Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The golden age of Roman military might came during the two hundred years that followed Augustus’s accession in 27 b.c. This age was known as the Pax Romana—a time when (by the standards of the day) Rome could offer exceptional stability, peace, and opportunities for prosperity to those who lived under its aegis. It was able to do so because it paid collectively to be protected by the most dangerous army on earth. The Pax Romana frayed and began to unravel after the death of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius in a.d. 180.

To be a citizen of Rome meant, in the deepest sense, freedom. For men it conferred an enviable package of rights and responsibilities: citizens could vote, hold political office, use the law courts to defend themselves and their property, wear the toga on ceremonial occasions, do military service in the legions rather than the auxiliaries, claim immunity from certain taxes, and avoid most forms of corporal and capital punishment, including flogging, torture, and crucifixion.

Among the most famous of the Egyptian Christian ascetics was Saint Anthony the Great. Anthony was himself quite literally a rich young man—the son and heir of a wealthy family who at the age of twenty went to church and heard Christ’s exhortation to poverty and promptly “sold all he had, gave the proceeds to the poor and from then on lived the life of a hermit.”6 His devotion to self-denial was a legendary model for generations of monks who came after him.

The formative age of Christianity produced a whole host of “desert fathers” and “desert mothers.” They included Anthony’s leading disciple, Macarius; a Roman soldier called Pachomius, who pioneered cenobitism, or the custom of ascetics living together in what became known as monasteries; a reformed bandit called Moses the Black; an anchorite, or female 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.

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.

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.

The great twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes is often credited with having popularized the idea that “if you owe the bank one hundred pounds, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million pounds, that’s the bank’s problem.”

Isidore’s natural cleverness made him remarkable. He wrote at least twenty-four books during his lifetime, which included historical chronicles, studies of natural scientific phenomena, mathematical textbooks, potted biographies of Church fathers, collections of epigrams, and his Etymologies, a giant encyclopedia in which he aimed to describe everything an educated person ought to know, ranging from the feeding habits of hedgehogs to the geographical arrangement of the world’s continents.11 (Not for nothing is Isidore today considered the patron saint of the internet.)

Medieval writers blamed the pestilence variously on God’s wrath, the prevalence of vice, the coming of Antichrist, the impending resurrection of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the excessive tightness of women’s clothes, misalignment of the planets, sodomy, evil vapors, rain, Jewish conspiracy, the tendency of hot and moist people to overindulge in sex and baths, and underripe vegetables, which doctors of medicine were sure caused “windy ulcers.”

The Black Death’s first wave lasted from 1347 until 1351. During that time, in the worst affected countries, up to 60 percent of the local population died.