Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Like Odilo, Hugh would also prove an astonishingly durable abbot, remaining in office for sixty years. In that time he continued where Odilo had left off: reinforcing the sense that the abbot of Cluny was a natural peer to kings and popes, exerting his political power across Europe, and seeing to it that Cluny stayed institutionally rich. Hugh was a brilliant administrator with a sharp eye for business. Under his leadership the Cluniac network grew toward its peak of around 1,500 houses.

the motherhouse of Cluny itself was not endowed with relics of comparable magnificence. However, for the time that it sat on top of such a vast pyramid of reformed monasteries, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, Cluny became vastly wealthy. Besides ample donations from direct benefactors, and the money it generated from its large estates, vast riches were funneled its way thanks to its investment in the Compostela pilgrim ways.

In 1062 King Ferdinand of León and Castile promised to give Hugh one thousand pounds in gold every year for the good of the Cluniac movement. In 1077 his son, Alfonso VI, bumped up the contribution to two thousand pounds.

These rich pickings allowed the Christian kings to make amends for the grave sins incurred in military campaigning. They did so by plowing funds into Cluny. In return for their generous donations, Hugh agreed that Cluniac houses would sing literally nonstop for the Spanish kings’ souls, those of their ancestors, and—most impressively—those of their as-yet-unborn descendants. At Cluny itself a special altar was set up at which masses sung would be deemed to assist the salvation of only Alfonso himself.

Hugh entrusted the job of realizing the saints’ plans to a brilliant mathematician from Liège, not far from the old imperial court at Aachen. His name was Hezelo, and he seems to have been well versed in mathematical proportions described by the great Roman engineer Vitruvius—whose work intrigued many other medieval geniuses, including Leonardo da Vinci.

Cluny III was more than twice the size of Justinian’s Hagia Sophia and substantially bigger than the Umayyads’ glorious Great Mosque of Damascus.

Cluny III was a masterpiece of an architectural style that would come to be known as Romanesque, so named because it drew on elements of ancient Roman architecture and the engineering theories that had made them possible.

However, while Cluny was a wonder of the new monastic world, it was also a far cry from the original ideal of reformed, stripped-back Benedictine practice. The monks who had been paid handsomely by high-net-worth clients to sing perpetual masses for their souls wore fine linen and ate well. Their liturgy was complex, highly structured, and beautifully performed. The ordinary brothers’ throats may have ached from perpetual chanting, but their hands were not calloused from manual labor, which was given over to serfs.

Gregory’s fierce desire to clean up the Church and impose papal authority in every Christian realm caused serious political disquiet in Europe. And when Gregory went to war with Hugh’s godson, the emperor Henry IV, in a conflict known as the Investiture Controversy—because it concerned the rights of secular rulers to appoint or “invest” bishops—Hugh was caught somewhat in the middle.

In 1088 a Cluniac monk—formerly Hugh’s deputy at Cluny—called Odo of Châtillon—was elected as Pope Urban II. His papacy redirected the violent energy of the Investiture Controversy toward a new experiment that would loom large over the next two centuries of monasticism in particular and western history in general: the Crusades.

With hindsight it feels only natural that this small band of spiritual warriors who assembled at Cîteaux—and thus became known as Cistercians—would come to steal Cluny’s thunder.

their guiding light was an affluent young Burgundian called Bernard.

Bernard was a leading voice in the Second Crusade, which he preached in the 1140s. He was also a driving force in establishing the military order of the Temple—the Templars. And just as Hugh of Cluny had seen a close ally elected Pope Urban II, so Bernard would celebrate one of his own protégés becoming pope: Eugenius III. But where Hugh of Cluny had worn the customary black habit of the Benedictines, Bernard of Clairvaux girded himself in Cistercian white, the color chosen to symbolize purity.

the power of the Cistercian order, inspired through Bernard of Clairvaux’s impassioned leadership, grew and grew, and long outlasted Bernard’s death in 1153. By this time more than three hundred Cistercian houses had been founded or reformed along Cistercian lines.

the dawn of the thirteenth century saw the rise of the mendicant* orders—the Franciscans and Dominicans, whose members (often called friars) stepped out from the cloister and, like the first generations of ascetics, took to wandering in towns and countryside, ministering and preaching and begging for alms to sustain themselves. Monasticism was in a sense returning to its roots—with

A life of such intense voluntary hardship, chastity, poverty, and repetitive liturgical worship holds scant appeal for rich young men and women in the twenty-first century. But what we surely can recognize today is the rise of vastly rich and powerful international institutions and corporations that exercise enormous soft power, and whose leaders have the ear of the world’s political grandees. We are at ease with the idea of voluntarily adapted “orders” for life designed to improve our individual and collective virtue; veganism is one of the most popular in the west today. Finally, we take for granted that there will be institutions in our lives that provide education, pastoral care, medicine, and respite for the retired elderly, whether run by the state or the community. We are in that sense perhaps not so far removed from a world run by monks as we may think.

“take a sharp knife and mutilate their [babies’] faces, so that they will be able to tolerate wounds.”3 Needless to say, this was a little more than hearsay and libel. But it spoke to a deep-rooted fear of the Magyars among the ordinary folk of Germany, a fear that was every bit the equal of the western Franks’ terror of the Vikings.

Although today it is a battle scarcely known outside central Europe, Lechfeld can be seen as a symbolic moment in the grand march of medieval history. For the triumph of heavy cavalry over light mounted archers coincided with the dawn of an age in which the sort of armored, lance-wielding horsemen whom Otto commanded began to take center stage in western warfare. For the next two centuries, powerful, mounted warriors dominated battlefields, while also beginning to burnish their status in society at large.

The Franks knew how to trade, breed, and deploy warhorses. But for a long time, when it came to the biggest clashes between their armies and those of foreign powers, the Franks fell back on foot soldiers. When Charles Martel defeated the great Arab army at the battle of Poitiers of 732, the Frankish army stood as an immovable wall to repel the Arab cavalry. Yet just two generations later, Frankish methods on the battlefield had moved on.

As a result, Carolingian foreign policy demanded very large, highly mobile armies that could move long distances at pace. To serve this need, Charlemagne demanded all significant landowners make themselves or a representative available for his army. He also developed corps of horsemen who could ride both to and into battle. In 792–93 Charlemagne issued a law ordering all cavalrymen to carry a spear to be thrust and stabbed toward the enemy, rather than thrown, javelin style.

The knight of the high Middle Ages was defined not only by his horse, but also by the specific weapons he wielded. These included slashing and stabbing sidearms, like swords and daggers. But most important was the couched lance:

In the Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered in southern England to chronicle and commemorate the Norman Conquest of 1066, we can still see the old-style cavalry ways in use: most of William of Normandy’s horsemen rumble toward Harold’s Anglo-Saxons holding spears javelin-style in their raised right hands: ready to jab or throw, but not to pile drive like a boring engine.

As the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene wrote in the twelfth century, a Frank fighting on foot was easy prey, but a Frank on horseback could put a hole in the walls of Babylon.

Yet the lance did not develop on its own. It required other technological advances to make it effective: the stirrup and the cantled saddle. Both served the same purpose. They counteracted the laws of physics, protecting the rider from his own momentum and allowing him to transfer all the acceleration and force of his charge through the shaft and tip of his lance. The cantled saddle was designed with a high back, to keep the rider in place on impact. Stirrups allowed him to deploy his legs for balance and further resistance. The lance made him a killing machine. Without these pieces of technology, there could have been no knight.

What seems reasonably certain is this: perhaps in the fourth century a.d. and certainly by the fifth, stirrups were invented in the Far East, by nomads in Siberia and what is now Mongolia.12 They were enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians, but took rather a long time to spread to the west. Eventually, however, the knowledge was transmitted via Persia and the Arab realms to the post-Roman Christian empires of the near east and the west, so that by the eighth century stirrups had arrived in Europe. By the 780s, stirrups were considered sufficiently commonplace that the author of a lavishly illustrated Spanish biblical commentary known as the Beatus could picture the four horsemen of the Apocalypse wearing them around their diabolical feet.

the stirrup’s rising popularity in the west coincided with a more general age of military invention: siege engines were improving, and castle building was following suit;

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.

In the Frankish realms, some of this land was obtained by the blunt method of confiscation; under the Carolingians, many Church estates were simply seized, parceled up, and handed out to military retainers. Given these to manage and farm, fighting men could afford to sustain themselves, and could also be bound into a system of obligation to the king or lord who allowed them to hold the land in the first place.

The bond was deepened by the need for aspirant knights to learn their trade: this generally happened when parents placed their sons from mid-childhood in the household of wealthy lords, who would take on responsibility for their education and physical training, in expectation that the boys would grow up to join their military retinue.

even when the western half of the Carolingian empire experienced a dearth in strong kingship following the deaths of Charlemagne and his immediate successors, the social mechanisms of lordship and military service continued. Indeed, they became all the more important as French kingship declined from its Carolingian high-water mark, and dukes, counts, and other lords—including high-ranking churchmen—began to tussle with one another for the security of their individual patches.

when the western half of the Carolingian empire experienced a dearth in strong kingship following the deaths of Charlemagne and his immediate successors, the social mechanisms of lordship and military service continued. Indeed, they became all the more important as French kingship declined from its Carolingian high-water mark, and dukes, counts, and other lords—including high-ranking churchmen—began to tussle with one another for the security of their individual patches.

in the third, the fact that warriors were now endowed as a matter of course with estates that could support an aristocratic lifestyle helped create an upper-class consciousness that lauded—indeed, fetishized—supposedly knightly virtues. The code of conduct and honor, which eventually came to be known as chivalry, would by the end of the Middle Ages become something akin to a secular religion.

Sancho “girded him with the belt of knighthood.”20 This ceremony, by which a sword was publicly and ritually fixed to a young warrior’s side with a belt, was by the mid-eleventh century an important public recognition of a fighter’s competence and high status. Aristocrats of the eleventh century were, almost by definition, members of a military caste, and girding with a sword was therefore a major life moment for male members: they were passing out of adolescence, inexperience, and the civilian life into an existence in which commanding troops and fighting would be the norm.

By the time Rodrigo was in his midthirties he was famous. He was also moving up in the world. King Sancho was murdered, and the new power in northern Spain was his son (and very possibly his murderer): Alfonso VI, who became king of Castile, León, and Galicia. Rodrigo joined the new king’s entourage in the early 1070s.

Earlier in the century a Berber dynasty of austere, conservative Muslims known as the Almoravids had conquered Morocco in northwest Africa, and in 1085 they set their sights on al-Andalus. They invaded and began what amounted to a full-blooded takeover of all the petty Islamic taifa kingdoms, whose rulers they scorned as decadent, weak-willed, and ripe for removal. Neither did the Almoravids hold the Christian kings of the northern kingdoms in very high regard. In 1086 they took aim at Alfonso of Castile: in October an Almoravid army crushed a Castilian one at the battle of Sagrajas.

When the leader of the Almoravids, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, “sent letters to [Rodrigo] strictly forbidding him to dare to enter the land of Valencia,” Rodrigo “spoke of Yusuf in terms of the strongest contempt,” and sent his own letters all over the region, advertising his willingness to meet an Almoravid army of any size in battle, and settle things one way or the other.

There were echoes of Charles Martel’s victory against the Umayyads at Poitiers in 732. There was plenty more campaigning to be done, but in retrospect the clash at Cuarte could be identified as a turning point in the Reconquista: a point from which momentum eventually shifted in favor of the Christian states of the Spanish north.

The author of this surprisingly generous eulogy was an Arab poet from Santarém (now in Portugal) named Ibn Bassam. As a Muslim and an admirer of the Almoravids, Ibn Bassam was culturally a long way removed from the Frankish realms that had incubated the culture of knighthood, a culture to which Rodrigo Díaz had wholeheartedly subscribed.

very soon after his death, El Cid was on his way to join a new pantheon of immortals. Just as the Church had its saints to give lesser mortals a lesson in good moral conduct, so the secular world was developing its own demigods, both real and mythical. Alongside El Cid we can count Roland, King Arthur, Perceval, and Lancelot; these heroes exemplified a way of living and a warrior code that coalesced as chivalry.

The bones of the wrists, shoulders, and spine bear the scars of painful, lifelong wear and tear: joints and vertebrae worn ragged by arduous days and months spent training, riding, and fighting in the saddle. The side and back of the skull bear six separate, severe wounds, administered with swords when the person was around the age of forty-five. These lethal blows were the reward for a life of toil.

The Song of Roland is in a loose sense historical, yet its concerns are not for sober recollection of long-ago deeds or meticulous scrutiny of evidence. Rather, the song uses the setting of Charlemagne’s wars against the Umayyads to expound on the natures of bravery, love, friendship, wisdom, faith, and justice. It is part of a broad genre of epic, historical, narrative poems that are collectively called chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”).

Taken together, the tales of Roland, William, and Isambert are not just evidence for a literary genre that boomed in the twelfth century. They are a guide to the complex self-image of the knightly and aristocratic classes in the medieval west—particularly those lands that spoke dialects of French and Italian.

chansons de geste

Tales of King Arthur are still fertile material for storytellers in the age of Netflix. And for good reason.39 Even in their earliest known forms—concocted between the pseudoscholarly History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth and the out-and-out fantastical romances of the French writer Chrétien de Troyes—they

Early in Chrétien de Troyes’s story Perceval, the title character is presented as a young boy throwing spears in the forest, teaching himself war, and enjoying the simple pleasures of nature. He hears, and then sees, Five armed knights, in armour from head to toe, coming through the woods. . . . . . . The glittering hauberks and the bright, shining helmets, the lances and the shields . . . the green and vermilion glistening in the sunshine . . . Convinced he must be seeing angels, he asks their leader, “Are you God?”

As knights developed a courtly status and good standing in society as landlords and members of the noble elite, so writing about knightliness came to focus on its spiritual and emotional aspects. Knights were exhorted to demonstrate courage, honesty, charity, piety, concern for the poor and downtrodden, gracious deportment in the halls of great lords, purity of heart, and unblemished devotion to one’s lady—who might not be one’s lady at all, but rather the unattainable wife of a social better.

Tournaments took place from about the 1090s, and were advertised in advance so that would-be participants could travel—sometimes from hundreds of miles away—to join the action. Along too came crowds of spectators, entertainers, peddlers, stallholders, blacksmiths, horse trainers, fortune-tellers, musicians, thieves, and ne’er-do-wells. The crucibles of the tournament were the Flanders and the Netherlands, and the lands between the kingdom of France and its Carolingian cousin, the German empire.

On the tournament circuit a knight could hone his skill for war and impress potential patrons (or lovers) with his ability in the saddle.

the author of a twelfth-century German romance called Lanzelet wrote, the tournament was a chance to win “fame and honour: there one can thrust and slash at will; all the celebrities will participate; and there one can meet distinguished knights and ladies. To stay away would be a disgrace.”

Like El Cid before him, William had now stepped up from the world of knightly adventure to the front rank of regional and international politics. But he would still throw himself headlong into battle when the situation called for it.