Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Compared with the rest of the known world, from the sixth century onward Europe became a commercial backwater, with little to export except for Baltic furs, Frankish swords, and enslaved people.23 Although it would be misleading to write off the whole of the early Middle Ages as a “dark” period in which all business receded to nothingness and human progress went into hibernation, in the grand scheme of western history, the Middle Ages were a period of stagnated economic development, which lasted several hundred years. Slowly, however, business recovered. From around the year 1000 Europe’s population boomed, in tandem with a surge in agricultural production. The Medieval Climate Optimum was kind to farmers, and huge new tracts of land were brought under the plow through forest clearances and marsh draining. Territory was seized from itinerant, pagan Slavs and put under Christian plows—a process that started with the Carolingians and continued under the crusaders.24 New farming technologies were developed, with heavy plows improving soil quality and the “three-field” crop rotation system preventing soil exhaustion. Shipbuilding also improved, making long voyages by sea safer and faster—whether those voyages were for enslaving people or plundering monasteries, Viking style, or for buying and selling goods in foreign markets. And from the time of Charlemagne onward, western Christian monarchs slowly began to stake their claims to ever-larger kingdoms, subjecting them to deeper...