Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

At the end of his Lombard wars he had himself crowned with the Lombards’ famous Iron Crown. This stunning piece of regalia, layered with gold and studded with garnets, sapphires, and amethysts, was even then at least 250 years old. Its name referred to the fact that it was also set with a thin ferrous band supposedly hammered out of one of the nails used to crucify Jesus.

Roland scarcely merited a mention in the chronicle accounts of the battle, during the Middle Ages he would gain a form of meme status. His name became the byword for and archetype of the courageous Christian knight who died heroically for his lord and faith, fighting in a losing cause but emerging with the greater glory for it. In the eleventh century, one version of the many minstrel songs composed about Roland was written down in verse as The Song of Roland (La chanson de Roland). Today this is revered as the oldest surviving work of French literature,

Charlemagne also commanded the Low Countries, most of modern Germany, the mountain passes into Muslim Spain, and much of Italy. True, this was not a state that could rival in size the first Islamic caliphates, or Rome at its height. All the same, though, the inhabitants of around one million square miles of territory theoretically obeyed Charlemagne’s decree.

In his designs for Aachen, Odo consciously mimicked features of famous late-Roman buildings. The eight-sided walls of the chapel chimed with the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna; a 125-meter-long audience hall evoked Constantine the Great’s audience hall in Trier. A long covered walkway echoed the Byzantine royal palace in Constantinople.

the chronicler Einhard recorded how it looked at the turn of the ninth century: it was, he said, “a church of great beauty . . . adorned with gold and silver and lamps and with railings and portals made of solid bronze.” Much of this splendor had been imported from many miles away. “Since [Charlemagne] could not procure columns and marble from anywhere else he took the trouble to have them brought from Rome and Ravenna.”

In the years 786–87 Charlemagne had personally traveled more than 3,500 kilometers in the effort to ensure his empire was governed and defended as he saw fit. This was a record-breaking itinerary—which

Because Charlemagne was a wildly enthusiastic issuer of charters, letters, and directives to all corners of his territories and beyond (often contained in documents known to historians as “capitularies”), his palace base at Aachen also became a center for both intellectual inquiry and manuscript production.

Under Alcuin’s supervision Aachen became an elite school for rhetoric, religion, and the liberal arts, in which the master encouraged all his pupils to copy him in nicknaming Charlemagne King David.

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. In order to perform this epic feat of storing and organizing medieval “big data,” the scribes at Aachen developed a new style of writing, known as Carolingian miniscule.

according to the author of the contemporary poem known as the Paderborn Epic (or Karolus magnus et Leo papa)—as “the lighthouse” and “father of Europe.”32 Just as his papal predecessors had sought out Pippin to save them from the Lombards, so Leo now implored Pippin’s son to restore him to his dignity—and his office.

The chronicler Einhard later claimed—unconvincingly—that Charlemagne had been unaware of Leo’s plans and was surprised to be offered such high honor.37 This was nonsense: Einhard’s dissembling was aimed at Byzantine readers who disapproved of Charlemagne usurping the title of emperor. In fact, far from being an embarrassing accident, Charlemagne’s elevation was deliberate, meticulously planned, and revolutionary. It restored to western and central Europe the fact of imperium, which had gone missing on the ground several hundred years earlier, and which seemed to be wobbling even in Constantinople, where—horror of horrors—a woman, the empress Irene (r. 797–802) occupied the Byzantine throne. What took place in St. Peter’s that Christmas was supposed to be the resurrection of the western Roman Empire.

It was. At the end of January 814, in the forty-seventh year of his reign, Charlemagne came down with a fever, accompanied by a pain in his side. He tried to cure himself with extreme fasting, but this made things worse. At nine o’clock in the morning on January 28 the emperor died, and was buried with great solemnity at Aachen. “The Franks, the Romans, all Christians are stung with worry and great mourning,”

In the spring of 845, when Louis the Pious’s youngest son, Charles the Bald, was ruling West Francia, a Danish warlord called Ragnar brought a fleet of 120 ships up the river Seine.

“Ships past counting voyage up the Seine, and throughout the entire region evil grows strong,” wrote one despairing chronicler. “Rouen is laid waste, looted and burnt.”45 Far from exhausted—indeed, now pumped up for more excitement—Ragnar’s men carried on up the river until they arrived in Paris, around Easter. A city of probably just a few thousand souls, Paris was not yet the powerhouse it would become in the later Middle Ages. But it was rich. The treasures of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis were especially alluring.

Helpless to evict the Northmen and terrified that if they stayed, there might be very little left of Paris to remember them by, Charles the Bald now agreed to pay Ragnar seven thousand pounds of silver and gold to retire. This was an astronomically large sum, and its size alone was a miserable humiliation for the Frankish king.

In 793 warriors appeared off the coast of Northumbria, leaped from their ships, and robbed the island of Lindisfarne, desecrating the monastery and murdering its brothers. This ferocious raid sent shock waves rippling out from Britain. When the news reached Charlemagne’s court in Aachen, Alcuin of York wrote to the king of Northumbria, deploring the fact that “the church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishing, exposed to the plundering of pagans.”

Around the same time, people living around Denmark were capable of constructing clinker-built* boats: the so-called Hjortspring boat, retrieved in a bog on the Danish island of Als in the 1920s, shows that these ancient Scandinavians went to sea in vessels that held crews of twenty.

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. (Chochilaicus may have been the model for King Hygelac, king of the Geats and uncle of the eponymous hero in the great medieval epic poem Beowulf.)

The Vikings’ worldview was informed particularly by climate. Possibly thanks to the shock of the great volcanic eruptions that caused global temperatures to plummet and harvests to fail during the 530s and 540s, the Vikings stories of genesis and apocalypse revolved around the lives of trees and the impending arrival of the Fimbulwinter, when the earth would freeze and all life would end.

Under Charlemagne the Franks became increasingly interesting to the Northmen. For one thing, Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons drove the Frankish frontier north, until it was nudging up against the lands of the Vikings. (From a.d. 810 to 811 there was a “Danish March” in the north of the empire, which served as a militarized buffer zone against the northern pagans.) And for another, the Carolingians founded and enriched monasteries and other Christian holy sites. Large amounts of movable wealth were placed in the hands of monks: physically the weakest men in society. Moreover, many monasteries—such as the Saint-Philibert at Noirmoutier, nestled on a spit of land at the mouth of the Loire—were on the coast or beside rivers, or in locations far from secular society, where the brothers were deliberately isolated from social violence—or so they thought.

From Byzantium, a few intrepid Northmen even reached Abbasid Persia; according to the Arab scholar and geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih, the Viking Rus’ traded in Baghdad in the 840s, bringing goods overland on camelback and posing as Christians to take advantage of a tax regime that offered preferential rates to People of the Book over pagans.54 Soon, silk and enslaved people were being exchanged between the Viking world and the Abbasid caliphate at a record rate, and silver Abbasid dirhams were flooding into the Scandinavian west.

In 882 a Viking army that had spent the previous winter despoiling Frisia entered the river Rhine and advanced toward Charlemagne’s palace-city of Aachen. They took over the palace and used Charlemagne’s once-beloved imperial chapel as a stable for their horses.

To the chroniclers (almost all of whom were based in monasteries and thus directly in the sights of the raiders), it seemed as if the devastation would never end. But for the Scandinavian adventurers, business was booming. One modern historian has estimated that during the ninth century, Vikings active in the Frankish lands stole or extorted in ransom and protection payments around seven million silver pennies, or approximately 14 percent of the total that were minted. The Carolingians had grown rich and powerful, and sponsored well-endowed abbeys, by plundering unbelievers on their borders. Now that process was ironically and very uncomfortably reversed.

The creation of Normandy was directly linked to the dramatic siege of Paris in 885–86. Among the Viking leaders of that expedition was a man called Rollo (or Hrólfr), who was probably born in Denmark, and whose career was described by a later biographer, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, in idealized but undeniably thrilling terms. Dudo described Rollo as a preternaturally tough and dogged soldier, “trained in the art of war and utterly ruthless,” who could typically be seen “in a helmet wonderfully ornamented with gold and a mail coat.”

Fatefully, Charles agreed. By a treaty probably sealed at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, halfway between Rouen and Paris, Rollo came in from the cold, agreeing to “a pact of love and inextricable friendship” with the Franks. Under its terms he undertook to give up raiding, marry the king’s daughter Gisla, and convert to Christianity.

It was clear—to Dudo at least—who had got the better deal, as the chronicler illustrated by way of an anecdote. When the time came to make formal submission to Charles the Simple to seal their deal, Rollo declared, “I will never kneel before the knees of another, nor will I kiss anyone’s foot.” Instead, he asked one of his henchmen to do the job on his behalf. The warrior, wrote Dudo, “immediately grasped the king’s foot and raised it to his mouth and planted a kiss on it while he remained standing, [which] laid the king flat on his back. So there rose a great laugh, and a great outcry among the people.”

Norman dukes would rule England until 1204, and with the wealth and military resources of the English crown behind them, were able to cause enormous trouble for the French kings, many of whom would rue the day that Charles the Simple had innocently handed over a large corner of his kingdom to a gang of hard-nosed men of the north.

Richard II was also, unquestionably, a man of the Frankish world: a Christian, the first Norman ruler to use the title duke (dux), and the man who commissioned Dudo of Saint-Quentin to write the history of his family, from which we learn about Rollo’s conversion and his assumption of power within the Frankish world. So, far from robbing monks, Richard II actively sponsored and patronized them—and not only in Normandy. This child of Viking stock and Frankish temperament was so well known for his pious generosity that every year Christian monks from the Sinai desert in Egypt traveled the better part of five thousand kilometers to Normandy to beg alms from Richard for their upkeep.65 The poachers had become world-famous gamekeepers.

In return they would be expected to engage in rounds of constant prayer and devotion, offering their hospitality to passing travelers and living in respectable chastity, obedient to the Rule of Saint Benedict—a code of monastic conduct drawn up hundreds of years previously in southern Italy by the sixth-century monk Benedict of Nursia. Popes would be their guardians. Berno would be their abbot. Their financial benefactors and physical protectors would be Duke William and his descendants.

During the next two hundred years monasticism boomed. Many variant types of monasticism were spawned: besides the Benedictines there were orders known as the Cistercians, Carthusians, Premonstratensians, Trinitarians, Gilbertines, Augustinians, Paulines, Celestines, Dominicans, and Franciscans, as well as military orders that included the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights.

the Cluniac system spearheaded a more general monastic explosion, which altered the relations between Church and state, and recharged and reshaped cultural life in the Christian world, transforming not only religious observance but also literacy, architecture, fine art, and music. All this was exemplified at Cluny itself. Although a visitor there today will find depressingly little to see, save a small set of buildings that escaped dynamiting by anticlerical philistines during the French Revolution of the eighteenth century, in its day Cluny was the site of arguably the grandest church in the world, fit to rival St. Peter’s in Rome and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

The formative age of Christianity produced a whole host of “desert fathers” and “desert mothers.” They included Anthony’s leading disciple, Macarius; a Roman soldier called Pachomius, who pioneered cenobitism, or the custom of ascetics living together in what became known as monasteries; a reformed bandit called Moses the Black; an anchorite, or female hermit, called Syncletica of Alexandria; and one Theodora, also of Alexandria, who joined a community of male ascetics, living undetected as a man until her death.

Both types of monasticism (the word stems from the Greek μονος, suggesting a oneness with God) coexisted throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed can still be found today. And both types caused some consternation for the established Church. Ascetics disrupted traditional social hierarchies. They were in most cases pious laypeople, not ordained priests. They did not fall under the jurisdiction of bishops, and could often drain authority and charitable funds from “official” representatives of the Church.

He exorcised demons, raised the dead, and cured a woman of insanity. Once a year he saw his sister Scholastica, who lived in a nunnery;* she was also able to perform miracles, which included persuading God to conjure up thunderstorms on demand.

The Rule of Saint Benedict, comprising seventy-three chapters, set out the basis of life for a monk living in a community under the guidance of an abbot. Its essential principles were prayer, study, and manual work, supplemented by frugal living, personal poverty, chastity, and a restricted diet. The rule provided for the hierarchy within the monastery.

It was, in short, an elegant and thoughtful piece of work, which was why Gregory the Great praised and publicized it in his account of Benedict’s life. Those who followed the rule, wrote Gregory, might “understand all [Benedict’s] manner of life and discipline.”

they found Benedict and Scholastica’s remains, scooped them up, washed them, and “laid them upon fine clean linen . . . to be carried home to their own country.”14 Specifically, this meant their monastery at Fleury (subsequently known as Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, about 150 kilometers due south of Paris). There the abbot, Mommolus, recognized a good thing when he saw one. The linen in which they were wrapped now seemed to be soaked in miraculous holy blood: Mommolus declared this a sure sign of their authenticity. So the remains were reinterred with honor in a shrine that catapulted Fleury Abbey to new fame.

Both Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious saw the Rule of Saint Benedict as a useful way to bring order to Christian practice and exercise meaningful imperial power over the ordinary lives of their subjects. This was an especially pressing matter in the case of monks, who occupied an awkward position outside direct ecclesiastical control, as unanswerable to bishops as they were to secular lords. Meanwhile, founding Benedictine monasteries in newly conquered pagan territories was also a reliable way to promote good Christian practice on the fringes of empire—a form of colonization and missionary activity rolled into one.

There were, therefore, two ways to go within the Frankish empire: you were either in the Church proper or under the imperially approved Benedictine rule. This did not instantly tidy up every aspect of Christian religious life across the vast Carolingian lands. But it ensured Benedictine practice became the norm across large swaths of Europe. Every mainstream monastic movement from this point on would build on the Benedictine standard—including the Cluniacs

He was not always especially nice about it: the brothers at Cluny were harshly punished for such tiny errors as failing to gather up and eat the crumbs from their plates at mealtimes. Most importantly, however, Odo began to export Cluny’s high standards to other monasteries. He visited Benedictine houses in central France as a sort of freelance standards inspector, advising them on improving their communal life. This almost always meant reverting to the first principles of hard physical labor and constant prayer. Odo was a stickler for silence unless absolutely necessary, and insisted on a rigorously policed diet, free from all meat. He was punctilious about dress code. His chief interests, in the words of his biographer, John of Salerno, were “contempt for the world, and after that, zeal for souls, the reform of monasteries, and of the clothes and food of monks.”

When he visited a monastery to reform it, he usually left behind one of his trusted, experienced fellow monks to ensure that his standards were maintained.21 In many cases these men would serve not as abbots, but as priors, answerable directly to Odo himself at Cluny. This practice soon became a system, and with every reformation he undertook, the abbot of Cluny expanded his authority. He was becoming more than just the head of a single house and an itinerant troubleshooter for others: he was actively folding newly reformed houses into the spiritual community of Cluny itself. By the time he died in 942, Odo had carried the name and the brand of Cluniac reform far and wide across western Europe.

A little later, during the Crusades, western Benedictine convents would be built in Palestine and Syria, on holy sites in Jerusalem, and at the coastal city of Antioch.

One elemental cause may have been climate change. Between around 950 and 1250 global temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose, and although this rise was by no means evenly felt across the globe, it provided the longest sustained period of benign climate conditions in the west since the Roman Climate Optimum.24 Although, as we shall see, the so-called Medieval Warm Period would not last throughout the Middle Ages, it made conditions in Europe relatively favorable to agriculture. This natural advantage coincided with the development of new horse harnesses and large iron plows (“heavy” plows) that allowed massively more efficient large-scale agriculture.

The drawing together of numerous fractured, post-Roman “barbarian” polities into a revived Christian empire provided a firmer central government, and directed major spheres of warfare to the fringes of the organized Christian west—pagan central Europe, Muslim Spain and (eventually) Scandinavia.

aristocratic warrior culture.

Fortunately, the Church was very open-minded about how penance was to be done, and Church authorities had no problem with the rich paying others to do their penance for them. By founding monasteries—as Duke William did at Cluny—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.

Monasteries sprang up by the hundreds. Looking back on this explosive time of growth, the tenth to twelfth centuries have often been labeled a “golden age” of monasticism.

There was also a daily Mass to be heard. Performing these services was known as opus Dei (God’s work), and it was the essential point of monasticism: this was monks’ contribution to society and an economy that placed great value on providing for souls as well as bodies. As a result, performing the offices was what most Benedictine monks spent most of their time doing. It behooved them to perform their duty to the best of their abilities. That meant a lot of singing. The Benedictine rule was extremely enthusiastic about music, which, said Saint Benedict, ensured that “our mind may be in harmony with our voice.”29 It required the monks to organize themselves into a choir, ensuring only the best singers were allowed to have a prominent part in the performance.

The most famous of these spiritual superhighways converged at the northwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, at the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Here, in 814, a hermit called Pelagius saw lights dancing in the sky, which led him miraculously to discover the remains of Saint James the Apostle.

The dangers and discomforts of traveling long distances like this were, of course, part of the penitential purpose. Earning God’s forgiveness was not supposed to be easy. But they also presented a golden business opportunity. Many centuries earlier, when Rome had been at the peak of its imperial power, the Roman roads that crisscrossed the empire were lined with purpose-built mansiones—effectively service stations for imperial officials that included stabling, overnight facilities, and hospitality. Now, along the pilgrim routes, there sprang a similar need.35 The Cluniacs recognized it and exploited it. Monasteries became the new mansiones, catering to the faithful as they struck out to seek salvation in northern Spain.