Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

of military power against enemies of the Roman Church wherever they could be perceived.

Crusading—a bastard hybrid of religion and violence, adopted as a vehicle for papal ambition but eventually allowed to run as it pleased, where it pleased, and against whom it pleased, was one of the Middle

Ages’ most successful and enduringly poisonous ideas. Its survival is a sign of both its genius and of the readiness of people both then and now to throw themselves into conflict in the name of a higher cause.

Marco was an evangelist for the Mongol regime, which, for all its severity and illiberality,

kept the peace and allowed trade to flourish safely and securely over a hitherto unimaginable span of territory, joining up the Christian west directly with the Chinese and Indian east, and making overland travel through Islamic Persia safe and reliable. This was not a totally benign judgment: for millions of massacred

civilians and their families, the Mongol advance of the thirteenth century had not been so much an economic miracle as a cataclysmic tragedy. But in the amoral worldview of the profit...

The Commercial Revolution placed power in the hands of new agents besides emperors, popes, and kings. It allowed the merchant to assume a prominent place in medieval society and culture. It gave cities in which merchants dominated newfound political status and independence.

Empire offered huge advantages for trade: safe, good-quality roads in which the chance of being stuck up and robbed was low, reliable coinage, and a legal system that could settle commercial

disputes. And it allowed regular people to participate, as farmers produced grain to feed armies, wealthy townsfolk sought expensive pottery and imported spices, and workshops and households demanded enslaved people to do their dirty work.

Compared with the rest of the known world, from the sixth century onward

Europe became a commercial backwater, with little to export except for Baltic furs, Frankish swords, and enslaved people.

Of course, Europe’s Jews were not thanked for this pioneering contribution to the macroeconomic fabric of their world: rather, they were

the object of suspicion, derision, and bursts of violent persecution, which accelerated during the Crusades and crescendoed in the late thirteenth century with waves of pogroms and expulsions throughout western Europe.*

The line between trading and raiding was always tenuous in the Middle Ages; the Venetians usually had a foot on either side of it.

The city’s

patron saint was (and is) Saint Mark the Evangelist, to whom the famous basilica on the Rialto is dedicated, but even he was, in a sense, stolen goods. In 828 a pair of Venetian merchants thieved Mark’s relics from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, smuggl...

they trusted—rightly—the Muslim inspectors would not inves...

Both Venice and Genoa thereby profited handsomely from supporting the Egyptian economy and military at a time when the stated goal of Egypt was to wipe the crusader states off the map. None of this stood up very well to ethical scrutiny. Yet then

as now, markets seldom suffered pangs of conscience. And neither did merchants.

This left Becket with a suppurating intellectual wound and an enormous chip on his shoulder. These had tragic consequences when in the 1160s Henry II promoted him—very controversially—as archbishop of Canterbury. Suddenly feeling his intellectual inferiority far more acutely than he felt his

duty to the king, Becket overcompensated by becoming an objectionable and obstructive primate who blocked Henry’s attempts to control the English church at every turn, with the eventual result that he was murdered, on Henry’s indirect orders, on the floor of Canterbury cathedral at Christmas 1170.

H...

managed to pursue his studies and scratch his intellectual itch, this might never have happened. Then...

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 f...

And at the same time, universities had become the focus of another phenomenon that remains strikingly familiar today, as they became a forum for defining and deciding heresies: avenues of thought that were not only wrong but illegal, and punishable by humiliation, ostracism, and even death.

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. It is perfectly possible to look at universities across the western world today and think that, by and large, not much has really changed.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a golden age of monumental architecture in the west, in which some of the most iconic buildings in world

history were erected. They were designed by civic and military architects and executed by master masons who explored new ways to defy gravity, sending spires and towers soaring toward the heavens, telling interwoven stories of wealth, power, piety, and dominion.

Most are now destroyed or lost, but they were all once Gothic masterpieces in their own right—ordered by a king who understood, as all great medieval rulers did, that a legacy could not be built in blood alone, but had to be certified and made permanent in stone.

“The past has devoured us, the

present is gnawing our entrails, the future threatens yet greater dangers,” wailed de’ Mussis.14 He was not far wrong.

But the sad fact was that the plague’s spread illustrated nothing so much as the deep interconnection between medieval communities—and their terrible

vulnerability to an infection that thrived on human mobility, overcrowding, and limited standards of hygiene.

So the Black Death was by no means a one-off event,

even in simple epidemiological terms. It was a long, drawn-out pandemic that killed around half the people in Europe and comparable numbers elsewhere, cast a shadow over the popular imagination for decades, and brought about a radical reshaping of western demography, political and social structures, attitudes,

and i...

Not surprisingly, a double whammy of soaring wages and plummeting rents sent panic swirling through political societies, whose most powerful members petitioned their rulers to help save them from financial ruin.

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 c...

This is to say they conformed to a model at least as old as republican Rome (and much in vogue

in the early twenty-first century), by which rich, cynical politicians mobilized the angry poor and attempted to direct their righteous anger against other elites.

Modern research has shown the Jacquerie’s leaders—Guillaume Cale and his captains—were not dirt-poor serfs, but relatively affluent, educated property owners, artisans, and professionals who expected better

than they were getting and who were able to channel and articulate the ire of their communities against a system that seemed to be failing them.40 That they themselves failed, and the fact that their uprising has latterly become a byword for heedless, bloodthirsty, rustic barbarity, does not mean that their

grievances were unreasonable or impossible for us to ...

it became abundantly clear to governments that in the post–Black Death world, the views and interests of ordinary people

would have to be considered, or the consequences could be severe.