Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The Abbasids made sweeping changes to the Islamic empire they had wrested from the Umayyads. They moved the capital eight hundred kilometers east from Damascus to a new city in Iraq called Baghdad, and devolved sweeping political and legal powers to local rulers known as emirs throughout the caliphate. The Abbasids also worked hard to integrate non-Arab Muslims into the umma on roughly equal terms.

Never again would caliphs wield as much political and spiritual power over such a massive swath of territory as they had during the heyday of the Rightly Guided caliphs and the Umayyads. Nevertheless, the Abbasid age (which lasted until 1258, when the caliphate was destroyed by the Mongols [see chapter 9]), would come to be known as the golden age of Islam, during which art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, medicine, and scientific inquiry flourished.

like the House of Wisdom. Yet the Abbasid age was also one in which the Muslim world’s center of gravity shifted, like its capital, to the east.

Developments in the dar al-Islam therefore affected the western world at one or more steps of remove. One of the great and lasting stories of the Middle Ages is one of increasing ignorance and hostility between the Islamic east and Christian west—a distinction that would have made very little sense at this point in our story, when the Umayyads were invested and engaged directly in affairs of the western Mediterranean as well as those of the Near and Middle East.

This supposed civilizational divide is today a favorite trope of the Far Right and extremists of various persuasions throughout the world—it owes at least part of its genesis to events that were rooted in the eighth century a.d.

the Umayyads themselves lived on, and their legacy can be felt powerfully in one particular region of the west today: in the southern halves of Spain and Portugal, which had been conquered so efficiently during al-Walid’s reign in 711–14. Amid the tumult of the Abbasid revolution, one of the old caliph al-Malik’s grandchildren ran away from Damascus, hotly pursued by would-be assassins intent on adding him to the list of slaughtered Umayyads. Having evaded them he wandered in exile for six years, making a long clandestine journey through North Africa until he arrived in southern Spain, where he proclaimed himself as caliph in his own right, and established an independent capital in the sweltering city of Córdoba—in the hottest part of Spain, where temperatures rival the roiling heat of Arabia. Over the following two decades he steadily brought the Muslim territories in Iberia together in what became known as the Emirate of Córdoba.

Córdoba gained immense renown in the Middle Ages as a city of learning and extraordinarily rich culture. Its population bloomed to around four hundred thousand inhabitants—a scale that put Córdoba comfortably in the league of Constantinople or even ancient Rome.

For a century between around 900 and 1000, the city of Córdoba and the rump Umayyad emirate it controlled had a strong claim to be the most advanced and sophisticated state in western Europe, and the fabulous legacy of that time is still tangibly embedded in southern Spanish and Portuguese culture.

After yet another round of civil war, they decided in 843 to abandon the European dream. The Carolingian empire was formally partitioned under the Treaty of Verdun, creating the three kingdoms of West Francia, the Middle Kingdom, and East Francia. (These approximated, respectively and very roughly, to modern France, northern Italy and Burgundy, and western Germany.)

Many would dream during the Middle Ages of piecing all these fragments back together, but it would take nearly a thousand years for one ruler to once again hold the whole Carolingian inheritance in his hands. He was Napoléon Bonaparte—another irresistible warrior and accumulator, but one whose career only served to emphasize what Charlemagne’s had done: it has only been possible to unite Europe once or twice in every millennium, and even then, not for very long.

COMING OF THE NORTHMEN In the spring of 845, when Louis the Pious’s youngest son, Charles the Bald, was ruling West Francia, a Danish warlord called Ragnar brought a fleet of 120 ships up the river Seine. It has sometimes been said that this Ragnar was the model for the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok

After traveling about seventy-five miles up the river, Ragnar and his followers disembarked their sleek ships to raid and plunder. “Ships past counting voyage up the Seine, and throughout the entire region evil grows strong,” wrote one despairing chronicler. “Rouen is laid waste, looted and burnt.”45 Far from exhausted—indeed, now pumped up for more excitement—Ragnar’s men carried on up the river until they arrived in Paris, around Easter. A city of probably just a few thousand souls, Paris was not yet the powerhouse it would become in the later

Ragnar summarily hanged 111 of the prisoners. Helpless to evict the Northmen and terrified that if they stayed, there might be very little left of Paris to remember them by, Charles the Bald now agreed to pay Ragnar seven thousand pounds of silver and gold to retire.

Once upon a time the Franks had been the most feared military force in the west. Now it was the Northmen’s turn.

The Northmen are often said to have burst out of their coastal settlements in what is now Sweden, Norway, and Denmark at the end of the eighth century. The most famous account of their arrival into the Christian realms of the west comes from Britain. In 793 warriors appeared off the coast of Northumbria, leaped from their ships, and robbed the island of Lindisfarne, desecrating the monastery and murdering its brothers.

The next year, 794, raiders appeared on the other side of the British Isles, in the Hebrides. In 799 Vikings raided the monastery of Saint-Philibert at Noirmoutier, just to the south of the river Loire. Sixty years later Viking raids would be a painful feature of life not only in the North and Irish Seas but as far away as Lisbon, Seville, and north Africa, as Northmen tangled with Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Umayyads, and Franks.

The people of Scandinavia were not somehow conjured into existence in the late eighth century. More than a millennium earlier, around 325 b.c., the Greek explorer Pytheas made a famous journey to the freezing northwest of the then known world and came into contact with a partly populated place called Thule, which may (or may not) have been Norway or Iceland.

In a.d. 515, a Danish ruler called Chochilaicus raided Frankish territory in the Low Countries. (Chochilaicus may have been the model for King Hygelac, king of the Geats and uncle of the eponymous hero in the great medieval epic poem Beowulf.) Yet until the eighth century, glimpses of the Northmen had been just that: few, far between, and fleeting. Although the northern world was linked to trade routes that connected ultimately with the Silk Roads, the links were relatively weak and had been severely disrupted by the barbarian migrations of the fifth and sixth centuries a.d.

The Vikings’ worldview was informed particularly by climate. Possibly thanks to the shock of the great volcanic eruptions that caused global temperatures to plummet and harvests to fail during the 530s and 540s, the Vikings stories of genesis and apocalypse revolved around the lives of trees and the impending arrival of the Fimbulwinter, when the earth would freeze and all life would end. The Northmen celebrated a colorful pantheon of gods such as Odin, Ull, Baldr, Thor, and Loki. They knew their lives were affected by other supernatural beings too, including the female beings known as Valkyries and fylgjur, as well as elves, dwarves, and trolls.

Historians have puzzled for generations over why the Vikings suddenly, in the course of two generations, broke their relative isolation and surged out to terrorize—and colonize—the west. Political turmoil, cultural revolution, climate change, and demographic pressure have all been proposed as causes.50

order fell to pieces. From around the fifth century, Scandinavian boat technology had been improving, perhaps driven by the opportunities for trade around the North Sea, including the long, fjord-pocked thousand-mile west coast of Norway.

At the same time there was rising cultural pressure on young Viking men to travel and enrich themselves. In a society that still allowed men to marry more than one woman (and possibly to kill female babies), men had to pay a “bride fee” for a prestigious marriage and simply to advertise their social credit. The best ways to raise funds for this were trade and piracy—or a bit of both.

And for another, the Carolingians founded and enriched monasteries and other Christian holy sites. Large amounts of movable wealth were placed in the hands of monks: physically the weakest men in society.

These fruits could not have hung lower, nor seemed riper, to a society of highly mobile warrior bands equipped with the finest ships outside the Mediterranean, whose viciousness Alcuin of York compared with that of the ancient Goths and Huns.

In place of the small, smash-and-grab hits on coastal targets that had characterized their forays at the end of the eighth century, by the ninth century came huge missions equipped for siege, subjugation, and settlement.

Almost everywhere, established powers struggled to contain the Viking threat. In England a “Great Heathen Army” of Vikings invaded in 865, possibly led by four of Ragnar Lodbrok’s sons, including Ivar the Boneless, who may have earned his name because of a disability that affected his legs.

But the Great Heathen Army was a fully formed army of conquest, bent on breaking the power of the Saxon kings who now ruled the petty kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, and East Anglia. With the army traveled a settler community including many women; they had come to live, not just raid. And they succeeded.

Viking advance was halted only after a long struggle led heroically on the Saxon side by Alfred, king of Wessex. A treaty agreed at some time between 878 and 890 formalized the partition of England, with the large portion of “Viking” territory, in the north and east of the country, known as the Danelaw.

Scandinavians would retain an interest in some or all of England until 1042, when Harthacnut, joint king of Denmark and England, died.

But England was only part of the picture. The Vikings traded, fought, and settled on the island kingdoms of Scotland and the Irish Sea: Orkney, the western isles of Scotland, Man, and Anglesey. In Ireland Viking colonists established a major kingdom around Dublin, which survived until the early eleventh century.

Byzantine emperors had come to envy the martial abilities of the Northmen so much that they maintained a personal bodyguard known as the Varangian guard, recruited from Viking stock. (Norse rune graffiti can still be found at the Hagia Sophia, possibly etched there by guardsmen called Halfdan and Ari.) From Byzantium, a few intrepid Northmen even reached Abbasid Persia; according to the Arab scholar and geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih, the Viking Rus’ traded in Baghdad in the 840s, bringing goods overland on camelback and posing as Christians to take advantage of a tax regime that offered preferential rates to People of the Book over pagans.

In 882 a Viking army that had spent the previous winter despoiling Frisia entered the river Rhine and advanced toward Charlemagne’s palace-city of Aachen. They took over the palace and used Charlemagne’s once-beloved imperial chapel as a stable for their horses.58 Throughout the Rhineland, the invaders “brought to their death servants of [Christ] by famine or sword, or sold them beyond the sea.”59 To the chroniclers (almost all of whom were based in monasteries and thus directly in the sights of the raiders), it seemed as if the devastation would never end.

The Carolingians had grown rich and powerful, and sponsored well-endowed abbeys, by plundering unbelievers on their borders. Now that process was ironically and very uncomfortably reversed. The hunters had become the hunted.

For the Carolingians, a half century of Viking attacks eventually proved fatal. Charles the Fat was seriously damaged by his craven response to the siege of Paris.

no ruler was ever again able to do as Charles the Fat had briefly done, and rule the full empire assembled by Pippin and Charlemagne.

Undone by their own family rivalries, the challenges of holding together such a vast and culturally diverse collection of territories and peoples, and the depredations of the Northmen (as well as other enemies on their eastern frontiers, including the Magyar tribal groups who had started to launch massive raids into imperial territory from what is now Hungary), the Carolingians drifted, generation by generation, from preeminence to irrelevance.

Behind them they left to the Middle Ages several distinct polities: Western Francia became the kingdom of France; Eastern Francia an empire centered on Germany and northern Italy that would in ti...

Yet there was another political entity that emerged from the age of Carolingians and Vikings. Over time, the Northmen evolved from Scandinavian raiders to become the rulers of more conventional, mainstream Christian states of the west.

Most obviously these included the kingdoms of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. There were also notable Viking-ruled kingdoms around the North Sea and Irish Sea (ranging from the small island kingdom of Orkney and the Irish kingdom of Dublin to the massive Danelaw, which consisted of much of modern England) as well as the Kievan Rus’, a vast patchwork of territories in modern Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine that was ruled over by the Viking Rurik dynasty, whose roots lay in eastern Sweden.

none was so influential on the subsequent course of medieval history as that which they carved out from the Frankish state: the realm of the No...

The creation of Normandy was directly linked to the dramatic siege of Paris in 885–86. Among the Viking leaders of that expedition was a man called Rollo (or Hrólfr), who was probably born in Denmark, and whose career was described by a later biographer, Dud...

Rollo was one of the most violent men of his exceptionally bloody times: on one occasion he prevailed in battle by ordering his men to kill all their animals, chop their carcasses in half, and build a makeshift barricade out of freshly butchered meat. But he was a canny negotiator. During the second half of the ninth century, Rollo made a tidy living among the Franks, doing as all thrusting young Northmen did: burning, laying towns and villages to waste, plundering, and killing.

But Rollo certainly did accept baptism. He was “imbued with the catholic faith of the sacrosanct Trinity,” wrote Dudo, “[and] caused his own counts and warriors and his entire armed band to be baptized and instructed through preaching in the faith of the Christian religion.” He also changed his name to that of his new godfather, Robert, the future Robert I, king of the Franks.

For in return, Charles the Simple granted Rollo all the lands spreading out from the Seine valley, which would come to be known as Normandy. The newly Christian Viking now controlled the riverine approach to Paris, along with a swath of famously fertile landscape and a coastline studded with strategically useful ports, from which passing sea traffic as well as vessels bound for nearby England could be monitored.

the Normans retained a sense of themselves as a people apart long into the Middle Ages.

Rivalry between dukes of Normandy and kings of France would be a pronounced and important feature of the eleventh- and twelfth-century political landscape in the west, especially after the year 1066, when Rollo’s great-great-great-grandson, William “the Bastard” of Normandy, launched his invasion of England, sending a flotilla of ships across the Channel to kill his rival Harold Godwinsson and seize the English crown.*

Norman dukes would rule England until 1204,

The Normans would climb further still on their journey from scourges of the Church to its fiercest defenders—as we shall see when we turn to the Crusades in chapter 8.

The Magyars had a long history of encroaching on the German sphere of interest. They were a pagan tribal people who had migrated toward central Europe from the east, to settle the vast plains that spread out from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Magyar fighting men were skilled riders who fought with bows and arrows from the saddle.

But it spoke to a deep-rooted fear of the Magyars among the ordinary folk of Germany, a fear that was every bit the equal of the western Franks’ terror of the Vikings. So in the midsummer of 955, when Otto of Germany heard a Magyar army had set its sights on Augsburg, it was his duty as king to drive them away.