Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

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. He also sent forth his navigators, conquerors, and slavers with the backing of Rome. 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.”

They were well placed to be the most powerful trading nation in western Europe, rivaled only by Castile. In the early sixteenth century, the experienced navigator Duarte Pacheco Pereira (nicknamed the Portuguese Achilles) laid the credit for this extraordinary program of expansion squarely with Henry. “The benefits conferred on [Portugal] by the virtuous Prince Henry are such that its kings and people are greatly indebted to him,” wrote Pereira, “for in the land which he discovered a great part of the Portuguese people now earn their livelihood and the kings [of Portugal] derive great profit from this commerce.”37 Of those who had—and would—suffer individual and systemic misery for generations thereafter, Pereira said not a word.

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. This had rung the death knell for the sultanate of Granada, and although it had taken more than twenty years for the end to come, come it had.

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 complete unfamiliarity with weapons as basic as swords, and appearing quite naive about trade. Columbus had come in search of a superior culture, with a court to rival the grand khan’s. Instead, he was being treated like the alien from a higher species.

“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 six of them prisoner to bring back to Ferdinand and Isabella, “so that they can learn to speak.”47 And he planted the Spanish flag on their island, to signal that he had taken possession of it on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs. Then he set off to find out what else there was to claim.

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.” What he found 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).

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.”

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.”

Right from the very beginning, these new lands were wild. The fate of the first garrison Columbus left in Hispaniola in 1493 warned as much. Once the admiral left, his men fell quickly to raiding the local tribes for gold and women, and bickering among themselves. They were soon murdered en masse by a local leader called Caonaobó.55 When Columbus came back to Hispaniola on his second mission, he did not immediately avenge their deaths. But he was no benevolent visitor either. Despite having specific orders not to maltreat the native people, Columbus did so: demanding tribute from them in gold, kidnapping and enslaving them, and building fortresses on their lands. At one point he wrote back to advise the Catholic Monarchs that the best strategy for making an economic success of the new lands would be to impose mass servitude on the local populations, along with forcible conversion to Christianity.

Columbus died on May 20, 1506, after suffering, wrote his son, from “gout and other ills and grief at seeing himself so fallen from his high estate.”56 But as he expired, the age of exploration in which he had played a pivotal role was well underway.

people, who had never seen or heard gunpowder before. One of these conquistadores was Hernán Cortés, the stiff-necked Spaniard who brought back huge quantities of gold from Mexico after his campaigns of 1519–21, in which his troops crushed and overthrew the Aztec empire, deposing and probably murdering its last emperor, Moctezuma II. Some of this gold was the treasure that Albrecht Dürer saw displayed in the Brussels town hall in 1520;

In 1488, however, a Portuguese captain called Bartholomew Diaz (Bartolomeu Dias) had provided tantalizing evidence that another route might exist. Diaz had been tasked by John II with going farther along the African coastline than any European sailor before him, and in the course of a battle with the seas that lasted nearly eighteen months, he succeeded.

This was literally world changing: maps of the world produced after Diaz’s journey had to be adjusted to take account of the fact that the Indian Ocean was not, as Ptolemy thought, landlocked by unexplored territory, but could be entered from the south. Armed with this knowledge, and stirred, after 1493, by the achievements of Christopher Columbus in the west Atlantic, the Portuguese were ready to try to push past Diaz’s landmark.

The second great expedition, much larger than da Gama’s, was captained by Pedro Álvares Cabral, who in 1500–1 undertook a massive sea voyage, first to the coast of Brazil, then east to the Cape of Good Hope, and on via Mozambique to Calicut and another point on India’s Malabar Coast: the kingdom of Cochin. Cabral and his crew came back somewhat battered by storms and running battles fought against Arab merchants in India, who resented the newcomers. But they were laden with spices, which were sold at a huge profit in Europe.

annual armadas were now sent along a route that became known for hundreds of years afterward as the Carreira da India. Taking advantage of trade winds in the Atlantic and monsoon patterns in the Indian Ocean, Portuguese fleets became a regular sight striking out from Lisbon to Cape Verde, southwest to Brazil, back around the southern tip of Africa, and then to India, sometimes through the channel between Mozambique and Madagascar, and at other times around the outside of the latter island.

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.

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. (And it lasted in part right through until modern times: Goa was only ceded back to India in 1961, and Macau in 1999.)

Before the fifteenth-century voyages of European discovery, maps of the world were partially completed jigsaws. After them, nowhere above sea level would be off-limits to explorers and navigators.

Spain and Portugal were the first great maritime powers to start colonizing lands thousands of miles away, but they were followed not long afterward by the English, French, and Dutch, among others. The establishment of these far-flung dominions profoundly changed the nature of global commerce, and it shattered and redrew age-old power structures on every continent in the world. It brought unimaginable wealth and prosperity to some individuals and realms, and foisted hellish misery, slavery, and evil on others.

This was the Protestant Reformation, and it began in Germany during the 1430s, when a goldsmith called Johannes Gutenberg worked out how to print a book.

autumn of 1455, two goldsmiths went to court in the German city of Mainz. Their dispute, which was heard by the city’s ecclesiastical authorities in the dining hall of a Franciscan friary, was about money. The first goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, had borrowed sixteen hundred guldens—a small fortune—to invest in equipment, labor, and his own time as he built a machine he hoped would change the nature of writing.

Throughout the Middle Ages, text had generally been produced by clerks writing longhand with quills and pots of gum-based ink on stretched and treated animal skin known as parchment or vellum. The best clerks were either efficient copyists or gifted artists—and sometimes both. But none were superhuman. They worked page by page, one manuscript at a time. A long text—a Bible, a book of saints’ lives, a tract by Aristotle or Ptolemy—would take a scribe hundreds or even thousands of hours to complete.

Gutenberg’s press would allow a small team of printers to set and replicate pages at previously unimaginable volume. Individual letters (known as movable type) would be cast from metal, then arranged together to form words, sentences, and paragraphs. They would then be smeared with oil-based ink and pressed against sheets of vellum or paper (another early medieval Chinese invention, only recently imported to the west) from Italy, as many times as required, printing identical leaves. Although all this was an expensive, difficult process that required considerable care and attention on the part of a skilled metalworker, it had the potential, Gutenberg thought, to render the old ways of manuscript copying obsolete, and usher in a bold new age of the written word.

Gutenberg’s Bible was duly published by Fust and Schoeffer, and sold before August 1456. It was a large book, designed to be read from a lectern. It had more than twelve hundred pages across its two volumes, laid out in forty-two-line double columns of black, blue, and red type, with fine illuminated letters here and there and occasional illustrations in the margins.2 It looked very much like a manuscript.

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. It was produced in or near Mainz—perhaps by Gutenberg himself,

since 1215 confession had been compulsory once a year for ordinary Latin Christians, who usually made it semipublicly in ceremonies during Easter. Sin and punishment in the afterlife were real concepts.6 So the offer of remission was attractive, which was why Margarethe had opened her purse to a papal representative, and bought her indulgence certificate, dated and personalized.

Indulgences like Margarethe’s were commonplace across Europe during the later Middle Ages. The purpose of an indulgence was, at root, simple. It was a cross between a spiritual hall pass and banknote, a letter issued or underwritten by the pope, which entitled the bearer to claim forgiveness for sins. The advantage to the sinner of buying such a document was straightforward: it reduced the time he or she was doomed to spend suffering the agonies of purgatory.

Indulgences were issued en masse—a little like modern-day shares, government bonds, or lotto tickets—and sold individually for hard cash.

During the first half of the thirteenth century, they fought with the Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and Sicily (most notably the emperor Frederick II). That dispute rolled into the long-running Guelph-Ghibelline wars, which plagued Italy’s city-states well into the fifteenth century. At the same time, Boniface VIII’s violent clash with Philip IV of France during the 1290s and early 1300s culminated not only in Boniface’s death but also with the wholesale removal of the papacy from Rome to Avignon, where popes sat for sixty-seven years in the orbit of the French crown—a time Petrarch called the papacy’s “Babylonian captivity.”

In the 1320s and 1330s the English philosopher and friar William Ockham saw fit to condemn Pope John XXII as a heretic, and dismissed popes in general as nothing more than men in gaudy hats. “No one is bound to believe the Pope in matters which are of the faith, unless he can demonstrate the reasonableness of what he says by the rule of faith,” Ockham wrote.

Bohemian heretic Jan Hus (who was influenced by the notorious Oxford theologian John Wycliffe [see chapter 11]) railed against papal corruption; either Hus or someone in his circle produced a Latin polemic known as the Anatomy of the Antichrist, which explained at painstaking length why the pope was in fact the devil: an “abomination of desolation,” the “angel of the bottomless pit,” a “he-goat,” and a “wicked and profane prince.”

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.

In the 1390s Geoffrey Chaucer satirized indulgences and other clerical swindles in his Canterbury Tales, in which the entertainingly venal Pardoner (a common term for an indulgence salesman) prefaces his tale with a pseudo-confession, boasting that he dupes gullible Christian folk into buying fake relics, and berates them so much for their sins that they rush to purchase indulgences from him, making him extremely rich.

He complained that “one pays for confession, for mass, for the sacrament, for indulgences, for churching a woman,* for a blessing, for burials, for funeral services and prayers.

Tickets to salvation, which previously had to be written out longhand, could now be mass-produced. And they were. In the quarter century that followed the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible, print shops opened across Europe, in Oxford, London, Paris, Lyon, Milan, Rome, Venice, Prague, and Kraków; not long after, printers were operating in Portugal, the Spanish kingdoms, Sweden, and Istanbul.

tipped the indulgence business from a service into a scandal was, at root, simple greed. In the 1470s Pope Sixtus IV, the notorious and extravagantly nepotistic pontiff whose enemies accused him of all manner of sexual predation, and whispered that he handed out cardinals’ hats to boys he fancied, found that his expenses were running away with him. The Italian wars demanded a program of castle building in the Papal States.

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. Encouraged in his thinking by a theologian and future cardinal called Raymond Peraudi, Sixtus reformulated the Saintes indulgence:

It is in this context that we must understand the publication of Martin Luther’s famous Ninety-Five Theses, an expression of outrage at the practice of indulgence selling that the author published in Wittenberg in the autumn of 1517. The Theses were a series of learned propositions pertaining to the state of the western church, prefaced with an invitation to all who disagreed to come and debate them with Luther.22 And they were designed for public consideration.

When his Theses entered the public domain, they touched a nerve. And they traveled. People heard about them, they wanted to read them, and printers reproduced them. 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.

In a world where the Roman Church built its wealth on the basis that salvation was something to be acquired, by either doing penance or buying one’s way closer to salvation, Luther’s assertion that the way to heaven was through belief, not deeds, sat very ill. If all one had to do was believe, repent, love one’s fellow humans, and pray for grace, it was hard to see the point of papal indulgences such as those offered by Sacrosanctis, which was promulgated in 1515 and aggressively preached in the German states by a Dominican friar called Johann Tetzel—just as Luther was in the depths of his theological research.

By Pope Leo X to fund the renovation of St. Peter's Basilica. Main characters involved: Martin Luther (friar of Augustinian Order) and Elector count Frederick of Saxony vs Pope Leo X, prince-archbishop Albretch of Magdeburg and Johann Tetzel (Dominican friar)

Luther was exceptionally frank and personal about it. “Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.”

Albert, who was already archbishop of Magdeburg, had been permitted by the pope to become archbishop of Mainz at the same time—which made him the most senior churchman in Germany, and meant he controlled two of the seven electoral votes that determined the identity of the German emperor. (His brother already controlled a third.)

Luther’s writings continued to circulate in print. He published more than any other man of his generation—with the possible exception of the brilliant Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus. It was as if he could not help himself. The modern edition of his complete works runs to over one hundred volumes, on all manner of subjects, bound together chiefly by the theme of Luther’s refusal to dissemble or hide what he believed was the truth about God’s love for mankind.

Unsurprisingly, the following summer Luther was officially condemned by Pope Leo himself, in a papal bull called Exsurge Domine (Arise, O Lord). In response, Luther burned a copy of the bull outside Wittenberg’s city gates. And so the battle lines were drawn. In a work written that same year, Luther called the “Romanists”—Leo, his supporters, and, in effect, anyone else who disagreed with him—“the fellowship of antichrist and the devil,” who had “nothing of Christ but the name.”

When Henry could not secure papal approval for an annulment (for reasons that will shortly become apparent), he performed an astonishing religious volte-face. Liberally reinterpreting his role as Fidei Defensor, he now took the view that protecting the Christian faith did not in fact require his obedience to the pope, but the opposite. In 1534 he withdrew England from its ancient allegiance to Rome, establishing an independent English church with himself as supreme head.

Tudor England ended the sixteenth century as the most powerful Protestant nation in Europe, virulently hostile to Catholics until the emancipation campaign of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the grand scheme of English history, the break with Rome was the moment at which contemporaries like the historian and Protestant polemicist John Foxe perceived the Middle Ages ending and a new, modern age beginning.

January 1521, just a few months before Henry VIII came up with his Assertio against Luther, Charles V convened an imperial Diet—a political assembly—in the free city of Worms,

he wrote a much less conciliatory tract entitled Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants. In this he condemned the peasants for misappropriating the cause of church reform and using it as a cover to commit horrible sins and crimes, and advocated a strong crackdown by their social betters. Plainly, Luther was shaken by what he had seen.

the new pope was another Medici: Leo’s first cousin Giulio, a career churchman of long experience, who had taken the name Clement VII. Clement was almost as wary of Charles V as Francis was. He therefore officially relieved Francis of any undertakings he had given while an imperial prisoner. And there was more. Not only did Clement absolve Francis of his promises, he also committed the papacy to a formal alliance with France, the purpose of which was to drive Charles and his imperial influence out of the whole Italian peninsula. This alliance was called the League of Cognac; its members included France, the papacy, Venice, Milan, and Florence. Of course, its very existence was a gross affront to Charles.

imposed at the Diet of Worms six years earlier.49 And he sent into Italy a huge force of landsknechte—fierce German-speaking mercenary units who wielded guns and pike, many of whom were not only hardened storm troopers, but Lutheran sympathizers.