Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

On his third voyage, he was accused of having misused his powers as “Viceroy Admiral and Governor-General” of the new lands, arrested, imprisoned, and shipped back to Spain in chains—an experience that left him bitter until the end of his days.

he wrote back to advise the Catholic Monarchs that the best strategy for making an economic success of the new lands would be to impose mass servitude on the local populations, along with forcible conversion to Christianity. Ferdinand and Isabella were less than enthusiastic about such heavy-handed tactics.

the new Spanish viceroy, a crusading knight called Nicolás de Ovando took uncompromising measures against the local people known as the Taíno, who were now chafing against the Spanish presence. Ovando had brought hundreds of troops with him to the islands, and set them loose on the unfortunate Taíno. Some were massacred. Their queen, Anacaona, was hanged in public. Many more were taken prisoner, and in dealing with them, Ovando followed old crusader logic: unbelievers captured in war were fair game to be enslaved.

Hernán Cortés, the stiff-necked Spaniard who brought back huge quantities of gold from Mexico after his campaigns of 1519–21, in which his troops crushed and overthrew the Aztec empire, deposing and probably murdering its last emperor, Moctezuma II.

by the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were appointing permanent governors for their outposts on the Indian mainland, and carving out a settlement centered on Goa. One hundred and fifty years later, the Portuguese had conquered hundreds of miles of the coastline of India, much of Sri Lanka, swaths of modern Bangladesh and Myanmar, and the tiny peninsula and archipelago of Macau, in southern China.

Goa was only ceded back to India in 1961, and Macau in 1999.)

Magellan—a secretive and extremely pious man who, like Columbus, constantly misled his crew about where they were going and what he hoped to achieve, did not live to see his journey’s end.

The line from Magellan and Elcano’s circumnavigation to Captain Cook’s arrival in Australia, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mount Everest, and our current age of satellite surveys and Google Earth was long, but it was direct.

the voyages of European discovery were one critical factor in bringing the Middle Ages to a close.

Looking back from the seventeenth century, the philosopher-politician Sir Francis Bacon ranked printing alongside gunpowder and the shipman’s compass in having changed “the appearance and state of the whole world.”4

In the course of Luther’s theological enquiries, however, he became increasingly interested in the nature of God’s forgiveness, which he believed was a matter of faith, rather than something that had to be earned by doing things.

The most extreme reformers—led by the Swiss preacher Ulrich Zwingli—had begun to question even sacraments like infant baptism. (For this they became known as Anabaptists.)

He enthusiastically encouraged other reform-minded intellectuals in Saxony and as far away as Zurich and Strasburg to begin dismantling the practices of the Catholic faith and establishing new rites of worship and ecclesiastical groups outside the control of Rome.

turning to the Germans, Bourbon decried the godless corruption of Rome’s Catholic clergy, who led the citizens “in lustful and effeminate pastimes . . . totally committed to amassing silver and gold with fraud, pillage, and cruelty, under the banner of Christian piety.” Taking Rome, he told them, would fulfill the dream of which “our infallible prophet, Martin Luther, has spoken many times.”

The sack of Rome in May 1527 lasted for more than a week. Screaming, “Spain! Spain! Kill! Kill!” imperial troops hurtled through into the city and ran wild. They made short work of the few thousand military defenders, including most of the pope’s Swiss Guards, who were cut down in front of St. Peter’s. After that, the city was theirs. Clement himself fled to the Castel Sant’Angelo—the

The pope and his circle remained barricaded in the Castel Sant’Angelo for a month, only negotiating their safety on June 7, at the price of four hundred thousand ducats. Even then, although most of those who had been cooped up in the fortress were allowed to leave, Clement himself was forced to stay there for his own safety. He was only released in early December—under the cover of darkness, for fear of enraging the rank and file of the occupying army.

On February 22, 1530, Charles appeared in Bologna, and Pope Clement crowned him with the Iron Crown of Lombardy, first seized for the empire so many centuries earlier by Charlemagne. Two days later, on his thirtieth birthday, Charles was officially crowned as Holy Roman emperor. He paraded around the city with Clement at his side. A wonderful new decade—indeed, a new era—stretched out before him.

The sack of Rome in 1527 had important consequences, many of which remain with us today. In England it is best known because it derailed King Henry VIII’s plans to annul his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon.

The Spanish, by contrast, were ascendant—and the combination of their swaggering progress through the New World and the Old, along with the formal unification of the Aragonese and Castilian crowns, launched a new golden age on the Iberian Peninsula. It was eventually personified by Charles V’s son and successor, Philip II, under whose patronage Madrid and the grand palace of El Escorial became the beating heart of European sophistication.

The Franco-Ottoman alliance, spawned at the end of the Middle Ages, endured from the mid-sixteenth century until the reign of Napoleon,

in the aftermath of Rome’s fall, a growing reform movement flourished from the 1530s onward, spurred by homegrown reformers like John Calvin. By mid-century, groups of protestants known as Huguenots began to pose serious problems for the French crown, and tensions eventually erupted in the French Wars of Religion, which were fought from the 1560s until the 1590s,

today one eighth of the world’s population—more than nine hundred million people—are members of a Protestant congregation.

by the 1530s, the western world was no longer recognizably medieval. The rise of the printed word, encounters with the New World, the collapse and fracture of the church militant, the demographic rearrangements caused by waves of the Black Death, the humanistic and artistic revolutions of the Renaissance—all these things and more had recast the shape and feel of the west,