Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Words are heavily loaded. The Middle Ages are often the butt of a big historical joke. Medieval is frequently deployed as a dirty term, particularly by newspaper editors, who use it as shorthand when they want to suggest stupidity, barbarity, and wanton violence.

And because we are all, in a sense, children of the Middle Ages, it is important that we recognize how similar we are to medieval people—as well as acknowledge our real and profound differences.

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? It was an argument that rumbled throughout Rome’s centuries of imperial dominance, and one that left a legacy to the Middle Ages and beyond.

on March 23, 543, the emperor declared “God’s Education” over. But this was the same wishful thinking that has traditionally accompanied any political statement about pandemic disease delivered with certain authority.

as so often proves the case, the Middle Ages remain with us today.

History continues to swirl around us, shaping attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, and worldviews. So it is that the word of God revealed in a cave in the Hijaz in the seventh century still affects the everyday lives of men and women living in the era of the smartphone and self-driving car.

By the 880s around half of England was under Scandinavian control or direct rule; the Viking advance was halted only after a long struggle led heroically on the Saxon side by Alfred, king of Wessex.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in the twentieth century, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

These were buzzing trade hubs: in the thirteenth century the city of Acre was said to produce more annual revenue than the kingdom of England.

For God and profit. personal motto of tuscan merchant francesco di marco datini

John Maynard Keynes is often credited with having popularized the idea that “if you owe the bank one hundred pounds, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million pounds, that’s the bank’s problem.” This was as true in the 1340s as at any time afterward.

(Not for nothing is Isidore today considered the patron saint of the internet.)

the Etymologies was a true masterpiece, treasured by generations of future readers for the breadth and color of its insights. It was one of the most widely read and influential books in the medieval west.

Isidore understood that to be a polymath, one could not afford to be too much of a dogmatist.

Like their modern successors, medieval universities could be progressive and viciously censorious, often at the same time.

Bettisia Gozzadini taught law, albeit with her face hidden behind a veil, from the late 1230s, and blazed a path for other women to follow—such as the sisters Novella and Bettina d’Andrea, who taught law at Bologna and Padua, respectively, in the fourteenth century.

Right from the start of the twelfth-century renaissance, there were powerful figures both inside and outside the universities who found the new spirit of intellectual inquiry to be as much a menace as a force for good. Not least among them was Bernard of Clairvaux.

A sharp-tongued Yorkshireman with a biting wit and no great optimism about mankind’s innate goodness, Wycliffe was active at the University of Oxford from the 1340s, where he was lucky to survive the Black Death.

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.

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.

Leonardo served many great masters in Italy and France. All were lucky to have him, for he was, as Vasari put it, “marvelous and celestial.”

History does not have to be made by nice people; in fact our tour of the Middle Ages to this point probably demonstrates that it very rarely is.

So whatever Columbus’s failings, his flaws, and his prejudices, which are assuredly even more out of step with twenty-first-century pieties than they were with those of his own time, he was—and remains—one of the most important figures in the whole of the Middle Ages.

Cruelty and inhumanity were the handmaidens of imperial expansion. There was no reason why the New World should be any different.

He was not the first to conceive of printing: the first printed scroll from China that bears a date (a copy of a Buddhist text called the Diamond Sutra) was made with woodblocks in a.d. 868, while metal type was in use in Korea from the thirteenth century.

The problem was, like all tech entrepreneurs in history, the breadth of ambition and imagination of Gutenberg was matched only by his ability to spend other people’s money.

Within weeks, as we would now put it, Luther went viral.