Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Rome officially became an empire on January 16 in the year 27 b.c., when the Senate awarded Octavian—an adopted son of Julius Caesar—the title of Augustus.

At its peak under Trajan (r. a.d. 98–117), who conquered Dacia (modern Romania), the empire covered some five million square kilometers, from Hadrian’s Wall to the banks of the river Tigris. A quarter of earth’s human population lived under Roman rule.

To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.

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.

The Pax Romana frayed and began to unravel after the death of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius in a.d. 180.

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.

The antique world can be said to have crumbled—and the Middle Ages begun—on the banks of the river Volga in the year a.d. 370. In that year there appeared at the riverside crowds of people known collectively as the Huns, who had left their homelands thousands of miles away on the grasslands—or steppe—north of China.

what is incontestable is that the shape of the Umayyad caliphate, and of the Muslim near east, was determined by the failure of the two sieges of Constantinople in 677–78 and 717–18.

Coin production has always been a tool of political propaganda as well as commerce,

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.

The Fourth Crusade was one of the most disgraceful and notorious escapades in the whole of the Middle Ages,

During the eighteen years of his papacy, Innocent preached five other crusades, prepared a sixth, and inspired a seventh. Not one of them went to Jerusalem.

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.

The Mongols pioneered the administrative tools of a global empire: a world-class postal system, universal law code, rationalized and decimalized military reform, and an extremely harsh but efficient approach to metropolitan planning.

“This Batu is very good to his people, yet they fear him greatly,” he wrote.29 This was the essence of Mongols’ rule: tolerance policed by terror.

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.

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.

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.

the earliest surviving copy of the Theses is one Luther mailed to Albert, archbishop of Mainz, on October 31.

“While I slept or drank Wittenberg beer,” he once wrote, “the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a Prince or Emperor inflicted such damage upon it.”