Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

were the fifth and sixth Umayyad caliphs, Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705) and his son al-Walid (r. 705–15). The elder of these, Abd al-Malik, became caliph in the midst of the second fitna, when provinces across the Muslim world were in open revolt. His first priority was to restore the unity and stability of Umayyad power across the still-expanding Islamic world. He did so by centralizing and “imperializing” authority, appointing powerful provincial governors who were closely accountable to his court in Damascus,

One of al-Malik’s more important reforms was his introduction of an Islamic coinage.

Across the Muslim world, old gold was now recalled to Damascus with menaces, to be turned into dinars. These were pure, pious, and consistent with the Qur’an’s apparent position on numismatics:

The Muslims had preferred to tax infidels and to keep their colonists segregated in newly founded garrison towns. The result was that the umma was spread widely across the world, but not very deeply.

Around the year 700 al-Malik ordered that public servants across the Umayyad world should use one language only: Arabic.

This simple administrative change was in fact a moment of juddering cultural importance in the history of the Islamic world—for it ensured that there would be an Islamic world in perpetuity, rather than a short-lived federation of former Roman and Persian territories ruled over by a thin monotheistic elite.

the Roman Empire in its pomp had been bound together over millions of square miles in part because Latin was a common language of cultural discourse as well as base communication.

Arabic became a lingua franca every bit as potent as Latin and Greek.

the Arab-speaking Islamic world inherited the Greek and Latin world’s position as the west’s most advanced intellectual and scientific society.

It was impossible to imagine Islam without the language of its first people, and once that language became mandatory for all who wished to interact with the state, the faith did not follow too far behind. From the early eighth century, Arabization was

gradually followed by conversion across the Muslim-held territories—a shift that can still be seen, felt, and heard in almost every part of the old medieval caliphate in the twenty-first century.*

Al-Malik pointed the way his son would follow when he commissioned the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in the 690s, pioneering pseudo-imperial monumental building with a distinctive Islamic flavor. Al-Walid took this idea and ran with it. In doing so, he created some of the most extraordinary buildings conceived in the last two thousand years—many

The mosque that arose on this hallowed spot included the first known concave mihrab—a feature in the mosque wall indicating the direction of Mecca, which is a unique and essential part of every mosque in the world today—yet this is set within a building that is decorated with mosaics far more reminiscent of the great churches of Byzantium than later monumental mosques would be. There are no representations of people, but there are many intricate images of houses, palaces, places of worship, trees, rivers, and foliage, which suggest earth and paradise all at once, and hint at a style of Islamic art that borrowed heavily from the Christian tradition of the time.

absorbed local styles and fused them with uniquely Islamic elements: the elaborate mosques of the late-medieval Ottoman Empire, which fairly bubble with elaborate domes

The architectural confidence to create mosques that spoke to Islam’s unique and deliberately exclusionary character while also borrowing liberally from the world around them can be traced directly back to the age of the Umayyads, and particularly to the caliphate of al-Walid.

So even today Martel’s victory is regarded as a historical turning point: a battle that changed the world, the moment at which the seemingly unstoppable sweep of Arab conquests in the century following Muhammad’s death was checked.

Moreover, the battle of Tours alone was nothing when placed alongside two earlier defeats that stand as much more convincing examples of historical turning points for the caliphate’s expansion. The first was the failed 717–18 siege of Constantinople, described earlier. The second is the battle of Aksu, also in 717, in which an Arab-led army, bolstered by troops of Turkic and Tibetan origin, was wiped out by the Tang Chinese in the Xinjiang region of modern China. This defeat heralded a gradual winding down of the Muslim charge eastward; by the 750s the borders of the Islamic world and Tang China had been settled in central Asia, where the two powers shared control of the Silk Road trading routes. The middle decades of the eighth century marked the point when the Islamic conquests hit their geopolitical limits, not only in Europe but across the world. Charles Martel’s victory in 732 was only one small part of that much larger process. In fact, the most significant incident that fixed western Europe’s medieval future and the place of Islam within it occurred between June 747 and August 750, when the Umayyad dynasty was overthrown in Damascus. The causes and course of this revolution were complex, but in short, various dissident groups within the caliphate—including Shia and non-Arab Muslim converts (known as mawali) who were excluded from many of the legal privileges of the umma—banded together under the leadership of a mysterious and secretive character from eastern Persia ...

local rebellion in the eastern city of Merv, they spread the spirit of full revolution throughout the caliphate, igniting a third fitna, which ended with military defeat for the caliph Marwan II at the battle of Zab (Iraq) in January 750. Three months later Damascus fell, and after this the surviving members of the dynasty were hunted and assassinated, one by one. Marwan was murdered after he fled to Egypt and replaced by a Jordanian Arab called Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah—whose sobriquet translates to English as “blood spiller.” Al-Saffah was thus the founder of a new dynasty named the Abbasids, who claimed descent from Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbas and identified themselves with a plain black flag.*

The Abbasids made sweeping changes to the Islamic empire they had wrested from the Umayyads. They moved the capital eight hundred kilometers east from Damascus to a new city in Iraq called Baghdad, and devolved sweeping political and legal powers to local rulers known as emirs throughout the caliphate. The Abbasids also worked hard to integrate non-Arab Muslims into the umma on roughly equal terms. As a result theirs was a time of political fracture within the Islamic world, when emirs gained steadily greater independence from the caliphs, and schismatic Sunni and Shia blocs emerged, as well as rival dynasties such as the Fatimids in Egypt and the Almoravids and Almohads in modern Morocco. Never again would caliphs wield as much political and spiritual power over such a massive swath of territory as they had during the heyday of the Rightly Guided caliphs and the Umayyads. Nevertheless, the Abbasid age (which lasted until 1258, when the caliphate was destroyed by the Mongols [see chapter 9]), would come to be known as the golden age of Islam, during which art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, medicine, and scientific inquiry flourished. In the eighth century the Abbasids stole the secrets of paper-manufacturing technology from the Tang Chinese, and in the thirteenth they learned the secrets of making gunpowder from the Song. They assembled massive libraries such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where millions of pages of books were translated, copied, and studied for th...

knowledge and technology from across the world in Islamic institutions like the House of Wisdom. Yet the Abbasid age was also one in which the Muslim world’s center of gravity shifted, like its capital, to the east. The caliphs now sat geographically and culturally removed from the old Roman territories that—along with Arabia—had formed the core of the first two caliphates. Developments in the dar al-Islam therefore affected the western world at one or more steps of remove. One of the great and lasting stories of the Middle Ages is one of increasing ignorance and hostility between the Islamic east and Christian west—a distinction that would have made very little sense at this point in our story, when the Umayyads were invested and engaged directly in affairs of the western Mediterranean as well as those of the Near and Middle East. This supposed civilizational divide is today a favorite trope of the Far Right and extremists of various persuasions throughout the world—it owes at least part of its genesis to events that were rooted in the eighth century a.d. Having said all this, however, we should also remember that although the Umayyad caliphate was overthrown in 750, the Umayyads themselves lived on, and their legacy can be felt powerfully in one particular region of the west today: in the southern halves of Spain and Portugal,

Over the following two decades he steadily brought the Muslim territories in Iberia together in what became known as the Emirate of Córdoba.

For a century between around 900 and 1000, the city of Córdoba and the rump Umayyad emirate it controlled had a strong claim to be the most advanced and sophisticated state in western Europe,

By no means were all of medieval Spain’s Muslim rulers enlightened intellectuals devoted to the twin causes of building libraries and public baths: the Berber dynasties known as the Almoravids and Almohads, who controlled al-Andalus from the

eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, were austere zealots responsible for much violent oppression and persecution of non-Muslims. A degree of popular prejudice and suspicion of the moro—the Moor, or Spanish Muslim, whose true loyalties supposedly lie in north Africa—is a continuing feature of Spain’s political discourse. Half memories of the medieval past have often been blended with less faraway recollections of the course of the twentieth-century Spanish Civil War, which began in Morocco and involved tens of thousands of Muslim troops from North Africa, fighting on the side of the nationalists under General Francisco Franco. This all amounts to a complicated, delicate situation. History continues to swirl around us, shaping attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, and worldviews. So it is that the word of God revealed in a cave in the Hijaz in the seventh century still affects the everyday lives of men and women living in the era of the smartphone and self-driving car.

The Carolingians were named in honor of their patriarch, Pippin’s father Charles Martel (Carolus Martellus): the man who had smashed the Umayyads at the battle of Tours. They produced more than one famous Charles, including Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, and Charles the Simple. But the most illustrious of all was Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus). During a reign that spanned forty years, Charlemagne united the lands we now know as France, Germany, northern Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands into a European superstate under his own command.

His Latin name—Carolus—has passed into many modern European languages such as Polish (król), Bulgarian (kral), Czech (král), and Hungarian (király) as the literal meaning for “king.”5 And his political achievement has been just as long-lasting. Uniting the lands on either side of the Rhine into a superstate centered on modern France and Germany took monumental effort. Keeping them together proved beyond the capabilities of most of Charlemagne’s successors.

Yet mighty as Charlemagne was, and as far as his imperium extended, the Carolingian Franks were not the only great power to come to prominence in this period. From the eighth century onward, vigorous bands of pagan explorers, traders, and killers from Scandinavia were also on the march. Today we know these people collectively as the Vikings. Inevitably, the Franks and Vikings clashed as much as they cooperated while they jockeyed for resources and power within the same regions of northern and western Europe. And in the end, in a process resembling nuclear fusion, the white heat of their collisions produced a third people, who would have their own important part to play in

medieval history. They were the Normans, who will loom large as the second part of this book unfolds.

The way the Franks told it, they had settled in Europe during the Bronze Age; their ancestors were a band of warriors who had left the Trojan War and wandered west.6 Whatever the case, from 460 they were a force to be reckoned with. Having settled west of the Rhine, they steadily imposed themselves on their neighbors—most notably the Visigoths and Burgundians—until by the seventh century they occupied all the territory of modern France, save the Breton peninsula and the coastal littoral between Arles and Perpignan

The Merovingians were at the peak of their powers in the fifth and sixth centuries. After Childeric I came a mighty king called Clovis. Clovis brought together the Frankish tribes into a coherent political and cultural unit. His wife, a Burgundian princess

called Clothilde,* converted him from paganism to Catholicism.

He also authorized the Salic Law (or Laws of the Salian Franks), a legal text issued between 507 and 511. The Salic Law would be a core component of Frankish law throughout the early Middle Ages, and was still cited in royal succession disputes eight hundred years later, in the fourteenth century.8 Clovis’s reign marked the true beginning of Frankish collective identity—which later became the sense of French nationhood. He is often described as the first real Frenchman.

few of Clovis’s descendants matched his extraordinary achievements. Indeed, from the later seventh century they came to be defined by their political impotence. The feeble later Merovingians were known derisively as rois fainéants (do-nothing kings). In each

of the main royal divisions of Frankish lands (Austrasia, Neustria, Aquitaine, Provence, and Burgundy), power was gradually devolved to officials known as mayors of the palaces (maior palatii). These mayors led armies and controlled military policy and strategy; they resolved disputes and conducted foreign diplomacy. They were a cross between magnates and prime ministers, in whose hands lay all the sweeping political authority that had leeched to them over the generations from their kings.

In the first half of the eighth century Charles Martel took the office of a Frankish mayor and upgraded it into full-fledged and publicly acknowledged kingship.

However, it still left another problem. In removing Childeric, Pippin had meddled with the fabric of the universe. Useless as the Merovingians had been, their kingship had lasted for centuries and carried with it the implied approval of the divine. It was a little unseemly to simply shove them aside.

Pippin needed to find a way to justify his own regime in the eyes of man—and God.

Zachary was worried about the power of the Lombards, whose territorial ambitions in Italy were a threat to the papacy and their usual secular defenders: the Byzantine exarchs of Ravenna. Zachary needed friends he could call upon if the Lombards moved against him. Pippin was well placed to be such a friend.

From this point onward Frankish kings would only be considered “made” once they had been anointed by a bishop or archbishop’s hands. Like Roman emperors in the Christian age and the first Islamic caliphs, Frankish kings now claimed there was a sacral character to their rule. The stage was set for kings to begin to regard themselves as in direct contact with God: approved and protected by the Almighty and entitled to think of themselves as his deputies on earth. And at the same time, the Church had been granted the right to judge the performance of French kings. The implications of this new pact would be felt long into—and indeed, after—the Middle Ages.

The pope would turn to the Franks as his secular defenders and throw his legitimizing influence behind the new Carolingian monarchy—if in return Pippin would incur vast costs and take considerable military risk by riding south over the Alps to deliver the papacy from its enemies. It was a high-stakes deal on both sides. But in retrospect it has come to represent a moment of seminal importance in western history: the moment at which the bishops of Rome no longer looked east to Constantinople for support, but to the barbarian-descended peoples of the west.

This was more than the coronation of a king. It was the sacred affirmation of the whole Carolingian dynasty. Between them, these first two generations of Carolingians would redraw the map of western Europe.

he granted lands he seized from the Lombards to the papacy, for popes to rule as earthly lords. This became known as the so-called Donation of Pippin, the basis for the existence of the Papal States, a region of Italy that survived until the nineteenth century.

Warfare in the early Carolingian age was still rooted in warlord ways. It revolved around annual campaigning in frontier zones, and relied on a ready stream of supporters willing to bear arms in the hope of winning gold, silver, goods, and enslaved people.

he left a war machine well tuned for deployment across all terrains, as well as political borders and alliances that extended hundreds and even thousands of miles in every direction. His son Charlemagne took this legacy and ran with it.

To make his victory absolute, Charlemagne declared himself the new ruler of Lombardy. He replaced the Lombard dukes, to whom day-to-day governance was devolved, with Frankish counts.20 This was an extraordinary power grab. In two centuries no western king had seized another king’s throne by force.

Over the course of the next two decades Charlemagne took aim at the pagan tribes of Saxony, whom he set out not simply to rob, as his father had done, but to conquer and convert.

He was unquestionably the most potent ruler in western Europe, and besides corresponding and exchanging gifts with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad,* he was also on familiar (if not always friendly) terms with the imperial court in Constantinople.

He had crushed the independent-minded lords of autonomous regions like Aquitaine, and forced everyone within the Frankish world to accept a new reality in which the old, decentralized Merovingian system of rule was replaced by a structure focused directly on a single king at the center of the political world.

Charlemagne had personally traveled more than 3,500 kilometers in the effort to ensure his empire was governed and defended as he saw fit. This was a record-breaking itinerary—which may never have been matched by any other ruler in the Middle Ages.

This was quite an expansion of the duties of kingship. But it followed logically from the relationship that had been established between the Carolingians and the Roman Church during his father’s reign. The Frankish kings had been touched by God through the popes. In Charlemagne’s eyes this gave him the right to speak with a special authority on matters that touched every one of his subjects’ souls.