Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

we still use Foxe’s label, although we have added a plural. For us, the years between the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century a.d. and the Protestant Reformation are “The Middle Ages.” Anything relating to the time is “medieval”—a nineteenth-century adjective, which literally means the same thing.

twenty-first-century global historians have tried to update the terminology, speaking not of Middle Ages but of a Middle Millennium, it has not yet caught on.

Climate change, mass migration, pandemic disease, technological change, and global networks: These sound like very modern, or even postmodern, concerns. But they shaped the medieval world too. 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.

the Roman Empire, a political behemoth only rivaled for size, sophistication, military muscle, and longevity by the Persian megastates of the Parthians and Sassanids, and the empire of the Chinese Han dynasty.

The Roman Empire, meanwhile, had “set its foot on the proud necks of savage peoples and given them laws to serve as the eternal foundation and guarantee of liberty.”

These boon years, during which nature seemed to offer her greatest prizes to any civilization capable of recognizing its opportunity, are now sometimes called the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO) or Roman Warm Period.

on his deathbed Augustus bragged that he had found Rome a city of brick, but left it a city of marble.

Tribes like the Iceni, who rebelled under the warrior queen Boudicca in a.d. 60–61, were wiped out with extreme prejudice. Others cut deals.

The golden age of Roman military might came during the two hundred years that followed Augustus’s accession in 27 b.c. This age was known as the Pax Romana—a

In the fourth century b.c. Alexander the Great’s Macedonian empire had extended from the Ionian Islands of the central Mediterranean to the Himalayas. The various Persian empires of antiquity covered similar territory. Around a.d. 100 the Chinese Eastern Han ruled over 2.5 million square miles and 60 million people.

landless poor known as proletarii

Rome was unique in the way that it developed and extended the concept of citizenship over its long history to help sustain its own imperial dominion. The root purpose of the empire was to funnel wealth to be spent in Rome: in that sense it was a racket based on rampant exploitation. Yet through the promise of citizenship—a share in the plunder—conquered aristocrats could usually be brought onside.

“Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves,” God told the Israelites, asking them only to refrain from enslaving one another.

despite occasional slave rebellions—most famously the Spartacus War of 73 b.c.—there was no movement to abolish Roman slaveholding, seemingly on the part of anyone.

In the west, Latin was adopted, adapted, and interbred with local tongues across the empire—a process that produced what would eventually become the great Romance languages of the second millennium a.d

Disputes between Roman citizens—veteran soldiers who had settled in the province, for example—would be subject to Roman law. Cases between noncitizens might be left to the preexisting laws of the land, allowing the community to keep hold of an important measure of self-determination.

In a.d. 112, Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor Trajan to describe a legal investigation he had undertaken in Bithynia (modern Turkey) following complaints against local Christians. Having tortured a number of them, including young girls, Pliny wrote, he had only really been able to establish that they followed a “bad . . . and extravagant superstition” that “is spread like a contagion.”

Under Decius—and later, under Valerian (r. a.d. 253–60) and Diocletian (r. a.d. 284–305)—Christians were flogged, flayed, thrown to wild beasts, and martyred in many inventive ways.

a network of “diocese” (the name was borrowed, ironically, from Diocletian, once the arch-persecutor, who had in his day divided the empire into secular diocese for ease of administration),

“Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying out of it,” wrote the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (r. a.d. 161–80).

“barbarians”: a derogatory word that encompassed a huge range of people, from itinerant nomadic tribes quite new to the west and ignorant or dismissive of Roman mores, to long-standing near neighbors, whose lives were heavily influenced by Roman-ness but who had not been able to share in the fruits of citizenship.

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.

the Huns were what we would today call climate migrants or even refugees.

the Huns were illiterate—a people with no record keeping or chronicle culture. They can no longer speak to us in their language, so we will never know their side of the story, and most of our information about them comes from people who hated them.

According to tree ring data provided by Qilian juniper samples from Qinghai province on the Tibetan Plateau, it seems that between a.d. 350 and 370, eastern Asia suffered a “megadrought”—which remains the worst drought recorded in the last two thousand years. The skies simply dried up. Northern China endured conditions at least as severe as those of the American dust bowl in the 1930s, or the Chinese drought of the 1870s—when

a climate emergency in eastern-central Asia fed a secondary migrant crisis in eastern Europe. Drought moved the Huns, and the Huns moved the Goths, so that in 376, huge bands of terrorized Gothic tribespeople showed up on the banks of another major Roman boundary river: the Danube.

The eastern seaboard of Britain had long been a tempting entry point for raiding parties of Picts, Scots, and Germanic tribes known collectively (if imprecisely) as Anglo-Saxons.

From the early fifth century Britain was steadily settled by war bands and migrant groups from the North Sea fringe. There was no single, coordinated military invasion such as the Romans had landed in the time of Claudius, or that the Normans would stage in 1066; the invasions were piecemeal and staggered over many years. Some of the names later applied to the peoples who arrived included the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes.

Mass migration, rightly or wrongly, stirs fear and loathing, for as the history of the western Roman Empire makes abundantly clear, it has the power to turn worlds upside down.

Saint Augustine, a citizen of Hippo, was lying in his sickbed as the Vandals arrived. He was doubly despondent at their presence, for not only were they barbarians, they were Christians of the Arian sect, rather than the Nicene rite to which Augustine belonged.

Attila took command of the Huns in the mid-430s, shortly before Carthage fell to the Vandals. And in the two decades of his reign, he dragged the western Roman Empire yet further along its path to ruin.

Aquileia, one of Italy’s richest and most prestigious cities, which stood at the head of the Adriatic, was taken by storm and razed—a sack that had deep and lasting implications for the locality, providing, in the long term, for the rise of the new city of Venice.

dwindling resources of a ravaged Italy, disease among Attila’s followers, and the prospect of losses to the eastern Roman army back in the Hunnic heartlands persuaded him it was time to go home.

For twenty years after Attila, groups of restless, wandering migrants were again on the move. The Huns were dispersed, no longer operating as a distinct political and military unit.

Odoacer sent the imperial regalia—the crown and cloak—to Constantinople, marking the physical impossibility of making another western emperor. With that, the title slipped into oblivion.

Theodoric was now king of Italy. After 493 the Ostrogoths settled around Ravenna and several other northern Italian cities, and over the following three decades Theodoric undertook an audacious new program of state building, following in the grandest Roman traditions.

Byzantium: the Greek-speaking inheritor state that served as a buffer between east and west, surviving for centuries until it was ravaged by crusaders and later consumed by the Ottomans—an event that heralded the end of the Middle Ages.

it is possible to argue that any nation in the world today that has a codified law (as opposed to, say, the common law that dominates the legal system in the United Kingdom) owes a debt to Justinian and Tribonian. Even if this was not the original intention, it was an incredible accomplishment. In little more than five years of intensive administrative activity Justinian had rewoven the legal fabric of the empire and refashioned legal thought in ways that would still be palpable fifteen centuries later.

wranglings between Arian and Nicene Christians, which had tormented the western empire during the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, had been complicated by another dispute, between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites, who disagreed over the exact nature of Christ and the balance between his human and divine qualities.17

Justinian subsequently decreed that everywhere homosexuals and “those detected in pederasty” should be gelded. Many died in agony. “From then on there was fear among those afflicted with homosexual lust,” wrote Malalas.18 It was a cruel demonstration of a prejudice that would endure throughout the Middle Ages.

Doctrinal minutiae assumed ever bigger and bloodier importance, while anything non-Christian was regarded with gathering suspicion. The Roman Empire had once been a super-spreader of classical learning across its vast territories. But as it fell to pieces in the west and became ever-more doctrinally obsessed in the east, it became an active blocker to knowledge chains across the ages, and the transmission of ancient learning throughout the empire began to fail.

The Hagia Sophia was the centerpiece of a singular campaign of urban renewal driven through with the same energy and speed that had characterized the emperor’s changes to Roman law.

between the 520s and 540s, possibly in southeast Africa, around the ivory markets of what is now Zanzibar, the disease mutated into a super-lethal strain. It then met with environmental conditions ripe for easy infection—the climate crisis of 536 contributed to this by weakening human and rat populations and forcing them into closer-than-usual cohabitation.42 And it spread rapidly along the long-established and booming trade networks around the Mediterranean.

Bubonic plague in fact continued to sweep and swirl around the Mediterranean world for the rest of the decade, resurfacing time and again all over the world until 749. How many people it killed in total during these pestilent years is today a matter of live historical debate—most of it largely speculative, with a range of opinions running from hardly anyone to one hundred million people. But the economic disruption was real: wildly fluctuating wheat prices, rapid wage inflation as ready laborers vanished, an overwhelmed inheritance system, and a near-total crash in construction.

Maurice fell out frequently with Pope Gregory I the Great, who resented the patriarch of Constantinople’s claim to be the “ecumenical” leader of the entire Church.

after Heraclius’s reign, the empire’s territorial transformation from Rome to Byzantium was complete. It was now a Greek-speaking state, focused on dominating the eastern Mediterranean, with power concentrated in Constantinople and its most important geopolitical rivals lying to the south and east. That was how it would remain, more or less, for eight and a half centuries.

Muhammad had died on June 8, 632, and Khalid now owed his high military command to Muhammad’s earthly successor (khalifa or caliph) and leader of the believers (amir al-mu’minin), a slight, elderly former merchant with sunken cheeks and a thin, dyed beard, named Abu Bakr.2 In promoting Khalid, the caliph had acknowledged the general’s loyal service during the previous decade.

With the exception of Spain and Portugal (and, later, Sicily), almost every major territory that was captured by early medieval Islamic armies retained, and still retains today, an Islamic identity and culture. The spirit of scientific invention and intellectual inquiry that thrived in some of the larger and more cosmopolitan Islamic cities would come to play a key role in the Renaissance of the later Middle Ages.

The roots of the Sunni-Shia divide can be traced back to the days of the very first caliphs, while the Arab-Persian division that emerged in the eighth century lives on in the modern Middle East in the geopolitical rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

one quarter of the world’s population follows some version of the faith professed by Khalid ibn al-Walid, Amr ibn al-As, and their companions as they stood before the walls of Damascus in the 630s.