Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

French Templars were arrested, around one hundred brothers were languishing in an Egyptian jail, refusing all offers to convert to Islam and be released: hardly the behavior of an unchristian rabble. The letter was a spirited defense of the order, probably written by a secular clerk, and it was a bitter rebuke to the bullying tactics deployed by the French government.6 But it preceded—or perhaps prompted—a direct response in kind.

heretics and apostates in French territory. The scholars were asked to ponder whether a secular ruler was “obliged or permitted” to act when he “hears the name of the Lord blasphemed and the Catholic faith rejected by heretics, schismatics or other unbelievers.” They were asked to judge whether the Templars—“a unique sect composed of many individuals so horrible, so abominable”—could be judged under secular law as knights, rather than only under canon law as churchmen.

the order were historic as well as recent.7 These and other leading questions were dangled in front of Paris’s theologians, with the obvious intention of securing their further intellectual backing for what was in reality a foregone conclusion.

cause people to condemn and hate them.” Their possessions ought to be used to further the defense of the Church, said the masters, but “regarding who should look after them, it seems to us that they ought to be collected in the way that will best serve the end.” In short, they equivocated sufficiently that Philip could claim both that he had taken proper legal advice and that he was justified in doing as he pleased. The

Although there had been semiformal gatherings and communities of scholars in Paris since the middle of the twelfth century, the university had only been officially founded in 1231 by Pope Gregory IX. It was therefore less than a century old in 1307, and one of only a handful of universities in the world—its nearest rivals being at Oxford and Bologna. Yet despite its youth, this institution was clearly regarded as an important pillar of the establishment, and the opinions of its brightest and best scholars carried political as well as academic importance.

Education at a university was not yet a standard part of growing up for middle- and upper-class youths, nor was it yet usual to find a university in every major town. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, medieval universities like the one in Paris were beginning to develop into something like the institutions we recognize in the twenty-first century.

understand how this came to pass, we must look at the intellectual and cultural tradition that produced them, beginning in the sixth century a.d., when the classical world was collapsing and its traditions of fearless academic inquiry were slowly disappearing in the west.

Isidore’s classroom was in Seville’s cathedral, where his elder brother Leander was bishop. However, the curriculum he studied there was not strictly Christian. In fact, 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).

But it also pointed the way ahead in a much broader sense: to a medieval western world in which the Catholic Church would exercise a monopoly over schooling, provide the institutional environment in which western intellectuals would exist, and dictate permissible—and forbidden—avenues of study.

From Isidore’s day in the sixth century until the end of the Middle Ages (and beyond) the Church had a firm grip on western education and scholarship. As much as anything else this was a matter of practicality. Like Judaism and, as it would soon transpire, Islam, Christianity was a religion rooted in the word of God, and his word was transmitted primarily through being written, read, and heard.

Saintly scholars such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome were load-bearing walls in the intellectual and liturgical architecture of the Church—and by extension in the lives of millions of medieval Christians.

Yet the Church had more to gain from scholarship than simply passing on the Good News. Right from the start of the Middle Ages, religious institutions were major landowners. This meant they had practical needs in worldly fields like land conveyancing and administration. Popes had taxes to collect and kings and emperors with whom to argue by long-distance post. Bishops had dioceses full of priests with whom they needed to communicate the latest matters of doctrinal or behavioral reform. Monasteries had obligations to their benefactors past and present, and needed to keep track of whose soul they were meant to be praying for on any given day. (They also had choirs, which needed young boys who could read or understand music well enough to sing the treble parts in their daily offices and masses.) Bureaucracy never ended. So the Church always needed literate people among its staff at every level.

Because scholars were overwhelmingly to be found in monasteries and cathedrals, scholarship as a whole took on an increasingly concentrated Christian flavor, in which the writings of non- and pre-Christians were viewed with mounting suspicion. Whereas in the sixth century Isidore of Seville had roved voraciously across the writings of Greek and Roman pagans as well as the early Church fathers, by the turn of the millennium, this sort of omnivorous scholarship was firmly out of favor. Between the sixth and eleventh centuries, much of the wisdom of the ancients was gradually lost to the Latin world.

Foundational philosophers such as Plato* were all but unknown.18 It took until the twelfth century for the intellectual floodgates to reopen and pagan knowledge to come washing back in.

TRANSLATION AND RENAISSANCE Although western Europe did not consider itself an intellectual backwater around the end of the first millennium a.d., the reality was that by the year 1000 it lagged far behind other parts of the world.

But any traveler who struck out east for the great cities of the Arab and Persian world would quickly realize where the real engine of global intellectual inquiry lay: in the lands of the caliphs and the realm of Islam.

This rich intellectual environment nurtured some of the greatest thinkers in world history, from the ninth-century Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi, known as the “father of algebra,”* and his contemporary, the brilliant chemist Jabir ibn-Hayyan, to the eleventh-century medic Ibn Sina (“Avicenna”) and twelfth-century geniuses such as the Andalusian mapmaker Muhammad al-Idrisi and philosopher Ibn Rushd (“Averroës”).

It was not until the turn of the twelfth century—not coincidentally, the dawn of the crusading era, when Islamic cities with scholarly communities like Toledo, Córdoba, Palermo, and Antioch came under Christian control, and Damascus, Alexandria, and Baghdad were suddenly more accessible than before—that the intellectual boundaries thrown up between the Arab and Christian blocs began to collapse, and scholarship both new and forgotten began flooding from the Arab world to the west.

Throughout human history, many devices have been invented to help people map, model, and track the changing patterns of the sky, ranging from sarson stones to the atomic clock. But in the Middle Ages, the most popular was the astrolabe—a mechanical device usually made from metal or wood that allowed a trained user to measure the position of the stars and planets and to calculate local time and geographical latitude. The astrolabe had been invented by the Greeks in either the second or third century b.c., and many different variations had been produced over the centuries by scholars in Byzantium and the Arab world.

It was effectively a finely tuned medieval GPS system that was studied, refined, updated, and written about by countless clever men and women throughout the medieval world.*

This was in itself a significant achievement for scholarship in Christian Europe, for in the following centuries the astrolabe would transform timekeeping and navigation, ultimately opening the way for the Portuguese voyages of discovery and the pivot to the New World. And in the immediate context of the eleventh century, Hermann’s work on the astrolabe was just as significant, for it signaled a coming scientific revolution.

In Germany (where the term eagle’s nest has closer links with the Second World War than the Middle Ages) castles also decorated the landscape. The golden age of castle building here, as elsewhere, was in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when many magnificent fortresses were erected, including at Heidelberg and Eltz, and Hohenstaufen Castle, perched on a small mountain above Göppingen in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg and home to the imperial family of Frederick II Hohenstaufen.

In its footprint, Castel del Monte resembles nothing quite so much as the first level of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (see chapter 4), the city that Frederick returned to Christian control during his crusade of 1228–29.

by the fifteenth century gunpowder and advances in casting massive cannon meant that no castle could be built that was strong enough to withstand a protracted siege shelling with live artillery, rather than the mechanical siege engines. Whereas castles built in the thirteenth century were designed to withstand sieges for a year or more, in 1415 it took the English king Henry V just a month to smash the fortified defenses of the town of Harfleur to rubble with twelve great guns. 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.

And later rulers would make the most of castles, even if they did not build them in great numbers. During fears of a French invasion of England in the 1540s, Henry VIII considerably strengthened the south coast’s string of fortresses. Four hundred years later the largest castle in that region, at Dover, was still a critical part of British military defense strategy: it served as the command center for the Dunkirk evacuations at the beginning of the Second World War, and was later adapted to include a nuclear bunker in the rock below, for use in the event of a third world war fought with atomic weapons.

Sainte-Chapelle

Île de la Cité in Paris, a Gothic masterpiece of almost

Constantine the Great’s imperial audience hall at Trier;

The Gothic movement—named in reference to the barbarians of old, by sneering fifteenth-century Italians, who saw the movement as a hideous perversion of the elegant aesthetic popular in ancient Rome—touched virtually every aspect of the arts, from painting and sculpture to embroidery and metalwork. But nowhere was it more enduring and exciting than in the field of architecture, and specifically in religious building.

western Europe during the first half of the Middle Ages, the dominant style was Romanesque: thick-walled buildings supported by elegant pillars and lit with round-topped windows.13 Gothic departed radically from this template. Its key motif was the pointed arch, which allowed builders to pull together enormously long and tall buildings, held together by fine stone skeletons, framing almost impossibly thin walls and lit by what could seem like acres of stained glass: colossal yet at the same time dazzlingly light, they were the physical realization of a New Jerusalem, or “heaven on earth.”14

The first Gothic building project of the Middle Ages was the abbey church at Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris.15 An abbey had sat there since Carolingian times, and by the early twelfth century, during the reign of Louis VII, it had become the spiritual home of the Frankish kings who claimed to be “most Christian” (les rois très chrétiens) in Europe, if not the world.

The glass depicted scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the lives of the saints, and events from the Crusades—the second of which was underway at the same time as Suger’s works were taking place. But this was not simply decoration. Suger’s abbey church was a building that accorded with Saint Denis’s supposed belief that God was light, and that through the light of God, the whole world was illuminated to man.20

Of course, as with any great church of the Middle Ages, the remodeled abbey church at Saint-Denis was packed with jeweled ornaments, fine sculptures, expensive wax candles, relics including the iron neck collar that had shackled Saint Denis himself before his martyrdom, and secular treasures such as a necklace that had belonged to Queen Nanthilda, whose husband, King Dagobert, was believed to have been the abbey’s first benefactor.

Extraordinary new cathedrals were flying up in towns and cities throughout northwest Europe, notably in Cambrai, Arras, Tournai, and Rouen. And in Paris, ground was broken on what became perhaps the most famous cathedral in the entire world: Notre-Dame. Reaching more than one hundred feet (thirty-three meters) high, this was the tallest cathedral that had been contemplated to that point, and a marvel of engineering, with ingeniously positioned ranks of flying buttresses allowing the walls to reach four stories in height.

Although the cathedral at Reims was preferred as the coronation site for French monarchs, and Saint-Denis was their mausoleum, Notre-Dame still exuded cultural and religious power from every grain of its fabric. At a critical moment during the last stages of the Hundred Years War, when the English brought their boy king Henry VI to be crowned as king of France, they chose Notre-Dame for the occasion.

This was by no means a phenomenon limited to France. In Germany, particularly glorious Gothic cathedrals appeared at Cologne and Strasbourg. In the fourteenth century King John of Bohemia and his son, the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, undertook an energetic rebuilding of Prague: giving the city a world-class university and a cathedral to match, paid for from a levy on profits from Bohemia’s rich silver mines; the cathedral was home to a glorious shrine containing the relics of Saint Wenceslas,*

Others, however, in cities like Magdeburg, Regensburg, and Ulm, did not stick slavishly to French styles, developing instead a German Gothic imprint, characterized by churches and cathedrals with single spires rather than two or more, and very wide roofs covering both the nave and the aisles alongside.

In southern Europe, the picture was more mixed. The Italians were generally lukewarm about the Gothic mania, with the notable exception of the astonishing, wide-fronted, deeply strange beast that was Milan Cathedral,

In Spain, meanwhile, the Christian ethos that underpinned Gothic form was just one more addition to a rich blend of architectural styles influenced by the strong Islamic and Jewish presence on the peninsula.

angels. But others were profoundly local: Toledo Cathedral, founded in the 1220s, was an idiosyncratic attempt to put Gothic clothing on the city’s main mosque; Seville’s cathedral, converted from a mosque at the start of the fifteenth century, underwent a similar transformation. These—and others like them in Valencia and Lleida—are weird and wonderful places, unique products of Spain’s variegated history. They also stand testament to the perceived power of Gothic design and decoration to bring a physical structure closer to God.

Lincoln cathedral originally owed everything to William the Conqueror. After invading England in 1066, the first Norman king undertook a large-scale rearrangement of the country. He built a lot of castles—including the “White Tower” on the north bank of the river Thames, which became the Tower of London.

rather than one or the other. In most cases William’s rearrangement of his English bishops and their seats did not involve long-distance removal. But in one case it did. In 1072 Pope Alexander III granted William permission to move the bishop of Dorchester-on-Thames in Oxfordshire 250 miles northeast, to the most distant extreme of his sprawling diocese, in Lincoln.

This was a drastic move, but one that made sense: whereas Dorchester was a pleasant Thames-side town on the edge of the Chiltern Hills, Lincoln was of far greater strategic and political importance. It had been founded by the Romans (as Lindum Colonia), occupied for two centuries by the Vikings, and sat at a useful strategic position on the road between London and York, as well as several other river courses and Roman-era thoroughfares.

Dante was a wildly popular subject. The great man had died 110 years earlier and was regarded in Florence as a literary demigod.

shade on a faction in the city led by the fifty-two-year-old banker Cosimo de’ Medici.

Under Cosimo’s leadership the Medici family had begun their rise not only to hegemony in Florence, but to the rank of a quasi-royal dynasty, whose sons would eventually include popes and grand dukes, and whose daughters would become queens. And although the peak of their powers lay some way off, in the first half of the sixteenth century, they were still dangerous people to cross.

Today Francesco Filelfo is not among the first names that people reach for when they think of the extraordinary intellectual and artistic world that flourished across the west in the late Middle Ages.

Filelfo does not belong in the first rank of these figures, and maybe not even in the second. Yet there is something in his little-known story that sums up the nature of the times.

From the late fourteenth century there flourished, first in Italy and, soon afterward, beyond the Alps in northern Europe, a cultural movement known as the Renaissance. The Renaissance—literally, “rebirth”—was a time in which creative people discovered new (or lost) approaches to literature, the arts, and architecture. From these there also sprang novel theories of political philosophy, natural science, medicine, and anatomy.

Crucially, right from the start, some of those who lived through the period recognized they were living in a new age. Among the first to state it was Leonardo Bruni, who wrote an epic, History of the Florentine People, in which he identified the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century as the end of one great age, and his own times in the early fifteenth century as the culmination of a long road back to civilization.9 This notion still underpins our sense of the boundaries of the Middle Ages—as the scope of books like this one shows.