Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Universities, which flourished in the century after the Black Death, were a particularly regular source of urban conflict, as students and academics clashed, either with townsfolk or with one another. Student riots had been a feature of city life since at least the year 1200, and they continued to occur until the end of the Middle Ages and well beyond.

student disorder was generally either a matter of internal university politicking or the result of clashes over the privileges due to academics versus those enjoyed by everyone else.

the popular and populist risings that emerged in the second half of the fourteenth century were certainly early indicators of some of the ways that the catastrophes of that time had shaken medieval society. Hierarchies were challenged vigorously. The ravages of war—either civil or foreign—were not simply accepted as a part of the drudgery of human existence, and when people felt they were being subjected to more misery than they could accept, they rose up and tried to make their voices heard, or else used the chaotic conditions of war as a springboard to launch their campaigns for better conditions.

Not until the sixteenth century did the west experience another large-scale revolt with the scope and character of those that took place between 1358 and 1382. That was the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25, and it was framed not by the traumatic effects of demographic collapse, but by the religious revolution that was breaking out across the west in the shape of the Protestant Reformation (see chapter 16).

Filelfo was every inch a fitting character to perform beneath it. He was one of the most exciting thinkers of his day. Educated in Pavia, he had been appointed to teach the arts in Venice at the age of just eighteen.

Dante was a wildly popular subject. The great man had died 110 years earlier and was regarded in Florence as a literary demigod. His tomb actually lay in Ravenna, where he had lived after being exiled from his home city in the course of the wars between the Blacks and Whites.

Under Cosimo’s leadership the Medici family had begun their rise not only to hegemony in Florence, but to the rank of a quasi-royal dynasty, whose sons would eventually include popes and grand dukes, and whose daughters would become queens.

Filelfo made, he was not welcomed back to Florence for nearly fifty years. Only in 1481 did Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo “the Magnificent” invite him back to become professor of Greek at the university. By now, however, Filelfo was eighty-three.

The superstars of this age are men like Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, Pico della Mirandola and Machiavelli, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Albrecht Dürer. Filelfo does not belong in the first rank of these figures, and maybe not even in the second. Yet there is something in his little-known story that sums up the nature of the times.

The Renaissance saw revived and intense interest in the glories of ancient Greek and Roman culture, rapid technical advances in painting and sculpture, and the dissemination of new ideas about matters such as education and statecraft.

Crucially, right from the start, some of those who lived through the period recognized they were living in a new age. Among the first to state it was Leonardo Bruni, who wrote an epic, History of the Florentine People, in which he identified the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century as the end of one great age, and his own times in the early fifteenth century as the culmination of a long road back to civilization.

The Renaissance was a time when genius and geniuses were unleashed. But patrons mattered as much as auteurs. Art and invention were tightly interwoven with money, power, and the ambitions of princes. Clever and creative people flocked to the wealthy to fund their endeavors, while the mighty threw their weight behind artists to help them emphasize their own good taste and the civic sophistication of their home cities.

Amor civicus of ancient Rome revived.

On Good Friday in 1327, one hundred and four years before Filelfo fell out with Cosimo de’ Medici, the young poet and diplomat Francesco Petrarca went to church in the papal city of Avignon. As he later told the story, it was there, on the most solemn day in the whole Christian calendar, that he first laid eyes on a woman called Laura. She was probably (but not definitely) Laura de Noves, recently married to the nobleman Count Hugh de Sade.

For nearly one thousand years in the west the standard framework used for discussing these themes had been the contemplation of Christ and his Passion. Now Petrarch stood the traditional model on its head. He was unquestionably a pious Christian—indeed, he was officially a clergyman. Yet he found the sublime in the individual, and not the other way around. He imbued the emotional and interior life of one person with infinite significance and the power to reveal higher truth. Everything still led back to God.

By and by his fame grew. So did his circle of powerful friends. In the first half of his career Petrarch worked for Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, a member of the powerful Roman noble dynasty whom Petrarch described in a sonnet as “Glorious Colonna!”13 He always moved in high places thereafter. One of his most famous patrons was Robert of Anjou, king of Naples (r. 1309–43), who harbored ambitions to be the preeminent ruler in Italy, and understood acutely the value of projecting might by associating with the leading artists and writers of his day. In 1341 Robert made Petrarch a tantalizing offer: come to Rome and be crowned poet laureate—an

his coronation oration eventually came to be seen as a manifesto for the entire Renaissance.17

like all the greatest medieval minds, Petrarch realized that to immerse himself in Christian thought did not necessarily imply abandonment of the classics. Through his travels and his work, he had amassed one of the greatest private book collections in Europe, which included texts that had not been read for many centuries, such as a cache of Cicero’s private letters, which he discovered in Verona.

The original text of the Triumphs took Petrarch nearly twenty years to complete, and he finished it in the early 1370s.

Together, Dante and Petrarch were the foremost Italian writers of the fourteenth century. They were the equals of their much-admired classical forebears, and the giants on whose shoulders many of the greatest artists and writers of the Renaissance would stand.

after Petrarch’s death in 1374, there was undeniably a boom in great literature, felt in realms across the west. Boccaccio, who died in 1375, had finished his Decameron twenty years earlier. In England the enthusiastic Italophile Geoffrey Chaucer began his Canterbury Tales around 1387 and worked on it until his own death in 1400. (Chaucer also translated Petrarch’s poetry into English and adapted one of his Latin stories, “Griselda,” as “The Clerk’s Tale.”)

In May 1430, however, Joan was captured, at the siege of Compiègne. She was brought to Arras to be imprisoned. Her captor was a nobleman called Jean de Luxembourg, who had been fighting on the English side at Compiègne. He owed his allegiance to England’s most important ally, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and through the duke’s mediation he sold Joan to the English. One year later, during which time a church court had convicted her of heresy, Joan was burned at the stake in Rouen.

in September 1535, Philip agreed the Treaty of Arras with Charles VII. He withdrew all his support for the English in France, repudiated the claim of the young English king Henry VI to call himself king of France, and joined a coalition of powers all vigorously hostile to England, including the kingdoms of Scotland and Castile. It was a stunning blow, from which the English cause would not recover. It led eventually to their final defeat in the Hundred Years War, at the battle of Castillon in 1453. So in the short and even the medium term, the Treaty of Arras was a potent demonstration of the power that the Duke of Burgundy could wield on the European stage.

Van Eyck died in 1441, while he was working on a painting known as the Madonna of the Provost van Maelbeke, commissioned for display in a monastery in Ypres (and today known only in replica).

although he produced most of his best works for other clients, he would forever be linked with Burgundy. Van Eyck was remembered in courts all across Europe as “an exquisite master in the art of painting,” while other artists—even Italians—would travel hundreds of miles to the Burgundian-controlled towns of Flanders and the Low Countries to study his work, hoping to learn how to re-create his greatest tricks.32 This was, in the end, why Philip the Good had hired him.

Philip outlived his finest artist by two and a half decades, dying at the age of seventy in 1467. By the end of the fifteenth century his descendants had proven unable to transform Burgundy into a kingdom, nor even to maintain it as an independent state: in the 1490s Burgundy was split up and much of its territory rolled into what would become the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire. But the reputation of this fleeting European half realm for punching far above its weight as a cultural force would endure for centuries afterward.

Under Verrocchio, students did not just learn to paint and sculpt. They picked up practical geometry and anatomy and studied classical literature, the better to understand the subject matter of the artworks they produced. Leonardo lapped it all up.

in the early 1470s, Florence was an even greater place to be an artist than it had been forty years previously in the days of Cosimo de’ Medici and Francesco Filelfo. The effective ruler of the city was now Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’ Medici, who took over the family business in 1469. Although the Medici bank’s finances were creaking—they suffered catastrophic losses through their Bruges branch in the 1470s, when a rogue local manager made massive, unsecured loans to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, the son and successor of Philip the Good—Lorenzo’s eagerness to spend his money lavishly made his tenure a golden age of the Renaissance.

A quick census of the artists working and emerging in Florence in the 1470s and 1480s is a roll call of some of the most brilliant in world history. As well as Verrocchio, Botticelli, and Leonardo, the city was home to Domenico Ghirlandaio and the Pollaiuolo brothers. The poet and Greek scholar Angelo Ambrogini (known as Poliziano) was combining his duties as tutor to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s children with translating Homer’s Iliad into Latin verse. In 1484 the scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (“a man of almost supernatural genius,” said Machiavelli) would arrive to seek Lorenzo’s patro...

In 1499 another French army marched over the Alps to invade northern Italy, deposing Ludovico Sforza (who eventually died in a French dungeon in 1508). Leonardo fled. He headed back to Florence, stopping briefly in Mantua to meet (and sketch) that city’s young and single-minded patron of the arts, Isabella d’Este, and in Venice to advise on defensive engineering to guard against possible invasion by the Ottomans.

In 1513 one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sons, Giovanni, was elected as Pope Leo X. He decided he could use Leonardo in the papal court, where lavish renovations were underway. In September of that year Leonardo left Florence for Rome, and began the last stage of his life.

In 1516, therefore, Leonardo left Rome and headed out of Italy for the first time in his long life, to serve yet another patron: Francis I, the young and charismatic new king of France. More than forty years younger than Leonardo, Francis was a true child of the Renaissance. Like his contemporary and sparring partner, Henry VIII of England, Francis was commandingly tall, handsome, and possessed of an instinctive love for fine things and the rich fruits of humanism. He came to the throne at age twenty on the first day of 1515, and met Leonardo with the pope at the end of the same year. Tempting Leonardo to France, where he lodged him in the picturesque village of Amboise, was a priceless opportunity to send the world a message about the values of his new French monarchy. It was also a chance for Francis personally to study with the greatest living polymath.

he died on May 2, 1519. A tradition, begun by Vasari, said that he died with Francis at his bedside—indeed, that he “expired in the arms of the King.” To Vasari, this was a fitting, noble end for so great a man. Leonardo “adorned and honored, in every action, no matter what mean and bare dwelling,” Vasari wrote. “Florence received a very great gift in the birth of Leonardo, and an incalculable loss in his death.”

Leonardo da Vinci was the ultimate Renaissance man—so

Many of Leonardo’s projects—from helicopters to diving bells—were so advanced that they were realized not in his time but in ours. He

Leonardo’s peers—from Botticelli and Donatello to Michelangelo and Raphael—would have made sure of that.

These creative people—and many others like them—continued to flourish throughout the sixteenth century, and into the early seventeenth. And what remained constant throughout that long period was the close interdependence of patrons and artists, neither of whom could do without one another. Indeed, one of the reasons that the magnificent creativity of the Renaissance lasted so very long after its genesis in the fourteenth century is that the most powerful men and women in Europe were growing ever richer, and gaining access to new sources of gold and precious goods, far beyond the imagination of any generation before them. As a rule, they were always happy to spend their newfound riches on pretty things.

in the spring of 1453, the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmed II ordered his troops to bring his biggest gun more than two hundred kilometers east, from his headquarters in Adrianople (Edirne) to the outskirts of Constantinople. Mehmed’s army numbered at least eighty thousand, which, along with his naval fleet, was large enough to keep the Byzantine capital blockaded.

The bellicose Islamic state had been founded in 1299 by Osman I, a small-time Turkic warlord based in Asia Minor just south of Constantinople. By the mid-fifteenth century Osman’s descendants ruled a rising superpower. They controlled much of the former Byzantine territory in the Balkans, and around half of Asia Minor, where they provided a bulwark between Europe and the Mongols.

On the night of May 28, 1453, after the siege had lasted forty-seven days, Mehmed’s men rushed Constantinople’s now very depleted walls. Inside them, a defense force consisting of Greek, Genoese, and Venetian troops, under the high command of the Byzantine emperor, forty-nine-year-old Constantine XI Palaiologos, fought bravely, as cannon blasts erupted, and the dark sky rained arrows, crossbow bolts, and Greek fire.

The Roman Empire was dead. As Kritovoulos wrote, “The great city of Constantine, raised to a great height of glory and dominion and wealth in its own time, overshadowing to an infinite degree all the cities around it, renowned for its glory, wealth, authority, power and greatness, and all its other qualities . . . thus came to its end.”

like West Berlin after the Second World War, the symbolism of Constantinople’s survival was just as important as the reality. If it could fall, where might be next? Rumors went around the west that when Mehmed entered Constantinople for the first time, he had thanked Muhammad for granting him victory, and added, “I pray that he will permit me to live long enough to capture and subjugate Old Rome as I have New Rome.”

After 1453 Mehmed continued his program of expansion. He set his sights—and his ships and troops—on conquering lands in eastern Europe, the Black Sea, and the Greek islands. In 1454–59 he sent armies into Serbia, eventually annexing it to the Ottoman Empire. In the 1460s he seized Bosnia, Albania, and the Peloponnese. From 1463 to 1479 he fought a long and bitter war against the Republic of Venice. As soon as this was settled, in 1480 Mehmed invaded southern Italy, at Otranto, which his men sacked and burned; a small crusade summons was required to reclaim the town the following year.

for a third, there were now certain practical difficulties in doing business. The great medieval trading states of the Mediterranean were in formidable shape in the mid-fifteenth century. Yet they did not enjoy perfectly harmonious relations with the Ottomans: Venice was at outright war with the Turks for a decade and a half, and lost to them its critical trading post at Negroponte. Genoa was stripped of its most important Black Sea port, Caffa. Certain specific sectors—such as the lucrative trade in transporting Turkic people captured and enslaved around the Black Sea to Mamluk Egypt—were halted outright.16 The Ottomans did not suddenly blockade the eastern Mediterranean, but they made doing business somewhat less attractive than it had been, on both a financial and an ethical basis.

archaeologists do not agree on the exact time that humans arrived, most concur that at some moment during the last Ice Age, settlers moved overland out of northeast Asia, picking their way across what was then a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, before heading south, either along the Pacific coast or through an ice-free corridor into the American interior.

Throughout the Middle Ages there were contacts—or claims of contact—from a wide range of other peoples. The sixth-century Irish monk Saint Brendan sailed extensively around the British Isles, and perhaps as far away as the Faroe Islands.19 According to his legend, which circulated widely in manuscripts from the tenth century onward, Brendan put to sea in a wood-framed coracle covered with “tanned ox-hide stretched over oak bark” and greased with fat. In this, he and a few companions sailed far and wide, enduring hunger and thirst and dodging fire-spewing sea monsters until after many years they discovered an island “so wide that forty days” wandering still did not bring them to the farther shore.

the Norse sagas claimed that several hundred travelers, led either by a married couple called Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir, or by an explorer called Leif Eriksson, made their way to a place they called Vinland. Here they encountered native peoples they derisively named skrælingar (loosely, “savages”), with whom they bartered and fought, and from whom they abducted children and caught diseases. Historians’ suspect these skrælingar were related to the now-extinct First Nations people known as the Beothuk.25 But it is not easy to be certain.

Territorial expansion was deeply embedded in Portuguese history and identity. The very fact of the kingdom’s existence was down to the efforts of generations of crusaders, who fought in the Reconquista to carve out their long, thin state along the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, grinding along year after year, in their wars against the Almoravids, Almohads, and taifa kings of al-Andalus. This was a long, hard process. Lisbon was taken from Islamic hands during the Second Crusade in 1147. It took another hundred years to establish the kingdom proper and extend its borders all the way down to the Algarve.

In the summer of 1415, when Henry was twenty-one, he accompanied his father to Ceuta, on the north coast of Morocco, which stood at the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar: the gateway between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, once famed as the location of the Pillars of Hercules. Ceuta was ruled by sultan of Morocco, but it held enormous economic allure to the Portuguese, not least because it was a coastal terminus for the camel caravans that crisscrossed northern Africa, bringing tons of gold every year across the Sahara from mines in the region known as west Sudan.

When Cadamosto passed by Madeira, he wowed at the fertile, abundant nature of the land, from which many types of useful wood could be harvested, and where sugar cane and grapes* grew easily. “Many of the inhabitants are rich, like the country itself,” he wrote, “since the island resembles a garden and everything that grows there is like gold.”

The business relationships the Portuguese struck with traders in west Africa’s coastal cities were often fruitful, although many of them would strike us today as morally abhorrent. One of Africa’s longest-standing trades was in enslaved people, and the Portuguese had few qualms about joining in. They had dabbled in the market via the Castilian-controlled Canary Islands since the late fourteenth century, but as their contacts in west Africa multiplied, so did their use and desire for African captives, who in some areas could be exchanged for European horses at the rate of between nine and fourteen humans to one animal. From the 1440s the sight of Africans being unloaded as cargo at the Portuguese port of Lagos (on the coast of the Algarve) became a familiar and doleful one.