Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The underpinning fact of Roman military hegemony

was the empire’s ability to absorb defeat, escalate conflict, and exact pitiless revenge; Rome lost many battles but precious few wars.

What made Rome so dominant in

the Mediterranean world and beyond was the fact that overwhelming armed force developed in tune with a sophisticated

civic machinery: a mesh of state-of-the-art social, cultural, and legal systems that Romans c...

and of them...

Whether or not they were right—and today we may well entertain our doubts about a society that heavily circumscribed the ...

poor, viciously persecuted dissenters from its n...

blood sport and other forms of civic violence, and depended on mass slavery for survival—the Roman way of life was highly exportable and left deep, of...

At the heart of this argument lay two age-old debates that have animated rulers of powerful realms from the beginning of time to

the present day: How does a state rehabilitate its former enemies, and does opening up membership of a state or society to non-natives strengthen or dilute its blood and character?

There have been a bare few handful of examples in recorded history of true “slave states,” in which slavery permeated every

facet of society, and on which an entire economy and culture was built. Rome was one.*

Philosophically, slavery was assumed to be essential to a free society—a natural phenomenon without which liberty for the true and noble Roman could not exist. Economically, the entire

edifice of Rome and its empire relied upon mass bondage, facilitated by the same long and complex trading networks that supplied the empire with essential commodities and luxury goods.

And a large part of the western attachment to slavery sprang from the fact that it had been indivisible from Rome’s swaggering glory.

the export of Roman institutions, values, technologies, and worldviews was absolutely fundamental in the centuries that followed the empire’s collapse.

The longevity of Roman rule, its sophistication, its particular geographical extent, its capacity for nobility and abject cruelty—all of these things had been

embedded to differing degrees on the western cultural and political landscape. All would continue to matter as the classical world evolved into the medieval. Even when Rome was gone, it was not forgotten. It was the historical foundation on which everything in the Middle Ages was built.

One reason that the label “the Dark Ages” has proven so hard to untie from the neck of the Middle Ages is that for hundreds of years—between the sixth century and the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the late thirteenth—the

the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west. This was not simply an unfortunate symptom of creeping cultural dementia. It sprang from the deliberate policies of eastern emperors like Justinian, who made it their business to hound out of their world the

self-appointed but unfortunately unchristian guardians of p...

The stage was set for kings to begin to regard

themselves as in direct contact with God: approved and protected by the Almighty and entitled to think of themselves as his deputies on earth. And at the same time, the Church had been granted the right to judge the performance of French kings. The implications of this new pact

would be felt long into—and indeed, after—t...

But in retrospect it has come to represent a moment of seminal importance in western history: the moment at which the bishops of

Rome no longer looked east to Constantinople for support, but to the barbarian-descended peoples of the west.

he granted lands he seized from the Lombards

to the papacy, for popes to rule as earthly lords. This became known as the so-called Donation of Pippin, the basis for the existence of the Papal States, a region of Italy that survived until the nineteenth century. (Today the pope rules only the tiny sovereign state of Vatican City, in Rome.)

To atone for sins, the Church recommended penance and prayer. This was time consuming, uncomfortable, and impractical for people who had jobs to do fighting and killing one another. Fortunately, the Church was very open-minded about how penance was to be done,

and Church authorities had no problem with the rich paying others to do their penance for them.

(If “feudalism” existed, then this is what it comprised: a complex nexus of interlocking personal relationships that, when taken as a whole, presented a haphazard but distinctive system of government.)

The compulsion to process brutality is the oldest

theme in art.

The reality for medieval warriors was a hard life concluding in a nasty death, followed by the distinct possibility of hell as punishment for all the slaughtering and maiming they had done. Yet the impulse among medieval fighting men and the poets who wrote for them was not to report this godforsaken reality in

plain prose, but to overwrite it with a heroic new literature that painted knights as lovers and questers whose ethical code perfumed the dubious reality of their deeds. As T. S. Eliot wrote in the twentieth century, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

At its heart, the song is a timeless war epic, in which heroes and villains struggle, battle, live, and die. But what sets The Song of Roland apart is its

wholehearted advocacy for the values of knighthood. Its story is designed to reflect back to its audience the most flattering image possible of their own martial world: one in which the best life is defined by faithful sworn obligations between vassals and lords and the knight’s near-pathological devotion to keeping

his word and taking up the offer of a fight, no matter how impossible the odds. And, of course, at the end of it all, the ultimate reward for the ...

Tourneying was a glamorous, perilous rich man’s sport, played by kings, great noblemen, and their hangers-on, in which the going was tough and the stakes were high.*

Knightliness—or the perception of knightliness—could make or break a man in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It made William Marshal. It unmade King

John.

It struck me then that knighthood is today

as it always was: 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.

To this stirring—and, we may note, bracingly violent—entreaty Urban added an incentive. All who went on his campaign of extermination and died along the way would be rewarded with “remission of sins.” Their earthly misdeeds would be forgiven,

their passage to heaven smoothed. In an age where offsetting sin had become a serious moral and financial concern for the people of the west, this was a highly alluring offer. Urban had produced a new and enduring spiritual calculus. Those who committed to leaving home and slaughtering other human

beings thousands of miles away would earn the ...

But it summed up exactly the reasons people in the Middle Ages would go off so regularly to fight in the name of the Lord: the terrifying hardship of the mission offered the prospect of spiritual and

earthly riches in roughly equal measure.

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