Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

It took some time for this informal system of student association to be recognized as a bona fide institution—it was only in 1158 that the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa granted the law known as Authentica habita, which conferred permanent privileges and rights on law students in Bologna and elsewhere.

Oxford benefited hugely from Anglo-French political wrangling during the reigns of the Plantagenet king Henry II and Capetian monarch Louis VII: during a particularly sour patch in relations between the two in 1167, Henry ordered all English scholars to leave their studies in Paris, upon which many of them crossed the English Channel, migrated up the Thames valley, and settled in Oxford, supercharging its academic profile and development.

Experts in anatomy and medicine in southern Italy grouped together at Salerno, which became the foremost medical school in Europe.

In the fourteenth century universities appeared far outside these four realms: Irish students could go to the University of Dublin, Bohemians to Prague, Poles to Kraków, Hungarians to Pecs, Albanians to Durres, and Germans to Heidelberg or Cologne.

In 1245 his fellow friars asked him to leave Italy and go north, to the University of Paris, where he was to bring glory to God by embarking on a career as an academic.

had the trust of the leading light of the faculty, the Bavarian theology professor and fellow Dominican Albert Magnus. After a short time in Paris, Albert took Aquinas to the university in his own hometown of Cologne, where Aquinas worked as a junior professor for four years, lecturing students on the Bible while continuing his own private study. In 1252 he went back in Paris to read for the degree of master of theology, and when he completed this, in 1256, he was recognized as a regent master, with responsibility for teaching.

His crowning study was the massive Summa theologiae—designed as an introduction to, and defense of, the whole of Christian belief, written for what we would now call undergraduates, but accessible to lay readers too.29 The Summa theologiae dealt with everything from the nature of the world to morality, virtue, sin, and the mysteries of the sacraments;

Aquinas was an academic devoted to what is known as the “scholastic” method—resolving intellectual problems through highly structured debate or “dialectical reasoning.”

Aquinas read and absorbed Aristotle (writing a commentary on the Metaphysics and other Aristotelian works), and his understanding of Aristotelian philosophy fed his analysis and exposition of scripture. This was not always straightforward:

Nevertheless, one of the most significant—if unintended—consequences of the rise of the universities was that institutions that had been created to facilitate serious study for its own sake developed into finishing schools for politicians.* By the time the sixteenth century dawned, a university career was becoming almost as necessary a qualification for public office as it is today.

Bologna University, for example, was the first to employ a woman as a lecturer: Bettisia Gozzadini taught law, albeit with her face hidden behind a veil, from the late 1230s, and blazed a path for other women to follow—such as the sisters Novella and Bettina d’Andrea, who taught law at Bologna and Padua, respectively, in the fourteenth century.

All of these, in different ways, spoke to a spirit of intellectual independence that remains a governing ideal in western higher education to this day. Yet if medieval universities could—and did—serve as clusters for radical thought and reexamination of long-held orthodoxies, they were just as often places where debate was stifled and forcibly shut down, in an attempt to preserve prevailing pieties.

there were powerful figures both inside and outside the universities who found the new spirit of intellectual inquiry to be as much a menace as a force for good. Not least among them was Bernard of Clairvaux. His monastic order, the Cistercians, were almost by definition hostile to book learning. And Bernard in particular—a mystic, rather than a scholar—was more or less allergic to any system of study that deviated from unquestioning adoration of scripture.

As a theologian he brilliantly spliced Aristotelian logical reasoning with scriptural study. He helped develop the Catholic doctrine of Limbo as a realm of the afterlife where unfortunate souls such as unbaptized babies might be found. He was a gifted musician and poet.

All the while, Abelard was writing brilliant but challenging books and treatises, which drew on Aristotelian methods of reasoning and often came to conclusions that could be construed as heretical. By the late 1130s, he had already been publicly convicted of heresy once (in 1121), on which occasion he was forced to burn a collection of his lectures known today as the Theologia “Summi boni.”

In 1210, an earlier group of scholars within the arts faculty at the university had been officially condemned for reading too much Aristotle. A number of that great Greek philosopher’s works had been officially forbidden, along with works by other scholars, both ancient and modern, which offered secondary commentary on him.

But nowhere was the entanglement of academy in the secular world played out more dramatically than at Oxford, where in the later fourteenth century a very different sort of heresy emerged, not only splitting that the university but causing ructions throughout political society. The heresy was known as Lollardy, and its guiding figure was the theologian and philosopher John Wycliffe.

Among a number of the controversial ideas that Wycliffe had been formulating during his academic career was the notion that there was no scriptural basis for the papacy, that transubstantiation (i.e., the literal transformation of bread into the body of Christ during the Eucharist) was nonsense, and that secular powers were within their rights to demand back lands that had been granted to the church.

Wycliffe the theologian had done far more than ruffle feathers within the academy: he had sparked revolutionary fervor across Europe, the effects of which would feed directly into the Protestant reformations that marked the end of the Middle Ages.

In 1409, in direct response to Wycliffism and Lollardy, the English archbishop of Canterbury (and Oxford alumnus) Thomas Arundel issued a series of thirteen “Constitutions”—clerical rulings directed specifically at the University of Oxford, which strictly limited the freedom of speech and research among academics, forbade unlicensed preaching and English translation of scripture, demanded monthly inspections by senior university officials to ensure that no untoward opinions were being expressed, and forbade teachers to say anything to their students that was not approved church doctrine.

In the long term, however, a template for intellectual life within western universities was set, one in which two conflicting ambitions are at play. On the one hand universities were to be institutions where the more intellectually vigorous and fearless people in society could go to learn, investigate, and challenge the world as they found it. Yet they were also under pressure from both within and without to serve as bulwarks for politically acceptable pieties.

To secure his legacy in Wales, Edward I had commissioned a string of massive stone castles, built at staggering cost across the beautiful, mountainous landscape of Powys and Gwynedd. These castles were state-of-the-art military installations and totems to the might of English monarchy. They cost vast sums and employed thousands of people during several decades. And they were hate objects for the subjugated Welsh, whose sense of self was deeply rooted in a liberty they saw as stretching back to Roman times and beyond.

so in the crusader states, where war and violence were more or less endemic—it was only natural, therefore, that some of the world’s finest castles were to be found in and around the kingdom of Jerusalem.

Caernarfon had been a Roman legionary outpost called Segontium, and although by the 1280s not much remained of that far-flung imperial outpost, the memory of a Welsh connection with Roman Britannia lived on.4 Caernarfon was associated (albeit dubiously) with Constantine the Great as well as the western usurper-emperor Magnus Maximus, both of whom had been declared emperor while in various parts of Britannia* (see chapter 2). Maximus—or Maxen Wledig, in Welsh—loomed especially large in local folklore. The great national romance known as The Mabinogion told in vaunting terms of a dream vision Maximus experienced:

During initial excavations in 1283, the supposed mortal remains of Maximus/Maxen Wledig were found, dug up, and reinterred with honors in a local church.

Around the year a.d. 1000, however, western Europe experienced a revolution in castle building. What prompted this revolution has vexed historians for generations: the answer probably lies in European instability after the breakup of the Carolingian empire; the external threats to Christian kingdoms posed by Vikings, Magyars, and Iberian Muslims;

These vastly improved castles were possible to conceive—let alone build—because of the leaps forward in economic activity and mathematics that occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the boom was also down to the basic willingness of later medieval patrons—royalty, nobility, and churchmen alike—to throw money and ambition at castle engineers.

To bring a project like Caernarfon from conception to completion could take decades, even without major interruptions. Quarrying, moving, cutting, and lifting stone was slow, labor-intensive, dirty, backbreaking toil. It was possible to build walls and other stoneworks for only about eight months a year, because winter frosts prevented lime mortar from setting.

As a rule, peaceful lands did not need giant castles, so tranquil working conditions were not a luxury granted to engineers.

The site and half-built town around it was sacked and captured. Newly constructed town walls were pulled down. When the rebellion was crushed, Master James and his on-site deputy, an expert mason called Master Walter of Hereford, were dismayed to find their progress set back by months, if not years.

In 1296, at the height of on-site activity at Beaumaris, Master James reported to the royal Exchequer that he had “one thousand carpenters, smiths, plasterers and navvies” at work, guarded by one hundred and thirty soldiers. They labored long and hard, in weather conditions that—as any visitor to the mountainous region of Snowdonia today will attest—could switch from beautiful to brutal on a dime. In total, nearly £15,000 was spent at Beaumaris,

In Hungary, the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century emphasized the need for castles to defend against marauders from the east; although many older castles were razed by the Mongols, they were rebuilt stronger in the decades after the dreaded Tartars vanished, on the orders of King Béla IV, who demanded a castle on every hilltop in his realm.

Frederick II Hohenstaufen. The Hohenstaufen were very enthusiastic castle builders—and needed to be, because their chief dynastic trait was fighting other rulers, particularly popes. However, their most impressive surviving castle lies not in Germany but in southern Italy, where Frederick erected the stunning fortress-cum-hunting-lodge Castel del Monte on a hill above Andria, in Apulia. With its eight-sided walls, each joined by an eight-sided tower, Castel del Monte spoke in part to Frederick’s political and military aims, but more, perhaps, to his fascination with geometry and mathematics, and his keen interest in Islam. In its footprint, Castel del Monte resembles nothing quite so much as the first level of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (see chapter 4), the city that Frederick returned to Christian control during his crusade of 1228–29. Edward I was not the only thirteenth-century king to import design ideas from the eastern Mediterranean.

first Gothic building project of the Middle Ages was the abbey church at Saint-Denis,

Building Notre-Dame was a colossal feat of construction: nearly one hundred years separated the moment that Louis VII laid the cornerstone at Easter in 1163 and the completion of the now-iconic circular “rose” stained-glass windows at either end of the transept. And even then, major works continued to be carried out on Notre-Dame until the late fourteenth century.

In Florence, however, the opportunities were much greater. The city had a population of perhaps forty-five thousand people (which made it larger than London), ruled by an oligarchic government generally dominated by wealthy merchant families. Like many other Italian cities, it had been plagued for most of the thirteenth century by violent civil strife, firstly between a pro-Hohenstaufen imperial faction known as the Ghibellines and a papal faction known as the Guelphs, and subsequently between parties known as the Blacks and Whites.

Not until 1418—some 122 years after the foundation stone on Arnolfo’s original cathedral was laid—did anyone come up with an engineering solution to the conundrum of Florence’s duomo. That person was a mathematical genius called Filippo Brunelleschi, who won an open competition for the commission and was forced to invent entirely new building systems and lifting machines to winch some four million bricks into position,

the cathedral now known as Santa Maria del Fiore was instantly recognized as a marvel of the sort scarcely seen since the death of the classical world a millennium before. Today it is generally recognized as the founding architectural achievement of the Italian Renaissance and the ancestor of the domes that adorned many monumental buildings of the modern age, including St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Les Invalides in Paris, and the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. But for that reason, it belongs to a phase of the Middle Ages that had yet to dawn when Arnolfo di Cambio broke ground in 1296.

The changes began with the climate. For several hundred years after 900, global temperatures had risen: the so-called Medieval Warm Period. But around 1300 they began to drop again—and sharply.

The climate became so regularly and bitterly cold that watercourses from the Baltic Sea to the river Thames and even the Golden Horn at Constantinople were prone to freezing in winter—phenomena that led to the period between 1300 and 1850 becoming known as the Little Ice Age.

There were, put simply, too many people for the technology of the time to handle. The population of England had raced from perhaps 1.5 million at the time of the Norman Conquest to around 6 million on the eve of the Great Famine.

This hybrid bubonic-pneumonic plague was probably circulating among the Mongols of central Asia in the early 1330s. It spread outward through the eastern world during that decade, throughout Transoxania, China, and Persia, although it did not seem to make a very serious impact in India.

Medieval writers blamed the pestilence variously on God’s wrath, the prevalence of vice, the coming of Antichrist, the impending resurrection of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the excessive tightness of women’s clothes, misalignment of the planets, sodomy, evil vapors, rain, Jewish conspiracy, the tendency of hot and moist people to overindulge in sex and baths,

True, the rich were better able to flee diseased cities for the comparative safety of quarantine in the countryside, a phenomenon the great Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio memorialized in his Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories told by a group of ten affluent young people who escape Florence to dodge infection. But wealth alone could not guarantee immunity, from either the sickness itself or the psychological trauma that came with survival.

In September 1349, Robert of Avesbury, a clerk who worked for the archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, stepped into the streets of London to witness a parade of Flemish flagellants. Around six hundred of these curious characters had recently appeared in the city, and they were now a regular sight. Twice each day they appeared, dressed in simple white open-backed shifts, wearing caps with red crosses on their heads. “Each carried a scourge with three tails in his right hand,” wrote Robert. “Each tail had a knot and through the middle many had fixed sharp nails. They marched in a line, one behind the other, whipping themselves with these scourges on their naked and bloody bodies.

Edward III spelled out how this worked in a letter to the English bishops in 1349, explaining that “prayer, fasting and the exercise of virtue” would encourage God to “repel the plague and illness and confer peace and tranquility and health of body and soul.”23 Countless other leaders like him urged the same, all to no avail. However, the immediate, religious reflexes that the Black Death set off were only a small part of the human response to the pestilence. The first economic consequence of the pandemic was to wreak havoc on prices and wages.

In England the government acted quickly. In 1349 and 1351 Edward III’s government rushed out legislation (the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers) that made it illegal for workers to claim wages above pre-pandemic rates. These were specified in law: five pence a day for mowing, three pence a day for carpentry or masonry work, two and a half pence a day for threshing wheat, and so on. At the same time it became a legal requirement for every able-bodied person under the age of sixty to work. Begging was outlawed. Workers were not permitted to leave their estates, and employers were forbidden to poach them by offering wages in excess of the government’s limits. The law was strictly enforced.

The kinda similar edict was also ratified by emperor Justinian the Great to control labor wages after the pandemic, but it was no prevailed

This attitude—of despising the poor except insofar as they occasionally reminded one of Jesus—was entirely typical in the hierarchical, aristocrat-led societies of the late Middle Ages. Yet in the teeth of a pandemic it was also dangerous. The Black Death’s harrying of the western world was more than just a financial inconvenience to be solved by legislation. It brought about an immediate and drastic rearrangement of European demography— which meant power lurched suddenly toward ordinary people. As a consequence, the second half of the fourteenth century saw a sudden rise in violent large-scale popular uprisings against established authorities. They began just as the first wave of the Black Death was beginning to wane, and continued until the end of the “calamitous” fourteenth century.

Enforcing the labor laws became something of an official obsession. By the 1370s, as Edward’s reign drew to a close, more than two thirds of the business of royal courts concerned labor violations.48 And this was not the only way that workers were being targeted.

the world was changing. Thanks to the Black Death, Europe’s population had undergone a long-term adjustment that would last for centuries. As a result, the relationship between landlords and peasants, and city leaders and workers, could never return to earlier medieval norms. As urban economies continued to develop, cash was confirmed as the key currency of social obligation. In realms like England, serfdom had all but disappeared by the early fifteenth century. Soldiers were almost exclusively mustered on the promise of fixed, salaried contracts, rather than obligation laid on them by liege homage.