Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Thanks to their relationships with wool producers, the Florentines could secure heavily discounted prices before English wool officially hit the export market.

bills of exchange.

Hối phiếu hoặc Checks

The Templars had pioneered their use in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, creating chits that allowed pilgrims traveling to the east to borrow against their properties and assets at home and withdraw their funds from Templar houses in the Holy Land.

They were a safe way to move credit over long distances, and could be secured against fraud with seals and code words. They allowed Christian merchants to get around the Roman Church’s strict prohibition on usury—for when money was changed between currencies, exchange rates could be manipulated artificially in the lender’s favor, effectively allowing profit to be baked into the trade without officially defining this as interest. Better yet, bills of exchange could also be traded and circulated—sold at a discount to third parties who could go on to cash them themselves.

The notion of keeping business accounts was not original to the Middle Ages: it dated back at least to the Roman republic. But double-entry bookkeeping—in which assets and liabilities were systematically listed in opposing columns and balanced out to describe numerically the state of the company—became a western business norm only in the fourteenth century when it was adopted by Italian merchants and applied across their businesses, giving them the competitive advantage of understanding their own trading performance and potential to an exact standard.

Datini was in many ways the poster boy for the bright and busy new commercial world of the later Middle Ages. He opened his account books with his personal motto, which summed up his approach to life. “For God and profit,” he wrote. But profit, like God, could be capricious, as traders and financiers sometimes found to their great cost.

Edward III would launch England into a new age. Soon after this Edward was old enough to exercise royal power independently, he began to plot, prosecute, and spend prodigious sums on war against the kings of Scotland and France in pursuit of his right—as he saw it—not only to rule the old Plantagenet dominions in Normandy and Aquitaine, but to claim the French crown itself. This was the beginning of the Hundred Years War, which historians usually date between 1337 and 1453.

Italian banks took regular repayments on their loans to England in the form of tax receipts and discounted wool sales, but by the mid-1340s both Edward and his Italian creditors found themselves in deep water. Then a perfect storm hit. In Florence, political and social unrest led to a series of rapid changes in government, in which the Bardi backed the wrong candidate. Meanwhile, wars in Tuscany that they had partly financed also turned out badly. From 1341 the Bardi and Peruzzi were struggling to keep up with the English king’s demand for funds. In 1341 they defaulted on a payment they had agreed to make to Flemish merchants on Edward’s behalf; under the terms of a deal the parties had struck, Edward was forced to hand over his aristocratic friends the earls of Derby and Warwick as hostages to the Flemings.40 It was humiliating for all involved.

In 1343 the Peruzzi went bust, amid a series of rapid changes of chairmen, allegations of political corruption leveled against board members, and repeated defaults on debts by the English.41 Then, in 1346 the Bardi were also forced to declare themselves bankrupt. Although they were not totally ruined—and were indeed still loaning large sums of money to the English crown thirty years later in the 1370s—they were nevertheless badly shaken and very nearly put out of business altogether.

The great twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes is often credited with having popularized the idea that “if you owe the bank one hundred pounds, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million pounds, that’s the bank’s problem.” This was as true in the 1340s as at any time afterward.

Geography made Lübeck a bustling port linking the Christian states of northern Europe with territory newly colonized around the Baltic, exploiting the rich commercial possibilities of a region abundant in timber, furs, amber, and resin. The ambitions of the merchants who lived and worked there ensured that over the years Lübeck became the most influential of a cluster of similar city-states around the Baltic and beyond, including Danzig, Riga, Bergen, Hamburg, Bremen, and even Cologne. By the mid-fourteenth century these had banded together in a loose commercial partnership known as the Hanseatic League.

This was more than just patriotism: it is fair to say that without the goodwill and financial backing of Whittington and his fellow London merchants, the Normandy campaign of 1415 could not have been fought—and Henry V would never have won the most famous battle in the whole of the Hundred Years War: Agincourt.

The Templars, de Nogaret revealed to the scholars, had been the subject of a long, covert investigation carried out by the French government and overseen by him. He claimed his inquiries had revealed foul and endemic corruption running from the top to the bottom of the Templar order. Under the cover of papal protection, generations of high-ranking Templars had turned their noble organization into a hotbed of homosexuality, idolatry, and vice, where members were not only allowed but encouraged to disrespect Christ’s name. According to an account of the meeting written by the chronicler Jean de St. Victor, de Nogaret alleged that in nightly rituals, Templars spat on the cross, trampled on images of Christ, and denied his holiness.1 They worshipped false idols and engaged one another in lewd sexual acts. In formal allegations drawn up by the government, the brothers’ supposed deeds were described as “a disgrace for humanity, a pernicious example of evil and a universal scandal” and the men themselves “wolves in sheep’s clothing . . . sons of infidelity.”

False accuse by French government upon the Knight Templars in 1307

The king had been complaining in private of his suspicions about the Templars since at least the spring of 1305.3 Whether he truly believed the order was riddled with sexual misconduct and godless corruption was not—and still is not—certain. But he was definitely interested in the Templars’ wealth as a possible resource to boost his faltering economy and fund his foreign wars, and it pleased him to pose as the scourge of Church corruption.

For nearly two centuries, Templar brothers had played a distinguished part in some of the most dramatic battles and sieges in the near east. They had taken on Saladin at Hattin in 1187, slogged through the flooded Nile delta during the disastrous Egyptian crusades of 1217–21 and 1249–50, and been the last men standing when the Mamluks overran Acre in 1291. The Templars had also developed an institutional expertise in financial services—as moneylenders, accountants, and civil servants, they were employed by the French crown to handle important aspects of public finance. Their non-fighting brothers had houses all over the west—in virtually every kingdom from England and France to the German states, Sicily, and Hungary, where their patrons included kings, queens, and the highest nobility. So for the French to set their sights on taking down this institution was no small task. But that, with the connivance of Paris’s scholars, is what they did.

The pope of the day, Clement V (r. 1305–14), was a Gascon-born milksop who had been elected under French political pressure in the expectation that he would be directly biddable from Paris; he spent his whole reign in France.* But even Clement could not be seen to simply roll over and allow the Templars to be destroyed by a secular prince. Clement therefore attempted to stall Philip’s assault by claiming the investigation into Templar corruption as his own, and extending it to every sovereign territory in western Christendom.

In late February a set of seven technical questions written in the king’s name were sent to the university’s regent and nonregent masters of theology. In dense legalese these asked the masters for their collective opinion on matters pertaining to the right—or the duty—of the French crown to proceed against heretics and apostates in French territory.

Perhaps the masters’ craven response was understandable. King Philip was undoubtedly a man to be feared, and in his reign to date he had shown no compunction about persecuting to ruin or death those who displeased him. Many of the masters of theology in Paris were also members of monastic orders that, like the Templars, were subject by papal oversight and therefore also potential targets for royal attacks. They had no wish to see the Templars crushed—but equally had no interest in drawing down further wrath on their own orders. What was more, they were pedantic churchmen who had a natural inclination to see heresy wherever they looked. There were one or two dissenting voices within the university—such as an aged Italian hermit-scholar who signed himself Augustine Triumphus and composed a personal demolition of the government’s case against the Templars.9 But by and large, the scholars left the government to go about its dubious business, hoping that having said their piece, they would be left alone to continue their studies and teaching.

In March 1312, at the Council of Vienne, Pope Clement declared the order beyond repair. In March 1314 Jacques de Molay was burned to death in Paris;

the university had only been officially founded in 1231 by Pope Gregory IX. It was therefore less than a century old in 1307, and one of only a handful of universities in the world—its nearest rivals being at Oxford and Bologna. Yet despite its youth, this institution was clearly regarded as an important pillar of the establishment, and the opinions of its brightest and best scholars carried political as well as academic importance.

the curriculum he studied there was not strictly Christian. In fact, the basic syllabus taught in Seville and all other schools like it dated back more than one thousand years, to long before Christ was even born. It was a classical program of study that would have been just as familiar to Aristotle in the fourth century b.c. as it would have been to Cicero in the first century b.c., Marcus Aurelius in the second century a.d., or Boethius in the sixth century a.d.

the so-called seven liberal arts (“liberal” because they were once considered suitable for free people rather than the enslaved). These were subdivided into two groups. First came the trivium, the arts of expression and argument: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Then came the quadrivium, which consisted of the arts of calculation: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Although the trivium and quadrivium did not cover the whole scheme of human knowledge—eager young minds would also be expected to apply themselves to theology, medicine, and law—they were nevertheless the bedrock of a formal education. Boethius described the quadrivium as the foundation stone on which all philosophical research into the nature of the world rested, and few serious medieval thinkers ever departed from that assumption.

In all, Isidore served as bishop of Seville for more than thirty years. Toward the end of his life, in 633–34 he presided over a Church conference known as the Fourth Council of Toledo, which set policies that would have a lasting impact on the cultural and political spirit of Christian Iberia during the Middle Ages. It tightened discriminatory laws against Spanish Jews, and promised close ties between the Church in Spain and its secular Christian rulers. Perhaps most significantly for Isidore himself, the council also commanded that bishops should establish schools alongside their cathedrals,

to a medieval western world in which the Catholic Church would exercise a monopoly over schooling, provide the institutional environment in which western intellectuals would exist, and dictate permissible—and forbidden—avenues of study.

at every level. Obviously, the surest way to maintain a supply of smart, literate people attuned to the latest approved doctrine was to educate them “in house”—which

scholarship remained alive in the west after the Roman Empire had retreated beyond the Balkans. It was why, wherever there was a cathedral or a monastery, there tended to be some form of school, a scriptorium, and a library.* And it was why the Rule of Saint Benedict demanded monks spend several hours every day reading the Bible and other religious writings.

newly founded abbey of Bec in Normandy was considered such a magnet for learning that the chronicler Orderic Vitalis thought “almost every monk seemed a philosopher.”

The biblical scholar Augustine, prior of St. Andrew’s Abbey in Rome, was selected by Pope Gregory I to lead the famous English mission of 597 that persuaded King Aethelbert of Kent to embrace Christianity and kick-started the conversion of Saxon England. The mathematician and astronomer Gerbert of Aurillac, who brought the abacus to Europe in the late tenth century and wrote several well-regarded mathematical textbooks, rose to the papacy itself, as Pope Sylvester II. Then there was Alcuin of York, the Englishman who sat for many years at the right hand of Charlemagne. The chronicler Einhard described Alcuin as the most learned man in the whole world;

Alcuin was encouraged to pursue his program of manuscript copying, which helped disseminate learned texts around the empire. And, like Isidore, he consciously used his political power to serve education itself: cultivating his own private group of students at the palace school at Aachen, and making reforms to the syllabus there that were later mimicked by monastic and cathedral schools that flourished during the Carolingian age and afterward.

scholarship as a whole took on an increasingly concentrated Christian flavor, in which the writings of non- and pre-Christians were viewed with mounting suspicion. Whereas in the sixth century Isidore of Seville had roved voraciously across the writings of Greek and Roman pagans as well as the early Church fathers, by the turn of the millennium, this sort of omnivorous scholarship was firmly out of favor.

From the time of the Abbasid revolution in 750, education was highly prized. Scholars were generously patronized. And critically, scholarship was detached from religion, allowing eastern Christians and Jews to contribute heavily to the collective body of knowledge within the Islamic empire. Libraries such as Baghdad’s House of Wisdom* compiled collections containing hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, translated into Arabic from almost every language in the literate world.

Yet despite the fact that the Islamic world directly abutted the Christian realms of the Mediterranean, between the eighth and eleventh centuries very little trickled across. It was not until the turn of the twelfth century—not coincidentally, the dawn of the crusading era, when Islamic cities with scholarly communities like Toledo, Córdoba, Palermo, and Antioch came under Christian control, and Damascus, Alexandria, and Baghdad were suddenly more accessible than before—that the intellectual boundaries thrown up between the Arab and Christian blocs began to collapse, and scholarship both new and forgotten began flooding from the Arab world to the west.

Until the turn of the millennium the astrolabe was something of a mystery to western Christian scholars. But during his time at Reichenau, Hermann managed to obtain an incomplete manuscript partially describing its workings. This document somehow made its way to his little island from the caliphate of Córdoba, probably via the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll, about 100 kilometers north of Barcelona. It may have been written by Gerbert of Aurillac, the French scholar who became Pope Sylvester II. Whatever the case, it contained scientific intelligence that was well known in the Islamic world but had seldom, if ever, been circulated north of the Alps and Pyrenees. Hermann had a scoop.

He then redrafted and completed the text to record his findings for posterity. This was in itself a significant achievement for scholarship in Christian Europe, for in the following centuries the astrolabe would transform timekeeping and navigation, ultimately opening the way for the Portuguese voyages of discovery and the pivot to the New World.

another talented scholar struck out for the intellectual heartlands of the Arab-speaking world. His name was Gerard of Cremona,

Specifically, Gerard yearned for a way to read the great classical scientist Claudius Ptolemy. Ptolemy had been a subject or citizen of the Roman Empire who lived in second-century a.d. Alexandria and wrote in Greek. His foundational work on astronomy was known as the Almagest,

the Almagest was known only secondhand in the west and was not available in Latin translation. It was, however, extant in Arabic.

In 1085 the Reconquista king of Castile and León, Alfonso VI, had conquered the city of Toledo from its Muslim rulers. Once one of the finest cities of Umayyad Andalusia, Toledo was full of libraries, which contained Arabic-language editions of classical texts unavailable anywhere else in Europe.

During his time at Toledo, Gerard translated nearly one hundred important scientific studies out of Arabic.

He worked on mathematical treatises by Greek giants such as Archimedes and Euclid, and on original Islamic works by astronomers such as the ninth-century mathematician and civil engineer al-Farghani and the tenth-century philosopher and legal writer al-Farabi. He translated the esteemed medical specialist al-Razi and the physicist and the so-called “father of optics” Ibn al-Haytham.

Toledo in the late twelfth century was home to “the wisest philosophers in all the world.”

Toledo was a fruitful place for Jewish scholars to work, particularly during the enlightened reign of Alfonso X the Wise of Castile (r. 1252–84), who patronized Toledo’s translators, including large numbers of Jews, encouraging them to render as much material as possible into Castilian vernacular rather than Latin.

As old works flooded anew into western libraries, trends in scholarship and creative writing were also transformed. In theology and philosophy, Aristotle’s influence was deeply felt with the rise of scholasticism: an approach to biblical study that emphasized logical deduction, with readers encouraged to interrogate texts deeply and reconcile paradoxes and contradictions by resorting to reasoning and structured argument.

From its completion in around 1150, the Sentences became the foundational textbook for all theology students until the end of the Middle Ages. Future generations of great medieval scholars including Thomas Aquinas (more on him shortly), Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham would all begin their academic careers by writing commentaries on the Sentences, and no theologian could consider himself a master until he had wrestled with it.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the historical tradition blossom, along with genres including biography, travelogue, and treatises on good government.

there may have been no greater individual chronicler in the whole Middle Ages than Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century monk at the notably learned English monastery in St. Albans, whose works of English history started with the Creation and worked their way down to the travails of his king, Henry III.

From the 1180s, windmills began to appear across the European landscape—devices that harnessed what we now call renewable energy to grind corn into flour but that depended on an impressive degree of mathematical engineering to build.25 New clocks were invented: elaborate devices powered by water or weights that marked the hours without lengthening or shortening them according to the amount of daylight. From the thirteenth century, scholars like the Englishman Roger Bacon began to record recipes for gunpowder—an invention whose arrival in the west would in time come to be associated symbolically with the end of the Middle Ages.

Hildegard of Bingen, a bright German nun prone to magnificent holy visions, and a prolific composer of liturgical music, morality plays, and tracts on medicine, natural science, health, herbology, and theology;

One of thirty-six Doctor of the Church.

the great Byzantine emperor Justinian’s Digest had been rediscovered in the 1070s, to great academic excitement among the jurists of northern Italy. As we saw in chapter 3, the Digest had been a towering legal achievement when it was compiled, which along with the codex and Institutes provided an authoritative guide to the entire body of Roman law as it had been understood during the sixth century a.d. Now, at the close of the eleventh century, this vast trove of legal writing offered a tantalizing new basis for thinking about justice and governance.

The mechanism by which Bologna became a university was essentially a process of unionization. Because many—perhaps most—of Bologna’s legal scholars from the eleventh century onward were noncitizens, they did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship and were subject to onerous laws levied on foreigners. Natives of each different country living in Bologna were regarded as collective entities and punished en masse if one of their number broke the city’s laws or defaulted on debt, a legal concept known as the right of reprisal. To resist this, Bologna’s eleventh-century students therefore began to organize themselves into mutual aid societies, known in Latin as universitas scholarium, which in turn could act collectively as the studium.