Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The end goal was not Constantinople, but Christ’s sepulcher in Muslim-ruled Jerusalem. If Byzantine emperors could not protect Christian interests there, Urban reasoned, popes would step in. They would not just save Byzantium. They would usurp the role of Roman emperors as guardians of the holiest places in the Christian world. One reason Urban could conceive of such a grand plan lay in his years spent in Cluny’s cloisters. As we have seen, under the leadership of Abbot Hugh, Cluny had been knit into the economy of warfare against non-Christian powers through its relationship with kings like Alfonso VI of Castile, an enthusiastic Reconquista warrior. Cluny’s financial strength and regional spread had been aided in no small part by the profits of the Reconquista, and the Roman Church’s mission on the Iberian Peninsula had also been boosted by the triumphs ground out in the 1080s and 1090s by men like El Cid. Might it be that what had worked in the west could transfer at scale to the east?