Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

a system of obligation to the king or lord who allowed them to hold the land in the first place. The bond was deepened by the need for aspirant knights to learn their trade: this generally happened when parents placed their sons from mid-childhood in the household of wealthy lords, who would take on responsibility for their education and physical training, in expectation that the boys would grow up to join their military retinue.

they became all the more important as French kingship declined from its Carolingian high-water mark, and dukes, counts, and other lords—including high-ranking churchmen—began to tussle with one another for the security of their individual patches.

The long-term results of all this were threefold. In the first place, an ever-more complex set of laws and procedures emerged to define the relations between land givers and landholders: semisacred rituals of homage-bound people to serve and protect one another (in theory at least) and a whole raft of legally enforceable rights, obligations, payments, and taxes developed around the bonds of land grants. (If “feudalism” existed, then this is what it comprised: a complex nexus of interlocking personal relationships that, when taken as a whole, presented a haphazard but distinctive system of government.) In the second, the success of a system by which large numbers of warriors could be sustained contributed to a sense, part real and part imagined, that society in the west was becoming more violent and dangerous. And in the third, the fact that warriors were now endowed as a matter of course with estates that could support an aristocratic lifestyle helped create an upper-class consciousness that lauded—indeed, fetishized—supposedly knightly virtues. The code of conduct and honor, which eventually came to be known as chivalry, would by the end of the Middle Ages become something akin to a secular religion.

This ceremony, by which a

sword was publicly and ritually fixed to a young warrior’s side with a belt, was by the mid-eleventh century an important public recognition of a fighter’s competence and high status. Aristocrats of the eleventh century were, almost by definition, members of a military caste, and girding with a sword was therefore a major life moment for male members: they were passing out of adolescence, inexperience, and the civilian life into an existence in which commanding troops and fighting would be the norm.

the knight was in many ways the tank of the medieval battlefield.

Thus was one of the major flaws in the whole system of knighthood illustrated.

When an able, highly trained killer was bound by obligation and reward to the service of a ruler, he could be contained and controlled. But cut loose, the warrior could be unpredictable, disruptive, and dangerous.

There was plenty more campaigning to be done, but in retrospect the clash at Cuarte could be identified as a turning point in the Reconquista: a point from which momentum eventually shifted in favor of the Christian states of the Spanish north.34

all the paradigmatic qualities of the eleventh-century knight: proud, constant, courageous, and dangerous.

Just as the Church had its saints to give lesser mortals a lesson in good moral conduct, so the secular world was developing its own demigods, both real and mythical. Alongside El Cid we can count Roland, King Arthur, Perceval, and

Lancelot; these heroes exemplified a way of living and a warrior code that coalesced as chivalry. In the later Middle Ages, chivalric knightliness, like Christian saintliness, became a powerful psychological institution, which was disseminated through literary culture and informed the real-life behavior of men and women across the western world.

The wish, perhaps even the need, to glamorize violence and romanticize warriors has been a part of human psychology since the dawn of civilization.

The compulsion to process brutality is the oldest theme in art. This being so, it is hardly surprising that when the Middle Ages forged a new way of fighting, people came up with a new genre of art to match. The reality of going to war on horseback in the Middle Ages was objectively terrible. It was not only expensive, tiring, and frightening; it also hurt.

Yet the impulse among medieval fighting men and the poets who wrote for them was not to report this godforsaken reality in plain prose, but to overwrite it with a heroic new literature that painted knights as lovers and questers whose ethical code perfumed the dubious reality of their deeds. As T. S. Eliot wrote in the twentieth century, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Rather, the song uses the setting of Charlemagne’s wars against the Umayyads to expound on the natures of bravery, love, friendship, wisdom, faith, and justice. It is part of a broad genre of epic, historical, narrative poems that are collectively called chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”).

What are we to make of all this? At its heart, the song is a timeless war epic, in which heroes and villains struggle, battle, live, and die. But what sets The Song of Roland apart is its wholehearted advocacy for the values of knighthood. Its story is designed to reflect back to its audience the most flattering image possible of their own martial world: one in which the best life is defined by faithful sworn obligations between vassals and lords and the knight’s near-pathological devotion to keeping his word and taking up the offer of a fight, no matter how impossible the odds. And, of course, at the end of it all, the ultimate reward for the soldier—as for the saint—is a good death.

The knight, even as he renounces his oath to a perjured lord, proves once again to be too good for the world. Knightliness, like cleanliness, lives next door to godliness.

They are a guide to the complex self-image of the knightly and aristocratic classes in the medieval west—particularly

Those like the songs of Roland and William, which were set in the time of Charlemagne, were described from the fourteenth century onward as being concerned with the Matter of France. Others, which took as their setting the long-ago events of the Trojan War, the foundation of Rome, and other classical topics, were said to deal with the Matter of Rome: they treated heroes like Theseus, Achilles, or Alexander the Great as off-the-shelf medieval knights.* The third great “world,” which is today arguably the most famous and enduring of all, was the world of the romances, set in the court of the legendary King Arthur and concerned with the Matter of Britain.

Always common to the tales, however, is the sense that humanity can be explored through the deeds of knights. Some of these knights exemplify their code. Many more of them show how difficult true knightliness—or chivalry—is to achieve. But to be a knight is always by definition a man’s highest calling.

Yet they were only one part of a broader literature exploring knightly culture, which we can refer to by the broad but slippery term chivalry.

As knights developed a courtly status and good standing in society as landlords and members of the noble elite, so writing about knightliness came to focus on its spiritual and emotional aspects. Knights were exhorted to demonstrate courage, honesty, charity, piety, concern for the poor and downtrodden, gracious deportment in the halls of great lords, purity of heart, and unblemished devotion to one’s lady—who might not be one’s lady at all, but rather the unattainable wife of a social better.

Whereas in the age of El Cid an aspiring warrior was girded with sword and belt and sent out to kill, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries an elaborate ritual of purification, bathing, oath swearing, and dubbing had become the ideal preparation for passage into knighthood: a process not far removed from ordination into priesthood, or anointing as a king.

The Church attempted on numerous occasions to ban tournaments, and from time to time individual rulers would outlaw them as a menace to public order. But for the most part these attempts were futile. Like twenty-first-century raves, tournaments were part of an irrepressible culture that celebrated and indulged the excitable impulses of youth.

A recurring theme of the romances was precisely this difficulty in policing the line between chaste courtly love and actual fornication and adultery.

For as much as William Marshal’s biographer would portray his rise through life as the reward for his dedication to knightly virtues, so too would chroniclers like the Anonymous of Béthune ascribe John’s free fall through kingship as just deserts for his unchivalrous approach to life. Knightliness—or the perception of knightliness—could make or break a man in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It made William Marshal. It unmade King John.

just how deeply the culture of chivalry informed and underpinned political events.

For the chivalric Arthurian romances also had a political context: the Matter of Britain. Arthur’s lasting accomplishment was supposedly the fact that he had fought to unite the fractured polities of the British Isles under his own rule. At the end of the thirteenth century this was no longer some obsolete matter lost in the mists of the half-remembered past. It was live public policy. The central goal of Edward I’s reign was the king’s drive to stamp English royal power over Scotland and Wales so that he alone could claim to be the master of the British—preeminent over the kings of Scots and native princes of Wales. In theory it was the Welsh who had the strongest historical claim to kinship with Arthur—as descendants of the Romano-Britons who had been forced west and corralled beyond the river Severn during the Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries a.d. But by co-opting Arthur, Edward was stripping the Welsh of their claim to kinship and the legitimacy of their independence.

By the time that Edward I was living out his own personal romantic fantasy, however, the role of the knight was beginning to change. For one, their role on the battlefield had to adapt to innovations in tactics and developments in armor. In the British Isles, one of the most catastrophic days in the history of knightly combat occurred on June 24, 1314, the second day of the battle of Bannockburn, at which hundreds of English knights under the command of Edward I’s hapless son Edward II (r. 1307–27) were skewered by pike-wielding Scottish infantry marshaled by the heroic king Robert the Bruce. In the century that followed, English knights began to radically change their fighting methods, abandoning their traditional reliance on the couched-lance charge and often riding into battle but fighting on foot as what military historians call “dismounted men-at-arms.” They were protected by ever-heavier armor, which was evolving from chain-link mail to “plate”-style armor, in which interlocking sheets of hammered steel provided better protection from sword, lance, and ax blows. No longer was the missile barrage of the old “Frankish” cavalry charge the chief weapon in the medieval general’s armory. Besides knights fighting on foot, English kings deployed longbowmen (often recruited from Wales), while their continental counterparts used crossbowmen—the Genoese were renowned for producing the most skilled. Furthermore, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the way armies were rai...

Strangely, however, this did not dim the allure of knighthood. Far from it. For as knights became relatively less critical on the battlefield, their standing in society was rising. From the mid-thirteenth century English knights began to be summoned to parliaments, where they sat in what became the Commons—the second (but today the most important) of the two English parliamentary cameras. This development was mirrored in the Spanish kingdoms (where caballeros had a right to be summoned to the parliamentary bodies known as Cortes), and in France (where Louis IX summoned nineteen knights to his first parlement). And as knightliness took on new social functions outside wartime, so knighthood became the badge of a much broader-based social class—known as the gentry.58 Noblemen would still be knighted as a matter of course—for knighthood was still linked to the martial spirit of the baronial caste and its tropes of masculinity. But it also extended down to the families who were wealthy but not rich, who controlled estates but not regions, who fought in wars but did not command divisions, and whose jobs in peacetime included serving as members of Parliament, judges, sheriffs, coroners, and tax collectors. By and by, these

tasks overtook military duties, to the point where gentlemen became somewhat loath to seek knighthood at all. (In England they were sometimes compelled, for tax purposes, to do so, in a process known as distraint of knighthood.)

The Byzantines were not only frozen out of Asia Minor: their reputation as the regional bulwark for Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean had also been dealt a severe blow. In 1009 they had proven powerless when a Fatimid caliph in Egypt, al-Hakim, had ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which protected Christ’s tomb. Now they were in an even weaker position. In their place, the ascendant powers in the east were the Seljuks, and to a lesser extent the Fatimids of Egypt.

Byzantine ambassadors were packed off to the realms of the west, to ask for military and moral support from the “other” half of Christendom: western Europe and the lands of the Franks.

The first schism was doctrinal and dated back just over three decades to 1054. In that year, disagreements between the Churches of Constantinople and Rome (concerning matters such as the appropriate duration of fasts and what kind of bread to use for the Eucharist) had flared up in an exchange of mutually contemptuous letters, followed by tit-for-tat excommunications. Relations between the eastern and western halves of Christendom were delicate, and Urban had to seek ways to smooth them where he could. The second schism had its origins across the Alps. In 1076 the so-called Investiture Controversy had erupted between Gregory VII and the German king Henry IV. Although this was ostensibly a disagreement over whether secular rulers could appoint (or “invest”) bishops without papal approval, the contest really drove to the heart of a much bigger question, the roots of which lay in Charlemagne’s reign, when the rulers of Frankish Germany had been allowed to develop notions of imperium. This posed deep constitutional questions. Were popes the single highest authority in the west, as Gregory had asserted in 1075 in a document known as the Dictatus papae? Or were kings supreme in their realms, under God alone? That was Henry’s position.2 With so much at stake, affairs became rancorous, then violent. When Urban was elected, a German-sponsored antipope, Clement III, was at large, and Rome had recently been attacked by the Normans of southern Italy.

Since the late tenth century, European churchmen had been fretting over what they could do to rein in the violence perpetrated by knights engaged in local feuds.

Two early attempts to impose Church discipline over unruly knights were known as the “peace movements”: the Peace of God (Pax Dei) and Truce of God (Treuga Dei). These were mass advocacy programs through which clergy tried to impress on fighting men the need to refrain from plundering churches, and killing, raping, maiming, or robbing civilians. Bishops tried to enforce the Peace by putting towns and regions under the Church’s explicit protection, and threatening God’s curse against trespassers who did their inhabitants harm. The Truce, meanwhile, named days and times of the year when fighting was forbidden.3 Both the Peace and the Truce of God proved widely popular among the common people, but they were not enormously effective. So among the many things that vexed Urban at the outset of his papacy was how to support moral censure with positive action.

The end goal was not Constantinople, but Christ’s sepulcher in Muslim-ruled Jerusalem. If Byzantine emperors could not protect Christian interests there, Urban reasoned, popes would step in. They would not just save Byzantium. They would usurp the role of Roman emperors as guardians of the holiest places in the Christian world. One reason Urban could conceive of such a grand plan lay in his years spent in Cluny’s cloisters. As we have seen, under the leadership of Abbot Hugh, Cluny had been knit into the economy of warfare against non-Christian powers through its relationship with kings like Alfonso VI of Castile, an enthusiastic Reconquista warrior. Cluny’s financial strength and regional spread had been aided in no small part by the profits of the Reconquista, and the Roman Church’s mission on the Iberian Peninsula had also been boosted by the triumphs ground out in the 1080s and 1090s by men like El Cid. Might it be that what had worked in the west could transfer at scale to the east?

All who went on his campaign of extermination and died along the way would be rewarded with “remission of sins.” Their earthly misdeeds would be forgiven, their passage to heaven smoothed. In an age where offsetting sin had become a serious moral and financial concern for the people of the west, this was a highly alluring offer. Urban had produced a new and enduring spiritual calculus. Those who committed to leaving home and slaughtering other human beings thousands of miles away would earn the wages of heaven. It went down a storm. So did the pope’s plan to send his armies from Byzantium to the Holy Land.

Urban commanded all who wished to participate to mark themselves out from their neighbors by fixing a sign of the cross to their shoulders or chests before going out into the world to spread the word and prepare for departure.

The first people to feel the wrath of Urban II’s crusaders were not Turks at the gates of Constantinople, nor Seljuks in Syria, nor Fatimids in Jerusalem. Rather, they were ordinary Jewish men, women, and children in the cities of the Rhineland, who in the late spring of 1096 fell victim to the murderous instincts of Christian mobs worked up into a frenzy by preachers promising a quick path to heaven. In cities such as Worms, Mainz, Speyer, and Cologne, roving bands stalked the streets, burning

synagogues, beating and killing Jewish families, and forcing individual Jews to convert to Christianity or commit suicide. Accounts of the atrocities at that time are a depressing reminder of the long and stubborn history of European anti-Semitism, which came to a head in the twentieth century. In 1096, Jews were dragged around the streets with their necks in nooses, herded into houses and burned, or beheaded in the streets before cheering crowds.9 “From this cruel slaughter of the Jews [only] a few escaped,” wrote the chronicler Albert of Aachen. Then “that intolerable company of men and women [i.e. the crusaders] continued on their way towards Jerusalem.”

Yet the first wave of crusaders to depart Europe for the east consisted of poorly trained and barely controllable zealots egged on by populist demagogues, including a shabby but charismatic ascetic called Peter the Hermit and a rich but disreputable German count called Emicho of Flonheim. The “People’s Crusade,” as this amateur vanguard was later known, swept eastward through Europe during the summer of 1096, followed the Danube through Hungary into the Balkans, and pitched up at the gates of Constantinople in early August.

By 1097, however, things were looking more promising for the crusaders, as better-organized armies commanded by lords and staffed by knights began to appear in Byzantine territory. These, at least, were serious warriors. Among the leaders of this so-called Princes’ Crusade were Raymond, Count of Toulouse; the French king’s brother Hugh of Vermandois; William the Conqueror’s son Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy; Robert, Count of Flanders; and a pair of ambitious brothers called Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin of Boulogne.

Ibn al-Athir had a point. Yet we must be cautious about following too closely. For generations, historians have been trying to fight the idea that the medieval Crusades were at root a “clash of civilizations” between the Christian and Islamic worlds. For one thing, such a stark and binary reading of medieval history plays uncomfortably into the narratives of extremist factions today, ranging from white supremacists and neofascists in America and Europe to Islamist fanatics and followers of al-Qaeda and ISIS.* For another, to characterize the Crusades as a simple faith war between Islam and Christianity is to ignore the complex regional and local politics that informed successive waves of crusading from the late eleventh century onward. Crusading was

about more than a tussle of ascendant monotheisms. It was about the changing shape of the western world at large. From the time of the First Crusade until the end of the Middle Ages, popes ordered or sanctioned military campaigns on three continents, against enemies who included Turkish warlords, Arab sultans, Kurdish generals, and Spanish Arab emirs, as well as Baltic pagans, French heretics, Mongol chieftains, disobedient western Christian kings, and even Holy Roman emperors. In other words, Islam held no monopoly on victimhood when it came to holy war; even if we ignore the many differences between the Muslims of Spain, Egypt, and Syria, still the so-called Saracens were one enemy among many. And just as important, it was never the case that Christians and Muslims of the crusading period were automatic and implacable enemies. There were times when they tore each other to shreds. But there were many other times and places in which crusaders and Muslims rubbed shoulders, traded, and interacted without feeling the least need to behead or burn one another to death. This is not to write the Crusades out of existence—simply to say that the importance of crusading in medieval history and its legacy to the world today is very often misconstrued as being about relations between Christians and Muslims and nothing more. As we shall see in the remainder of this chapter, crusading was important precisely because it was such a varied phenomenon and a malleable concept. It did not sim...

outre-mer (“beyond the sea”)

But the Latin settlers survived, putting down roots in the Holy Land while remaining linked to the west by ties that were by turns spiritual, emotional, dynastic, and economic.

And it was not just religious ties that bound the new crusader states with the wider world. As the kingdom stabilized under the new monarchy, it began to resemble a western “feudal” state—with barons and knights granted estates and villages in return for sworn military service to the crown.

For European merchants, the crusader world offered a tantalizing business opportunity, thanks to its numerous coastal cities, which served as trading entrepôts connecting sea traffic from the eastern Mediterranean with the Silk Road caravan routes overland to central Asia and China. These were buzzing trade hubs: in the thirteenth century the city of Acre was said to produce more annual revenue than the kingdom of England. As a result, every major city conquered by the crusaders quickly became home to a colony or colonies of expatriate merchants trading in goods including fruits, honey and marmalade, cane sugar, cotton, linen, camel hair cloth and wool, glassware, and exotic items traded over long distances such as Indian pepper and Chinese silks.