that Wycliffe had been formulating during his academic career was the notion that there was no scriptural basis for the papacy, that transubstantiation (i.e., the literal transformation of bread into the body of Christ during the Eucharist) was nonsense, and that secular powers were within their rights to demand back lands that had been granted to the church.

With this revolution in battlefield technology, by the sixteenth century, fortress building was something of an obsolete art, and the golden age of the castle maestro was over.

In crowded cities, where extended families lived under the same roof in tightly cramped streets, and where rats and other flea-bearing animals abounded, there was no stopping the spread.

In the absence of microbial biology and vaccine technology, there were no effective medical responses save for total quarantine and patience while the disease ran its course.

At this point, organized flagellation had become something of a craze. It began in Italian cities around 1260, in the midst of a fraught period of hunger and destructive warfare between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. The practice subsequently caught on in Germany and northwest Europe. Flagellants sought to atone for their own sins, and those of mankind at large, through organized self-harm.22 Besides being an interesting reversal of the crusading imperative to hurt other people in the name of Christ, flagellation was also tailor-made for the Black Death, which seemed certain proof that God was angry and needed to be appeased.

they conformed to a model at least as old as republican Rome (and much in vogue in the early twenty-first century), by which rich, cynical politicians mobilized the angry poor and attempted to direct their righteous anger against other elites.

it became abundantly clear to governments that in the post–Black Death world, the views and interests of ordinary people would have to be considered, or the consequences could be severe.

Yet he found the sublime in the individual, and not the other way around. He imbued the emotional and interior life of one person with infinite significance and the power to reveal higher truth. Everything still led back to God. But the route was radically different. And Petrarch’s approach would come to lie at the core of an overarching aesthetic and moral philosophy known as humanism,

The concept of the indulgence was an old one: it originated around the same time as the crusades in the eleventh century, when remission of sins was first granted in exchange for arduous pilgrimage, and subsequently on a large scale to the armies who marched off to fight Christ’s enemies.10 After this, 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. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, indulgences without an obligation to fight Saracens or pagans were sold to willing customers around Europe on an ad hoc basis.

Henry’s reign still marks the boundary between the medieval and early modern worlds.

The Spanish, by contrast, were ascendant—and the combination of their swaggering progress through the New World and the Old, along with the formal unification of the Aragonese and Castilian crowns, launched a new golden age on the Iberian Peninsula. It was eventually personified by Charles V’s son and successor, Philip II, under whose patronage Madrid and the grand palace of El Escorial became the beating heart of European sophistication.

But I hope that this, along with the chapters that have gone before, should be sufficient for us to see that by the 1530s, the western world was no longer recognizably medieval. The rise of the printed word, encounters with the New World, the collapse and fracture of the church militant, the demographic rearrangements caused by waves of the Black Death, the humanistic and artistic revolutions of the Renaissance—all these things and more had recast the shape and feel of the west, in ways that contemporaries explicitly recognized, even as the process was taking place. The Middle Ages did not exactly die on the streets of Rome in 1527—but afterward, it was very clear that something had been lost and was never coming back.