Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Even when Rome was gone, it was not forgotten. It was the historical foundation on which everything in the Middle Ages was built.

Ammianus Marcellinus called the Huns “quite abnormally savage.” Certainly they were physically distinctive, often binding their children’s skulls so that their heads grew long and conical.

Procopius demonstrated that there is no enemy so vicious as a former friend.

In a.d. 528 he wrote, “Some of the bishops from various provinces were accused of . . . homosexual practices. Among them was Isaiah, bishop of Rhodes . . . and likewise [a Thracian bishop] named Alexander.”

Justinian subsequently decreed that everywhere homosexuals and “those detected in pederasty” should be gelded.

Hagia Sophia, which Isidore and Anthemius produced in five years between 532 and 537, stands in comparison with the most magnificent buildings ever constructed.

During the Middle Ages Arab scholars compiled, translated, and preserved hundreds of thousands of texts from across the classical world, and the Arab-speaking Islamic world inherited the Greek and Latin world’s position as the west’s most advanced intellectual and scientific society. This would not have been possible without al-Malik’s decision in the 690s to impose the Arabic language on the Umayyad caliphate’s bureaucrats.

This was no ordinary coronation. Part baptism, part priestly ordination, it was a piece of sublime public theater. It advertised the support of the Church, and not merely the Frankish aristocracy, for Pippin’s elevation. And it would have long-lasting consequences. From this point onward Frankish kings would only be considered “made” once they had been anointed by a bishop or archbishop’s hands.

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—the Middle Ages.

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.15 It was also the first time that Pippin’s son Charles—the future Charlemagne—met a pope.

Charlemagne was described by the chronicler Einhard as being large and strong; when his grave was exhumed in the nineteenth century he measured a little over six feet three inches—a prodigious height for his times. “The

The code of conduct and honor, which eventually came to be known as chivalry, would by the end of the Middle Ages become something akin to a secular religion.

Petrarch wrote as if in a daze: “The life we lead is a sleep, whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming. I wish I could have woken before this.”19

The Black Death was not just a reaper’s scythe: it was also a new broom. It swept hard across the fourteenth century. And after the sweeping, things would never look the same again.

“When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” Nonsense, wrote Luther: in fact the indulgence system was a scam in which both sellers and buyers were at fault.

Sacrosanctis was in fact the public face of a corporate conspiracy between the leading men of three powerful European families: the Medici (in the form of Pope Leo); Jakob Fugger, head of the Augsburg banking and mining dynasty and a man often said to have been the richest in human history; and Albert, archbishop of Mainz, a member of the politically influential Hohenzollern dynasty and (not coincidentally) the man to whom Luther mailed the first copy of his Theses.

Luther called the “Romanists”—Leo, his supporters, and, in effect, anyone else who disagreed with him—“the fellowship of antichrist and the devil,” who had “nothing of Christ but the name.”29

“As long as my conscience is captive to the word of God,” he said, “I neither can nor will recant, since it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience. God help me.”35