Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

the Roman Empire had been a political, cultural, religious, and military force in the west for nearly a millennium.

What was not clear at the start of the fifth century was how much of this Roman-ness would survive. In that regard, only time would tell. In some regions—most notably the old Greek world of the eastern Mediterranean—Rome was destined to live on, updated but not radically altered, for many more centuries. In other places—such as Britain, where we began this chapter—the most obvious signs of Roman influence waned sharply once the legions left; much of Rome’s legacy was buried, sometimes literally, as new waves of settlers arrived. For some people the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a seismic event, which demanded that they pack up their possessions and either bury them in the ground or haul them away to a new life elsewhere. Yet for others it would have registered barely, if at all. Just as there was no single defining experience of life under the Roman Empire, so there was no one typical experience of life without it. It would be naive to imagine otherwise.

The longevity of Roman rule, its sophistication, its particular geographical extent, its capacity for nobility and abject cruelty—all of these things had been embedded to differing degrees on the western cultural and political landscape. All would continue to matter as the classical world evolved into the medieval. Even when Rome was gone, it was not forgotten. It was the historical foundation on which everything in the Middle Ages was built.

the future of the Roman west now lay in the hands of the newcomers. The age of the barbarian had dawned.

The Huns were related in some way to a nomadic group who populated and dominated the Asian steppe as rulers of a tribal empire from the third century b.c.5 These nomads fought against the Chinese Qin and Han dynasties, and Chinese scribes dubbed them “Xiongnu,” or “howling slaves.”6 The name stuck, and was transliterated as Xwn or Hun. Although the Xiongnu empire collapsed in the second century a.d., many tribes survived, and the scattered descendants of the imperial Xiongnu still retained the name two hundred years later. Xiongnu, Xwn, or Hun: who called them what, when, and where is only vaguely knowable given the patchy sources of the time. But whichever way the word was rendered, it carried a sense of implied horror, the fear and loathing traditionally borne by sedentary civilizations toward alien nomads.

Neither he nor any other writers at the time thought to investigate why the Huns appeared on the Volga in a.d. 370. The fact was, they did.

The grass and scrub of the steppe would have turned to mean, biting dust. For the Huns, who depended on grazing animals for their meat, drink, clothing, and transport, this was an existential disaster. And it would have presented a stark choice: move, or die. They chose to move.

In other words, a climate emergency in eastern-central Asia fed a secondary migrant crisis in eastern Europe. Drought moved the Huns, and the Huns moved the Goths, so that in 376, huge bands of terrorized Gothic tribespeople showed up on the banks of another major Roman boundary river: the Danube.

The war—which was not so much against a single king or a single people as against demography and human movement itself—had only just begun.

All the same, the thunderous responses of writers like Jerome and Augustine still communicate the deep shock caused by Alaric’s sack of Rome. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States of America, the terrible symbolism of an assault on a world superpower far outweighed the immediate physical damage done. Alaric’s Goths struck at the heart of the Roman Empire, leaving scars that only hardened and deepened as the years went by.

Mass migration, rightly or wrongly, stirs fear and loathing, for as the history of the western Roman Empire makes abundantly clear, it has the power to turn worlds upside down.

This was more than just a matter of wounded pride. The entire Roman economy depended on Carthaginian grain exports: now these were cut off. In wresting Carthage and so much more of north Africa away from Roman control, the Vandals had sliced through the life root of the western empire.

The eastern emperors tried to help, sending several naval fleets of their own, in 460 and 468, to try to recapture Carthage and cut off the snake’s head. But they failed. The Roman west was left battered and critically diminished.

However, at around the time of Attila’s accession, the Huns added to their armory a critical new technological skill—siege engineering.

Yet the Huns’ collapse as a unified state had severe repercussions, for it sent scattering across Europe more huge groups of unsettled Germanic tribespeople, now freed from Hunnic dominion. History was repeating itself. For twenty years after Attila, groups of restless, wandering migrants were again on the move. The Huns were dispersed, no longer operating as a distinct political and military unit. But their legacy lived on.

And the task was made all the harder by the fact that it coincided with a new political crisis in Ravenna. In September 454, Aëtius, victor at the

Catalaunian Plains, was murdered: his killer was none other than the emperor Valentinian III, who had been encouraged by factions at court to regard his finest general, a veteran of thirty years’ service, as a rival for the throne.

And so began a cycle of coup and countercoup that saw nine emperors occupy the western throne in twenty years. Few of them died in their beds, and politics at the court in Ravenna was dominated by the struggles of strongmen—notably the Germanic-born Flavius Ricimer—clinging to power while dealing with barbarian incursions throughout the collapsing empire. With Vandals in Africa, the Visigoths and Suevi carving up Aquitaine, Iberia, and southern Gaul, and new powers including Franks (see chapter 5) and Burgundians also on the march, there was plenty for generals like Ricimer to do.

The strongest bonds of political loyalty across the west had ceased to be between disparate peoples and their emperors or the abstract imperial system. They were now loyal to the tribe, the general, and the momentarily ascendant warlord. Landowners across the provinces had paid tribute to (and held office in) the Roman Empire on the understanding that it offered military might to defend their lives, laws to protect their property, and an aristocratic culture to bind them to their neighbors. Now all of this was broken. Rome’s consensus—its collective identity—had been shattered. An end was in sight.

Now in his place Odoacer ruled Italy—not as an emperor but as a king (rex).

He explicitly acknowledged supreme Roman authority as stemming from Constantinople—though the eastern emperor Zeno was unimpressed and refused to acknowledge the new arrangement.

After Julius Nepos’s death, Odoacer sent the imperial regalia—the crown and cloak—to Constantinople, marking the physical impossibility of making another western emperor. With that, the title slipped into oblivion. It was a historic landmark, but only the logical result of the steady ruin of Roman networks, power structures, and political units that had taken place over the previous seventy years.

If Theodoric could depose Odoacer, he could have Italy for himself. Barbarian was now turned against barbarian.

It had taken him three and half years, but Theodoric was now king of Italy.

Although many squabbles with Constantinople lay ahead, Theodoric was momentarily assured of his acceptability to the Roman establishment. He therefore set about imitating Roman-ness to the full. Although an Arian Christian, he made strenuous efforts to accommodate and respect the Nicene bishops and Church of Rome. He emphasized obedience to Roman law codes, rather than issuing his own, as was the practice in many of the nascent barbarian states of the west, not least the kingdoms of the Franks and Burgundians. Through military campaigns and marriage alliances he secured peace with the Vandals of North Africa and established close political ties with the sprawling kingdom of the Visigoths, where in 511 he imposed his own king (his grandson Amalric), assembling a huge Pan-Gothic kingdom that extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea.

Theodoric self-consciously styled his kingship on the model of the late-Roman emperors. But his

was not a Roman empire. Across the west, things had changed forever.

Not only had the ethnic identities of rulers and landowners changed, so had their political horizons and the systems of government. The empire lived on in Constantinople, where many new challenges—new religions, new technologies, new networks, and new diseases—would remold it during the centuries to come. But in the west, kings and kingdoms were rapidly supplanting emperors and empires, ushering in an age that will, when we turn to it again, look more recognizably “medieval” than the world of wandering barbarians and child emperors has thus far.

What a strange, lurching time it had been, in the century-and-a-bit since the Huns had crossed the Volga in 370. Everything had been turned upside down: heaved into motion through the irresistible power of climatic fluctuation and human migration, allied to the usual random historical movers of chance, ambition, and individual agency. For those at the time, life could seem bewildering, and it is perhaps not surprising that writers of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries turned to a metaphor that would prove wildly popular throughout the medieval west: that of fortune’s wheel.

Throughout his life Boethius had written on a wide range of subjects: his interests included mathematics, music, philosophy, and theology. But he composed his most famous work in jail while awaiting execution for his crimes. The Consolation of Philosophy attempted to place earthly troubles in a divine context. Written in the form of a dialog between Boethius and Lady Philosophy, it asked its readers to accept that there were higher

powers at work behind the vicissitudes of man’s fleeting life. In the course of his musings, he turned to the notion of fortune’s wheel. “So now you have committed yourself to the rule of Fortune, you must acquiesce in her ways,” he wrote. “If you are trying to stop her wheel from turning, you are of all men the most obtuse.”

The apocalyptic scenes John conjured in his writings formed a memoir from the front line of the first global pandemic in recorded history. A form of bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, spread by fleas that hopped between small mammals, black rats, and human beings, the disease slashed its way across all three continents of the known world in the middle of the sixth century a.d., ravaging sub-Saharan Africa, Persia and the Middle East, China and central Asia, the Mediterranean coastal bowl, and northwestern Europe.

The Plague of Justinian did not on its own transform the world. But it was a significant part of a larger story of transformation, reform, realignment, and a struggle for preeminence, which took place between the 520s, where our last chapter ended, and the 620s, where our next will begin. This was a formative hundred years for the rump of the Roman Empire; for relations between the Mediterranean east and west; for the cultural balance between the “Greek” and “Latin” spheres; for regional relations between the Roman and Persian empires; for lawmaking; for great religions; for urban planners; for great artists. During an age that was buffeted not only by the first world pandemic but also by a global climate shock, political realities and patterns of thought were set that would affect the Mediterranean world for nearly one thousand years. To understand all this, we must focus on the birth—or rebirth—of the eastern Roman Empire during the sixth century. This is the time when historians generally stop speaking of Rome and the Roman Empire and refer instead to Byzantium: the Greek-speaking inheritor state that served as a buffer between east and west, surviving for centuries until it was ravaged by crusaders and later consumed by the Ottomans—an event that heralded the end of the Middle Ages.

Even before his official elevation to the purple, many had supposed Justinian was the real power in the empire.

He was a Latin speaker of the same Balkan peasant origin as his uncle, and he favored the Chalcedonian form of Christianity, at a time where the empire was riven with religious schism between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites (or Monophysites),* and emperors were encouraged to line up aggressively with one or other of these rival camps.

Theodora rose a long way through society to reach the imperial palace.

Much of this sprang from misogyny, some of it from distaste for Theodora’s adherence to the sect of Miaphysitism, and the rest from personal spite.

throughout her life Theodora played a vital part in imperial governance, particularly by helping Justinian to juggle the theological factions that did spiritual and sometimes physical battle throughout his empire.

When Justinian and Theodora came to power in the summer of 527, there were plenty of issues facing the empire. Although Constantinople had survived the barbarian crisis that had engulfed the west, resisting attacks by Huns and Goths and although the imperial finances were still fairly robust, during the first decade of Justinian’s reign he would be forced to fight major wars on two fronts, put down a domestic rebellion that threatened to topple him altogether, and rebuild major parts of his capital city. However, on his accession Justinian thought the most pressing matter facing him was legal reform. He was a passionate legislator, whose attitude to rule was summed up by a maxim from one of his legal texts: “The imperial majesty should be armed with laws as well as glorified with arms, that there may be good government in times both of war and of peace.”13 In his mind, legal tidiness was intimately linked with godliness,

and divine sanction for his rule. So, within six months of his reign beginning, Justinian ordered the reform and recodification of the entire body of Roman law.14 The commission Justinian appointed to carry out this gargantuan task was assembled under the leadership of a young, energetic Greek lawyer called Tribonian. With him worked some of the most acute legal minds in Constantinople, and together they reviewed millions of lines of imperial constitutions—statements of the law made by emperors all the way back to Augustus. Just twenty months into Justinian’s reign, these lawyers had digested, edited, and compiled these statements into a single, definitive account of Roman law known as the Justinianic Code (codex iustinianus). The codex was issued on April 7, 529, and sent to every province in the empire, where it automatically superseded every other legal code. It was not perfect: in December a.d. 534 a second edition was required to clean up inconsistencies. Nor did it set in stone a single Roman law, perfectly formed and unchangeable for eternity; law by its nature is constantly evolving, and Justinian by his nature was addicted to issuing new legal commands, which were collected by scholars as the Novels (Novellae constitutiones). But the code was a phenomenal achievement nonetheless. It ran to twelve books, covering civil, ecclesiastical, criminal, and public law. It was an exercise in clarification and bureaucratic streamlining that set a gold standard for constituti...

they disagreed with each other, he preserved them by cleansing them of the mass of their verbal trickery,” wrote Procopius.15 From a chronicler whose stock-in-trade was verbal trickery, this was high praise indeed. The code was, however, just one of the legal reforms of Justinian’s early reign. The year after it was issued, Tribonian was given another mammoth task. Having dealt with the minutiae of specific Roman laws, he now impaneled experts to make sense of jurisprudence, as it was contained in the collective writings of the great classical jurists. Most of the great jurists of the imperial era—men such as Gaius, Papinian, Ulpian, and Paulus—had lived and written during pre-Christian times. So their pronouncements were not only frequently contradictory but also flirted with irreligion. As they were pagans, their opinions were naturally devoid of Christian sentiment. And impieties did not please Justinian. So Tribonian was tasked with creating a single statement of Roman jurisprudence, in which the great works of the ancients were rationalized and improved by references to Almighty God. This project appeared in two stages: first the so-called Fifty Questions (quinquaginta deci...

any nation in the world today that has a codified law (as opposed to, say, the common law that dominates the legal system in the United Kingdom) owes a debt to Justinian and Tribonian. Even if this was not the original intention, it was an incredible accomplishment. In little more than five years of intensive administrative activity Justinian had rewoven the legal fabric of the empire and refashioned le...

While Tribonian oversaw Justinian’s program of legal reforms, the new emperor was also turning his mind to the intertwined issues of heresy, unorthodoxy, disbelief, and sexual malpractice. Here too there was much to do. One of his toughest tasks was trying to negotiate a path through the difficult issue of schism and heresy within the imperial church. By the time of his accession, wranglings between Arian and Nicene Christians, which had tormented the western empire during the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, had been complicated by another dispute, between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites, who disagreed over the exact nature of Christ and the balance between his human and divine qualities.17 Today the issues at stake between these two groups can seem arcane to all but specialist church historians. But in the sixth century they were enough to cause popular riots and international diplomatic crises. Bishops had been murdered by mobs for professing views at odds with their

congregations’; a formal schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople had endured between 484 and 518 over the matter.* And while the imperial capital was staunchly Chalcedonian, large areas outside it were just as steadfastly Miaphysite. These included Egypt, the breadbasket of the empire itself. The prospect of losing the province over a matter of faith was not an enticing one. But it was real. In light of this Justinian was forced to walk a tightrope between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites for his entire reign. He was helped somewhat by the fact that his wife Theodora was herself strongly Miaphysite and went out of her way to shelter members of the sect, thereby giving the impression of imperial evenhandedness. But Justinian never really grasped the problem with the firmness that he had shown in reforming Roman law. The best that could be said was that he avoided escalating the dispute into another official schism in the Christian world. Elsewhere, however, Justinian’s suppressing instinct and pursuit of orthodoxy would be felt rather more deeply. He was an especially keen persecutor of sexual deviance.

Finally, alongside sexual deviancy was the troubling matter of spiritual degeneracy, and specifically the fact that in an empire that was ostentatiously Christian (doctrinal disputes notwithstanding), some stubborn outposts of old-fashioned paganism remained.

Among the rash of laws passed in the first decade of Justinian’s reign was a decree that pagans were not allowed to teach students. In itself this did not stand out from the other collections of anti-pagan legislation collected in Justinian’s law codes. But its effect on one important institution was soon made clear. John Malalas spelled out what it meant. In an entry covering the year 529, he wrote, “The emperor issued a decree and sent it to Athens ordering that no-one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws.”

In effect, Justinian’s diktat had spelled the end for the famous school in the ancient Greek capital—the city of Plato and Aristotle—where students had absorbed the insights of classical philosophy and natural science for generations. The closure of the Athens school was important. It did not kill at a stroke all non-Christian learning in the eastern empire.21 Nor did it immediately throw up an intellectual wall between the classical age and the dawning era of Christian hegemony in Europe and the west. But it was both significant and symbolic. For while scholarship in Persia and other eastern parts flourished, with libraries in Baghdad and other Middle Eastern capitals preserving and transmitting copies of the works of Aristotle

and other non-Christian greats, Justinian’s reign, and the sixth century in general, was marked by a self-blinkering in the Christian world. Doctrinal minutiae assumed ever bigger and bloodier importance, while anything non-Christian was regarded with gathering suspicion. The Roman Empire had once been a super-spreader of classical learning across its vast territories. But as it fell to pieces in the west and became ever-more doctrinally obsessed in the east, it became an active blocker to knowledge chains across the ages, and the transmission of ancient learning throughout the empire began to fail. One reason that the label “the Dark Ages” has proven so hard to untie from the neck of the Middle Ages is that for hundreds of years—between the sixth century and the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the late thirteenth—the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west. This was not simply an unfortunate symptom of creeping cultural dementia. It sprang from the deliberate policies of eastern emperors like Justinian, who made it their business to hound out of their world the self-appointed but unfortunately unchristian guardians of priceless knowledge.

Over time the most ardent racing supporters had come to organize themselves into factions, and in Constantinople there were four: the Greens, Blues, Reds, and Whites. By far the largest and most powerful were the Greens and Blues, whose rabid members sat in blocs in the Hippodrome, and took “team” positions on religious and political matters, expecting their collective voices to carry weight among the imperial administration.

Then they poured out into the streets around the Hippodrome, yelling the Greek word nika (conquer)—a popular chant during chariot races—and setting fire to buildings.