Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

An enslaved person imported from Gaul, brought across the British Sea (Oceanus Britannicus—today the English Channel), and converted into cash on the markets of London (Londinium) might in those days cost six hundred denarii—assuming he or she were fit, young, and either hardworking or good-looking. This was no small price, around twice an ordinary soldier’s annual wages.

Marcellinus could still maintain that “Rome is accepted in every region of the world as mistress and queen. . . . Everywhere the authority of its senators is paid the respect due to their grey hairs, and the name of the Roman people is an object of reverence and awe.”

the legacy of Rome remains with us even to this day, stamped into language, landscape, law, and culture. And if Rome still speaks to us in the twenty-first century, its voice rang even louder during the Middle Ages—the period that this book aims to chronicle and explore.

Between roughly the years 200 b.c. and a.d. 150—when Rome flourished as republic and empire—a set of pleasant and profitable climate conditions settled upon the west. For nearly four centuries, there were no massive volcanic eruptions of the sort that from time to time depress temperatures across the globe; during the same age solar activity was high and stable.11 As a result, western Europe and the broader Mediterranean fringe enjoyed a cycle of unusually warm and hospitable decades, which also happened to be very wet.12 Plants and animals flourished: elephants roamed forests in the Atlas mountains, while grapevines and olive groves could be grown farther north than at any time in living memory.

Roman Climate Optimum (RCO) or Roman Warm Period.

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.

The cost of maintaining this force, dispersed across millions of square miles from the North Sea to the Caspian Sea, gobbled between 2 and 4 percent of the empire’s entire GDP every year; well over half the state budget was spent on defense.

Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.

The underpinning fact of Roman military hegemony was the empire’s ability to absorb defeat, escalate conflict, and exact pitiless revenge; Rome lost many battles but precious few wars.

Yet overwhelming military power and reach alone did not distinguish Rome from other broadly contemporaneous superpowers of the classical world. In the fourth century b.c. Alexander the Great’s Macedonian empire had extended from the Ionian Islands of the central Mediterranean to the Himalayas. The various Persian empires of antiquity covered similar territory. Around a.d. 100 the Chinese Eastern Han ruled over 2.5 million square miles and 60 million people. What made Rome so dominant in the Mediterranean world and beyond was the fact that overwhelming armed force developed in tune with a sophisticated civic machinery: a mesh of state-of-the-art social, cultural, and legal systems that Romans considered to be virtuous in and of themselves.

Before the Senate in a.d. 48, Claudius was well prepared. To the suspicions leveled against the Gauls’ loyalty he said: “If anyone concentrates on the fact that the Gauls resisted the divine Julius [Caesar] in war for ten years, he should consider that they have also been loyal and trustworthy for a hundred years, and had this loyalty tried to the utmost when we were in danger.” To the more general objections about non-Italians being classed as Roman, he directed his listeners to the examples of the ancient Greeks. “What was the ruin of Sparta and Athens but this, that mighty as they were in war, they spurned from them as aliens those whom they had conquered?” Either convinced or browbeaten by their impassioned emperor, the senators eventually agreed. From that point on, Gauls could not only attain Roman citizenship but also aspire to the highest political office in the empire.

Roman society was obsessed with rank and order, and the small distinctions between the upper-class divisions of senators (senatores) and equestrians (equites), the middling ranks of the plebeians, and the landless poor known as proletarii were taken very seriously.

Rome was not by any means unique in fostering this concept of legal and social privilege—there were citizens in ancient Greece, Carthage, and numerous other Mediterranean states of the era. But Rome was unique in the way that it developed and extended the concept of citizenship over its long history to help sustain its own imperial dominion.

More than a century before Caracalla was born, Rome was ruled for ten years by Vespasian, founder of the Flavian dynasty. Vespasian came to power in a.d. 69 as the victor of a brief, nasty civil war, during which four men ruled in a single year;* but before he was an emperor, he had enjoyed a short career in north Africa during which he was known as a “mule driver,” a euphemism for a slave trader.

God told the Israelites, asking them only to refrain from enslaving one another.27 Yet Rome was different. 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.

Another contrasting accessory is the so-called Zoninus collar, dating to the fourth or fifth century a.d., and today displayed at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome. Roughly wrought from iron, it dangled a large—presumably irritating and painful—pendant, of the sort of that people today use to identify lost dogs. The inscription informed any stranger who encountered the wearer on his or her own that this person was a runaway. It promised a reward of one gold coin (solidus) for their return.

As Rome’s relentless expansion continued into the imperial age, so too were Gauls, Britons, Germanic tribespeople, and others sucked into the slave system. Slave piracy was a bane across Europe and the wider Mediterranean. The first-century b.c. Greek historian and philosopher Strabo described slaver brigands terrorizing the lands around Armenia and Syria, rounding up civilians and shipping them off for sale. “[This] proved most profitable,” he wrote, “for not only were they easily captured, but the market, which was large and rich in property, was not extremely far away.”

John Chrysostom, a Christian preacher of the late third century a.d., sketched out this hierarchy for his audience. Even in a poor man’s house, he said, “the man rules his wife, the wife rules the slaves, the slaves rule their own wives, and again the men and women rule the children.”

the classical Latin of the great Roman poets, philosophers, and historians was of no more use to ordinary day-to-day speakers than the syntax and vocabulary of Shakespeare’s sonnets would have been to an innkeeper or goatherd in Elizabethan England.

In the west, Latin was adopted, adapted, and interbred with local tongues across the empire—a process that produced what would eventually become the great Romance languages of the second millennium a.d.

there was little indication during his lifetime in the first century a.d. that his enthusiastic wanderings and writings would eventually plant Christ’s name in the hearts of literally billions of people during the next two thousand years of world history. In a.d. 112, Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor Trajan to describe a legal investigation he had undertaken in Bithynia (modern Turkey) following complaints against local Christians. Having tortured a number of them, including young girls, Pliny wrote, he had only really been able to establish that they followed a “bad . . . and extravagant superstition” that “is spread like a contagion.”

In the autumn of a.d. 312, as Constantine was preparing to fight his rival emperor Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge over the river Tiber, he looked to the heavens and saw a blazing cross above the sun, accompanied by the Greek words Εν Τούτω̣ Νίκα (In this sign, conquer). He took this to be a message from the god of the Christians, clearly a god who at that moment appeared to be more interested in battles and politics than in his son Jesus Christ’s program of charity, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

Human beings have been superstitious in all ages, and we are especially good at adducing portents when we have the benefit of hindsight. Hence the opinion of the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who looked back on the end of the fourth century into which he was born and reflected that this was a time when fortune’s wheel, “which is perpetually alternating prosperity and adversity,” was turning fast.

the Huns were what we would today call climate migrants or even refugees. But in the fourth century they did not come to the west to solicit sympathy. Rather, they arrived on horseback, carrying composite reflex bows that were unusually large and powerful and could shoot arrows accurately to an exceptional range of 150 meters, piercing armor at 100 meters. Such weapons were beyond the craftsmanship of any contemporary nomadic people, and the Huns’ expertise in mounted archery earned them a reputation for brutality and slaughter that they enthusiastically played up.

Ammianus Marcellinus considered the Huns a scourge of the gods; their appearance in the west was, in his telling, simply a manifestation of “the wrath of Mars.”

Ammianus Marcellinus said only that they were “consumed by a savage passion to pillage the property of others.”

there is one source that can give us a clue about what drove the Huns from their home on the Asian steppe and turned them toward the west. It is not a chronicler or an itinerant Silk Road merchant, but the rugged, spiny Chinese mountain tree known as the Qilian juniper or Przewalski’s juniper ( Juniperus przewalski).

In this case, the Qilian juniper tells us about the amount of rain that fell in the east during the fourth century a.d.10 According to tree ring data provided by Qilian juniper samples from Qinghai province on the Tibetan Plateau, it seems that between a.d. 350 and 370, eastern Asia suffered a “megadrought”—which remains the worst drought recorded in the last two thousand years.

In a.d. 370 various bands of Huns began to cross the Volga, which empties into the Caspian Sea on the border between modern Russia and Kazakhstan. This in itself was not an immediate threat to Rome. When Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon in 49 b.c. he was about 350 kilometers away from the imperial capital; the Huns crossing the Volga were approximately ten times farther away from central Italy, and more than 2,000 kilometers from the eastern capital in Constantinople. It would be decades before they asserted themselves directly as a first-rank power in the Roman world.

In 376 Gothic envoys found Valens in Antioch and formally requested admission for their people. The emperor pondered for a while and then said he would allow some of the Goths to cross the Danube, after which they could settle their families in Thrace (modern Bulgaria and eastern Greece), so long as they sent their menfolk to join the military. Orders went to the frontier granting passage across the water to the Gothic tribe known as the Thervingi; but a rival tribe, the Greuthungi, were to be kept out.

According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the Roman officials in charge of the Danube crossings—named Lupicinus and Maximus—took advantage of starving migrant Thervingian families by forcing them to sell their children into slavery in return for parcels of dog flesh.

“huge clubs hardened in the fire” and “plunged their daggers in the breasts of those who put up a stout resistance. . . . The whole field was strewn with corpses. . . . A number had fallen by sling-shot or had been transfixed by shafts tipped with metal. In some cases the head had been split in two by a sword-stroke through crown and forehead, and hung down on both shoulders, a most gruesome sight.”

Valens was conflicted about asking for the help of his much younger and more successful co-emperor. Both his pride and his advisers urged him to get the job done unaided. So in the end Valens did not wait for Gratian to arrive. Having kept his army in camp throughout much of the summer, in early August he received word that large numbers of Goths were assembling near Adrianople (now Edirne, in Turkey), under a commander called Fritigern. Scouts estimated that they had around ten thousand troops. Valens decided to attack them on his own.

According to a letter by the biblical scholar and Church father Saint Jerome, violent outsiders plundered the city of Mainz, massacring thousands of churchgoers in the process. They besieged and reduced Worms, and ran riot in Reims, Amiens, Arras, Thérouanne, Tournai, Speyer, Strasbourg, Lyon, and Narbonne. “Those which the sword spares without, famine ravages within,” wrote Saint Jerome.

The Christian poet Orientius adopted much the same tone. “All Gaul burned as a single funeral pyre.”

Alaric asked the emperor to allow his Visigoths to settle in territory roughly comprising modern Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia. He also asked for high Roman military office—as a successor to Stilicho himself. He proposed “friendship and alliance between him and the Romans, against everyone who took up arms and was roused to war against the emperor.”

The Visigoths’ sack of a.d. 410 was no annihilation; the attachment of Alaric and many of his followers to the Christian faith ensured that. But it was definitely an enthusiastic looting spree. Having entered Rome through the Salarian Gate, the Goths toured Rome’s shrines, monuments, public buildings, and private houses, stripping them of valuables but leaving most structures standing and most people unmolested. Ordinary civilians were allowed to take refuge in the large basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul, which were designated places of Christian sanctuary. Visigoths ran riot in the Forum, burned the Senate house, and ruined several large mansions, but otherwise the majority of Rome’s famous landmarks were left intact. Some high-value items, including a two-thousand-pound silver tabernacle, were stolen, and wealthy citizens were held up with menaces.

Alaric’s Goths struck at the heart of the Roman Empire, leaving scars that only hardened and deepened as the years went by.

To get to Damascus he had dragged his brigade on a hellish six-day march through the arid Syrian desert. Their only means of transporting enough water for this march had been to force around twenty fat, old she-camels to drink massive volumes of water, binding the beasts’ mouths to prevent their chewing their cud, and then killing several of them daily to retrieve the water from their stomachs.3 Now, as Khalid stood outside Damascus, he was setting his arm against his most dangerous foe so far.

The caliphate established by the Arab conquests was more than just a new political federation. It was specifically and explicitly a faith empire—more so than the Roman Empire had ever been, even after Constantine’s conversion and Justinian’s reforms; even after a promulgation late in Heraclius’s reign that all Jews in Byzantium were to be forcibly converted to Christianity.

This preference for tousled locks had earned the Merovingians the name reges criniti (“long-haired kings”), which was more than just a trademark or an idle nickname. Hair was an essential symbol of their power. Like Samson in the Old Testament, if a Merovingian was given a crew cut, he was deemed to be shorn of all power. So in 751 Childeric was not merely being restyled. He was ceremonially deposed.

According to one chronicler, Pippin was “chosen king by all the Franks, consecrated by the bishops and received the homage of the great men.”2 This writer recorded his judgment in the royal Frankish annals, which were sponsored by Pippin and his descendants and therefore painted them in the softest and most flattering light. Be that as it may, the year 751 still marked a formative time in European history, as Francia entered the Carolingian age. The Carolingians were named in honor of their patriarch, Pippin’s father Charles Martel (Carolus Martellus):

As a child Pippin had been educated by monks at the abbey of Saint-Denis in Paris, where he had been imbued with an acute sense of biblical history. So in 751 when Pippin was crowned as the new king of the Franks by the papal legate Boniface, archbishop of Metz, he drew on the examples of Old Testament kings. Boniface anointed him with holy oil—slathered

From this point onward Frankish kings would only be considered “made” once they had been anointed by a bishop or archbishop’s hands. Like Roman emperors in the Christian age and the first Islamic caliphs, Frankish kings now claimed there was a sacral character to their rule.

But Pippin had a taste for theater and a nose for holy oil. So three years after the ceremony at Soissons, he went even further. By this time Pope Zachary was dead, but his replacement, Stephen II, was similarly pliable. Over the winter of 753–54 the new pope traversed the Alps, and at Epiphany (January 6) he appeared in solemn splendor at the Frankish palace at Ponthion, to ask for military assistance,

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.

First he was sent out into the freezing winter at the head of a diplomatic escort to accompany Pope Stephen on the last one hundred miles of his journey to the royal palace in early January. Then, a little over six months later, on July 28, 754, he joined his father as the pope capped his visit with yet another anointing and coronation at Saint-Denis. A third ceremony might have felt a little like overkill, except that this time it was not only Pippin who was anointed and blessed by the pope, but also Charlemagne, his brother Carloman,* and their mother Bertrada. This was more than the coronation of a king. It was the sacred affirmation of the whole Carolingian dynasty.

Warfare in the early Carolingian age was still rooted in warlord ways. It revolved around annual campaigning in frontier zones, and relied on a ready stream of supporters willing to bear arms in the hope of winning gold, silver, goods, and enslaved people.

Only on feast days or visits to see the popes in Rome would he wear gold robes or jewels; “on other days his costume was little different from that of the common people.” He was ostentatiously pious, a keen reader who could also write to a basic standard, a light sleeper and a healthy eater, although never a drunk. He was, then, in Einhard’s sympathetic eyes at least, the very image of a mighty king.

The horror of the dungeon seemed less than the bright gleam of iron. “Oh the iron! Woe for the iron!” was the confused cry that rose from the citizens.19 By 776 Desiderius had been captured and imprisoned, and Carloman’s sons had disappeared: woe for the iron indeed. To make his victory absolute, Charlemagne declared himself the new ruler of Lombardy. He replaced the Lombard dukes, to whom day-to-day governance was devolved, with Frankish counts.