Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

There were major European plague outbreaks in 1361 and 1369, during the 1370s and again in the 1390s. (The last of these attacks seemed to strike particularly hard at boys and young men.) These secondary waves were not as severe as the first, but they caused widespread misery and mortality all the same, and prevented any rebound in population numbers, which remained depressed until the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. So the Black Death was by no means a one-off event, even in simple epidemiological terms. It was a long, drawn-out pandemic that killed around half the people in Europe and comparable numbers elsewhere, cast a shadow over the popular imagination for decades, and brought about a radical reshaping of western demography, political and social structures, attitudes, and ideas.

The first economic consequence of the pandemic was to wreak havoc on prices and wages. When Europe’s population peaked at the start of the century, there had been abundant workers, many of them bonded to the land in the legally unfree status of serfdom. However, the effect of losing around one in every two people, virtually at a stroke, stood the world on its head and put labor suddenly at a premium. The chronicler Henry Knighton recorded that in 1349 “crops perished in the fields for lack of harvesters”; even where willing workers could be found, the cost to landowners of bringing in their crops rocketed.24 The sudden population decline also caused a collapse in the price of land rents. In a situation so severe that some villages were wiped out and abandoned forever, land was suddenly dirt cheap, and landlords were scrambling for tenants.

Popular rebellions happened throughout the Middle Ages. It would have been strange if they did not. The vast majority of medieval human beings were rural peasants, supplemented after the millennium by significant numbers of urban poor.28 The lot of these people usually hovered somewhere just above terrible, and there were inevitably moments during the Middle Ages when groups of the dispossessed perceived this to be the fault of their leaders rather than just the way of the world. As a result, from time to time ordinary folk banded together to express their anger and try to effect change.

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.

For centuries, people have looked back at the Renaissance and seen it as an epochal cultural turn that marks the boundaries between the Middle Ages and modernity. 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” on our journey to this point (see chapter 11). So 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.

To live and work in the vibrant, handsomely funded world of the Renaissance meant accepting its macabre realities and the ubiquity of bloodshed, crime, and war. So it was no coincidence that Leonardo positioned himself to Ludovico Sforza as a man who could do more than merely paint like an angel. He knew that to be truly great required a measure of pragmatism—being able to turn one’s ingenuity to all manner of ends, including, if necessary, diabolical ones.

There was a cold, pragmatic streak to Leonardo’s genius, which sat strangely at odds with his gentler, humanistic interests.41 A patron, it seemed, was a patron. Serving Borgia allowed Leonardo to develop his skills in cartography, bridge building, and fortification design. That was apparently enough for him to overlook any amount of moral squalor.

Leonardo da Vinci was the ultimate Renaissance man—so much so that it is often hard for us to conceive of him as a product of the Middle Ages. Yet he was born in the same year as King Richard III of England; he died several decades before the Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the sun, and not the earth, might sit at the center of the heavens.* Many of Leonardo’s projects—from helicopters to diving bells—were so advanced that they were realized not in his time but in ours. He is an essentially liminal character—one who belongs to both our worlds, and who has the power to connect us emotionally as well as intellectually to the Middle Ages.

The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 shocked Christian Europe in much the same way as Jerusalem’s capture by Saladin had done in 1187. This was not surprising. For thousands of Italian merchants and adventurous pilgrims, Constantinople was a vital and glorious gateway to the eastern half of the world. For millions more, Constantinople was an idea. It represented the enduring presence of the Roman Empire on earth and a historical continuity stretching back to time out of mind. For more than a millennium it had been a pillar of the Christian world, which seemed to hold Turks and the armies of Islam at arm’s length.

From the fifteenth century until the seventeenth, the Turk was the bogeyman at the end of Christian Europe’s bed.

As a result, fifteenth-century European merchant adventurers, in alliance with ambitious new monarchies, particularly in Spain and Portugal, started to consider branching out into other avenues of trade, and devising schemes by which they might source help for the fight back against the perfidious Turk. Many of them began to look west, across the Atlantic Ocean.

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. The immorality of the trade troubled at least some observers: in 1444 the chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara recorded his mixed feelings when he watched caravels in Lagos disembarking 235 African men, women, and children, who were cruelly divided up, with families broken and mothers separated from their children, each one taken off for a life of involuntary servitude, hundreds of miles from their homelands.

Columbus was an avid reader, and he had studied works by historic travelers ranging from the ancient Greek polymath Ptolemy to the thirteenth-century Venetian adventurer Marco Polo (see chapter 10). He had also pored over a colorful fourteenth-century travelogue—partly derivative of other sources and partly imaginary—supposedly by an English knight called Sir John Mandeville. The author claimed to have written this “because it has been a long time since there was a crusading expedition overseas, and because many men long to hear about that land [i.e., the former kingdom of Jerusalem] and various countries nearby.” He described regions from Asia Minor to India and recycled hoary old myths such as the tales of Prester John.

So whatever Columbus’s failings, his flaws, and his prejudices, which are assuredly even more out of step with twenty-first-century pieties than they were with those of his own time, he was—and remains—one of the most important figures in the whole of the Middle Ages. And from the moment he returned from the Caribbean, it was clear he had opened up a new age in human history.

The name second only to that of Columbus in the history of late medieval navigation is that of Vasco da Gama. In 1497 da Gama was in his thirties, and a member of the crusading Order of Santiago. He was therefore favored by King John II, who was the grand master of the order, and gave da Gama his blessing to explore the Indian Ocean as far as he could.

Unlike the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean was a sophisticated and highly developed maritime trading zone; although da Gama’s cannon proved effective defense when they were occasionally required to let them off, gunpowder was old hat, and the Portuguese enjoyed nothing like the technological advantages that had benefited Christopher Columbus.

One hundred and fifty years later, the Portuguese had conquered hundreds of miles of the coastline of India, much of Sri Lanka, swaths of modern Bangladesh and Myanmar, and the tiny peninsula and archipelago of Macau, in southern China. Their ships brought back to Lisbon black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg; in the east they traded cotton cloth and gold or silver bullion.

On the other side of the world, meanwhile, they had also taken control of Brazil, the stopping point on the first stage of the Carreira da India. This was, truly, a world empire, in which Portuguese forts, ports, trading stations, factories, and garrisons extended around the known world like a string of pearls.

Mechanized printing changed western culture in the fifteenth century as fundamentally and profoundly as the creation of the smartphone changed it at the turn of the twenty-first. It led to sweeping developments in literature and literacy, education and popular politics, cartography, history, advertising, propaganda, and bureaucracy.3 Looking back from the seventeenth century, the philosopher-politician Sir Francis Bacon ranked printing alongside gunpowder and the shipman’s compass in having changed “the appearance and state of the whole world.”

First, printers like Gutenberg provided the tools by which the papacy plunged itself headlong into a crisis of ethics and institutional corruption. Then, printers allowed dissent against the established order to spread across Europe at breakneck speed. The result was that, in the space of a few short decades, medieval Europe descended into religious and political turmoil, as a new movement—Protestantism—took root, providing the first serious challenge to Catholicism in one thousand years.

The earliest surviving western document to have been printed with a movable-type press—or at least, the first with an identifiable date on it—is not a Bible or any other sort of book,* but rather a document known as a papal letter of indulgence.

The concept of the indulgence was an old one: it originated around the same time as the crusades in the eleventh century, when remission of sins was first granted in exchange for arduous pilgrimage, and subsequently on a large scale to the armies who marched off to fight Christ’s enemies.10 After this, indulgences took on a life of their own, helped significantly by the invention of purgatory—which developed as a Catholic doctrine between 1160 and 1180. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, indulgences without an obligation to fight Saracens or pagans were sold to willing customers around Europe on an ad hoc basis. And in 1343 Pope Clement VI formalized the system, effectively confirming that indulgences could be bought from approved clerics for cash. Thus was a busy market established, which Hus and many others like him considered a symbol of the intolerable moneygrubbing that characterized the Roman Church.

Given the moneymaking potential of indulgences, it should now be obvious why the advent of mechanized printing in the 1450s seemed like a boon to the church. Tickets to salvation, which previously had to be written out longhand, could now be mass-produced.

Calculating that the market could be grown exponentially if indulgences were available to all souls, wherever they might reside, Sixtus was the first pope to state that indulgences could be bought on behalf of the dead. He slipped this new concept into a papal grant of 1476, which confirmed an existing indulgence for rebuilding the cathedral in the French city of Saintes.

By the end of the fifteenth century, printing houses were handling all sorts of material besides Bibles and indulgence slips. Around the year 1500 there were some twenty-seven thousand books in print across Europe.18 And books were only a part of it. Gutenberg himself printed calendars, which detailed religious festivals, or the best times of the month to administer bloodletting and laxatives.

Within weeks, as we would now put it, Luther went viral. In the last months of 1517 hundreds of copies of his Theses were printed in Germany: some in the original Latin and others in vernacular translation. Within a year Luther’s writings were known to intellectuals and booksellers in England, France, and Italy.

He took aim at a catchphrase popularly associated with Tetzel, a neat ditty that ran, “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

The sack of Rome in 1527 had important consequences, many of which remain with us today. In England it is best known because it derailed King Henry VIII’s plans to annul his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon. Henry’s ministers submitted the request for papal dispensation to divorce while Clement was languishing under effective house arrest in Rome in the autumn of 1527; because Catherine was Charles’s aunt, there was no way the request could be granted. As a result, a bullheaded Henry charged down another, far-more-destructive path: as we have already seen, he withdrew England from the Roman Church, announced his own supremacy in matters of both church and state, and allowed Lutheranism into a realm where previously it had been forbidden. A page was turned in English—and eventually, British and Irish—history, and Henry’s reign still marks the boundary between the medieval and early modern worlds.