Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Yet a generation after Marcellinus wrote these paeans, the western half of the empire was in a state of final collapse: Roman garrisons and political rulers were everywhere abandoning lands they and their forebears had occupied and ruled since the dawn of the millennium.

So what were the defining features of the Roman Empire? First and most striking to outsiders was Rome’s extraordinary and enduring military strength.

The machinery of state relied upon (and to a large degree existed to serve) a professional standing army that numbered around a quarter of a million men at the end of Augustus’s reign, and at its peak in the early third century a.d. could field 450,000 troops across the empire.

Slavery was a fact of life throughout the ancient world. Slaves, or more properly, enslaved people—meaning persons defined as property, forced to work, stripped of their rights, and socially “dead”—could be found in virtually every significant realm of the age. In China, the Qin, Han, and Xin dynasties enforced various forms of slavery; so too did ancient rulers of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and India.

There have been a bare few handful of examples in recorded history of true “slave states,” in which slavery permeated every facet of society, and on which an entire economy and culture was built. Rome was one.*

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. Economically, the entire edifice of Rome and its empire relied upon mass bondage, facilitated by the same long and complex trading networks that supplied the empire with essential commodities and luxury goods.

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

In the 370s, when Rome’s fatal malady set in, the Roman state—monarchy, republic, and empire—had existed for more than a millennium. Yet within little more than one hundred years, by the end of the fifth century a.d., every province west of the Balkans had slipped from Roman control.

After this, a general called Flavius Constantius slowly but steadily brought back a semblance of calm in the west, persuading Athaulf to bring the Visigoths permanently into the Roman fold, and settling them with a homeland in Aquitaine, in southwest Gaul.

The Vandals were unflinchingly severe in persecuting Nicene Christians, but even so, there was nothing intrinsically barbaric in the violence that engulfed north Africa under the Vandals; this was simply the way of the world.

Not long after he became sole ruler of the Huns, Attila switched his focus of attack from the eastern Roman Empire to the west. In a.d. 450 he broke off cordial relations with Valentinian III’s court in Ravenna, crossed the Rhine, and embarked on a rampage around Gaul so shocking that it would live, infamous in popular memory, for more than 1,500 years.

The last of the western Roman emperors is traditionally reckoned to be Romulus Augustus—nicknamed Augustulus, or “little emperor.” A puppet ruler, he was aged around fifteen when, in October 475, he was raised to the throne as an avatar for his father, the general Orestes—who had at one time served as a secretary to none other than Attila.

By the end of the fifth century, Goths of various flavors could be found all over Europe. The Visigoths—the branch who had originally stormed Rome in 410 under the command of Alaric—had energetically established a kingdom with its capital at Toulouse.

In little more than five years of intensive administrative activity Justinian had rewoven the legal fabric of the empire and refashioned legal thought in ways that would still be palpable fifteen centuries later. And he was just getting started.

One reason that the label “the Dark Ages” has proven so hard to untie from the neck of the Middle Ages is that for hundreds of years—between the sixth century and the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the late thirteenth—the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west. This was not simply an unfortunate symptom of creeping cultural dementia. It sprang from the deliberate policies of eastern emperors like Justinian, who made it their business to hound out of their world the self-appointed but unfortunately unchristian guardians of priceless knowledge.

The Hippodrome factions shared with modern European soccer ultras a pompous self-regard, a taste for violence, and a collective fixation on clothes and haircuts.* Very thin-skinned, they could easily be stirred to violence when they felt they had been slighted or ignored.

The stage was set for kings to begin to regard themselves as in direct contact with God: approved and protected by the Almighty and entitled to think of themselves as his deputies on earth. And at the same time, the Church had been granted the right to judge the performance of French kings. The implications of this new pact would be felt long into—and indeed, after—the Middle Ages.

And after a fashion another broad-ranging pact between Roman popes and Frankish kings was thrashed out. The pope would turn to the Franks as his secular defenders and throw his legitimizing influence behind the new Carolingian monarchy—if in return Pippin would incur vast costs and take considerable military risk by riding south over the Alps to deliver the papacy from its enemies. It was a high-stakes deal on both sides. But in retrospect it has come to represent a moment of seminal importance in western history: the moment at which the bishops of Rome no longer looked east to Constantinople for support, but to the barbarian-descended peoples of the west.

Making manuscripts was as important in Aachen as reading them, and during the early ninth century the school’s scribes began a massive program of knowledge preservation, creating a super-archive of information passed down from the classical world. During the ninth century perhaps one hundred thousand manuscripts were produced there, preserving what today represent the earliest surviving copies of texts by writers and thinkers ranging from Cicero and Julius Caesar to Boethius.

Over the centuries that followed, the northerners remained an acknowledged presence on the edge of the known world. In the days of Augustus, the Roman military scouted Jutland. In a.d. 515, a Danish ruler called Chochilaicus raided Frankish territory in the Low Countries.

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 time become known as the German, or Holy Roman, Empire. (Middle Francia, sometimes known as Lotharingia, was gradually squeezed out of existence.)

the landowning warrior classes of Europe could effectively offset their sins by paying for monks to beg forgiveness their behalf in the form of masses.* The result was that from the ninth century onward, founding, endowing, or donating to monasteries became a popular pastime for rich men and women. And like all rich-people pastimes throughout history, it quickly became the object of fashion, competition, and one-upmanship. Monasteries that could demonstrate the finest standards of observance, grandest churches and libraries, largest and most devout communities, and best international reputations were highly prized.

Compostela and Cluny III By the high Middle Ages,* monasteries had taken on most of what we now think of as the basic functions of the liberal welfare state. They were centers of literacy, education, hospitality, medical treatment, tourist information, elderly social care, and spiritual counseling—in addition to their main role as a retreat for the godly. As a result they had wandered a long way from their origins as places of impoverished retreat, and now had close and lucrative links with the outside world.

A medieval handbook for pilgrims planning to travel this road was written in the twelfth century. It gave much practical advice to the intrepid traveler, noting spots along the way where the wine was good and the local people honorable. But it also warned of the perils of the trip: giant wasps and horseflies around Bordeaux, the greed and drunkenness of Gascons, the risks of being swindled or even deliberately drowned by rogue ferrymen at river crossings, and the absolute barbarousness of the Navarrese, who spoke like barking dogs and copulated with mules and mares during the night.34 The

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.

From the tenth century, the status and importance of knights rocketed across the medieval west. Within a couple of generations, Frankish-style heavy cavalry evolved to become preeminent on battlefields from the British Isles to Egypt and the Middle East. As they did so, the social cachet of being able to fight in the saddle also soared. By 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.

From the knight’s point of view, at least, the root cause of change was the cost of doing business. Fighting in the saddle was beastly expensive. At the turn of the first millennium, a single, fully equipped mounted warrior would need at least three horses, mail armor, a helmet, weapons including lances, a sword, an ax or mace, dagger, underclothing, several tents and flags, and one or more assistants who needed to be supplied with grooming tools, cooking utensils, food, and drink. This was no small outlay. To supply and sustain a single knight for one year cost approximately as much as sustaining ten peasant families for the same period.17 It was an astronomically expensive career, and one that could only be contemplated by those who were born rich or else could be made so.

One way for a knight to sustain himself was to chance his arm: battle offered the opportunity to seize plunder, equipment, and prisoners for ransom. But this was a precarious way to fund a career. A more reliable route was to find a patron and eventually become a landowner. Thus, from around the ninth century onward, across the west, men who fought on horseback were awarded hundreds of acres of farmable land, which they held in exchange for making themselves available to fight for the person—a higher lord or king—who had granted it to them.

Like modern superhero movie franchises, the chansons de geste spawned sequels, prequels, “remakes,” and character-led spin-offs as successive poets and scribes refashioned the stories for their times. And as with superhero franchises, there were a number of dominant “worlds,” with their own casts of characters. Those like the songs of Roland and William, which were set in the time of Charlemagne, were described from the fourteenth century onward as being concerned with the Matter of France. Others, which took as their setting the long-ago events of the Trojan War, the foundation of Rome, and other classical topics, were said to deal with the Matter of Rome: they treated heroes like Theseus, Achilles, or Alexander the Great as off-the-shelf medieval knights.* The third great “world,” which is today arguably the most famous and enduring of all, was the world of the romances, set in the court of the legendary King Arthur and concerned with the Matter of Britain.

The Church attempted on numerous occasions to ban tournaments, and from time to time individual rulers would outlaw them as a menace to public order. But for the most part these attempts were futile. Like twenty-first-century raves, tournaments were part of an irrepressible culture that celebrated and indulged the excitable impulses of youth.

From the mid-thirteenth century onward, the crusader states of the east entered a terminal decline. Geopolitics in Syria and Palestine were changing radically, in part thanks to disruptions caused by the rise of the Mongols. In 1244 the city of Jerusalem was invaded and sacked by the Turks of Khwarazm, who had been displaced and forced out of central Asia by the Mongol advance. Then from the 1260s, a new ruling dynasty in Egypt—a Turkish slave-soldier caste known as the Mamluks—began to chip away at the remaining coastal redoubts and fortresses of the kingdom of Jerusalem, county of Tripoli, and principality of Antioch.

Crusading to the east was dying, and its institutions were following suit. In the early fourteenth century the Knights Templar were destroyed in a cynical and systematic attack led by the French government of Philip IV “the Fair” (see chapter 11), whose ministers accused Templar leaders of blasphemy, sexual deviance, and gross misconduct.

Crusading—a bastard hybrid of religion and violence, adopted as a vehicle for papal ambition but eventually allowed to run as it pleased, where it pleased, and against whom it pleased, was one of the Middle Ages’ most successful and enduringly poisonous ideas. Its survival is a sign of both its genius and of the readiness of people both then and now to throw themselves into conflict in the name of a higher cause.

The Mongols pioneered the administrative tools of a global empire: a world-class postal system, universal law code, rationalized and decimalized military reform, and an extremely harsh but efficient approach to metropolitan planning. Their imperial systems set a gold standard that had not been seen on such scale since Rome’s demise and arguably would not be seen again until the nineteenth century. More than any empire since pre-Christian Romans, they were largely relaxed about religious dogma (although Genghis Khan forbade Islamic ritual halal slaughter of animals), relatively flexible about permitting local customs under the umbrella of Mongol rule, and respectful of religious leaders without preferring one sect or faith to another. As a result of these achievements and more, historians have credited the Mongol khans with everything from revolutionizing medieval banking to forging the worldview of American founding fathers. In their own day they inspired both envious admiration and sheer, slack-jawed terror.

So, then, within the space of less than two centuries, the Mongols had rampaged from the eastern steppe to supremacy over the whole Eurasian world, before imploding, briefly reuniting, and then disintegrating again. Theirs was a strange story indeed, and perhaps the bloodiest one of all the Middle Ages. Mongol methods of conquest, pioneered and perfected by Genghis Khan, and imitated ably by Temür, prefigured the terror autocracies of the twentieth century, in which millions of civilians could be thoughtlessly murdered to service the demented personal ambitions of charismatic rulers, and the goal of spreading an ideology as far around the globe as it would go. Yet alongside their gross bloodlust and a cruelty that cannot be written off with mere historical relativism, the Mongols also changed the world profoundly—for better and for worse.

Dreadful as were the means of the Mongols, the changes they wrought were astonishing and epoch shifting. Indeed, this transformation of trade is almost certainly the Mongols’ greatest significance to the story we are telling in this book. So it is to that part of their legacy that we will now turn, as we discover how intrepid merchants, scholars, and explorers from east and west flourished in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests, exchanging ideas, goods, and wealth, and remodeling the western world and western minds as they did so.

During Marco’s lifetime and the century after it, the western world underwent sweeping economic changes, with increasingly sophisticated ways of trading and financing business invented, and new markets opened up. The name historians have given to the changes that took place in this age is the Commercial Revolution, and this is a deservedly grand term. What took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was as economically significant as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and Digital Revolution through which we are presently living.

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.

The Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvaini wrote of the Mongol empire that fear of the khans made the roads so safe that “a woman with a golden vessel on her head might walk alone [across it] without fear or dread.”29 The Italians did not carry gold vessels on their heads, but they took full advantage of conditions nonetheless.

The notion of keeping business accounts was not original to the Middle Ages: it dated back at least to the Roman republic. But double-entry bookkeeping—in which assets and liabilities were systematically listed in opposing columns and balanced out to describe numerically the state of the company—became a western business norm only in the fourteenth century when it was adopted by Italian merchants and applied across their businesses, giving them the competitive advantage of understanding their own trading performance and potential to an exact standard. Bookkeeping, the notion of corporate risk, and sedentary business were the rocks on which companies like the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Frescobaldi were built. They remain core components of capitalism today.

The ambitions of the merchants who lived and worked there ensured that over the years Lübeck became the most influential of a cluster of similar city-states around the Baltic and beyond, including Danzig, Riga, Bergen, Hamburg, Bremen, and even Cologne. By the mid-fourteenth century these had banded together in a loose commercial partnership known as the Hanseatic League.

It was no surprise that a merchant should feature in Chaucer’s riotous compendium, for the author had lifelong experience of business. His father was a vintner, or wine merchant, and traveled widely in the course of his trades. As a boy Chaucer was raised in Vintry Ward, then London’s most cosmopolitan district, home to Germans, French, Italians, and Flemings, many of them in London for the sole purpose of doing business, and a riverside ward in which merchant ships loaded down with wares from all over the world docked constantly throughout the year.45 As an adult Chaucer served as a customs official for the English crown, and he lived for more than a decade in apartments above the Aldgate, one of the main passages in and out of London’s walls and a busy portal for traders approaching the city from the east.

The changes wrought to medieval society and economy during the commercial revolution laid the foundations for the golden age of western capitalism that followed many centuries later. Everyone today whose life is enhanced by Chinese exports, banking credit, travel insurance, and investment in stocks and shares owes something to the Middle Ages. We are standing on the shoulders of giants.

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. The Carolingian manuscript machine at Aachen, cathedral schools dotted across France, England, and Germany, and monastic libraries stocked chiefly with texts by Christian writers were all well and good. 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.

All of these were great thinkers in their own right. But as the Middle Ages wore on, another sort of scholar came to prominence: not the freelance monk or nun or the wandering merchant, but the master—who was part of a community dedicated only to the business of study, debate, research, and teaching at one of the great universities that were established across the west between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

Aquinas’s brothers attempted to test his Dominican credentials by hiring prostitutes to try to tempt him into sin.27 But for Aquinas, the scent of books was infinitely more alluring than the perfume of hookers’ knickers.

Like their modern successors, medieval universities could be progressive and viciously censorious, often at the same time.

In 1277, Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, issued an official decree threatening to excommunicate anyone at the city’s university who held or taught one of 219 erroneous points of view.

The Black Death, as the plague pandemic that scythed through Asia, Europe, North Africa, and some regions of sub-Saharan Africa from the 1340s is known, began in a similar place to the rinderpest pandemic: with the Mongols.8 As we have already seen, plague was caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis (or Y. pestis), which jumped to humans from steppe rodents such as rats and marmots via fleabites (see chapter 3). Eight hundred years earlier the Justinianic pandemic had ripped around sixth-century Byzantium, killing millions of people. What emerged in the fourteenth century was worse: a new, hyper-infectious mutation of the same illness, which could apparently spread between rats, cats, dogs, birds, and people with uncommon ease. Once in a human host, it caused similar, ghastly symptoms to the sixth-century pestilence: fever; swellings known as “buboes” around the groin, armpits, and neck; internal bleeding; uncontrollable vomiting; and death within a few days.9 It also developed a pneumonic strain that could be passed from human to human on the breath.

The Black Death’s first wave lasted from 1347 until 1351. During that time, in the worst affected countries, up to 60 percent of the local population died. This was a staggering mortality rate, which reeling chroniclers understandably exaggerated even further: some suggested that by the end of the pandemic, just one in ten people was left alive. And the Black Death did not just carry off the poor.