Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

It was neither the first nor the last time in history that revolution would be crushed with overkill. In medieval England, there would not be another popular rising for the better part of seventy years.

The frenzy of popular and populist rebellion that gripped Europe between 1378 and 1382 deserves to be thought of in this category, as a revolutionary “moment,” in which many people in many places at

roughly the same time all sought to change their circumstances by taking to the streets: reacting to different local provocations and crying liberty in different languages, but nevertheless connected to one another thematically and historically.

The factions who contested power during the king’s maddest episodes were known as the Burgundians and Armagnacs, and both sides sought to involve the citizens of Paris and the common mob in their disputes.

The complaints of Cade’s rebels were a bold, one-sided, but educated critique of England’s many problems, from a class of people who were now fully engaged in the political process, rather than

seeking to ride roughshod over it. They illustrated precisely how far the world had moved on from the agonies of the Black Death era.

Having survived the onslaught of Y. pestis, the world was suddenly awash with new ideas, discoveries, and technologies—some of them revived from the classical era and others invented afresh. What dawned in the fourteenth century and blossomed in the fifteenth was the

Renaissance, a time of beauty, genius, invention, and inspiration, yet one that had dirt on its belly and blood beneath its claws. It is on this glorious, dangerous time of rebirth and renewal that we must now cast our eye.

The fact remains that

whether we like the term “Renaissance” or not, it would be a brave or foolish person who denied that the fifteenth century in particular saw a groundswell of cultural and intellectual endeavor, which produced some of the most famous works of art and literature in human history, under the patronage of magnificent,

if often rather grubby, customers. So it is to this age that we will now address our thoughts, as we look at artistic and humanistic explosion of the late Middle Ages, along with the oc...

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. But the route was radically different.

To Henry, new lands were for profit. Unbelievers were for baptism. And the ends justified the means.

Columbus’s brute cynicism was founded in the cold reality

of virtually every colonial program in history. Cruelty and inhumanity were the handmaidens of imperial expansion. There was no reason why the New World should be any different.

Mechanized printing changed western culture in the fifteenth century as fundamentally and profoundly as the creation of the smartphone changed it at the turn of the twenty-first. It led to sweeping developments in literature and literacy,

education and popular politics, cartography, history, advertising, propaganda, and bureaucracy.

But most important for our purposes, the printing press occupied a central place in the Reformation—the revolution that ripped apart the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. First, printers like Gutenberg provided the tools by which the papacy plunged itself headlong into a crisis

of ethics and institutional corruption. Then, printers allowed dissent against the established order to spread across Europe at breakneck speed. The result was that, in the space of a few short decades, medieval Europe descended into religious and political turmoil, as a new movement—Protestantism—took root, providing

the first serious challenge to Catholicism in one...

Yet if there had ever been a time when popes were beyond criticism or reproach, by the late fifteenth century it was over.

The concept of the

indulgence was an old one: it originated around the same time as the crusades in the eleventh century, when remission of sins was first granted in exchange for arduous pilgrimage, and subsequently on a large scale to the armies who marched off to fight Christ’s enemies.10 After this, indulgences took on a life of their

own, helped significantly by the invention of purgatory—which developed as a Catholic doctrine between 1160 and 1180. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, indulgences without an obligation to fight Saracens or pagans wer...

And in 13...

Clement VI formalized the system, effectively confirming that indulgences could be bought from approved clerics for cash. Thus was a busy market established, which Hus and many others like him considered a symbol of the in...

Like twenty-first century social media users, medieval men and women rushed to engage

with a system that offered them something they actually wanted, even as it turned each one of them into a profit node in a system bigger than they could comprehend.

And we might not judge them too harshly for it. In a western world that had been ravaged by the Black Death and t...

this new means of offsetting sin and insuring against the tortures of damnation must have seemed...

In a world where the Roman Church built its wealth on the

basis that salvation was something to be acquired, by either doing penance or buying one’s way closer to salvation, Luther’s assertion that the way to heaven was through belief, not deeds, sat very ill.

He was also translating the New Testament into German, writing hymns, and contemplating ways to force European Jews to convert to Christianity. Although the latter suggested that there were some medieval prejudices so ingrained that even the revolutionary mind of Martin Luther could not overturn them, in almost

every other way he was beginning to write the documents on which to build an entirely new church.