Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

from the 1260s, a new ruling dynasty in Egypt—a Turkish slave-soldier caste known as the Mamluks—began to chip away at the remaining coastal redoubts and fortresses of the kingdom of Jerusalem, county of Tripoli, and principality of Antioch.

in the 1260s, Simon de Montfort the younger, son of the Cathar crusader of the same name, declared his rebellion against King Henry III of England to be a crusade.*

The fifteenth century saw five crusades launched against the Hussites—followers of a Bohemian heretic called Jan Hus, an early dissident theologian of what would come to be known as the Reformation

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. Its survival is a sign of both its genius and of the readiness of people both then and now to throw themselves into conflict in the name of a higher cause.

de Vitry and other churchmen like him decided this King David must be a descendent of a mythical Christian warrior-ruler called Prester John. In their forefathers’ times men had spoken of this Prester John, ruler of a dimly perceived place called the Three Indies, to whom dozens of kings allegedly paid tribute—predicting he would visit Jerusalem “with a huge army befitting the glory of our Majesty to inflict a humiliating defeat on the enemies of the Cross.”3 Sadly for them, this had never happened, for the simple reason that Prester John did not exist.

Genghis Khan (or as many scholars now prefer, Chinggis Qan),

the Mongols rebooted the whole shape of trade and interaction across Asia and the Middle East. The severely policed order they imposed on their conquered territories created a relative period of peace sometimes known by historians as the Pax Mongolica. It permitted epic journeys of overland exploration, and an easier transfer between east and west of technologies, knowledge, and people.

Studies of ancient trees in the pine forests of central Mongolia have shown that during the exact time that Temüjin was growing up, the area enjoyed fifteen consecutive years of mild weather and abundant rainfall.8 This was the most hospitable period of weather the region had experienced in eleven hundred years.

The four khanates that emerged out of the crisis years around 1260 were nevertheless massive power blocs by any standard. The first, and notionally the senior, was centered on China and known as the Great Yuan (or Yuan dynasty). It was established by Kublai Khan in 1271 and was—or quickly became—explicitly Chinese in character and culture, embracing Confucianism and the native Chinese aptitude for technological invention.

In 1368 a new dynasty—the Ming—came to power, and the survivors from among the Yuan fled back to the Mongol steppe, where a small and unremarkable rump state known as the Northern Yuan endured until the seventeenth century.

In Afghanistan and northern India, Temür did leave an important imperial legacy, through his descendant Babur, who founded the Mughal Empire at Kabul in the early sixteenth century.

In Russia, a trading backwater called Moscow grew to become a regionally dominant trading hub—initially as somewhere that merchants could operate at a safe distance from the Mongols of the Golden Horde, but subsequently as an ally of the Golden Horde khans and, by the sixteenth century, the dominant state in western Asia, whose ruler claimed lordship over all the Rus’ as tsar.46

the principle of religious freedom enshrined in the west in general and the U.S. Constitution in particular had its origins in the philosophy of Genghis Khan.

The strong Islamic character of central Asia and southern Russia today owes a huge amount to the Mongols.

Their rearrangement of central Asia, Persia, and the Kievan Rus’ was as cruel as any imperial expansion of the nineteenth century. But like the colonial scramble of the nineteenth century, the Mongols’ bloody rampage across the world map nevertheless opened up global trade and information networks that ushered in a new age in western history.

Born in Venice in 1253 to a family of businessmen, Marco Polo was forty-five when he fought at the battle of Curzola. He had spent most of his adult life away from Europe. His father, Niccolò Polo, and uncle Maffeo Polo were among the vanguard of European travelers to the Mongol court, having made their first journey to visit Kublai Khan in 1260, after liquidating earlier business ventures in Constantinople to escape the restoration of a Byzantine emperor.

Giovanni da Montecorvino was sent to Khanbaliq (Beijing) in the 1290s under papal instruction to establish himself as the city’s first archbishop; he led a successful mission in Mongol China for nearly twenty years, preaching and converting people at the churches he founded, and translating the New Testament into the Mongol tongue.

Initially attendees brought with them large quantities of stock and samples, which could be stored in purpose-built warehouses in and around these towns. But as time went on, the Champagne fairs would evolve into something closer to what we would today call a stock exchange, with currency, credit, and contracts changing hands and real goods being delivered (or not) at some future moment, with much business being done by specialist agents on behalf of wealthy companies, banks, and governments.

It was said in 1297—with only a little exaggeration—that 50 percent of England’s wealth came from wool.

The first western bank had been created in Venice in the twelfth century. But by the early fourteenth century the most successful houses were the Florentine-based Bardi, Peruzzi, and Frescobaldi. (The most famous banking dynasty the Middle Ages produced was the Medici—who in the fifteenth century rose from Florentine financiers to a dynasty of oligarchs, popes, and queens.*) These family-run “super-companies” bought and sold stocks, offered deposit banking to clients large and small, and provided a whole raft of secondary financial services including loans and investment in business ventures, long-distance cash and credit transfer, and tax collection

from the 1340s at the latest, merchants in Genoa began to draw up insurance contracts, which would pay out if stocks were lost in transit.

Lübeck became the most influential of a cluster of similar city-states around the Baltic and beyond, including Danzig, Riga, Bergen, Hamburg, Bremen, and even Cologne. By the mid-fourteenth century these had banded together in a loose commercial partnership known as the Hanseatic League. The axis of trade for the league’s merchants stretched from London and Bruges in the west as far as Novgorod in the east, and throughout this trading region Hanseatic agents could be found pushing the interests of their bloc.

commercial activity was not only memorialized in stone; it also left its mark on the page. When Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales in the 1390s, he gave one of his bawdiest and strangest stories to The Merchant.* It was no surprise that a merchant should feature in Chaucer’s riotous compendium, for the author had lifelong experience of business.

mercer: the catchall name for traders in England who imported fine silks, linens, and similar fabrics, and exported wool and its by-products.

Like Judaism and, as it would soon transpire, Islam, Christianity was a religion rooted in the word of God, and his word was transmitted primarily through being written, read, and heard.

Bologna’s eleventh-century students therefore began to organize themselves into mutual aid societies, known in Latin as universitas scholarium, which in turn could act collectively as the studium.

in 1209, riots in Oxford sent groups of nervous academics scuttling east across England to a safer spot on the edge of the East Anglian fens, where they became the first scholars of the University of Cambridge.

His crowning study was the massive Summa theologiae—designed as an introduction to, and defense of, the whole of Christian belief, written for what we would now call undergraduates, but accessible to lay readers too.29 The Summa theologiae dealt with everything from the nature of the world to morality, virtue, sin, and the mysteries of the sacraments; it is still a set text for divinity students and priesthood candidates today.

Dafydd ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales, was condemned to die by an English Parliament convened in the Anglo-Welsh border town of Shrewsbury in September 1283. His death was to be cruel and unusual. Dafydd considered himself a freedom fighter, defending the rights of the native Welsh to live as they wished, according to their own laws and customs, and not under the rule of their hated neighbors to the east.

Dafydd was found guilty of treason. He was sentenced to be the first person in British history to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. This was a horrible way to die, as Dafydd found out firsthand. Having been taken from his prison cell at Rhuddlan Castle in north Wales, he was dragged behind a horse to the scaffold in Shrewsbury, where he was strung up by his neck and left to struggle and choke for a while. Then he was cut down by the executioner, a townsman called Geoffrey, who proceeded to slice out his intestines with a butcher’s blade. Only then was Dafydd put out of his misery: beheaded and hacked into four pieces,

the Welsh were heartily fed up. In September 1294 they rebelled. During the revolt insurgents tried to put a stop to works at Caernarfon—not so much lying down in front of the bulldozers as setting out to burn the entire building to the ground. The site and half-built town around it was sacked and captured. Newly constructed town walls were pulled down. When the rebellion was crushed, Master James and his on-site deputy, an expert mason called Master Walter of Hereford, were dismayed to find their progress set back by months, if not years.

Edward spent £50,000—a staggering sum—on Windsor, with large new apartment suites, offices, and entertaining spaces. Today Windsor Castle still serves as the de facto home of English chivalry, particularly when it hosts gatherings of the Order of the Garter in its stunning Gothic chapel of Saint George (rebuilt in the late fifteenth century by Edward IV and Henry VII), or during its thrice-weekly changing of the guard—a public ceremony that normally attracts hundreds of curious spectators and tourists.

Although the cathedral at Reims was preferred as the coronation site for French monarchs, and Saint-Denis was their mausoleum, Notre-Dame still exuded cultural and religious power from every grain of its fabric. At a critical moment during the last stages of the Hundred Years War, when the English brought their boy king Henry VI to be crowned as king of France, they chose Notre-Dame for the occasion.

Toledo Cathedral, founded in the 1220s, was an idiosyncratic attempt to put Gothic clothing on the city’s main mosque; Seville’s cathedral, converted from a mosque at the start of the fifteenth century, underwent a similar transformation.

when Brunelleschi finished the dome, the cathedral now known as Santa Maria del Fiore was instantly recognized as a marvel of the sort scarcely seen since the death of the classical world a millennium before. Today it is generally recognized as the founding architectural achievement of the Italian Renaissance and the ancestor of the domes that adorned many monumental buildings of the modern age, including St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Les Invalides in Paris, and the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC.

For several hundred years after 900, global temperatures had risen: the so-called Medieval Warm Period. But around 1300 they began to drop again—and sharply. This rapid cooling was prompted by a period of intense volcanic activity around the world, during which seismic explosions belched sulfur dioxide and other sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the stratosphere.

freezing in winter—phenomena that led to the period between 1300 and 1850 becoming known as the Little Ice Age.

The population of England had raced from perhaps 1.5 million at the time of the Norman Conquest to around 6 million on the eve of the Great Famine.* That pattern was broadly mirrored elsewhere, especially in the cities of Europe and the near east,

This hybrid bubonic-pneumonic plague was probably circulating among the Mongols of central Asia in the early 1330s. It spread outward through the eastern world during that decade, throughout Transoxania, China, and Persia,

“The past has devoured us, the present is gnawing our entrails, the future threatens yet greater dangers,” wailed de’ Mussis.14 He was not far wrong.

Medieval writers blamed the pestilence variously on God’s wrath, the prevalence of vice, the coming of Antichrist, the impending resurrection of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the excessive tightness of women’s clothes, misalignment of the planets, sodomy, evil vapors, rain, Jewish conspiracy, the tendency of hot and moist people to overindulge in sex and baths, and underripe vegetables, which doctors of medicine were sure caused “windy ulcers.”

The Black Death’s first wave lasted from 1347 until 1351. During that time, in the worst affected countries, up to 60 percent of the local population died.

the rich were better able to flee diseased cities for the comparative safety of quarantine in the countryside, a phenomenon the great Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio memorialized in his Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories told by a group of ten affluent young people who escape Florence to dodge infection.

Henry Knighton recorded that in 1349 “crops perished in the fields for lack of harvesters”; even where willing workers could be found, the cost to landowners of bringing in their crops rocketed.24 The sudden population decline also caused a collapse in the price of land rents. In a situation so severe that some villages were wiped out and abandoned forever, land was suddenly dirt cheap, and landlords were scrambling for tenants. Not surprisingly, a double whammy of soaring wages and plummeting rents sent panic swirling through political societies, whose most powerful members petitioned their rulers to help save them from financial ruin.

The Black Death’s harrying of the western world was more than just a financial inconvenience to be solved by legislation. It brought about an immediate and drastic rearrangement of European demography— which meant power lurched suddenly toward ordinary people.

In Bruges in 1302, a group of townswomen seized a French soldier and sliced him up “like a tuna fish.”

Many of them began to look west, across the Atlantic Ocean. It was not very clear what, if anything, lay there. But many explorers and patrons were willing to find out. Their most fervent wish was that navigating the Atlantic might reveal a new passage to the east that would bypass the Ottoman zone. But as it transpired, they found something very different: the islands and mainland of the Americas, and the abundant, deadly, fragile, wonderful territories of a new world.

In the 980s an exiled outlaw known as Erik the Red kick-started the colonization of Greenland.

On close reading of Christopher Columbus’s letters and notebooks he does not present an especially attractive figure. “The Admiral,” as it pleased him to be known, was a braggart and at times an outright liar. He misled his crew about his intentions and the progress of their expedition. He claimed credit for having been the first to spot land in the Bahamas, when he had done no such thing. He took advantage of the good nature of people he met in the new lands;

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. And from the moment he returned from the Caribbean, it was clear he had opened up a new age in human history.