Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The Fifth Crusade, planned by Innocent and promulgated at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, was eventually overseen by his successor, Honorius III, with very limited success. Despite the deployment of large, predominantly French and German armies to assault Damietta, four years of war between 1217 and 1221 produced no lasting gains. Damietta was taken and lost, and an attempt to storm the Egyptian capital of Cairo was easily defeated by the sultan, Saladin’s nephew al-Kamil, who flooded the Nile valley and sunk the crusader army into fields of sapping mud. This, along with an almost identical crusade to Damietta led by Louis IX of France in 1248–54, was the last, faintly farcical mass assault on the east, which was thereafter left increasingly to the defense of the military orders, bolstered occasionally by independent expeditions raised privately by great lords. But this did not mean an end to crusading. For as the age of the great campaigns diminished, many smaller fields of crusader warfare emerged in their stead. In Spain, the victory over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 began a new phase of the Reconquista in which the Christian powers were

increasingly ascendant, working their way steadily southward until by 1252 only the emirate of Granada in the far south of the peninsula remained under Islamic rule. Meanwhile, in northern Europe, crusading became effectively permanent, as the Teutonic Knights put down roots in frontier country and led annual raids into pagan lands around the Baltic regions known generically as Prussia, to convert unbelievers by force and carve out new estates for Christian secular lords and bishops. This was a slow but ultimately successful process, which for a time created a military crusader state in the Baltic, stretching all the way from what is now northern Poland to Estonia. At the same time, as we shall see in chapter 9, the crusade became a means of defending the borders of Christendom in eastern Europe from a new world superpower—the Mongols.

Although he never led a mass crusade to the east, Frederick did travel to the kingdom of Jerusalem in the late 1220s, where he used his rare rapport with his the sultan al-Kamil to achieve what many had given up as impossible: the return of Christian rule to the holy city. In a negotiated settlement brokered via personal diplomacy between himself and the sultan, Frederick secured recognition for Christian oversight, on the understanding that Muslims would be allowed unmolested access to the Haram al-Sharif so that they could worship at the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque. Frederick claimed the title and crown of king of Jerusalem for himself, but left day-to-day government in the hands of appointed deputies when he returned to Europe. Although this happy balance of powers lasted only sixteen years, it was a miraculously evenhanded and bloodless revolution for which Frederick might have expected the thanks and adulation of all of Christendom.

He made a mortal enemy of Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227–41), an imperious and querulous individual cut from much the same cloth as Innocent III, whose driving mission was to stamp out heresy, persecute unbelievers everywhere, and make all earthly princes aware that their power was nothing when compared with the papal majesty. Terrified that Frederick’s power in Sicily, southern Italy, Germany, and Lombardy would enable the Hohenstaufen dynasty to surround and dominate popes in the Papal States, Gregory repeatedly accused Frederick of heresy and encouraged other rulers to invade Hohenstaufen lands.

It would be difficult to think of a greater inversion—or even perversion—of the original mission of crusading than a Latin king of Jerusalem losing his head in a war against the pope. But that was the way the world was moving.

Then 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. Over the course of three decades they ground the vulnerable and increasingly neglected crusader cities into the dust, culminating in a huge siege of Acre in May 1291, which ended in a forced evacuation by sea. Thereafter the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem relocated to Cyprus, where it withered away.

But just as often, crusading became a badge to wear to give any war fought by a Christian power an added gloss of legitimacy.

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

And this was far from the last mention of the C-word. Crusading outlived the Middle Ages, and remains today a favored trope of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and Islamist terrorists, all of whom cleave to the decidedly shaky idea that it has defined Christian and Muslim relations for a millennium. They are not right, but they are not original in their error either. 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.

Conflating various Christian prophecies with the undoubtedly exciting eyewitness reports given by the prisoners of war, 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.

What they had thought was “King David,” grandson of Prester John and savior of the Christian west, was in fact Genghis Khan (or as many scholars now prefer, Chinggis Qan), a down-and-out nomad boy from the steppe of Mongolia who had risen to become the most successful conqueror of his age. In two decades, Genghis had created a merciless and apparently invincible Mongolian war machine, then set it loose on the world around him, from Korea to Mesopotamia. In doing so he had torn up the political structures of central Asia and the Middle East, bringing about the demise of two of the eastern world’s greatest imperial

dynasties: the Jin in China and the Khwarazmians in Persia. And there was more to come. From Genghis’s rise in the early 1200s, until 1259, when the superstate he conquered was formally partitioned into four huge quarters, the Mongols controlled the biggest contiguous land empire in the world. And although the Mongols’ period of global preeminence lasted only 150 years, their achievements in that time stood in comparison with those of the ancient Macedonians, Persians, or Romans. Their methods were more brutal than those of any other global empire before the modern age: the Mongols did not hesitate to level entire cities, wipe out whole populations, ruin vast regions, and leave once-busy metropolises smoldering and desolate, either to be rebuilt to their own liking or simply wiped from the map.5 Yet weighed against their appalling legacy of slaughter, waste, and genocide was the fact that 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. It may also, as we shall see in chapter 13, have allowed for the transmission of the worst pandemic in world history. The Mongols pioneered the administrative tools of a global empire: a world-class postal...

The reasons for his success were simple but effective. Besides a personal talent for fighting and marrying, both of which were essential tools of steppe diplomacy, he had also lighted upon some radical reforms to traditional Mongol tribal and military organization. Like Muhammad uniting the bickering tribes of Arabia during the seventh century a.d., Temüjin saw that bonds of clan and blood repelled as often as they attracted, and that by weakening them in favor of a direct bond to himself, he could create a whole that was much more powerful than its constituent parts. This necessitated some simple but important practical steps. One was to introduce a strong element of meritocracy into his military organization. Mongol society was customarily arranged according to tribal hierarchies based on ancestry and wealth. Temüjin tore this tradition to shreds. He chose his allies and his military officers on the strict basis of talent and loyalty. Then he gave his officers regularized units of men to command. The base unit was a company of ten men called an Arban, comprising six light mounted archers and four more heavily armored lancers. Ten of these companies made a Zuun. Ten Zuuns made a Mingghan. And the largest unit, ten thousand men strong, was a Tumen. Critically for the unity of the military as a whole, these units were not constructed from tribal groupings. They cut across family and clan lines.9 Once troops had been placed in their unit, they could not transfer—on pain of d...

Outside his army, Temüjin also focused on ways to bind together the society under his rule. Here he bore some resemblance to the great Byzantine emperor Justinian. A law code known as the Jasaq or Yassa enjoined everyone under Mongol rule to refrain from stealing from or enslaving one another, to exhibit strict protocols of generosity and hospitality, to obey the authority of the khan above all others, and to disdain rape, sodomy, washing clothes in thunderstorms, and urinating in sources of water. Harsh and usually mortal punishments were levied without sentiment on anyone who offended Temüjin or his code: ordinary people found guilty of crimes were beheaded with a sword, while distinguished officers or leaders had their backs broken so they died without their blood being spilled.

This served two ends. First, it was a form of psychological warfare: Temüjin realized that his enemies were more likely to crumble at his mere approach if they suspected the alternative to immediate surrender was immediate death.

Second, annihilating all but totally subservient opponents ensured that Temüjin could win wars with relatively small armies, because he did not need to leave large numbers to police conquered communities. Yet balanced against rule by terror was a surprising degree of tolerance for those whom the Mongols allowed to survive. Clans and tribes who surrendered to the Mongols were actively integrated into Mongol society. Their men were expected to join the army, and the women and children were folded into the rest of the community. Meanwhile, most religious faiths were tolerated—a fact that would become increasingly important once the Mongol world started to expand outward. (Temüjin was fascinated by religious faiths in general, and usually viewed them as useful additions to Mongol shamanic paganism, rather than competitors.10) So from early in his career Temüjin conceived of a Mongol world characterized by overwhelming military force, but also a strong degree of enforced social cohesion. Many a dictator in world history after him would have similar ideas. Few would ever pursue or achieve their goals with such devastating success as Temüjin.

Five years later Temüjin had defeated all the other neighboring powers, including the Merkits, Naimans, Tatars, and Uighurs. Each of them bowed before his name—which in 1206 became Genghis Khan (loosely, “fierce ruler”) when a council of high tribal chiefs known as a quriltai awarded him the title in recognition of his

extraordinary feats of conquest.

At this time the rulers of Persia and many surrounding territories were the Khwarazmians, Turks who had once been mamluks, but had risen up to become the masters of their own huge empire, which sat across the rich cities and Silk Roads of central Asia.

This was the start of a lasting partnership between Venetian doges and Mongol khans, which endured well into the fourteenth century, paving the way for the famous adventures of Marco Polo (see chapter 10) and making the Republic of Venice very rich.

Never especially culturally dogmatic, the Mongols had eagerly harvested technologies and customs from the lands they had visited: Chinese shipbuilders and Persian siege engineers had been co-opted into the military. Uighur scribes had been drafted into government administration, and a new official script was adopted for bureaucracy across the empire. In 1227 Genghis issued a paper currency, copied from the defeated Jin dynasty of China, backed by silver and silk.

According to the Croatian chronicler Thomas the Archdeacon, the reason for this abrupt departure was that the Hungarian steppe, although expansive, did not provide enough grass to feed the huge herds of horses the Mongols required for long campaigning.24 But Mongol politics had also taken a sharp turn: Ögödei Khan, Genghis’s third son and successor as supreme khan, died in late December 1241, and there was a momentary power vacuum in Mongolia.

The Mongol empire was now bigger than ever. And it connected regions of the world that had for a long time been cut off from one another. As a result, from the middle of the thirteenth century, intrepid explorers began to strike out into strange new lands, documenting what they saw and describing the exotic conditions that existed under the command of a superpower of a size unseen in the whole of the Middle Ages. For all that they had destroyed worlds, the Mongols had also opened them up for exploration. Even during Roman times, the Far East had been beyond the horizon of a single traveler—the silk and other commodities traded from China had arrived only via indirect trade, and India was scarcely any better known. Now under Mongol hegemony, all that would change—at least for a time.

This was the essence of Mongols’ rule: tolerance policed by terror.

Then, even more shockingly, Hülagü had the Abbasid caliph, al-Musta’sim, put to death. Al-Musta’sim had made the error of refusing to capitulate when the Mongols approached, so there was no helping him. The supreme spiritual leader of the Sunni Muslim world was rolled up in a carpet and trampled by horses. Thus was the light was extinguished on a dynasty whose history stretched back to the revolution against the Umayyads in a.d. 750 (see chapter 4). There was, it seemed, no limit to Mongol ruthlessness—and nothing in the world that was too sacred for them to destroy.

But whatever the case, Möngke was dead. The fallout from his death brought about confusion, civil war, and eventually the partition of the Mongol empire into four separate regional powers known

as khanates, each of which would develop its own distinctive character and political objectives.

The fact is that the Mongol empire, which had functioned very effectively across such a huge expanse for the first half of the thirteenth century proved unable to hold together when its guiding principle—unwavering loyalty to the authority of a single, undisputed leader—was challenged. The extraordinary postal communications system established under Ögödei, which allowed commanders to keep in contact with one another while fighting thousands of miles apart, was no use if those commanders decided that they were more interested in their own gain than that of the supreme khan

and the good of the empire itself. Moreover, the Mongols were in some sense the victims of their own adaptability. Regional commanders who had been sent into China, central Asia, Persia, and the Russian steppe had, over the course of a couple of generations, started to feel a stronger degree of affinity for their own patch of the empire than they did for the concept of the Mongol dominions as a whole. Some gained a fondness for urban living rather than life under the felt of the ger. Some adopted local religions, professing Tibetan Buddhism or Sunni Islam, abandoning the shaman-led paganism of the old country. This was, perhaps, only natural: not even the mighty Roman Empire had managed to prevent its regional commanders from going native sooner or later. But in the thirteenth century it meant that the Mongol empire could not stay Mongol forever. 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.

West of the Great Yuan lay the other three Mongol successor states. The Chagatai Khanate, so named because its rulers were the descendants of Genghis Khan’s second son Chagatai, sat squarely over central Asia, from the Altai mountains in the east to the Oxus River in the west. This khanate remained nomadic, tribal, and highly unstable, with repeated lurches between rival rulers. (In the fourteenth century it split, contracted, and morphed into an entity known as Moghulistan.) And for generations its rulers clashed with those of the Mongol Ilkhanate, established by Hülagü and his line on what had once been the Persian empire of the Khwarazm-Shah.

But as it turned out, Hülagü and his successors had strictly limited success against the Mamluks. Descended from steppe nomads themselves, highly disciplined and adept at warfare, the Mamluks proved to be the bulwark that set the limits of Mongol expansion in the Levant. They secured Egypt, Palestine, and eventually much of Syria, and by the end of the thirteenth century had ended any Mongol drive into north Africa or Arabia. What this meant was that the Mongols of the Ilkhanate effectively became the latest rulers of the old Persian empire, and as they settled into this role, they gradually started to look and sound like every other recent ruler of that part of the world. In 1295 the Ilkhan Ghazan converted from Buddhism to Sunni Islam—quite a decision for the great-grandson of Hülagü to take, because it was the latter who had literally put the Abbasid caliph to death in 1258.

This left one more khanate: the so-called Golden Horde.* As we have seen, when travelers such as Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William of Rubruck traversed the Mongol empire, they had found the western portion, which overlaid the Russian steppe, under the control of a regional commander, Batu. As the thirteenth century wore on, this region became an independent khanate under its own khan, who had to be a descendent of Genghis Khan through the line of his eldest son, Jochi.

As we will see in the next chapter, the Mongols were in large part responsible for the boom in global trade that occurred along these routes from the thirteenth century onward, and the Golden Horde was a vast intermediary market for commercial goods ranging from silk, spices, precious metals and stones, furs, salt, skins, and enslaved people. It was also a melting pot for religions and cultures. As Ibn Battuta noted, the Mongol khans had converted to Islam. But they were highly indulgent of Christianity, exempting the Eastern Church in their lands from taxation and refraining from demanding that churchmen serve in the Mongol army. Indeed, they solicited prayers for their souls from Russian clerics. Likewise, the khans of the Golden Horde were prepared to deal peaceably with princes of the Rus’ who acknowledged their overlordship and paid them tribute.

After the shock of the Mongol invasions had subsided, from the middle of the thirteenth century the Golden Horde and the native princes of the Rus’ dealt with one another relatively easily: the Mongols took tribute and military service, and in return they kept the peace among the princes, cut them in on their lucrative trade networks, and protected them from enemies in the west. By contrast, the khans of the Golden Horde spent much of the same period feuding and fighting with their Mongol cousins in the Ilkhanate, who presented a serious threat to their territorial ambitions in the Caucasus and were competitors for merchant traffic along their different sections of the Silk Roads. This curious state of affairs—in which Mongols fought Mongols and indulged princes of the outside world—was in many ways an exact inversion of everything that Genghis Khan had stood for. And slowly but surely, Mongol-on-Mongol violence would bring down the curtain on the empire that had once been the scourge of the world.

A long-running and very violent insurrection known as the Red Turban uprisings, which took place between 1351 and 1367, finally destroyed the Yuan dynasty as a regional force. 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. And the

rot was not limited to the Far East. In Persia the Mongol Ilkhanate had dissolved into a patchwork of petty warlord fiefdoms by the 1330s, with the last undisputed Ilkhan dying in 1335—more or less at the same time that Temür was born.43 The Golden Horde was increasingly riven by faction and infighting, and so the Chagatai khanate, where Temür had been born, was effectively partitioned. To Genghis, Ögödei, or even Kublai Khan this would have all been unrecognizable. The Mongol successor states no longer remotely resembled the superpower they had once comprised. But spectacularly, if momentarily, Temür rolled back the years. Between 1360, when he first took to the battlefield, and his death in the early fifteenth century, Temür swept up the jagged shards of the great Mongol empire and pieced them back together under his own charismatic rule. His route to preeminence was a familiar one. Having risen in the tribal society of central Asia thanks to his skill in battle and talent for diplomacy, Temür then set his sights outward. He gathered and motivated a large, multiethnic army that roved far and wide, terrorizing those who refused to bow to its approach. He justified his aggression with direct reference to history: although he was not descended from Genghis, two of his four-dozen wives or concubines were from the old khan’s line. Temür insisted that this gave him the right to restore what the old man had once assembled. He labeled himself as a son-in-law (küregen) of Genghis...

home in central Asia) he bore the title of great emir and carried himself with the imperious...

Decades of expansionist campaigning throughout Asia, southern Russia, and the Middle East brought Temür lordship over three of the four old khanates—the Chagatai, Ilkhanate, and Golden Horde; in the end, only the Ming emperors held out against him. Moreover, he fought his way west, deep into Asia Minor, and for a time seemed to be bearing down toward Europe. There, news of his vast conquests worried and excited Christian kings in roughly equal measure. Still in thrall to updated versions of the Prester John fantasy, many wondered whether it was better to tremble at Temür’s name or attempt to convert him to Christianity and enlist him to destroy their mutual enemies—particularly the Ottoman Turks who had risen up to take control of many of the former Byzantine provinces in the eastern Mediterranean.

Certainly he persecuted to virtual extinction the Nestorian Christians of Persia and central Asia.

He had terrorized more or less the whole Asian continent and Middle East, roped together a vast empire that bowed to his personal command, and effected such a rapid redistribution of treasure and artistic talent that the stage was set for a cultural and intellectual golden age in central Asia, where his capital city of Samarkand—like Karakorum before it—grew fat and glorious on the spoils of war.

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. However, though the Mughals were destined to be a mighty power in the east in the early modern age, they were only dimly recognizable as inheritors of the Mongols. Like Genghis, Temür’s greatest talent was for conquest and expansion. Building a stable, unified superstate that could outlive him by generations was not his forte. But nor, to be fair, was it his chief goal.

Theirs was a strange story indeed, and perhaps the bloodiest one of all the

Middle Ages. Mongol methods of conquest, pioneered and perfected by Genghis Khan, and imitated ably by Temür, prefigured the terror autocracies of the twentieth century, in which millions of civilians could be thoughtlessly murdered to service the demented personal ambitions of charismatic rulers, and the goal of spreading an ideology as far around the globe as it would go. Yet alongside their gross bloodlust and a cruelty that cannot be written off with mere historical relativism, the Mongols also changed the world profoundly—for better and for worse. In some cases the changes were to basic political geography. The Mongols’ tendency to burn cities to the ground and either replace or erase them effectively reoriented whole regions. In the Far East, their conquests created the enduring idea of a Greater China, with one imperial (or quasi-imperial) power dominant over a massive territorial area, ruled from what is now Beijing, extending out onto the steppe and including a huge number of different ethnic groups. In the Middle East, poor ruined Baghdad declined, to be overtaken in importance by Tabriz in Azerbaijan. In central Asia, Samarkand was catapulted to powerhouse status by Temür’s plunders. 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 cent...

laissez-faire attitude toward religious dogma seems refreshing when set against the bigotry of the crusading age—and one modern scholar has even argued that it set such a fine historical example that 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.47 But alongside that, the Mongols also made sweeping changes to the religious composition of Eurasia. By converting to Islam, the Mongol rulers of the Ilkhanate, Chagatai khanate, and Golden Horde together created a vast Islamic zone that stretched all the way from the Tian Shan to the Caucasus, where it connected with the Turkish and Arabic realms of the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa. The strong Islamic character of central Asia and southern Russia today owes a huge amount to the Mongols. And this is not only observable with hindsight. The Christian princes and Franciscan friars of the west who implored successive Mongol khans to become “King David” and convert to Christianity realized that the religious identity of this vast and domineering imperial power would have a lasting effect on the balance of world faiths. Had they succeeded in convincing men like Möngke Khan to accept baptism, many more church spires than minarets might be in Asia today. And relations between modern states like the United States and Iran, or Russia and Turkey might look rather different. But that is speculation. What is certain, and w...

Mongols’ rampant territorial ambition and the scale of their conquests made it possible to travel thousands of miles beyond the horizon and come back again to tell the tale. 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. Dreadful as were the means of the Mongols, the changes they wrought were astonishing and epoch shifting. Indeed, this transformation of trade is almost certainly the Mongols’ greatest significance to the story we are telling in this book. So it is to that part of their legacy that we will now turn, as we discover how intrepid merchants, scholars, and explorers from east and west flourished in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests, exchanging ideas, goods, and wealth, and remodeling the western world and western minds as they did so.

Scores of sleek galleys, all bristling with troops, flew the flags of two of Europe’s leading maritime states: the Republic of Venice and Republic of Genoa. Located on opposite sides of the Italian peninsula—Venice in the northeast and Genoa in the northwest—these ambitious, autonomous cities (along with a third rival, the Republic of Pisa) had been at loggerheads for nearly fifty years. They had fought in the Holy Land and in Constantinople. They had fought in the ports of the Black Sea, and around the islands of the Aegean and Adriatic. Their contest was for supremacy

on the waves, and they played the game very roughly, for victory could bring more than simple neighborly bragging rights or plunder. The Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans were competing to become the leading mercantile power in the west. At the turn of the fourteenth century, this was no small prize. World trade was booming. Commodities and luxury goods were flying halfway around the globe at a pace seldom seen before in the whole of human history. Commercial dominance in this age was worth fighting—and dying—for.

All of this mattered, for it showed how a new, commerce-focused, and globally connected world was coming to life under the Pax Mongolica—the vast trading zone pacified and policed by the khans. Marco was an evangelist for the Mongol regime, which, for all its severity and illiberality, kept the peace and allowed trade to flourish safely and securely over a hitherto unimaginable span of territory, joining up the Christian west directly with the Chinese and Indian east, and making overland travel through Islamic Persia safe and reliable.

Major changes were happening closer to home. During Marco’s lifetime and the century after it, the western world underwent sweeping economic changes,

with increasingly sophisticated ways of trading and financing business invented, and new markets opened up. The name historians have given to the changes that took place in this age is the Commercial Revolution, and this is a deservedly grand term. What took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was as economically significant as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and Digital Revolution through which we are presently living. The Commercial Revolution placed power in the hands of new agents besides emperors, popes, and kings. It allowed the merchant to assume a prominent place in medieval society and culture. It gave cities in which merchants dominated newfound political status and independence. Tastes in art and literature were moved by the mores of the merchant class who could afford to act as both patrons and creators. Political regimes and wars were underwritten by merchant money. It is a cliché much repeated by historians that the medieval world was made up of three groups of people: those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked. But from the thirteenth century onward, we must also take into account those who counted, moved, saved, and spent. It is to the rise of the merchants, and their contribution to both the Middle Ages and the world today, that the rest of this chapter will now turn.