Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Yet William could not get along with John. The new king’s character was neatly summed up by a chronicler known as the Anonymous of Béthune. Although John was capable of lavish hospitality and generosity, noted the writer, adding that he gave out handsome cloaks to his household knights, John was otherwise “a very bad man, more cruel than all others, he lusted after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated. Whenever he could, he told lies rather than the truth. . . . He hated and was jealous of all honorable men; it greatly displeased him when he saw someone acting well. He was brim-full with evil qualities.”

Even a summary list of his failures runs quite long: John lost most of the Plantagenets’ lands in France (including the duchy of Normandy); he murdered Arthur of Brittany; he irritated Pope Innocent III to such a degree that he was excommunicated; he extorted so much money from his barons in taxes and semi-legal fines that he pushed many of them to the verge of either bankruptcy or rebellion; he wasted all the money he had plundered from his people on a hopeless war to regain his French lands; he drove his realm into a civil war, during which he was forced to grant a peace treaty circumscribing his royal powers, later known as Magna Carta; he reignited the civil war by renouncing Magna Carta and consequently suffered a full invasion of his realm by the heir to the French crown, Prince Louis;

Marshal used this as yet another opportunity to demonstrate his unwavering fidelity, by riding to the service of a lord who hardly deserved it on any other grounds save the oath Marshal had sworn to support him on becoming Earl of Pembroke. He stuck ostentatiously by the king’s side during the rebellion that produced Magna Carta—just

When John finally died, in October 1216, Marshal was, as usual, not far away. He took personal responsibility for John’s nine-year-old son Henry: knighting him, attending him on his coronation as Henry III in Gloucester Abbey, and going on to lead the war effort that removed French troops from English soil and reunited the realm under the new young king’s rule.

Marshal’s biography is unbeatable as an applied demonstration of just how deeply the culture of chivalry informed and underpinned political events. It crystallizes what it meant to be a knight, and it shows how one man whose shoulders were broad enough to bear the burden of an exacting moral code could materially shape his times.

the Arthurian romances continued to exert a firm grip on the medieval upper-class imagination. When Richard the Lionheart left England in the 1190s for his crusade to the Holy Land, he carried with him a sword that he identified as Arthur’s Excalibur. In the 1230s, Henry III of England’s younger brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, took over Tintagel Island, a peninsula on the north Cornish coast, and built a castle that he actively promoted as marking the spot where King Arthur had been conceived.

For the chivalric Arthurian romances also had a political context: the Matter of Britain. Arthur’s lasting accomplishment was supposedly the fact that he had fought to unite the fractured polities of the British Isles under his own rule. At the end of the thirteenth century this was no longer some obsolete matter lost in the mists of the half-remembered past. It was live public policy. The central goal of Edward I’s reign was the king’s drive to stamp English royal power over Scotland and Wales so that he alone could claim to be the master of the British—preeminent over the kings of Scots and native princes of Wales.

In the British Isles, one of the most catastrophic days in the history of knightly combat occurred on June 24, 1314, the second day of the battle of Bannockburn, at which hundreds of English knights under the command of Edward I’s hapless son Edward II (r. 1307–27) were skewered by pike-wielding Scottish infantry marshaled by the heroic king Robert the Bruce.

Strangely, however, this did not dim the allure of knighthood. Far from it. For as knights became relatively less critical on the battlefield, their standing in society was rising. From the mid-thirteenth century English knights began to be summoned to parliaments, where they sat in what became the Commons—the second (but today the most important) of the two English parliamentary cameras.

Noblemen would still be knighted as a matter of course—for knighthood was still linked to the martial spirit of the baronial caste and its tropes of masculinity. But it also extended down to the families who were wealthy but not rich, who controlled estates but not regions, who fought in wars but did not command divisions, and whose jobs in peacetime included serving as members of Parliament, judges, sheriffs, coroners, and tax collectors. By and by, these tasks overtook military duties, to the point where gentlemen became somewhat loath to seek knighthood at all.

A visitor to the Tower of London or Windsor Castle today can see the gargantuan suits of armor Henry commissioned around the time of his last military campaigns in France in the 1540s—armor that would have been quite useless had the king ever been hit with a cannonball but that advertised his self-image as a chivalrous soldier in the romantic tradition stretching back centuries before his birth. Nor was Henry the last English king to indulge in medieval cosplay. The Tower of London also displays fine, ornately decorated suits of armor made for Charles I (r. 1625–49) and James II (r. 1685–88), neither of whom, despite the troubles of their reigns, had much real use for medieval armor beyond ceremonial showboating.

Yet the United Kingdom has no monopoly on modern chivalry. Institutions of knighthood still exist across the world, including in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Sweden.59 Even in the United States one can find knights and knightly institutions. While writing this book I attended an investiture ceremony of a modern-day American chivalric order, held at a church in Nashville, Tennessee.

an avowedly elite and international affair; partly fantastical and sometimes outright silly; less a way of fighting and far more a set of shared assumptions; but an institution that once comprised the philosophy of the most powerful people in the west and allowed them to shape the world around them.

In 1009 they had proven powerless when a Fatimid caliph in Egypt, al-Hakim, had ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which protected Christ’s tomb.

On March 12, 1088, a middle-aged French bishop called Odo of Châtillon was consecrated as Pope Urban II. Already Odo had enjoyed a distinguished career in the Church.

Cluny’s dignitaries during its golden era tended to be at ease in high company, and Odo was no different. Like Abbot Hugh, he ingratiated himself with leaders across Europe, and became particularly close to the great reforming pope Gregory VII. Around 1080 Gregory plucked Odo out of Cluny to appoint him cardinal bishop of Ostia. This was his springboard to the papacy itself.

The second schism had its origins across the Alps. In 1076 the so-called Investiture Controversy had erupted between Gregory VII and the German king Henry IV.

This posed deep constitutional questions. Were popes the single highest authority in the west, as Gregory had asserted in 1075 in a document known as the Dictatus papae? Or were kings supreme in their realms, under God alone? That was Henry’s position.

Bishops tried to enforce the Peace by putting towns and regions under the Church’s explicit protection, and threatening God’s curse against trespassers who did their inhabitants harm. The Truce, meanwhile, named days and times of the year when fighting was forbidden.3 Both the Peace and the Truce of God proved widely popular among the common people, but they were not enormously effective. So among the many things that vexed Urban at the outset of his papacy was how to support moral censure with positive action.

This was not the first time that such a request had arrived from Byzantium: after the catastrophe at Manzikert, an anonymous letter addressed to the Count of Flanders had begged western military aid against the Turks; Pope Gregory had separately lobbied secular princes to “bring aid to the Christians who are grievously afflicted by the most frequent ravagings of the Saracens.”

From the spring of 1095 onward Pope Urban threw himself into an extraordinary rallying tour, concentrated on southern France and Burgundy. He glad-handed powerful noblemen and bishops—influential men such as Raymond, Count of Toulouse; Odo, Duke of Burgundy; and Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy—and he excited preachers both official and unofficial to take his message far and wide.

The end goal was not Constantinople, but Christ’s sepulcher in Muslim-ruled Jerusalem. If Byzantine emperors could not protect Christian interests there, Urban reasoned, popes would step in. They would not just save Byzantium. They would usurp the role of Roman emperors as guardians of the holiest places in the Christian world.

# From previous Investiture Controvery: This is the strongest action where Popes could prove superiority over Holy Roman Emperor as the highest authority of God's vicar on earth

in November, he convened another Church council, ninety miles away at Clermont. And on November 27, he gave a sermon as destined to be spoken of for a thousand years. The exact text is lost, but according to a chronicler known as Fulcher of Chartres, Urban implored his audience to:

All who went on his campaign of extermination and died along the way would be rewarded with “remission of sins.”

“Deus vult!” they cried. “Deus vult!” God wills it—God wills it.* Like a modern-day politician at an election rally, Urban had established a call-and-response catchphrase that would motivate his supporters long after he had moved on. He also invented a neat piece of theater.

This was not quite as Urban II had intended. His vision for the First Crusade was one in which powerful nobles would lead large military divisions toward the Holy Land, in a reasonably organized fashion. Yet the first wave of crusaders to depart Europe for the east consisted of poorly trained and barely controllable zealots egged on by populist demagogues, including a shabby but charismatic ascetic called Peter the Hermit and a rich but disreputable German count called Emicho of Flonheim. The “People’s Crusade,” as this amateur vanguard was later known,

The emperor Alexios Komnenos was not delighted to see them. They had announced their arrival by rioting and skirmishing in Byzantine towns along their route, and the crusaders’ lack of military expertise and discipline made them worthless for the task at hand: driving Turkish armies commanded by a warlord and self-appointed “sultan of Rum”* Qilij Arslan I out of Asia Minor for good.

as better-organized armies commanded by lords and staffed by knights began to appear in Byzantine territory. These, at least, were serious warriors. Among the leaders of this so-called Princes’ Crusade were Raymond, Count of Toulouse; the French king’s brother Hugh of Vermandois; William the Conqueror’s son Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy; Robert, Count of Flanders; and a pair of ambitious brothers called Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin of Boulogne.

Their task was a huge one: driving Qilij Arslan and any other Turkish warlords back through Asia Minor, and restoring captured cities to the control of the Byzantine emperor, before making their way through Syria toward Jerusalem. It would be very difficult, even for an army with a core of seven and a half thousand knights trained in lethal, Frankish couched-lance warfare.

They camped outside the walls for nine months, during one of the bitterest winters many of them had ever experienced, and finally forced their way into a starving Antioch by trickery in June 1098.

they relieved their miseries by carrying out a dreadful massacre, an orgy of mass murder so hideous that, as one chronicler put it, “the earth was covered with blood and the corpses of the slaughtered . . . the bodies of Christians, Gauls as well as Greeks, Syrians and Armenians mixed together.”

After besieging Jerusalem for around a month, the crusader army breached the city’s walls at two points on Friday, July 15. As had happened in Antioch a year previously, they rushed in and put the city to the sword.

When news of the atrocities reached the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, it “brought tears to the eye and pained the heart.”17 Many in the caliph’s court cursed the world, and at least one blamed Islam’s Sunni-Shia sectarian divide for having weakened the unity of the umma to such an extent that the Franks (ifranj, as westerners were generically known to educated Muslims of this time) had been able to conquer their sacred lands.

For another, to characterize the Crusades as a simple faith war between Islam and Christianity is to ignore the complex regional and local politics that informed successive waves of crusading from the late eleventh century onward.

From the time of the First Crusade until the end of the Middle Ages, popes ordered or sanctioned military campaigns on three continents, against enemies who included Turkish warlords, Arab sultans, Kurdish generals, and Spanish Arab emirs, as well as Baltic pagans, French heretics, Mongol chieftains, disobedient western Christian kings, and even Holy Roman emperors.

crusading was important precisely because it was such a varied phenomenon and a malleable concept. It did not simply define relations between Christianity and Islam; rather, it set a template for the projection of military power against enemies of the Roman Church wherever they could be perceived.

In 1110 the city of Sidon, partway between Beirut and Tyre, was prized away from its Muslim rulers by an army that included a party of Norwegian Vikings, who had sailed to the Holy Land from Scandinavia led by their intrepid teenage king, Sigurd I “Jerusalemfarer.”18 Sigurd helped reduce Sidon, then returned to Scandinavia with a splinter of Christ’s True Cross, the holiest relic in Jerusalem, as reward for his service.

A British pilgrim called Saewulf, who visited Jerusalem around 1103, suffered shipwreck and piracy during his long sea journeys to and from the east, and complained that the roads around Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth were plagued by brigands who hid out in caves, “awake day and night, always keeping a lookout for someone to attack.” (By the roadside, he wrote, lay “countless corpses which have been torn up by wild beasts.” 19)

And it was not just religious ties that bound the new crusader states with the wider world. As the kingdom stabilized under the new monarchy, it began to resemble a western “feudal” state—with barons and knights granted estates and villages in return for sworn military service to the crown.

A significant number of noble and even royal families put down roots in the east, creating blood networks from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.

it was a matter of duty. In the late 1129, Fulk, Count of Anjou, in central France, was persuaded to hand over his lands to his son Geoffrey and travel to Jerusalem to marry the aging king Baldwin II’s daughter and heir, Melisende. Two years later Baldwin died: Melisende was queen of Jerusalem and Fulk was king. He stayed in the east until his own death in 1143. This in turn meant that, back home in the west, Fulk’s descendants remained conscious that they now had family in the Holy Land. Fulk’s grandson Henry II of England was petitioned in the 1180s to honor family history by taking over the crown of Jerusalem during a succession crisis there. Henry demurred, but the Plantagenets remained keen supporters of crusading ever after: every Plantagenet king until the early fourteenth century took crusader vows, and two of them (Richard the Lionheart and Edward I) fought in the Holy Land with distinction—as

These were buzzing trade hubs: in the thirteenth century the city of Acre was said to produce more annual revenue than the kingdom of England.

in the thirteenth century the city of Acre was said to produce more annual revenue than the kingdom of England. As a result, every major city conquered by the crusaders quickly became home to a colony or colonies of expatriate merchants trading in goods including fruits, honey and marmalade, cane sugar, cotton, linen, camel hair cloth and wool, glassware, and exotic items traded over long distances such as Indian pepper and Chinese silks.

The notion of a military order that seemed to fuse the two hitherto distinct roles of knight and monk was obviously paradoxical. But it gained acceptance in the Church thanks in large part to the advocacy of Bernard of Clairvaux—the energetic Cistercian abbot whom we met in chapter 6. Bernard and his protégé Pope Eugene III, who became pontiff in 1145, were fascinated by the notion of reforming the decadent institution of knighthood, just as the Cistercians had tried to reform the bloated and indulgent corpus of Benedictine monasticism.

Bolstered with papal approval, a promising financial basis on which to solicit donations and income, and no shortage of work to do patrolling the Holy Land, the Templars thrived. Their membership ballooned. They received handsome awards of landed estates, revenue, and other patronage from wealthy supporters across Europe and the near east. And they built up a network of monastic-style houses in almost every Christian territory of the west, where non-fighting brothers worked to finance the military wing in the east.

the Christian cleric Fulcher of Chartres made much the same point. Fulcher took part in the First Crusade, and he was one of those who remained in the east long after it was over, serving as chaplain to King Baldwin I. In his official history of the crusade, known as The Deeds of the Franks (Gesta Francorum), Fulcher marveled at the fact that the crusaders had survived at all.

The troubles began in the 1140s, when a Turkish soldier and career politician known as Imad al-Din Zengi attacked the city of Edessa—capital of the smallest and most vulnerable of the crusader states. Edessa was a long way from the coast, halfway between the Latin-held city of Antioch and Aleppo, where Zengi was governor, and that fact of geography alone made it vulnerable. Zengi had a reputation for drunkenness and extreme cruelty to his troops and enemies alike, but he was a brilliant strategist, with ambitions to unite as many Syrian cities as possible under his own leadership.

In 1144 Zengi appeared outside Edessa with troops, siege towers, and professional diggers. The miners tunneled beneath the city walls while artillerymen used giant catapults known as mangonels to bombard the citizens from above. It did not take long for the Turks to break Edessa’s resistance.

Bernard’s announcement of the Crusade (backed by a papal bull known as Quantum praedecessores) was followed by an intense spate of preaching and negotiation with possible military leaders. Knights and untrained civilians signed up in droves. And popular enthusiasm spilled over as before into zealotry, bigotry, and anti-Semitic attacks, in which a new generation of Jews in the Rhineland were beaten, robbed, mutilated, blinded, murdered, or hounded until they committed suicide.

When Bernard preached at Vézelay, he was accompanied onstage by one of them: Louis VII of France (r. 1137–80). Not long afterward the king of the Germans, Conrad III (r. 1138–52),* also succumbed to Bernard’s diplomatic pressure and signed up.