Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

History, thought Foxe (or ecclesiastical history, which was the stuff that really mattered to him) could be sliced into three great chunks.

It began with “the primitive time,” by which he meant those ancient days when Christians hid in catacombs to dodge persecution by wicked, faithless Romans, and tried to avoid being crucified or worse. It culminated in what Foxe called “our latter days”—the era of the Reformation, when the grip of the Catholic Church on life in Europe was challenged,

Sandwiched between these two periods was an awkward slab consisting of about one thousand years. Foxe called this “the middle age.” It was...

Today we still use Foxe’s label, although we have added a plural. For us, the years between the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century a.d. and the Protestant Reformation are “The Middle Ages.” Anything relating to the time is “medieval”—a...

Although some twenty-first-century global historians have tried to update the terminology, speaking not of Middle Ages but of a Middle Millennium, it has not yet caught on.2

have divided this book into four broadly chronological sections. Part I looks at what one brilliant modern historian has labeled the “inheritance of Rome.”

then looks at the secondary superpowers that emerged in Rome’s wake: the so-called barbarian realms that laid the foundations for the European kingdoms; the remodeled eastern Roman superstate of Byzantium; and the first Islamic empires. It takes the story from the beginning of the fifth century a.d. to the middle of the eighth.

Part II opens in the age of the Franks, who revived a Christian, pseudo-Roman empire in the west.

Part III begins with the stunning appearance of a new global superpower. The rise of the Mongols in the twelfth century a.d. was a sharp and hideously brutal episode, in which an eastern empire—with its capital in what is now Beijing—achieved fleeting domination over half the world, at the cost of millions of lives.

in what is sometimes called the “high” Middle Ages.

Part IV of this book brings the Middle Ages to a close. The section begins with a global pandemic that ripped through the world, from east to west, devastating populations, reshaping economies, and changing the way that people thought about the world around them. It

Last of all, we will see how shifting religious dogma, allied to new communication technology, brought about the Protestant Reformation—an upheaval that (as

This book focuses mostly on the west, and sees the history of other parts of the world through a western lens. I make no apology for that.

But the very notion of the Middle Ages is one that is specific to western history. I am also writing in the west, where I have lived and studied for most of my career.

By the time Apuleius was writing, Rome had been a slave society for nearly half a millennium. Slavery became a vital pillar of Roman life from the second century b.c., when the republic began its period of rapid expansion around the Mediterranean. With dazzling military victories—in the Balkans, the Greek islands, north Africa, and elsewhere—came the opportunity to take vast plunder, including human bounty.

Enslaved people could be worked as hard as the owner saw fit, beaten as hard as he or she liked, kept like pigs, bred like cattle, and then either set free or simply abandoned when they became too old or sick to serve. Thousands of miles from home, traumatized, and probably unable at first to speak the local language, they transformed the city of Rome, the republic, and, latterly, the empire.

Roman slavery was not per se racist (and here is an important point of contrast with slavery in the Caribbean or American South), but it was taken for granted that “barbarians” from outside the empire were infinitely more suitable for enslavement than Romans themselves.

Yet despite occasional slave rebellions—most famously the Spartacus War of 73 b.c.—there was no movement to abolish Roman slaveholding, seemingly on the part of anyone.

But to go very much further—still less to contemplate a world without slavery—would have been nonsensical. Philosophically, slavery was assumed to be essential to a free society—a natural phenomenon without which liberty for the true and noble Roman could not exist.

Rome extended both citizenship and slavery to the provinces, this was far from the only mark of its influence in the world, which would endure into the medieval era.

Seemingly everywhere the Romans went, law, language, and landscape took on flavors of “Roman-ness.” So too, from the fourth century a.d., did religion, as the empire became a powerful vehicle for spreading the first of two great monotheistic faiths that emerged in the first millennium a.d.: Christianity.

Romanization touched the ruling classes in the provinces vastly more than it affected the ordinary masses, and was concentrated in towns and cities, not the countryside.

For Rome was a highly networked superstate, whose disparate peoples were linked by super-engineered roads, efficiently policed seaways, and trade routes that extended to the ends of the earth. And the connective fibers of empire were not only physical pathways; they were cultural constants that made Roman-ness possible and recognizable across dozens of generations and several million square miles of imperial territory.

As we shall see, Rome’s distinctive influence on the urban landscape of the west went into abeyance after its political collapse. Yet it mattered greatly in the longer term, for it was rediscovered and lionized during the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the high-water mark of civilization, to be resurrected if possible.

But another area in which Rome left an indelible mark throughout the entire Middle Ages was in language. Indeed, one of Rome’s most lasting legacies, not only to the Middle Ages but to schoolchildren even today, was its common tongue.

This did not mean that every person from Antioch to St. Albans spoke to one another in the epigrams of Martial: the classical Latin of the great Roman poets, philosophers, and historians was of no more use to ordinary day-to-day speakers than the syntax and vocabulary of Shakespeare’s...

In the west, Latin was adopted, adapted, and interbred with local tongues across the empire—a process that produced what would eventually become the great Romance languages of the second millennium a.d.

Learning Latin—and the skills of grammar and rhetoric—formed an elemental part of elite education. It was not possible to contemplate a political or bureaucratic career without a working knowledge of the language.

collectively the Twelve Tables provided the bedrock of Roman law for nearly a thousand years. Of course, during those thousand years, Roman law also developed considerably. The Twelve Tables were supplemented by statutes and the pronouncements of officials ranging from magistrates to emperors.

In this way, Roman law was much like Roman language. It was also similar, in its historical robustness, to Roman religion—or at least, the religion that was adopted throughout the empire from the fourth century a.d. onward. That religion was Christianity.

Yet between around a.d. 200 and 350 Christianity was transformed. First, Christians were taken seriously as a group. Then, in the mid-third century they were persecuted en masse. The really programmatic pursuit of Christians began under emperor Decius (r. a.d. 249–51), who took umbrage at general Christian refusal to take part in a series of pagan sacrifices that he had ordered for the good of the empire during the Crisis of the Third Century. Under Decius—and later, under Valerian (r. a.d. 253–60) and Diocletian (r. a.d. 284–305)—Christians were flogged, flayed, thrown to wild beasts, and martyred in many inventive ways.

Racking, scraping, branding, and barbecuing—all these horrors and more were visited on Christ’s unfortunate partisans during the later third century. Yet at the beginning of the fourth century Christians’ troubles abruptly eased. First they were tolerated, then they were embraced, and finally their beliefs and presence were championed. By the time the Roman Empire in the west suffered its fatal collapse in the early fifth century, Christianity was the official imperial religion, and its future as one of the world’s biggest faiths was assured. Much of this was down to the emperor Constantine I.

the autumn of a.d. 312, as Constantine was preparing to fight his rival emperor Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge over the river Tiber, he looked to the heavens and saw a blazing cross above the sun, accompanied by the Greek words Εν Τούτω̣ Νίκα (In this sign, conquer). He took this to be a message from the god of the Christians, clearly a god who at that moment appeared to be more interested in battles and politics than in his son Jesus Christ’s program of charity, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

From that moment onward he heaped all the fruits of imperial patronage on Christian bishops and believers. His soldiers went into battle with the Chi-Rho daubed on their shields.

And in a.d. 330, Constantine formally founded Constantinople: a new imperial capital in the east at Byzantium (Byzantion, now Istanbul), and filled it with monumental Christian churches.

One landmark was the edict of Caracalla of a.d. 212, when citizenship was radically redistributed in the provinces. Another was the Crisis of the Third Century, when Rome juddered, split, almost collapsed, and then reformed. A third was Constantine’s reign, when Rome adopted Christianity and the new capital, Constantinople, ensured that the hub and the future of the empire would subsequently be found in the eastern Mediterranean rather than the west. And a fourth (as we shall see in the next chapter) came with the arrival of nomadic steppe tribes in Europe in a.d. 370, an event that placed enormous and eventually intolerable pressure on Roman institutions, boundaries, and power structures.

turn of the fifth century a.d., even as it broke apart, the Roman Empire had been a political, cultural, religious, and military force in the west for nearly a millennium.

What was not clear at the start of the fifth century was how much of this Roman-ness would survive. In that regard, only time would tell. In some regions—most notably the old Greek world of the eastern Mediterranean—Rome was destined to live on, updated but not radically altered, for many more centuries.

For some people the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a seismic event, which demanded that they pack up their possessions and either bury them in the ground or haul them away to a new life elsewhere. Yet for others it would have registered barely, if at all. Just as there was no single defining experience of life under the Roman Empire, so there was no one typical experience of life without it. It would be naive to imagine otherwise.

Even when Rome was gone, it was not forgotten. It was the historical foundation on which everything in the Middle Ages was built.

Ambushed and outnumbered, he could not defend himself, but only watch in horror as Theodoric advanced on him with his sword drawn. “Theodoric leaped forward and struck [Odoacer] on the collarbone with his sword, while Odoacer cried out, ‘Where is God?’ ” recorded a later Greek historian called John of Antioch. “The blow was mortal, for it pierced Odoacer’s body through to the lower part of the back.”

After 493 the Ostrogoths settled around Ravenna and several other northern Italian cities, and over the following three decades Theodoric undertook an audacious new program of state building,

Around 497 his energetic sycophancy bore fruit, as Zeno’s successor, Anastasius I, cautiously recognized his kingship. Although many squabbles with Constantinople lay ahead, Theodoric was momentarily assured of his acceptability to the Roman establishment.

Through military campaigns and marriage alliances he secured peace with the Vandals of North Africa and established close political ties with the sprawling kingdom of the Visigoths, where in 511 he imposed his own king (his grandson Amalric), assembling a huge Pan-Gothic kingdom that extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea.

These and other monuments in the city, including Theodoric’s mausoleum, stand testament to the surprising glory of the new barbarian era. Theodoric self-consciously styled his kingship on the model of the late-Roman emperors. But his was not a Roman empire. Across the west, things had changed forever.

But in the west, kings and kingdoms were rapidly supplanting emperors and empires, ushering in an age that will, when we turn to it again, look more recognizably “medieval” than the world of wandering barbarians and child emperors has thus far.

What a strange, lurching time it had been, in the century-and-a-bit since the Huns had crossed the Volga in 370. Everything had been turned upside down: heaved into motion through the irresistible power of climatic fluctuation and human migration, allied to the usual random historical movers of chance, ambition, and individual agency.

But he composed his most famous work in jail while awaiting execution for his crimes. The Consolation of Philosophy attempted to place earthly troubles in a divine context. Written in the form of a dialog between Boethius and Lady Philosophy, it asked its readers to accept that there were higher powers at work behind the vicissitudes of man’s fleeting life. In the course of his musings, he turned to the notion of fortune’s wheel. “So now you have committed yourself to the rule of Fortune, you must acquiesce in her ways,” he wrote. “If you are trying to stop her wheel from turning, you are of all men the most obtuse.”67

Shortly after he finished his work, the great philosopher was horribly tortured and clubbed to death. Within two years, the great Ostrogothic king Theodoric had also breathed his last. Ahead of them, a strange new world was opening up.

This is the time when historians generally stop speaking of Rome and the Roman Empire and refer instead to Byzantium: the Greek-speaking inheritor state that served as a buffer between east and west, surviving for centuries until it was ravaged by crusaders and later consumed by the Ottomans—an event that heralded the end of the Middle Ages.