Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

hermit, called Syncletica of Alexandria; and one Theodora, also of Alexandria, who joined a community of male ascetics, living undetected as a man until her death. Together these early ascetics were an eclectic and varied bunch of pious pioneers—experimental, often (to our eyes) eccentric, but connected by a remarkable desire to experience extreme physical deprivation, usually in remote and inhospitable places. Together they alighted on the essence of what became medieval mon...

After its beginnings in the desert, the monastic movement grew steadily between the third and sixth centuries a.d., creeping out of Egypt to all parts of the Christian east and west, with notable early centers in Caesarea-in-Cappadocia (modern Kayseri, Turkey), Aquileia (Italy), and Marmoutier (France)—the

There were, broadly speaking, two types of monk. Hermits operated singly. Some removed themselves to the middle of nowhere—extreme practitioners of eremitism might choose to become stylites, meaning they lived on top of pillars—while other hermits wandered the towns and countryside, preaching,

begging for their upkeep, and offering spiritual guidance to ordinary laypeople. Then there were cenobites, who formed single-sex communities, living together, usually in a fixed abode with common areas and individual cells, praying, studying, and laboring their days away. Both types of monasticism (the word stems from the Greek μονος, suggesting a oneness with God) coexisted throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed can still be found today. And both types caused some consternation for the established Church. Ascetics disrupted traditional social hierarchies. They were in most cases pious laypeople, not ordained priests. They did not fall under the jurisdiction of bishops, and could often drain authority and charitable funds from “official” representatives of the Church. At the Council of Chalcedon, held in Byzantium in 451, there was an attempt to force monks to live in monasteries and quit wandering, but this had little long-lasting effect.9 For one thing it was practically very difficult to police individual piety. And for another, global cultural networks in the early Middle Ages were already wide and strong enough to mean that men and women were living monastic lives far beyond the discipline of Constantinople: by the fifth century Christian hermits could already be found as far afield as Ireland and Persia. Wherever there was Christianity, there were monks and hermits, and for a long time there seemed to be very little way to impose any sort of order or discipline on t...

Italian called Benedict ...

To ensure that his own standards were kept at Monte Cassino and other similar foundations, Benedict “wrote a rule for his monks, both excellent for discretion and also eloquent in style.”

Nevertheless, Benedict’s rule was simple, elegant, and influential. It would

become the template for western monasticism for generations afterward. Monks who lived under its provisions would be known as Benedictines, or, in reference to the mandatory color of their robes, Black Monks. The Rule of Saint Benedict, comprising seventy-three chapters, set out the basis of life for a monk living in a community under the guidance of an abbot. Its essential principles were prayer, study, and manual work, supplemented by frugal living, personal poverty, chastity, and a restricted diet.

They too could aspire to perfection by obeying the commands of what we might now describe as a holy algorithm. Just as Saint Anthony in the desert had established an example for early ascetics in the Roman Empire to follow, so Benedict on his hilltop at Monte Cassino had now assembled a step-by-step recipe for the monastic lifestyle. Over subsequent generations this would be exported all over the Christian west.

The influence of Irish monasticism—which emphasized extreme personal hardship and missionary wandering, as exemplified by the missionary saints Columba and Columbanus*—was particularly strong.

Both Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious saw the Rule of Saint Benedict as a useful way to bring order to Christian practice and exercise meaningful imperial power over the ordinary lives of their subjects. This was an especially pressing matter in the case of monks, who occupied an awkward position outside direct ecclesiastical control, as unanswerable to bishops as they were to secular lords. Meanwhile, founding Benedictine monasteries in newly conquered pagan territories was also a reliable way to promote good Christian practice on the fringes of empire—a form of colonization and missionary activity rolled into one. Finally, the Carolingians recognized that monasteries were the only real way to provide serious education, where clever young men (and women) could learn to parse Christian scripture while also studying Latin and pagan writings preserved from the ancient world.

There

ought to be fixed processes of initiation, an emphasis on obedience to the abbot, a lifestyle focused on prayer, work, and study, and, above all, adherence to the Rule of Saint Benedict, which could be augmented only by additional regulations that were in keeping with its spirit. Any monk who felt that he might not be up to the rigors of the life was to seek ordination as a cleric—joining the ranks of the institutional Church and coming under the jurisdiction of his local bishop. There were, therefore, two ways to go within the Frankish empire: you were either in the Church proper or under the imperially approved Benedictine rule.

And as this technology combined with the effects of a fluctuating climate, landholding became ever-more profitable and landowners had ever-more disposable income to spend. But what to spend it on? One very good answer was salvation. As we have seen, the rise of the Carolingians changed the way western Europe was politically constituted. The drawing together of numerous fractured, post-Roman “barbarian” polities into a revived Christian empire provided a firmer central government, and directed major spheres of warfare to the fringes of the organized Christian west—pagan central Europe, Muslim Spain and (eventually) Scandinavia. But it also set the conditions

for more small-scale fighting within the west itself. Frankish elites were increasingly tied to their rulers and rewarded for their loyalty with grants of land. They defended their territories by fighting one another. We will explore in more detail later how this changed aristocratic warrior culture. But in simple terms, the consequence was a sharp rise in lethal violence between Christian warriors, and a concomitant desire among those warriors to make sure that they did not go to hell for their sins.

Fortunately, the Church was very open-minded about how penance was to be done, and Church authorities had no problem with the rich paying others to do their penance for them. By founding monasteries—as Duke William did at Cluny—the landowning warrior classes of Europe could effectively offset their sins by paying for monks to beg forgiveness their behalf in the form of masses.*

Monasteries that could demonstrate the finest standards of observance, grandest churches and libraries, largest and most devout communities, and best international reputations were highly prized. The super wealthy founded them. The wealthy donated to them. And in turn the affluent and those just

getting by followed suit.26 Monasteries sprang up by the hundreds. Looking back on this explosive time of growth, the tenth to twelfth centuries have often been labeled a “golden age” of monasticism.

Gifting children to religious houses in this fashion—as oblates, literally meaning “offerings”—was common

aristocratic practice, because it ensured the child would receive an education, while reducing the number of potential heirs among a large family.

Performing these services was known as opus Dei (God’s work), and it was the essential point of monasticism: this was monks’ contribution to society and an economy that placed great value on providing for souls as well as bodies. As a result, performing the offices was what most Benedictine monks spent most of their time doing. It behooved them to perform their duty to the best of their abilities.

Benedict recommended they learn the melodic style of plainchant that had been popular during his day in the basilicas of Rome: this was commonly called Gregorian chant, after Benedict’s friend and cheerleader Pope Gregory I the Great, who was often (probably wrongly) said to have invented it.

There was, therefore, plenty of room for musical creativity during the monastic boom of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

But at Cluny, opulent surroundings were understood to magnify the power of the divine praise that took place there.

By the high Middle Ages,* monasteries had taken on most of what we now think of as the basic functions of the liberal welfare state. They were centers of literacy, education, hospitality, medical treatment, tourist information, elderly social care, and spiritual counseling—in addition to their main role as a retreat for the godly. As a result they had wandered a long way from their origins as places of impoverished retreat, and now had close and lucrative links with the outside world.

The most famous of these spiritual superhighways converged at the northwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, at the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.

For Christian pilgrims fit enough to travel long distances, Compostela was (and is) an irresistible attraction. Outside the Holy Land only St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome could also boast the remains of one of the apostles. The obligation to pray at such a venerable shrine in one’s lifetime was not incumbent on Christ’s faithful in quite the same way as performing hajj was to Muslims. But it was still important.

Many centuries earlier, when Rome had been at the peak of its imperial power, the Roman roads that crisscrossed the empire were lined with purpose-built mansiones—effectively service stations for imperial officials that included stabling, overnight facilities, and hospitality. Now, along the pilgrim routes, there sprang a similar need.35 The Cluniacs recognized it and exploited it. Monasteries became the new mansiones, catering to the faithful as they struck out to seek salvation in northern Spain.

Cluniac houses not only lubricated the valuable tourist trade through the Spanish kingdoms but also were able to offer what Ferdinand and Alfonso saw as the most elite soul-laundering service on earth.

These rich pickings allowed the Christian kings to make amends for the grave sins incurred in military campaigning. They did so by plowing funds into Cluny.

Cluny III was a masterpiece of an architectural style that would come to be known as Romanesque, so named because it drew on elements of ancient Roman architecture and the engineering theories that had made them possible.

Cluny’s monks were scholars. Its abbots were saints. But people were starting to grumble.

With hindsight it feels only natural that this small band of spiritual warriors who assembled at Cîteaux—and thus became known as Cistercians—would come to steal Cluny’s thunder.

Bernard insisted on an utter lack of adornment and dedication to the simplest possible existence, stripped bare of art, philosophy, complex rites, and expensive architectural projects. These were incompatible approaches and ultimately only one could triumph.

Cistercians were drawn, just as Cluniacs had been, into the wars of the Reconquista, putting down roots in the expanding Christian kingdoms of Iberia.

Then, the

dawn of the thirteenth century saw the rise of the mendicant* orders—the Franciscans and Dominicans, whose members (often called friars) stepped out from the cloister and, like the first generations of ascetics, took to wandering in towns and countryside, ministering and preaching and begging for alms to sustain themselves. Monasticism was in a sense returning to its roots—with a welter of different approaches, suited to local tastes and the whim of devout and sometimes eccentric individuals who sought their own idiosyncratic relationship with God and did not feel the need to sign up to a giant multinational spiritual corporation such as Cluny had been in its heyday.

Few people in the western Christian world now seek permanent retreat into a monastic order. A life of such intense voluntary hardship, chastity, poverty, and repetitive liturgical worship holds scant appeal for rich young men and women in the twenty-first century. But what we surely can recognize today is the rise of vastly rich and powerful international institutions and corporations that exercise enormous soft power, and whose leaders have the ear of the world’s political grandees. We are at ease with the idea of voluntarily adapted “orders” for life designed to improve our individual and collective virtue; veganism is one of the most popular in the west today. Finally, we take for granted that there will

be institutions in our lives that provide education, pastoral care, medicine, and respite for the retired elderly, whether run by the state or the community. We are in that sense perhaps not so far removed from a world run by monks as we may think.

These were knights: people whom the monasteries had grown in part to save from damnation, but who represented the opposite way of life to monasticism, in which their power was executed not in word and song but at the end of a lance or sword.

The Magyars had a long history of encroaching on the German sphere of interest. They were a pagan tribal people who had migrated toward central Europe from the east, to settle the vast plains that spread out from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Magyar fighting men were skilled riders who fought with bows and arrows from the saddle. They were dexterous, lightning fast, and deadly. Christian writers in the German realm spread tall stories of their unique ferocity.

For the next two centuries, powerful, mounted warriors dominated battlefields, while also beginning to burnish their status in society at large. The battle of Lechfeld did not cause that shift. But it did show which way the wind was blowing.7 The European knight was coming of age. From the tenth century, the status and importance of knights rocketed across the medieval west. Within a couple of generations, Frankish-style heavy cavalry evolved to become preeminent on battlefields from the British Isles to Egypt and the Middle East. As they did so, the social cachet of being able to fight in the saddle also soared. By the twelfth century, the knight was a man whose importance in wartime was rewarded with landed wealth and high rank during peacetime. And around him was emerging a distinctive cult of knightliness known as chivalry, which would inform art, literature, and high culture long beyond the end of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the tropes and rituals of knighthood and chivalry persist in many western countries right down to the present day. In terms of popular perception, the knight is arguably the most distinctive legacy the Middle Ages have left to us.

Humans and horses have cooperated in battle since at least the Bronze Age.

but much of the toughest fighting took place on the frontiers against Saxons, Slavs, Danes, and Spanish Muslims. As a result, Carolingian foreign policy demanded very large, highly mobile armies that could move long distances at pace.

With a couched lance at his disposal, however, the knight was no longer an infantryman on horseback. He had become the medieval equivalent of a guided missile.* Riding in tandem with half a dozen or more other guided missiles, he was almost unstoppable. As the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene wrote in the twelfth century, a Frank fighting on foot was easy prey, but a Frank on horseback could put a hole in the walls of Babylon.10 Yet the lance did not develop on its own. It required other technological advances to make it effective: the stirrup and the cantled saddle. Both served the same purpose. They counteracted the laws of physics, protecting the rider from his own momentum and allowing him to transfer all the acceleration and force of his charge through the shaft and tip of his lance. The cantled saddle was designed with a high back, to keep the rider in place

on impact. Stirrups allowed him to deploy his legs for balance and further resistance. The lance made him a killing machine. Without these pieces of technology, there could have been no knight.

What seems reasonably certain is this: perhaps in the fourth century a.d. and certainly by the fifth, stirrups were invented in the Far East, by nomads in Siberia and what is now Mongolia.12 They were enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians, but took rather a long time to spread to the west. Eventually, however, the knowledge was transmitted via Persia and the Arab realms to the post-Roman Christian empires of the near east and the west, so that by the eighth century stirrups had arrived in Europe.

Although it took some time for stirrups to catch on everywhere—not until the late eleventh century were they ubiquitous—eventually they transformed the way people rode and fought.14 True, the stirrup’s rising popularity in the west coincided with a more general age of military invention: siege engines were improving, and castle building was following suit;

from the twelfth century, it became increasingly common across Europe to build fortresses out of stone rather than timber and earthworks.15 But stirrups were no less important for being part of a general improvement in military hardware. They allowed individual riders to stay in the saddle at greater speed and to fight with greater ferocity, and the result was that knights became dominant on the battlefield, and highly valued by emperors, kings, and other aristocrats. Finally, as the demand for knights rose, their social position, rank, and presence began to alter as well. The most contentious part of the story of the knight’s origin, however, is not how stirrup technology spread. It concerns the degree to which the rising preference for heavily armed, mounted warriors directly caused a social revolution in Europe, and ushered in the “age of feudalism”: an all-pervasive, notionally pyramid-shaped system of social organization, in which lords granted land to their vassals in exchange for formal promises of military service, and the vassals then subcontracted it to poorer men in return for further service, either in the form of military assistance or agricultural labor or both.16 Most historians would now hesitate at drawing a direct link between these two phenomena, and some argue that feudalism as a concept is far too simplistic a model to explain how medieval society really worked. Yet it is still just about uncontroversial to note that at the same time as horse-mounted w...

It was an astronomically expensive career, and one that could only be contemplated by those who were born rich or else could be made so. One way for a knight to sustain himself was to chance his arm: battle offered the opportunity to seize plunder, equipment, and prisoners for ransom. But this was a precarious way to fund a career. A more reliable route was to find a patron and eventually become a landowner. Thus, from around the ninth century onward, across the west, men who fought on horseback were awarded hundreds of acres of farmable land, which they held in exchange for making themselves available to fight for the person—a higher lord or king—who had granted it to them. In the Frankish realms, some of this land was obtained by the blunt method of confiscation; under the Carolingians, many Church estates were simply seized, parceled up, and handed out to military retainers. Given these to manage and farm, fighting men could afford to sustain themselves, and could also be bound into