Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Of all the gods and goddesses worshipped at the Ka‘ba, the most important was Allah, but in the early seventh century other names were also revered there: Hubal loomed large among them, as did the three goddesses, Manat, Allat, and al-Uzza.15 There was even a picture inside the Ka‘ba of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

he was in a cave in Mount Hira, on the outskirts of Mecca, a place he liked to go now and then to meditate and reflect. One day he was visited there by the angel Gabriel, who addressed him directly and commanded him to recite. Muhammad came to understand he had been chosen as Allah’s prophet and messenger—the last such in a long line that stretched back through Jesus, Solomon, David, Abraham, Noah, and Moses all the way to the first man, Adam.

As that other great prophet and preacher Jesus of Nazareth had demonstrated six hundred years before, any charismatic and pious individual who sought to build a religious creed around the themes of poverty and social inequality very quickly amassed rich and powerful enemies. Muhammad soon found himself an outcast in his own tribe.

in electing Uthman the council passed over the claims of Muhammad’s cousin Ali, and this decision would eventually have enormous consequences for the history of Islam and the wider world.

Uthman’s successor as caliph was Muhammad’s exceptionally pious and upstanding cousin Ali, a proven warrior and intimate member of the Prophet’s family, who had grown up with Muhammad and was married to Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah.

in the summer of 661 Muawiya demanded oaths of loyalty from the leading regional commanders in the Islamic world, receiving them at holy sites in Jerusalem. He was now the caliph—the first ruler of a dynasty that history has come to call the Umayyads,

the Sunni-Shia divide. Shia Muslims refused to accept the legitimacy of the Umayyad caliphate, or indeed the legitimacy of Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman’s regimes. Instead, they insisted that Ali was Muhammad’s rightful successor: the first imam. This in turn implied an alternative succession, through Hasan and Husayn, then a bloodline of further imams descended from Muhammad.

The Umayyads were so intent on emulating Byzantium that between the 660s and 710s they repeatedly tried to take over the old Roman state wholesale. The result was a wide-ranging war across the near east and southern Mediterranean, which lasted for more than a century. The two great powers clashed frequently in north Africa, as Arab-led armies pushed toward the Maghreb (modern Algeria and Morocco). And they fought a series of battles on the high seas around Asia Minor, culminating in two spectacular sieges of Constantinople.

Martel sought out “Abd al-Rahman on the road between Tours and Poitiers. After a seven-day period of phony war, he brought the Muslims to battle.

Al-Saffah was thus the founder of a new dynasty named the Abbasids, who claimed descent from Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbas and identified themselves with a plain black flag.*

The Abbasids made sweeping changes to the Islamic empire they had wrested from the Umayyads. They moved the capital eight hundred kilometers east from Damascus to a new city in Iraq called Baghdad, and devolved sweeping political and legal powers to local rulers known as emirs

Córdoba gained immense renown in the Middle Ages as a city of learning and extraordinarily rich culture. Its population bloomed to around four hundred thousand inhabitants—a scale that put Córdoba comfortably in the league of Constantinople or even ancient Rome.

Berber dynasties known as the Almoravids and Almohads, who controlled al-Andalus from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, were austere zealots responsible for much violent oppression and persecution of non-Muslims.

The Carolingians were named in honor of their patriarch, Pippin’s father Charles Martel (Carolus Martellus): the man who had smashed the Umayyads at the battle of Tours. They produced more than one famous Charles, including Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, and Charles the Simple. But the most illustrious of all was Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus).

Franks and Vikings clashed as much as they cooperated while they jockeyed for resources and power within the same regions of northern and western Europe.

Clovis’s reign marked the true beginning of Frankish collective identity—which later became the sense of French nationhood. He is often described as the first real Frenchman.

The pope would turn to the Franks as his secular defenders and throw his legitimizing influence behind the new Carolingian monarchy—if in return Pippin would incur vast costs and take considerable military risk by riding south over the Alps to deliver the papacy from its enemies. It was a high-stakes deal on both sides. But in retrospect it has come to represent a moment of seminal importance 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

Pippin reveled in his triumph, and he granted lands he seized from the Lombards to the papacy, for popes to rule as earthly lords. This became known as the so-called Donation of Pippin, the basis for the existence of the Papal States, a region of Italy that survived until the nineteenth century.

Making manuscripts was as important in Aachen as reading them, and during the early ninth century the school’s scribes began a massive program of knowledge preservation, creating a super-archive of information passed down from the classical world.

manuscripts were produced there, preserving what today represent the earliest surviving copies of texts by writers and thinkers ranging from Cicero and Julius Caesar to Boethius.

during the reign of Frederick I Barbarossa, a tradition arose where those emperors formally crowned by a pope could call themselves Holy Roman emperors. And in that form, the office endured until the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Like Alexander the Great before him, Charlemagne had built an empire that quickly proved itself possible only as an extension of one man’s political self.

Many would dream during the Middle Ages of piecing all these fragments back together, but it would take nearly a thousand years for one ruler to once again hold the whole Carolingian inheritance in his hands. He was Napoléon Bonaparte—another

Historians have puzzled for generations over why the Vikings suddenly, in the course of two generations, broke their relative isolation and surged out to terrorize—and colonize—the west. Political turmoil, cultural revolution, climate change, and demographic pressure have all been proposed as causes.50 Like all huge questions, it has no straightforward answer.

In 869 Edmund, king of East Anglia, was put to death by the Vikings.

monks wondered why God was so angry that he had sent the Vikings. Another chronicler reflected that it must have been their sins: “[The] Frankish nation . . . was overflowing with foul indecencies. . . . Traitors and perjurers deserve to be condemned, and unbelievers and infidels are justly punished.”57

Carolingians drifted, generation by generation, from preeminence to irrelevance. Behind them they left to the Middle Ages several distinct polities: Western Francia became the kingdom of France; Eastern Francia an empire centered on Germany and northern Italy that would in time become known as the German, or Holy Roman, Empire.

By the high Middle Ages,* monasteries had taken on most of what we now think of as the basic functions of the liberal welfare state. They were centers of literacy, education, hospitality, medical treatment, tourist information, elderly social care, and spiritual counseling—in addition to their main role as a retreat for the godly. As a result they had wandered a long way from their origins as places of impoverished retreat, and now had close and lucrative links with the outside world.

a Magyar leader called Vajk would convert to Christianity, change his name to Stephen, and rule (from 1001 to 1038) as a king within the orbit of the Roman Church.

Once the western Roman Empire collapsed, the only settled powers in Europe who used horses to a significant degree on the battlefield were the Arabs and Visigoths. The Franks knew how to trade, breed, and deploy warhorses. But for a long time, when it came to the biggest clashes between their armies and those of foreign powers, the Franks fell back on foot soldiers.

In 792–93 Charlemagne issued a law ordering all cavalrymen to carry a spear to be thrust and stabbed toward the enemy, rather than thrown, javelin style. This proved so effective that over the following two centuries, spear-wielding horsemen became an increasingly important part of western medieval armies. The Latin term for such men was miles (plural: milites); the Old German term, kneht. By the eleventh century the word had entered Old English as cnihtas, from which today we have the word knight.

heavily armed, mounted warriors directly caused a social revolution in Europe, and ushered in the “age of feudalism”: an all-pervasive, notionally pyramid-shaped system of social organization, in which lords granted land to their vassals in exchange for formal promises of military service, and the vassals then subcontracted it to poorer men in return for further service, either in the form of military assistance or agricultural labor or both.

To supply and sustain a single knight for one year cost approximately as much as sustaining ten peasant families for the same period.17 It was an astronomically expensive career, and one that could only be contemplated by those who were born rich or else could be made so.

from around the ninth century onward, across the west, men who fought on horseback were awarded hundreds of acres of farmable land, which they held in exchange for making themselves available to fight for the person—a higher lord or king—who had granted it to them.

feudal, the land-for-arms social compact)

A skeleton found in the 1990s in southern England, recently radiocarbon-dated to the time of the battle of Hastings, shows the dreadful physical degradation knighthood entailed. The bones of the wrists, shoulders, and spine bear the scars of painful, lifelong wear and tear: joints and vertebrae worn ragged by arduous days and months spent training, riding, and fighting in the saddle. The side and back of the skull bear six separate, severe wounds, administered with swords when the person was around the age of forty-five.

The Song of Roland today occupies a foundational place in French literature, as much as Beowulf does in English and The Song of the Cid in Spanish.

Like modern superhero movie franchises, the chansons de geste spawned sequels, prequels, “remakes,” and character-led spin-offs as successive poets and scribes refashioned the stories for their times. And as with superhero franchises, there were a number of dominant “worlds,” with their own casts of characters. Those like the songs of Roland and William, which were set in the time of Charlemagne, were described from the fourteenth century onward as being concerned with the Matter of France.

Early in Chrétien de Troyes’s story Perceval, the title character is presented as a young boy throwing spears in the forest, teaching himself war, and enjoying the simple pleasures of nature. He hears, and then sees, Five armed knights, in armour from head to toe, coming through the woods. . . . . . . The glittering hauberks and the bright, shining helmets, the lances and the shields . . . the green and vermilion glistening in the sunshine . . . Convinced he must be seeing angels, he asks their leader, “Are you God?” “No, by my faith,” replies the man. “I am a knight.”

Lionheart or not, Marshal bested Richard, killing his horse from under him but sparing the young man’s life. “Let the Devil kill you,” he famously told Richard. “I won’t be the one to do it.”52 This combination of chivalrous propriety with bloody lethality earned William a high place in the Lionheart’s esteem, and when Richard was crowned king, Marshal slid from one Plantagenet’s service to another’s.

by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the way armies were raised was also shifting. Kings no longer depended so heavily on the reciprocal “feudal” system of land grants in exchange for military service when they went to war. Instead, taxes levied across society were used to pay for contracted soldiers and mercenaries, who agreed to turn up and fight on fixed-term deals, typically of forty days.

From the mid-thirteenth century English knights began to be summoned to parliaments, where they sat in what became the Commons—the second (but today the most important) of the two English parliamentary cameras. This development was mirrored in the Spanish kingdoms (where caballeros had a right to be summoned to the parliamentary bodies known as Cortes), and in France (where Louis IX summoned nineteen knights to his first parlement).

Today one of the highest and most exclusive public honors in the United Kingdom is the award of knighthood; more exclusive still is membership of the Order of the Garter—an Arthurian-style club originally founded for two dozen jousting partners of Edward III in 1348.

Although the term crusade was not yet coined, Urban had created the first crusaders.* A phenomenon known first as the “great stirring” and later as the “First Crusade” had begun.

There were times when they tore each other to shreds. But there were many other times and places in which crusaders and Muslims rubbed shoulders, traded, and interacted without feeling the least need to behead or burn one another to death.

the Almoravids who had swept through al-Andalus in the eleventh century were now in a state of protracted collapse; they were deposed in a revolution in Morocco and replaced by an even more puritanical Muslim sect known as the Almohads. This instability made the Iberian Peninsula a ripe field for warfare,

Although the Wendish crusade was small and sparsely attended when compared with the royal-led mission to Syria or the battles of the Reconquista, its categorization as a crusade was a critical event in medieval history, which framed colonization and conversion in northeast Europe as holy war.

the last really serious crusade to the Latin kingdom: the Third Crusade. Preached with an urgency that stemmed from abject humiliation verging on existential crisis, it was led by a new generation of warrior kings: Philip II of France and Richard the Lionheart.

During a dispute with King John of England over the appointment of an archbishop of Canterbury called Stephen Langton, Innocent prepared (but did not publish) documents authorizing a crusade against John, whom he had excommunicated for his disobedience and general impertinence.

Terrified that Frederick’s power in Sicily, southern Italy, Germany, and Lombardy would enable the Hohenstaufen dynasty to surround and dominate popes in the Papal States, Gregory repeatedly accused Frederick of heresy and encouraged other rulers to invade Hohenstaufen lands. This enmity outlived both men: from the 1240s until the 1260s successive popes preached warfare against Frederick and his successors,