Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Half a millennium later, during the zenith of the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean world was alive with trade, joined to an unprecedented degree in a single political and economic market, under imperial supervision.

Empire offered huge advantages for trade: safe, good-quality roads in which the chance of being stuck up and robbed was low, reliable coinage, and a legal system that could settle commercial disputes. And it allowed regular people to participate, as farmers

produced grain to feed armies, wealthy townsfolk sought expensive pottery and imported spices, and workshops and households demanded enslaved people to do their dirty work. Interestingly, despite the sheer amount of trade that took place by land and sea, particularly during the first two centuries of empire, the Romans did not hold merchants in especially high regard.

Still, as would be starkly clear in retrospect, Roman emperors still oversaw a trading bloc that was uniquely powerful and diverse in its own time, and that would be badly missed when the empire fell apart. For Roman trading relied on Roman unity. Once Rome shattered and its authority waned, the basic conditions for long-distance and high-frequency trading worsened steeply.

Long-distance exchange between the post-Roman west and India and China was complicated by political and religious upheaval in the Middle East and central Asia, not least the Byzantine-Persian wars, the rise of Islam, and the depredations of the Magyars in eastern Europe.

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...

theory at least) made longer overland trading journeys safer and more secure. As trading networks began to extend further afield, so institutions appeared to help make business easier. In the eleventh century, markets began to grow and expand in towns across Europe, at predictable times of the week, month, or year. Here, surplus grain could be exchanged for wine, leather, worked metal, or livestock, which was distributed by traveling traders. Over the next two hundred years, markets and fairs (originally markets associated with a religious festival or holiday) became an increasingly important part of economic life in Europe. With the rise of the market came a surge in coin production, along with the silver and copper mining required to mint coins.25 Meanwhile, basic financial services came to be offered in the growing towns and cities across the west, especially through Jewish commercial networks. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries Jewish people all over the west became prominent in moneylending, as well as long-distance trade, carrying commodities like salt, cloth, wine, and enslaved people throughout the old Roman world.26 Of course, Europe’s Jews were not thanked for this pioneering contribution to the macroeconomic fabric of their world: rather, they were the object of suspicion, derision, and bursts of violent persecution, which accelerated during the Crusades and crescendoed in the late thirteenth century with waves of pogroms and expulsions throughout western ...

Champagne occupied a convenient geographical location where cloth manufacturers in the Low Countries could mingle with vendors of foreign luxury goods imported via Byzantium and Italy, and fur traders from the Baltic.27 All who attended were protected by the authority of the counts of Champagne, who by licensing the fairs also took responsibility for ensuring they were kept free from swindling or brawling, and seeing that there was a fair process for resolving disputes and pursuing those who welched on their debts. The Champagne fairs soon attracted traders from hundreds of miles away, lured by the promise of a stable, safe, fixed location where business could be done at volume. Initially attendees brought with them large quantities of stock and samples, which could be stored in purpose-built warehouses in and around these towns. But as time went on, the Champagne

fairs would evolve into something closer to what we would today call a stock exchange, with currency, credit, and contracts changing hands and real goods being delivered (or not) at some future moment, with much business being done by specialist agents on behalf of wealthy companies, banks, and governments.

In their early days the Venetians manufactured salt and glass, but as the Middle Ages wore on, they found there was better business to be done as professional middlemen, who took advantage of their blessings of geography and the necessity of making a living without any farmlands to fall back on, to link together the markets of Arab north Africa, Greek Byzantium, and the Latin west, importing and exporting commodities and luxury goods.

The line between trading and raiding was always tenuous in the Middle Ages; the Venetians usually had a foot on either side of it.

Around the turn of the millennium, Venice and a handful of other Italian cities, mostly on the coasts of the long peninsula, began to experience economic liftoff. The motor for their success was their innate sense of adventure. Rather than simply trading from within their own city walls, colonies of Italian merchants set up shop in every other significant trading

city that would have them, usually living together as neighbors in protected quarters, where they were allowed to observe their own religious rites, use their own weights and measures, and claim immunity from a raft of local taxes and tolls. Their favored status and insular expatriate lifestyle did not always win them friends, and murderous riots against Italian merchants were a regular event throughout the later Middle Ages. In 1182 Constantinople witnessed the dreadful Massacre of the Latins, when tens of thousands of Italian merchants were murdered or enslaved, in a frenzy of anti-western bloodletting encouraged by the imperial government.

Both Venice and Genoa thereby profited handsomely from supporting the Egyptian economy and military at a time when the stated goal of Egypt was to wipe the crusader states off the map.

By the time of the Mongol conquests, when Marco Polo was enjoying his adventures at the court of Kublai Khan, Italy’s city-states occupied the box seat in Mediterranean trade and were naturally placed to benefit from the opening up of commercial routes to the Far East.

one major hurdle that faced would-be eastern traders: sheer distance.

The same was true on a smaller but still significant scale of trade everywhere: the merchant stood a far better chance of making profit if he could stay in one place and let others move goods on his behalf. This was where the other side of the medieval Commercial Revolution came in. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, new financial tools and institutions emerged that could help businessmen realize the goal

of making money without traipsing relentlessly around the world in person. These new moneymaking devices lent merchants enormous power, both in their hometowns and beyond.

The first western bank had been created in Venice in the twelfth century.

Moving money was one of the first issues to be solved by medieval financiers, through the invention of a cashless credit transfer system that operated on so-called bills of exchange. These were, to use a crude analogy, medieval travelers’ checks: they promised to pay the bearer a fixed sum of money at a destination far from their place of issue, and often in a different currency. The Templars had pioneered their use in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, creating chits that allowed pilgrims traveling to the east to borrow against their properties and assets at home and withdraw their funds from Templar houses in the Holy Land. Italian bankers used them extensively, and with good reason. These sorts of

financial instruments are small potatoes indeed to us today—but in the Middle Ages they were truly revolutionary. They were a safe way to move credit over long distances, and could be secured against fraud with seals and code words. They allowed Christian merchants to get around the Roman Church’s strict prohibition on usury—for when money was changed between currencies, exchange rates could be manipulated artificially in the lender’s favor, effectively allowing profit to be baked into the trade without officially defining this as interest. Better yet, bills of exchange could also be traded and circulated—sold at a discount to third parties who could go on to cash them themselves. This allowed for flexible, adventurous deals to be struck across long distances. Groups of merchants could act as truly international entities, with sprawling webs of commercial activity but scant need for international travel, save to transport stock. The merchant who availed himself of the fourteenth century’s financial innovations was free as never before to become “sedentary”—based in a single city but

able to do business in many others. It was a great leap forward. There were many more devices that facilitated the financial strides of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—and that directly affected commercial networks such as the Florentine-English wool trade. It was an unfortunate fact of shipping that ships sometimes sank, usually with the loss of their valuable cargo as well as their crews. So from the 1340s at the latest, merchants in Genoa began to draw up insurance contracts, which would pay out if stocks were lost in transit. At roughly the same time, merchants began to formalize ways in which they could work together to invest capital jointly in commercial ventures, thereby sharing both the risks and the profits between themselves. This was a vital part in the development of the “company” itself: the practice of multiple partners and investors sharing in the fortunes of a single abstract commercial entity, with new investors being sought out when the company wished to expand, and records kept of how the company was performing, what its assets and liabilities were, and how its success (or failure) could be projected into the future. The notion of keeping business acc...

Medieval merchants exercised power in lots of ways. Wealth was of course a form of power in its own right. And by their sheer command of resources and reserves of gold and silver, Italian cities like Venice, Genoa, and Pisa achieved commercial success, which went a long way toward guaranteeing their political independence from kings and emperors. It allowed them to act as states, despite their tiny geographical footprint: going to war, joining and even leading crusades, invading enemy territory, and colonizing non-Christian spaces. At the same time, diplomats like Marco Polo influenced the ways in which westerners were perceived far from home: they were cultural ambassadors as well as diplomatic envoys. And as we have seen in the case of England, merchants and their companies could exercise tremendous economic sway over central parts of a nation’s economy.

The ambitions of the merchants who lived and worked there ensured that over the years Lübeck became the most influential of a cluster of similar city-states around the Baltic and beyond, including Danzig, Riga, Bergen, Hamburg, Bremen, and even Cologne. By the mid-fourteenth century these had banded together in a loose commercial partnership known as the Hanseatic League.

And whereas in classical times theirs had not been considered a genteel line of business, in the late Middle Ages merchants’ wealth and omnipresence started to buy them social and cultural respectability.

And perhaps it is not surprising that then—as now—businesspeople who sought or accepted political office laid themselves open to allegations of corruption, malfeasance, and hopeless conflicts of interest.*

His Canterbury Tales were heavily influenced by an elite, international artistic culture in which ideas and stories were traded as eagerly—and over as great expanses—as Indian spices and English woolsacks, and could do so specifically because the commercial revolution allowed it.

It is no exaggeration to say that the great cultural flourishing that occurred toward the end of the Middle Ages owed much to the mercantile flourishing that preceded it.

But by and large, the scholars left the government to go about its dubious business, hoping that having said their piece, they would be left alone to continue their studies and teaching. They were not the first academics in history to make a quiet life their overriding priority. Nor would they be the last.

Its pillars were the so-called seven liberal arts (“liberal” because they were once considered suitable for free people rather than the enslaved). These were subdivided into two groups. First came the trivium, the arts of expression and argument: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Then came the quadrivium, which consisted of the arts of calculation: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Although the trivium and quadrivium did not cover the whole scheme of human knowledge—eager young minds would also be expected to apply themselves to theology, medicine, and law—they were nevertheless the bedrock of a formal education. Boethius described the quadrivium as the foundation stone on which all philosophical research into the nature of the world rested, and few serious medieval thinkers ever departed from that assumption.*

(Not for nothing is Isidore today considered the patron saint of the internet.)

Toward the end of his life, in 633–34 he presided over a Church conference known as the Fourth Council of Toledo, which set policies that would have a lasting impact on the cultural and political spirit of Christian Iberia during the Middle Ages. It tightened discriminatory laws against Spanish Jews, and promised close ties between the Church in Spain and its secular Christian rulers. Perhaps most significantly for Isidore himself, the council also commanded that bishops should establish schools alongside their cathedrals, in imitation of the one that had set him along his path to scholarly and political prominence. In part this was an acknowledgment that all the good things in Isidore’s life had begun with education. But it also pointed the way ahead in a much broader sense: to a medieval western world in which the Catholic Church would exercise a monopoly over schooling, provide the institutional environment in which western intellectuals would exist, and dictate permissible—and forbidden—avenues of study.

From Isidore’s day in the sixth century until the end of the Middle Ages (and beyond) the Church had a firm grip on western education and scholarship. As much as anything else this was a matter of practicality. Like Judaism and, as it would soon transpire, Islam, Christianity was a religion rooted in the word of God, and his word was transmitted primarily through being written, read, and heard. Saint Paul, the apostle who did more than anyone else to publicize Christ’s teachings, was an educated man with a working knowledge of several languages and a healthy smattering of philosophy. The next five hundred years produced many more great thinkers and writers like him. Saintly scholars such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome were load-bearing walls in the intellectual and liturgical architecture of the Church—and by extension in the lives of millions of medieval Christians.

Bureaucracy never ended. So the Church always needed literate people among its staff at every level.

Although going to school was an indispensable grounding for a career in the Church, monasteries and cathedral schools also came to be training grounds for those who needed to be literate but had ambitions in the secular world: practicing law, doing business, or working as scribes in the civil bureaucracies that attended kings and other landowners.*

Yet paradoxically, it was also a bad time to be a scholar. For although scholarship in the west was encouraged, respected, patronized, and protected during the Carolingian age, during the early Middle Ages the Latin Christian world was also becoming increasingly inward looking: suspicious of other faiths, other modes of thinking, and other authorities. Because scholars were overwhelmingly to be found in monasteries and cathedrals, scholarship as a whole took on an increasingly concentrated Christian flavor, in which the writings of non- and pre-Christians were viewed with mounting suspicion.

For Gerard of Cremona was never working alone. Rather, he was part of a buzzing scholarly community, all eagerly rendering into Latin and Catalan texts that had been lost to western minds for hundreds of years.

Meanwhile, Toledo was a fruitful place for Jewish scholars to work, particularly during the enlightened reign of Alfonso X the Wise of Castile (r. 1252–84), who patronized Toledo’s translators, including large numbers of Jews, encouraging them to render as much material as possible into Castilian vernacular rather than Latin. In doing so, he—and they—helped to lay the foundations for the Spanish language, which is today spoken by around half a billion people worldwide.

The translation movement was a pivotal event, because it ushered in a period that historians call the “twelfth-century renaissance.”23 The return of classical works to the western mainstream—which would not have been possible without people like Gerard of Cremona—shook up whole spheres of thought, radically transforming academic disciplines including philosophy, theology, and law. But it also had tangible, real-world effects, as technologies developed on the basis of new knowledge and, in the spirit of an exciting new scientific age, found their way into ordinary people’s lives. Within the traditional centers of study—monasteries and cathedral schools—the twelfth century saw an explosion in the sheer number of books produced. Many of these were carefully wrought Latin copies of ancient texts—the Bible, of course; the works of the church fathers; service books for use in church; and the works of the early medieval geniuses Boethius, Isidore of Seville, and the northern English monk-historian the Venerable Bede, who in the early eighth century had written the huge Ecclesiastical History of the English People. But alongside these now appeared works by Aristotle and Euclid, Galen and Proclus. Roman poets like Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Terence, and rhetoricians like Cicero, Cato, and Seneca did not require translation, of course—but interest in them was revived, and their works were

copied and pored over by medieval grammarians, who devoted themselves to analyzing classical Latin and creating technical linguistic handbooks based on their findings.24 As old works flooded anew into western libraries, trends in scholarship and creative writing were also transformed. In theology and philosophy, Aristotle’s influence was deeply felt with the rise of scholasticism: an approach to biblical study that emphasized logical deduction, with readers encouraged to interrogate texts deeply and reconcile paradoxes and contradictions by resorting to reasoning and structured argument.

But it was not only high academic discourse that was transformed in the twelfth century. This was also a time of vigorous writing in less abstract fields—not least romance and history. As we saw in chapter 7, the twelfth century saw a surge in knightly romances and epic storytelling—and it was no coincidence that

many of the tales that were invented and popularized in the high Middle Ages reached back to classical times for their subject matter or plots. Athens and Rome, whose great figures had been rescued from the fog of posterity by the translators, now inspired the tales that were told by the fires in lords’ halls and the songs minstrels composed as they wandered the landscape.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the historical tradition blossom, along with genres including biography, travelogue, and treatises on good government.

And then there were advances beyond the realms of science and literature. It was not only the astrolabe that came west during the twelfth century. From the 1180s, windmills began to appear across the European landscape—devices that harnessed what we now call renewable energy to grind corn into flour but that depended on an impressive degree of mathematical engineering to build.25 New clocks were invented: elaborate devices powered by water or weights that marked the hours without lengthening or shortening them according to the amount of daylight. From the thirteenth century, scholars like the Englishman Roger Bacon began to record recipes for gunpowder—an invention whose arrival in the west would in time come to be associated symbolically with the end of the Middle Ages. All of these inventions and many more besides emerged from the reinvigorated twelfth century. At the root of them all lay education, scholarship, and study—still very much the preserve of churchmen, but more connected than ever before to the secular world outside the cloister.

But as the Middle Ages wore on, another sort of scholar came to prominence: not the freelance monk or nun or the wandering merchant, but the master—who was part of a community dedicated only to the business of study, debate, research, and teaching at one of the great universities that were established across the west between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

Because there were few times during the later Middle Ages when popes and emperors were not squabbling, from the tenth century Bologna began to attract communities of lawyers—expert in either canon or civil law—who found the city a convenient base from which to attract business.

Besides the practical business of mediating and litigating when emperors and popes were at one another’s throats, the great Byzantine emperor Justinian’s Digest had been rediscovered in the 1070s, to great academic excitement among the jurists of northern Italy. As we saw in chapter 3, the Digest had been a towering legal achievement when it was compiled, which along with the codex and Institutes provided an authoritative guide to the entire body of Roman law as it had been understood during the sixth century a.d. Now, at the close of the eleventh century, this vast trove of legal writing offered a tantalizing new basis for thinking about justice and governance. But to make it applicable and useful in the context of a world that had changed

profoundly in the intervening five hundred and fifty years also required analysis, commentary, and interpretation. So there was plenty for legal students to work on, and no shortage of willing volunteers.

the very fact of Irnerius’s employment was a sign of the esteem in which Bologna’s legal scholars were already held. This reputation, and the sheer fact that so many lawyers were gathered in one place, was the basis for what became the university. The mechanism by which Bologna became a university was essentially a process of unionization. Because many—perhaps

most—of Bologna’s legal scholars from the eleventh century onward were noncitizens, they did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship and were subject to onerous laws levied on foreigners. Natives of each different country living in Bologna were regarded as collective entities and punished en masse if one of their number broke the city’s laws or defaulted on debt, a legal concept known as the right of reprisal. To resist this, Bologna’s eleventh-century students therefore began to organize themselves into mutual aid societies, known in Latin as universitas scholarium, which in turn could act collectively as the studium. Thus banded together, students were able to negotiate their collective rights and liberties with the city’s authorities—with the implicit threat that they would all walk away from the city and deprive it of their economic custom if they did not get what they wanted. Students also found it convenient to negotiate as a bloc with their teachers, deciding what they would be taught and how much lecturers deserved to be paid, and censuring or sacking professors who offended them by dint of substandard teaching or unpopular opinions. It took some time for this informal system of student association to be recognized as a bona fide institution—it was only in 1158 that the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa granted the law known as Authentica habita, which conferred permanent privileges and rights on law students in Bologna and elsewhere.26 But the elemental f...