Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The problem, however, was that the Magyars were no conventional troops. Like the “barbarian” tribespeople who had swept into Europe in the twilight years of the western Roman Empire, they excelled at fighting in open, grassy terrain, for their ancestors had learned the ways of war on the Eurasian steppe.

Otto arrived on August 10 to find the city totally surrounded. One monastic annalist estimated, very improbably, that there were one hundred thousand Magyars outside it. Whatever their real numbers, these Magyar warriors, under leaders called Bulcsu, Lehel, and Taksony, were unquestionably battle hardened, having already plundered their way through Bavaria, “which they devastated and occupied from the Danube to the dark forests on the rim of the mountains.”

Rather than sitting light in their saddles, loosing off arrows, and relying on agility and speed, the German troops were organized around a core of heavy cavalry. These were mounted warriors who wore thick armor, including helmets, and fought with sword and lance, running their enemies down and hacking them to pieces. Riding in good order and given the chance to fight at close quarters, heavy cavalry could usually be expected to defeat light mounted archers. The only question was whether the Magyars would give Otto’s men the sort of battle they wanted.

And the clash, which came to be known as the battle of Lechfeld, gained semilegendary status. Its casualties—like Conrad the Red, who was killed in the fighting when he loosened his armor to cool off and was hit in the throat by an arrow—were hailed as heroes and even martyrs. And the outcome of the battle came to be seen as a pivotal moment in the history of the Germans and Magyars. After Lechfeld, the waves of attacks from the dreaded, baby-defacing Hungarians seemed to come abruptly to an end. A curtain fell on the waves of so-called barbarian migrations that had been a feature of western European life for nearly five centuries. Within

Lechfeld can be seen as a symbolic moment in the grand march of medieval history. For the triumph of heavy cavalry over light mounted archers coincided with the dawn of an age in which the sort of armored, lance-wielding horsemen whom Otto commanded began to take center stage in western warfare.

The battle of Lechfeld did not cause that shift. But it did show which way the wind was blowing.7 The European knight was coming of age.

the twelfth century, the knight was a man whose importance in wartime was rewarded with landed wealth and high rank during peacetime. And around him was emerging a distinctive cult of knightliness known as chivalry, which would inform art, literature, and high culture long beyond the end of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the tropes and rituals of knighthood and chivalry persist in many western countries right down to the present day.

Yet if it was not original, medieval knighthood was still revolutionary. Once the western Roman Empire collapsed, the only settled powers in Europe who used horses to a significant degree on the battlefield were the Arabs and Visigoths. The Franks knew how to trade, breed, and deploy warhorses. But for a long time, when it came to the biggest clashes between their armies and those of foreign powers, the Franks fell back on foot soldiers. When Charles Martel defeated the great Arab army at the battle of Poitiers of 732, the Frankish army stood as an immovable wall to repel the Arab cavalry. Yet just two generations later, Frankish methods on the battlefield had moved on.

In 792–93 Charlemagne issued a law ordering all cavalrymen to carry a spear to be thrust and stabbed toward the enemy, rather than thrown, javelin style. This proved so effective that over the following two centuries, spear-wielding horsemen became an increasingly important part of western medieval armies.

The Latin term for such men was miles (plural: milites); the Old German term, kneht. By the eleventh century the word had entered Old English as cnihtas, from which today we have the word knight.

The knight of the high Middle Ages was defined not only by his horse, but also by the specific weapons he wielded. These included slashing and stabbing sidearms, like swords and daggers. But most important was the couched lance: a long, strong, metal-tipped mutation of the spear, three or more meters in length with a handle at its blunt end for the rider to hold.

With a couched lance at his disposal, however, the knight was no longer an infantryman on horseback. He had become the medieval equivalent of a guided missile.* Riding in tandem with half a dozen or more other guided missiles, he was almost unstoppable.

Yet the lance did not develop on its own. It required other technological advances to make it effective: the stirrup and the cantled saddle. Both served the same purpose. They counteracted the laws of physics, protecting the rider from his own momentum and allowing him to transfer all the acceleration and force of his charge through the shaft and tip of his lance. The cantled saddle was designed with a high back, to keep the rider in place on impact.

Pagans are wrong and Christians are right. the song of roland

The events that had brought him to such a woeful position were these: earlier that summer Romanus had summoned a huge army, consisting of perhaps forty thousand men, drawn from a wide area.

The Seljuks, whom Alp Arslan led, were Turks. They were Sunni Muslims descended originally from nomadic tribes who lived around the Aral Sea (which today lies between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan). But since the late tenth century they had risen to become the dominant power in the Islamic world, conquering their way out of central Asia into Persia, taking control of Baghdad in 1055 with the approval of the Abbasid caliph, and subsequently branching out toward Syria, Armenia, Georgia, and the eastern fringes of Byzantium.

into Egypt, ruled from a.d. 909 by Shia caliphs of the Fatimid dynasty; northward through the Caucasus toward the lands of the Rus’; and all the way across Asia Minor as far as the Bosphorus strait on which sat Constantinople. That was why Romanus had been compelled to stand up to them. That was why his failure, ensured by defeat and embarrassment at Manzikert, mattered.

When Romanus set out for Constantinople, things did not go well.

Philip Augustus of France in 1205, “wounds that do not respond to the healing of poultices must be lanced with a blade.”41

wipe them from the face of the earth.42 He summoned a crusading force to meet at Lyon in the summer of 1209 and deal with the enemies of God once and for all.

Command of the anti-Cathar army was entrusted to an experienced crusader: Simon de Montfort, a veteran of the Fourth Crusade and a tireless, stiff-necked zealot, whose life’s driving passion was slaughtering infidels wherever he could find them.* In the Albigensian Crusade he found the perfect outlet for his bloodlust.

From June 1209 for a full two years, Simon de Montfort and his fellow crusaders cut a swath through the French south, besieging towns suspected of harboring Cathars, and burning, slicing, or torturing people to death.

lordship of his own, created out of lands he had confiscated from lords who refused to back his actions against heretics. By late 1212 he was in charge of a considerable portion of southern France,

In 1213 de Montfort attempted to extend his crusader state into territory belonging to Pedro II, king of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, whose dominions stretched north of the Pyrenees. Pedro was a Reconquista hero, who had

scourge of the Cathars for another two years,

They had fought in the Holy Land and in Constantinople. They had fought in the ports of the Black Sea, and around the islands of the Aegean and Adriatic.

The Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans were competing to become the leading mercantile power in the west.

Yet strangely, it would not be remembered as Genoa’s triumph, either. Instead, this bloody skirmish in the stunning blue waters off the Dalmatian coast would come to be associated most closely with one of the Venetian prisoners of war. He was a veteran adventurer from a family of merchants, who had been farther around the world than almost any person alive—seeing many extraordinary things and meeting many astonishing people. A survivor and a charmer, he had mind-boggling stories to tell. And after he was captured at the battle of Curzola, he had the opportunity to tell them. He was incarcerated alongside a sympathetic and talented professional writer called Rustichello of Pisa, who drew memories out of his cellmate and wrote them down for posterity. The result was a great popular travelogue, which still sells thousands of copies every year. Of course, the merchant was Marco Polo—and his story is justly one of the most celebrated of the whole Middle Ages.

Born in Venice in 1253 to a family of businessmen, Marco Polo was forty-five when he fought at the battle of Curzola. He had spent most of his adult life away from Europe.

between 1338 and 1353. Yet Marco Polo differed significantly from these other travelers. Almost without exception they were friars—Dominican or Franciscan holy men whose chief responsibility was to the word of God and the well-being of the Latin Church, and for whom the hardship of the journey was part of their spiritual calling.

What was more, they were Venetians—citizens of one of the most ruthless and outward-looking mercantile states in the west.

The Polos’ journey east took them along a broadly familiar route. In 1271 they sailed from Venice to Constantinople, and crossed the Black Sea, disembarking at Trebizond in Armenia. A long overland trek on camelback across Persia took them into central Asia, and onward to the khan’s summer palace at Shangdu (sometimes called Xanadu), where they arrived after three and a half years of travel.

This opulent residence, built in marble and decorated in gold, was home to many bizarre and exotic hangers-on, including sorcerers who sacrificed live animals, ate the flesh of condemned criminals, and played conjuring tricks at mealtimes, along with thousands of bald-headed ascetic monks who worshipped fire and slept on the ground.

The colorful tales Marco collected for Kublai provided the bulk of The Travels, and just as they entertained the khan, so too did they dazzle Europeans, with descriptions of many of the great cities of eastern China, Burma, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, west India, and Persia, alongside stories about Russia and the “Region of Darkness”—a place where pale-faced tribes lived in semipermanent night, trapping wild animals for their furs.

He adored the wet markets, where live animals were sold for next to nothing and killed on the spot. He savored the fruit, the fish, the local wine, the “spices, trinkets, drugs and pearls” sold from shops that occupied the street-level stories of high buildings.

In Persia, he observed, where there was a busy market for transporting horses for sale in India, people in many districts were “brutal and bloodthirsty . . . forever slaughtering one another.” But they left merchants and travelers alone, because they themselves lived in terror of the Mongols, who imposed “severe penalties upon them.”16 In China, where paper money was used, the advanced attitude to macroeconomics meant the Great Khan “has more treasure than anyone else in the world.”

Marco was an evangelist for the Mongol regime, which, for all its severity and illiberality, kept the peace and allowed trade to flourish safely and securely over a hitherto unimaginable span of territory, joining up the Christian west directly with the Chinese and Indian east, and making overland travel through Islamic Persia safe and reliable. This was not a totally benign judgment: for millions of massacred civilians and their families, the Mongol advance of the thirteenth century had not been so much an economic miracle as a cataclysmic tragedy. But in the amoral worldview of the profit-hungry salesman, the khans had ushered in a boom. And in Marco’s mind, eastern trade was there to be seized by adventurous businessmen in Europe, and particularly by the merchants of in the advanced Italian city-republics.

is a cliché much repeated by historians that the medieval world was made up of three groups of people: those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked. But from the thirteenth century onward, we must also take into account those who counted, moved, saved, and spent. It

Empire offered huge advantages for trade: safe, good-quality roads in which the chance of being stuck up and robbed was low, reliable coinage, and a legal system that could settle commercial disputes. And it allowed regular people to participate, as farmers produced grain to feed armies, wealthy townsfolk sought expensive pottery and imported spices, and workshops and households demanded enslaved people to do their dirty work.

Romans did not hold merchants in especially high regard. Buying and selling was not a profession considered fit for a patrician, and the economic life of the upper classes was usually focused on managing their country estates.

Although it would be misleading to write off the whole of the early Middle Ages as a “dark” period in which all business receded to nothingness and human progress went into hibernation, in the grand scheme of western history, the Middle Ages were a period of stagnated economic development, which lasted several hundred years.

Slowly, however, business recovered. From around the year 1000 Europe’s population boomed, in tandem with a surge in agricultural production. The Medieval Climate Optimum was kind to farmers, and huge new tracts of land were brought under the plow through forest clearances and marsh draining.

Meanwhile, basic financial services came to be offered in the growing towns and cities across the west, especially through Jewish commercial networks. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries Jewish people all over the west became prominent in moneylending, as well as long-distance trade, carrying commodities like salt, cloth, wine, and enslaved people throughout the old Roman world.26 Of course, Europe’s Jews were not thanked for this pioneering contribution to the macroeconomic fabric of their world: rather, they were the object of suspicion, derision, and bursts of violent persecution, which accelerated during the Crusades and crescendoed in the late thirteenth century with waves of pogroms and expulsions throughout western Europe.* Nevertheless, the Jewish contribution to the great medieval economic revival was significant. • • •

Slowly but surely, then, around the turn of the millennium, western economies began to spring noticeably back to life. One of the most famous trade hubs to emerge in the reinvigorated medieval world could be found in the county of Champagne, east of Paris.

Many of the most high-profile customers at the fairs of Champagne and Flanders traveled there across the Alps from the Italian city-republics, of which the most reliably bullish was Venice.

The Templars, de Nogaret revealed to the scholars, had been the subject of a long, covert investigation carried out by the French government and overseen by him. He claimed his inquiries had revealed foul and endemic corruption running from the top to the bottom of the Templar order. Under the cover of papal protection, generations of high-ranking Templars had turned their noble organization into a hotbed of homosexuality, idolatry, and vice, where members were not only allowed but encouraged to disrespect Christ’s name.

In light of these revelations, the scholars learned, the French government had taken swift and decisive action. On the previous day—Friday, October 13—every Templar in France, up to and including the order’s grand master, Jacques de Molay, had been arrested by government agents. The order’s property had been impounded. Templar houses (known as preceptories or commanderies) had been seized and searched. Hundreds of Templars were now in prison.

The French attack on the Templars that began in 1307 was one of the most shocking events in the history of the late medieval west. As we saw in chapter 8, the Templars were famous across the Christian world and beyond. For nearly two centuries, Templar brothers had played a distinguished part in some of the most dramatic battles and sieges in the near east. They had taken on Saladin at Hattin in 1187, slogged through the flooded Nile delta during the disastrous Egyptian crusades of 1217–21 and 1249–50, and been the last men standing when the Mamluks overran Acre in 1291. The Templars had also developed an institutional expertise in financial services—as moneylenders, accountants, and civil servants, they were employed by the French crown to handle important aspects of public finance.

Philip’s best interrogators, led by his personal confessor, the Dominican friar William of Paris. They had been deprived of sleep, starved, shackled, isolated, and beaten. Some had been burned with fire or stretched with the strappado. They had been physically and psychologically broken down until they agreed they were guilty. And now, in long and tragic sequence, these frightened men were brought out and deposed before the academics. One by one they recited their confessions. Then they were taken back to their cells.

spiraled out of any single person’s control. The pope of the day, Clement V (r. 1305–14), was a Gascon-born milksop who had been elected under French political pressure in the expectation that he would be directly biddable from Paris; he spent his whole reign in France.* But even Clement could not be seen to simply roll over and allow the Templars to be destroyed by a secular prince.