Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The Renaissance was a time when genius and geniuses were unleashed. But patrons mattered as much as auteurs. Art and invention were tightly interwoven with money, power, and the ambitions of princes. Clever and creative people flocked to the wealthy to fund their endeavors, while the mighty threw their weight behind artists to help them emphasize their own good taste and the civic sophistication of their home cities. So for every Filelfo there was a Cosimo, each capable of elevating and thwarting the other in roughly equal measure.

Today, however, some historians dislike the term, on the grounds that it implies a dearth of invention or any transformations in thought during the centuries that preceded it. Others still have decided to co-opt and dilute the term “Renaissance” by applying it to earlier moments in the Middle Ages; we have already encountered the “twelfth-century renaissance”

be it. The fact remains that whether we like the term “Renaissance” or not, it would be a brave or foolish person who denied that the fifteenth century in particular saw a groundswell of cultural and intellectual endeavor, which produced some of the most famous works of art and literature in human history, under the patronage of magnificent, if often rather grubby, customers.

THE FIRST HUMANIST On Good Friday in 1327, one hundred and four years before Filelfo fell out with Cosimo de’ Medici, the young poet and diplomat Francesco Petrarca went to church in the papal city of Avignon.

Aged seventeen, Laura de Noves was scarcely out of adolescence, though this was fairly normal for fourteenth-century brides. Six years older, Petrarca, or Petrarch, as he is known today in English, was captivated by her.

Like Dante, Petrarch wrote most of his best poetry in Italian, rather than Latin. He also perfected the fourteen-line poetic form of the sonnet.

But Petrarch molded it and mastered it to such an extent that the “Petrarchan sonnet” is now a staple of Italian poetry, just as the later “Shakespearean sonnet” is in English.11

And Petrarch’s approach would come to lie at the core of an overarching aesthetic and moral philosophy known as humanism, which drove the achievements of the Renaissance. Future generations looked on him as the first of the humanists.

Petrarch’s blistering defense of verse, and his wider claim for art as a lens through which to spy the divine, was stirring and challenging in the 1340s. It would take two centuries for his insights to be fully unpacked by writers, artists, and thinkers across the west. But his coronation oration eventually came to be seen as a manifesto for the entire Renaissance.17

Petrarch’s life following his coronation in Rome could be read, in retrospect, as a model for the new intellectual and cultural world of the Renaissance, which burst into life at the end of the Middle Ages. As we have already seen, Petrarch was spared by the Black Death in 1348, but his beloved Laura was not, and nor were many of his friends (see chapter 13). As

Yet like all the greatest medieval minds, Petrarch realized that to immerse himself in Christian thought did not necessarily imply abandonment of the classics.

Together, Dante and Petrarch were the foremost Italian writers of the fourteenth century. They were the equals of their much-admired classical forebears, and the giants on whose shoulders many of the greatest artists and writers of the Renaissance would stand.

The Norse colony at L’Anse aux Meadows, made up of timber buildings and cut-turf houses, was abandoned and burned within a generation of being established. Eventually the Norse also retreated from Greenland. So while the Black Sea, Baltic Sea, and Mediterranean all buzzed with commercial shipping, by the late Middle Ages the Atlantic remained a great question mark on the map of the world. It was a barrier, far more than it was a bridge.

The process by which the “far” side of the Atlantic was opened up to regular European traffic was gradual and dilatory.

Portuguese prince known to history as Henry the Navigator.

He was born in 1394 and grew up at a court that fairly bubbled with political ambition.27 John I was the first king of a new dynasty called the Aviz, and he wished to raise Portugal to the rank of a major European power.28 Thus he intervened in the Hundred Years War by signing a perpetual peace treaty with England;* threw open his capital, Lisbon, to Italian banking houses and Flemish merchants, promoting Portugal as a naval stopping point between the ports of Flanders and England and those of the Mediterranean; and groomed his family to participate in his great project.29 His children were given first-rate educations,

Territorial expansion was deeply embedded in Portuguese history and identity. The very fact of the kingdom’s existence was down to the efforts of generations of crusaders, who fought in the Reconquista to carve out their long, thin state along the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, grinding along year after year, in their wars against the Almoravids, Almohads, and taifa kings of al-Andalus. This was a long, hard process. Lisbon was taken from Islamic hands during the Second Crusade in 1147. It took another hundred years to establish the kingdom proper and extend its borders all the way down to the Algarve.

Ceuta was ruled by sultan of Morocco, but it held enormous economic allure to the Portuguese, not least because it was a coastal terminus for the camel caravans that crisscrossed northern Africa, bringing tons of gold every year across the Sahara from mines in the region known as west Sudan.30 It was also a Muslim-held city, which chimed well with Portugal’s history of expansion into land seized from infidels.

It was no secret that beyond the Sahara lay fabulous natural resources: a well-known world atlas produced on Majorca in 1375 had shown the heartlands of Africa populated by black kings bedecked in gold, and elegant slave-drivers on camelback, wearing long, luxurious robes. The main problem was access, which relied heavily on Islamic intermediaries. The goal for the Portuguese was to cut out the Saharan camel trains, and open sea routes that could bring all the wealth of west Africa directly to the Mediterranean.

Ship technology was improving: the fifteenth century

the same time, improved understanding of Atlantic wind patterns meant navigators knew how to get home from journeys to or beyond the equator: having headed south, one could return north by sailing out into the Atlantic, then circling back in toward Iberia, rather than trying to struggle along the coast.

The first expeditions under Henry’s auspices departed soon after the battle of Ceuta, and landed, somewhat accidentally, in the Madeiran archipelago, which Henry ordered to be claimed for Portugal. Not long afterward, in the late 1420s and early 1430s, the Azores islands were also colonized. In the 1450s a Venetian explorer and slave trader called Alvise Cadamosto laid claim to the Cape Verde Islands during an expedition along the Guinea coast.

them under Henry’s sponsorship, were also docking on the African mainland, advancing a little farther south every sailing season so that by mid-century the Gulf of Guinea (the coastlines of modern-day Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin) was in reach. The business relationships the Portuguese struck with traders in west Africa’s coastal cities were often fruitful, although many of them would strike us today as morally abhorrent. One of Africa’s longest-standing trades was in enslaved people, and the Portuguese had few qualms about joining in.

From the 1440s the sight of Africans being unloaded as cargo at the Portuguese port of Lagos (on the coast of the Algarve) became a familiar and doleful one.

To Henry, new lands were for profit. Unbelievers were for baptism. And the ends justified the means. Henry’s mind was steeped in the traditions of crusading and conquest, neither of which were pursuits for the fainthearted. He was the grand master of the Order of Christ, a reconstituted Portuguese chapter of the Knights Templar, and he involved this order extensively in colonizing Portugal’s new territories.

In 1452 and 1456 the Portuguese received papal license to “invade, conquer, fight [and] subjugate the Saracens and pagans, and other infidels and other enemies of Christ,” to conquer their lands and “to lead their persons in perpetual servitude.”36 Conflating the heightened anti-Islamic mood of the mid-fifteenth century with the spirit of adventure and conquest over unbelievers far away from the holy lands did not demand a huge leap of imagination. But it gave valuable godly sanction to a military-economic project of the sort that had not been seen since the creation of the crusader states in Palestine and Syria in the twelfth century.

Christopher Columbus On the second day of January 1492 a solemn ceremony took place in southern Spain. At the magnificent palace of the Alhambra, perched amid the hills of Granada, the last Islamic ruler of mainland Spain formally quit his sultanate and his home.

Over the centuries the Reconquista wars had whittled away at what little remained of Muslim al-Andalus, and in 1469 Christian Spain had been effectively united in a single superkingdom, when King Ferdinand II of Aragon married Queen Isabella I of Castile.

Watching events in Granada that day was a Genoese adventurer called Cristoforo Colombo—or, as he is usually known today, Christopher Columbus.39 He had been in and around the Iberian Peninsula for nearly twenty years, having moved to Lisbon in the 1470s. In that time Columbus had turned himself into a regular Atlantic sea dog, sailing back and forth to the new Portuguese island outposts in the Azores and Madeira, and venturing farther still—far along the Guinea coast and (so he claimed) up into the North Atlantic as far as Iceland.

Columbus lapped it up. And from his reading, combined with his personal experiences at sea, he came to two broad conclusions. The first was that there was abundant wealth across the Atlantic. If, as Ptolemy argued, the earth was a sphere, then a journey Columbus (incorrectly) reckoned at less than three thousand miles ought to bring a man to the Far East, whose dizzying riches Marco Polo and Mandeville had described at length. Columbus’s second belief was that by visiting the east he could revive the project of converting a khan or some other great eastern king to Christianity, which he maintained was still the best strategy for combating the “idolatry” and “doctrines of perdition” practiced by Muslims around the Mediterranean.41

As time went by, Columbus grew, like many a zealot in history, increasingly obsessive about his grand scheme. All he needed was someone to back him. And that was where Ferdinand and Isabella—vanquishers of Muslim sultans, joint governors of the largest realm on the Iberian Peninsula, now styling themselves as the “Catholic Monarchs”—came in.

According to this, on August 3, Columbus set out “half an hour before sunrise” from Palos, on the southern coast of Spain, taking his three caravels, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, to the Canary Islands. Here locals assured him that his journey would probably be a short one, because every day at sunset “they saw land to the westward.”42 If true, this would have implied that the Americas were between three and twenty miles away. Plainly, they were not.

Having made repairs to his ships and awaited a good wind, Columbus struck out west from the Canaries on Saturday, September 8.

But land never seemed to come,

They spent, in all, thirty-three days at sea. Only on October 11, with the crew on the brink of mutiny, did a sailor called Rodrigo sight land—a coral island in the Bahamas that they named San Salvador. “All breathed again and were rejoiced,” wrote Columbus. That night they anchored offshore, and the next morning Columbus and a small group of his crew went to land in an armed boat, with a banner bearing Ferdinand and Isabella’s initials and a crusader-style cross.43

They were met on the shore by a very excited and very naked group of men and women, whom Columbus presented with “red caps and glass beads . . . also many other trifles.” The delighted islanders swapped these for “parrots and balls of cotton thread and spears. . . . They very willingly traded everything they had.”44 It was a happy encounter: “They became marvellously friendly to us,” wrote Columbus.45

The sight of these people filled Columbus with a mixture of emotions. Certainly they were good-looking and young, with light brown skin, “very straight legs and no bellies, but well-formed bodies.” Yet they seemed almost comically primitive—going about in nothing more than body paint, paddling long canoes carved from tree trunks, showing comp...

Columbus had come in search of a superior culture, with a court to rival the grand khan’s. Instead, he was being treated like...

One thought, however, occurred to him immediately. Although these islanders were plainly not the trading partners with whom the Catholic Monarchs might found a new world order, “they should be good servants and very intelligent . . . and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for they appeared to me to have no religion.” He decided to take si...

For the next few weeks Columbus and his crew explored nearby islands. Still hoping he might be somewhere a lot farther east than he actually was— possibly on an outlying island of the Japanese archipelago—Columbus was looking for the mainland of “Cathay.”

instead were a number of other small Caribbean islands, and then, in late October and early November, the much larger landmasses of Cuba and Haiti (which he called Hispaniola).

the exotic things that lay everywhere: pearls and gold, herbs and spices, new root vegetables, sweet and juicy fruits, masses of cotton, and “certain perfumed he...

But they were also appalled at some of the local customs. Columbus’s son Ferdinand later wrote that “the Indians* are accustomed to eating unclean things, such as large, fat spiders and white worms that breed among decayed wood. . . . T...

Columbus that his patrons “must be very great princes, since [they] had sent me fearlessly from so far away in the sky.”49

After years of struggle, Columbus’s belief that something wonderful lay across the Atlantic had been vindicated. Ferdinand’s chaplain and court historian, Peter Martyr, was unsure what to make of these discoveries, writing “one must speak of a new world, so distant is it and devoid of civilization and religion.”52 But Columbus was sure that all good Christians owed him thanks “for the great triumph which they will have, by the conversion of so many peoples to our holy faith and for the temporal benefits which will follow, not only for Spain, but all Christendom.”53 It was the victory he had dreamed about for so long.

He misled his crew about his intentions and the progress of their expedition. He claimed credit for having been the first to spot land in the Bahamas, when he had done no such thing. He took advantage of the good nature of people he met in the new lands; any passing anthropological interest he had in them was second always to his cynical eye for ways in which he and future Spanish expeditions might exploit their resources and labor. And when he came back to Spain, he exaggerated his achievements and the potential of his discoveries, claiming Hispaniola was bigger than the entire Iberian Peninsula, already replete with beautiful harbors and rich gold mines (it was not), and that Cuba was “larger than England and Scotland put together.”54

Given the comparative standards of medieval technology, contact between the Americas and Europe was only ever going to come from one direction. And although it is certain that if Columbus had not made his voyage, someone else would have done so soon afterward, the fact remains it was he who had the nerve, the plan, and the sheer good fortune to go forth and prosper.

History does not have to be made by nice people; in fact our tour of the Middle Ages to this point probably demonstrates that it very rarely is.

After reappearing Spain in 1493, Columbus did not waste much time in planning his next trips west. There would be three in all.

1498–1500 he ventured farther south, stopping at Trinidad and alighting briefly on the South American mainland at what is now Venezuela. And on his final adventure, in 1502–4, he explored the coastline of Central America (modern Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica).