Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. ecclesiastes 1:9–10

The Middle Ages were (it is usually supposed) the time when the classical world had vanished but the modern world was yet to get going; when people built castles and men fought in armor on horseback; when the world was flat and everything very far away.

I am going to ask—and I hope answer—some big questions: What happened in the Middle Ages? Who ruled? What did power look like? What were the big forces that shaped people’s lives? And how (if at all) did the Middle Ages shape the world we know today?

It opens with the Roman Empire in the west in a state of retreat and collapse, rocked by a changing climate and several generations of mass migration, among other things. It then looks at the secondary superpowers that emerged in Rome’s wake: the so-called barbarian realms that laid the foundations for the European kingdoms; the remodeled eastern Roman superstate of Byzantium; and the first Islamic empires.

the Franks, who revived a Christian, pseudo-Roman empire in the west.

This part of the book asks how monks and knights came to play such an important role in western society during the Middle Ages—and how the fusion of their two mindsets gave birth to the Crusades.

The rise of the Mongols in the twelfth century a.d. was a sharp and hideously brutal episode, in which an eastern empire—with its capital in what is now Beijing—achieved fleeting domination over half the world, at the cost of millions of lives. Against the background of this dramatic shift in global geopolitics, part III also looks at other emerging powers in what is sometimes called the “high” Middle Ages. We will meet merchants who invented extraordinary new financial techniques to make themselves and the world richer; scholars who revived the wisdom of the ancients and founded some of today’s greatest universities; and the architects and engineers who built the cities, cathedrals, and castles that still stand seven hundred years on, as portals back to the medieval world.

a global pandemic that ripped through the world, from east to west, devastating populations, reshaping economies, and changing the way that people thought about the world around them.

Last of all, we will see how shifting religious dogma, allied to new communication technology, brought about the Protestant Reformation—an upheaval that (as Foxe recognized) brought the curtain down on “the middle age.”

As the title suggests, this

is a book about power. By that I do not mean simply political power, or even human power. We will come across many mighty men and women (although because this is the Middle Ages, there are inevitably more of the former than the latter). But I am also interested in mapping great forces beyond human control. 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.

But the very notion of the Middle Ages is one that is specific to western history.

For to see the medieval west properly, we must first ask how and why Eternal Rome (Roma aeterna) managed to command an empire connecting three continents, an innumerable number of peoples with their various religions and traditions, and a similarly vast babble of languages; an empire of tribal wanderers, peasant farmers, and metropolitan elites; an empire stretching out from the creative hubs of antique culture to the ends of the known world.

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.

Colossal, centrally commanded, fiercely defended at the fringes, and closely governed (if not exactly free or tolerant) within its borders, technologically advanced and efficiently connected to itself and the world beyond, Rome’s imperial apogee had arrived.

So what were the defining features of the Roman Empire? First and most striking to outsiders was Rome’s extraordinary and enduring military strength. Warrior culture infused politics. Election to office during the republic was more or less contingent on having completed a term of military service, and military command in turn depended on election to political office. Unsurprisingly, therefore, many of Rome’s greatest historical achievements were won on the battlefield.

There was a strong culture of reward and honor for distinguished service, but by the same token, discipline was brutally strict, proceeding by starvation, flogging, and on occasion summary execution.

Collectively these wars demonstrated the long-term superiority of Rome’s military, which continued into the imperial era.

Even when legions suffered ambush or defeat—as they did from time to time, in Britain, Gaul, Germany (Germania), Dacia, Palestine, and elsewhere—the loss was seldom sufficient to vanquish the Roman presence. 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. For all this, however, the Roman army also won many fine victories in which no swords were drawn, no javelins readied, and no blood spilled. The advantage of unapproachable battlefield scale was then—as it has regularly been throughout history—the luxury of winning without fighting. The Roman army’s might was not simply an active force, it also acted as a de facto deterrent to potential rivals; because no other power in the western world could match the resources of the imperial forces, emperors could use the mere fact of their military capability as a political tool to bludgeon rivals into submission.21 This is a lesson that most superpowers in world history have come to appreciate. 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 time when (by the standards of the day) Rome could offer exceptional stability, peace, and opportunities for prosperity to those who lived under its aegis.

What made Rome so dominant in the Mediterranean world and beyond was the fact that overwhelming armed force developed in tune with a sophisticated civic machinery: a mesh of state-of-the-art social, cultural, and legal systems that Romans considered to be virtuous in and of themselves. Whether or not they were right—and today we may well entertain our doubts about a society that heavily circumscribed the rights of millions of women and the poor, viciously persecuted dissenters from its norms, fetishized blood sport and other forms of civic violence, and depended

on mass slavery for survival—the Roman way of life was highly exportable and left deep, often permanent marks everywhere it arrived.

Rome, argued Claudius, had always been a place in which the worthiest outsiders were absorbed.

At the heart of this argument lay two age-old debates that have animated rulers of powerful realms from the beginning of time to the present day: How does a state rehabilitate its former enemies, and does opening up membership of a state or society to non-natives strengthen or dilute its blood and character?

One of the most important social distinctions of Rome—both in the city itself, the Italian peninsula, and (eventually) the vast territories the Roman army conquered—was between citizens and the rest.

But citizenship mattered most. To be a citizen of Rome meant, in the deepest sense, freedom. For men it conferred an enviable package of rights and responsibilities: citizens could vote, hold political office, use the law courts to defend themselves and their property, wear the toga on ceremonial occasions, do military service in the legions rather than the auxiliaries, claim immunity from certain taxes, and avoid most forms of corporal and capital punishment, including flogging, torture, and crucifixion. Citizenship was not limited to men: although many of its rights were denied to women, female citizens could pass the status to their children, and their lives were more likely to feature comfort and plenty if they were citizens than if they were not. Citizenship was therefore a prized status, which was why the Roman state dangled it as reward for auxiliaries who served a quarter century in the Roman army, and for enslaved people who served uncomplainingly in the knowledge that if their master freed them, they too could claim the right to limited citizenship as freedmen. To lose one’s citizenship—the punishment imposed for very serious crimes such as homicide or forgery—was a form of legal dismemberment and social death. Rome was not by any means unique in fostering this concept of legal and social privilege—there were citizens in ancient Greece, Carthage, and numerous other Mediterranean states of the era. But Rome was unique in the way that it developed and extended the ...

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.

Many historians have seen the edict of Caracalla (sometimes called the Antonine Constitution) as a turning point in the history of the empire, because it was a decision that weakened the imperial system to its core, diluting the appeal to non-Romans of joining the army and denuding citizenship of prestige. Perhaps this is so. But it is also true that an open attitude to assimilation within the empire had been one of Rome’s key historic advantages,* for it prioritized the values of the Roman system above everything else, and admitted freely and without hang-ups the possibility that people were capable of entertaining more than

one cultural identity. A Roman did not need to have been born within sight of the seven hills of the Eternal City: he or she could be north African or Greek, a Gaul, German, or Briton, a Spaniard or a Slav. Even emperors did not have to be ethnically “Roman.” Trajan and Hadrian were Spaniards. Septimius Severus, who seized power in a.d. 193 and clung to it until a.d. 211, was born in Libya (Leptis Magna) to a north African father and a Syrian Arab mother; his successors (known as the Severan dynasty) therefore shared this African Arab heritage. The second emperor of this dynasty was none other than Caracalla. So while Caracalla had good political reasons for issuing his edict of a.d. 212—not least widening the tax base during a parlous time for the public finances—it is perhaps not too anachronistic to suspect the experience of being an emperor with African heritage must have affected his thinking.

Slavery was a fact of life throughout the ancient world. Slaves, or more properly, enslaved people—meaning persons defined as property, forced to work, stripped of their rights, and socially “dead”—could be found in virtually every significant realm of the age.

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.*

but it was taken for granted that “barbarians” from outside the empire were infinitely more suitable for enslavement than Romans themselves.

But to go very much further—still less to contemplate a world without slavery—would have been nonsensical. Philosophically, slavery was assumed to be essential to a free society—a natural phenomenon without which liberty for the true and noble Roman could not exist. Economically, the entire edifice of Rome and its empire relied upon mass bondage, facilitated by the same long and complex trading networks that supplied the empire

with essential commodities and luxury goods. Ultimately, Rome was a patriarchal society in which enslaved people occupied a position of inferiority that was simply their lot.

And even in places where slavery seemed to die out, its place as a pillar of economy and culture was often replaced by serfdom—a system of human bondage to the land. This was not quite the same as chattel slavery, although the difference would have felt slight to the people involved. And a large part of the western attachment to slavery sprang from the fact that it had been indivisible from Rome’s swaggering glory.

If Rome extended both citizenship and slavery to the provinces, this was far from the only mark of its influence in the world, which would endure into the medieval era. Beyond the simple fact of its legions and its institutions, Rome possessed a potent cultural brand. Seemingly everywhere the Romans went, law, language, and landscape took on flavors of “Roman-ness.”

This was not an even process, and the differing products of mixing Roman customs with the native practices of the Iberian Peninsula, north Africa, Gaul, Britain, the Balkans, Greece, and the Levant—among others—produced a wide range of distinctive subcultures, all existing together under the banner of empire. More importantly still, Romanization touched the ruling classes in the provinces vastly more than it affected the ordinary masses, and was concentrated in towns and cities, not the countryside. Despite those caveats, however, the export of Roman institutions, values, technologies, and worldviews was absolutely fundamental in the centuries that followed the empire’s collapse. For Rome was a highly networked superstate, whose disparate peoples were linked by super-engineered roads, efficiently policed seaways, and trade routes that extended to the ends of the earth. And the connective fibers of empire were not only physical pathways; they were cultural constants that made Roman-ness possible and recognizable across dozens of generations and several million square miles of imperial territory. They ensured that there was a sense of connectedness across the old Roman territories long after the empire itself was defunct.

But another area in which Rome left an indelible mark throughout the entire Middle Ages was in language. Indeed, one of Rome’s most lasting legacies, not only to the Middle Ages but to schoolchildren even today, was its common tongue.

The official language used across the Roman Empire was Latin. This did not mean that every person from Antioch to St. Albans spoke to one another in the epigrams of Martial: the classical Latin of the great Roman poets, philosophers, and historians was of no more use to ordinary day-to-day speakers than the syntax and vocabulary of Shakespeare’s sonnets would have been to an innkeeper or goatherd in Elizabethan England. In the east of the empire, Latin competed with Greek for the position of the most prevalent, admirable, and useful language, particularly after the empire was formally partitioned in the early fourth century a.d. 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. But if it was not exactly a universal tongue, Latin certainly was the first language of official imperial business, which allowed educated Romans everywhere to communicate with one another and to advertise their status as sophisticated beings.

Aside from bragging about sexual prowess and conquests, one of the most practical applications of the Latin language as a lingua franca—one that would endure well into the Middle Ages—was its connection to Roman law. Romans were proud of the ancient history of their lawmaking, which supposedly dated back to the fifth century b.c., when the so-called Twelve Tables were inscribed. These drew together Rome’s traditions and customs regarding legal procedure, debt, inheritance, families, landholding, religious practice, and serious crimes ranging from homicide and treason to theft and perjury; collectively the Twelve Tables provided the bedrock of Roman law for nearly a thousand years.

The “purest” form of Roman law existed, of course, in Rome itself, but during the imperial age, the legal system was exported in various forms to the provinces. Provincial governors toured the cities of their jurisdiction on an assize, hearing legal cases and determining them according to the most appropriate law code to the case. 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.

the influence of Roman law was rich and long-lasting. It thrived not only in the republic during which Cicero lived, but the empire, too, and its influence would be felt very powerfully throughout the Middle Ages and well into the modern era.

Romans had traditionally been enthusiastic collectors of gods, including the Olympian pantheon and various mystery cults from the east. So to begin with, there was little enthusiasm for this odd Jewish sect, whose members sought to keep alive the memory of the carpenter’s son who had caused a brief stir in Jerusalem during the governorship of Pontius Pilate.

Yet between around a.d. 200 and 350 Christianity was transformed. First, Christians were taken seriously as a group. Then, in the mid-third century they were persecuted en masse.

Yet at the beginning of the fourth century Christians’ troubles abruptly eased. First they were tolerated, then they were embraced, and finally their beliefs and presence were championed. By the time the Roman Empire in the west suffered its fatal collapse in the early fifth century, Christianity was the official imperial religion, and its future as one of the world’s biggest faiths was assured.

Constantine was now on his way to abolishing the tetrarchy and establishing himself as a single emperor to rule over all. From that moment onward he heaped all the fruits of imperial patronage on Christian bishops and believers. His soldiers went into battle with the Chi-Rho daubed on their shields. Officials from across the empire were told to enforce a new imperial edict issued in Milan in a.d. 313, which promised nondiscrimination against Christians.

By the fifth century Christianity was the official imperial religion, and emperors had begun to take seriously its theological minutiae, especially when it came to persecuting heretics and schismatics. In turn, Christianity underwent its first wave of Romanization, developing a distinct military tone, a preference for Latin as the language of exegesis, 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), a taste for monumental architecture and spectacular ritual, and—perhaps most enduringly—a nascent divide between its eastern and western branches, mirroring the rupture that defined the Roman Empire from Constantine’s day onward.

After him, Christianity was propelled from an unpopular fringe cult to the central worship system in the empire.

If we are to seek “turning points” in the history of the empire over which he ruled, there are plenty of options. One landmark was the edict of Caracalla of a.d. 212, when citizenship was radically redistributed in the provinces. Another was the Crisis of the Third Century, when Rome juddered, split, almost collapsed, and then reformed. A third was Constantine’s reign, when Rome adopted Christianity and the new capital, Constantinople, ensured that the hub and the future of the empire would subsequently be found in the eastern Mediterranean rather than the west. And a fourth (as we shall see in the next chapter) came with the arrival of nomadic steppe tribes in Europe in a.d. 370, an event that placed enormous and eventually intolerable pressure on Roman institutions, boundaries, and power structures.

What is important is that by the turn of the fifth century a.d., even as it broke apart,