Powers and Thrones Quotes

“This combination of chivalrous propriety with bloody lethality”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Sacrosanctis was in fact the public face of a corporate conspiracy between the leading men of three powerful European families: the Medici (in the form of Pope Leo); Jakob Fugger, head of the Augsburg banking and mining dynasty and a man often said to have been the richest in human history; and Albert, archbishop of Mainz, a member of the politically influential Hohenzollern dynasty and (not coincidentally) the man to whom Luther mailed the first copy of his Theses.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“The Ciompi Revolt very often looked like—and was—a genuine class war; its first leader was an old vegetable seller who waved a flag known as the banner of justice and uttered little of note except the revolutionary slogan “Long live the Popolo Minuto [i.e., the little people].”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“One eyewitness in Ireland left blank pages at the end of his chronicle, in case by some miracle there were any humans left in the future to carry on his work. “The past has devoured us, the present is gnawing our entrails, the future threatens yet greater dangers,” wailed de’ Mussis.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“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.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Crusading outlived the Middle Ages, and remains today a favored trope of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and Islamist terrorists, all of whom cleave to the decidedly shaky idea that it has defined Christian and Muslim relations for a millennium. They are not right, but they are not original in their error either. Crusading—a bastard hybrid of religion and violence, adopted as a vehicle for papal ambition but eventually allowed to run as it pleased, where it pleased, and against whom it pleased, was one of the Middle Ages’ most successful and enduringly poisonous ideas.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Cathars regarded human flesh as by its nature sinful and detestable—a view that, as we have seen, Innocent had once professed wholeheartedly to share. They thought the only route to escape from mortal corruption was by living according to a strict doctrine of self-denial: sexual abstinence, vegetarianism, and simplicity of life.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“the Roman Empire was not an especially nice place to be a Christian.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“He complained that ‘one pays for confession, for mass, for the sacrament, for indulgences, for churching a woman,e for a blessing, for burials, for funeral services and prayers. The very last penny which an old woman has hidden in her bundle for fear of thieves or robbery will not be saved. The villainous priest will grab it.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Medieval writers blamed the pestilence variously on God’s wrath, the prevalence of vice, the coming of the Antichrist, the impending resurrection of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the excessive tightness of women’s clothes, misalignment of the planets, sodomy, evil vapours, rain, Jewish conspiracy, the tendency of hot and moist people to overindulge in sex and baths, and under-ripe vegetables, which doctors of medicine were sure caused ‘windy ulcers’.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“And this was more than mere relocation. 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.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“That they themselves failed, and the fact that their uprising has latterly become a byword for heedless, bloodthirsty, rustic barbarity, does not mean that their grievances were unreasonable or impossible for us to understand today.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“The concept of jihad (meaning “struggle”) demanded that all Muslims make strenuous effort for the cause of Islam. Very often during the Middle Ages this meant taking up arms and killing other human beings in the expectation of reward in the afterlife”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“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.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“After a fashion he recovered, and his capital city eventually returned to some semblance of normality; on March 23, 543, the emperor declared “God’s Education” over. But this was the same wishful thinking that has traditionally accompanied any political statement about pandemic disease delivered with certain authority. Bubonic plague in fact continued to sweep and swirl around the Mediterranean world for the rest of the decade, resurfacing time and again all over the world until 749.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Sacrosanctis was in fact the public face of a corporate conspiracy between the leading men of three powerful European families: the Medici (in the form of Pope Leo); Jakob Fugger, head of the Augsburg banking and mining dynasty and a man often said to have been the richest in human history; and Albert, archbishop of Mainz, a member of the politically influential Hohenzollern dynasty and (not coincidentally) the man to whom Luther mailed the first copy of his Theses.
The nature of the agreement between these three was broadly thus: Albert, who was already archbishop of Magdeburg, had been permitted by the pope to become archbishop of Mainz at the same time – which made him the most senior churchman in Germany, and meant he controlled two of the seven electoral votes which determined the identity of the German emperor. (His brother already controlled a third.) Vast fees were due to Rome as a tax on taking office as an archbishop – but Albert could afford these, thanks to a loan from Fugger, who advanced the money on the basis that he would have the Hohenzollern and their electoral votes in his pocket. Albert, for his part, promised Leo he would do all he could to make sure that German Christians bought as many indulgences as possible, partly because his share of the proceeds could repay his debt to Fugger and partly so that funds would flow rapidly to Leo in Rome for the completion of St Peter’s. For the parties involved this was a neat arrangement by which they all got what they wanted – so long as the faithful did their part and kept pumping money into pardons.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“During the thirteenth century Genoese traders in the Black Sea port of Caffa struck a deal to run slaves captured in the Caucasus by the Mongols to the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, shipping them to the Nile Delta via the Black Sea and Mediterranean, whereupon the slaves would be forcibly impressed into the Mamluk army. Effectively this meant that the Christian Genoese were directly responsible for supplying workers to a power that was doing its best to crush the western crusader states of Syria and Palestine.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“where he wrote his Chirurgia magna, destined to become one of the most important medical textbooks of the Middle Ages.*”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“The thirteenth-century Italian medic Lanfranc of Milan was forced to leave his studies in Italy during political turmoil in the 1290s”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Surely, Luther had not predicted scenes like this when he began his investigations into the scriptural basis for indulgences. Horrified at the crimes being now perpetrated in the name of the reform movement he had begun, he tried increasingly to distance himself from the rebels’ actions. His first effort was a pamphlet called An Admonition to Peace, which advised the rebels to calm down and negotiate for better conditions. But when that fell on deaf ears he wrote a much less conciliatory tract entitled Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“crusading was important precisely because it was such a varied phenomenon and a malleable concept. It did not simply define relations between Christianity and Islam; rather, it set a template for the projection of military power against enemies of the Roman Church wherever they could be perceived. • • • How”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“it became abundantly clear to governments that in the post–Black Death world, the views and interests of ordinary people would have to be considered, or the consequences could be severe.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“England described the bogeyman “Jak Bonehomme” as “a haughty and arrogant man with the heart of Lucifer” who commanded nearly two hundred thousand rebels, organized in three battalions, as they marched around the whole kingdom of France “taking great booty from the land and sparing no gentleman or lady. Once they had won over . . . castles and towns, they took the lords’ wives, beautiful ladies and of great renown, and slept with them against their will. . . . And in many places this Jak Bonehomme ripped babies from their mothers’ wombs and with these babies’ blood [the rebels] quenched their thirst and anointed their bodies in contempt of God and the saints.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Abelard had been disgraced as a young man when he was master of the cathedral school of Notre-Dame in Paris: in 1115–16 he took a part-time job as tutor to a girl called Heloïse, the nieces of one of the cathedral canons. Unfortunately, in the course of teaching Heloïse, Abelard seduced her, got her pregnant (with a son whom she would name Astrolabe),* married her, and then sent her to live in a nunnery. In return for this, Heloïse’s irate uncle accosted Abelard and brutally castrated him. Fortunate to survive the ordeal, Abelard retired to live as a monk at the abbey of Saint-Denis, although he was later forced to leave, having wound up his fellow monks one too many times with his deliberately provocative behavior and opinions. He lived for a time as a wandering hermit, and gave public lectures on theology in the streets of Paris.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“MEDIEVAL “WOKE”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“It is a cliché much repeated by historians that the medieval world was made up of three groups of people: those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked. But from the thirteenth century onward, we must also take into account those who counted, moved, saved, and spent.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Yet strangely, it would not be remembered as Genoa’s triumph, either. Instead, this bloody skirmish in the stunning blue waters off the Dalmatian coast would come to be associated most closely with one of the Venetian prisoners of war. He was a veteran adventurer from a family of merchants, who had been farther around the world than almost any person alive—seeing many extraordinary things and meeting many astonishing people. A survivor and a charmer, he had mind-boggling stories to tell. And after he was captured at the battle of Curzola, he had the opportunity to tell them. He was incarcerated alongside a sympathetic and talented professional writer called Rustichello of Pisa, who drew memories out of his cellmate and wrote them down for posterity. The result was a great popular travelogue, which still sells thousands of copies every year. Of course, the merchant was Marco Polo—”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“Where Genghis’s body now lies is as obscure as the cause of his death, for he had his burial place kept deliberately secret: horses trampled the burial spot beyond identification, after which the burial party was supposedly murdered, and their murderers murdered, and the gravediggers murdered.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“The Venetians struck a deal by which the Mongols agreed to attack their trading rivals, the Genoese, in their lucrative colony at Soldaia, on the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. This was the start of a lasting partnership between Venetian doges and Mongol khans, which endured well into the fourteenth century, paving the way for the famous adventures of Marco Polo (see chapter 10) and making the Republic of Venice very rich. Devils, it seemed, could ride together.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

“And in 1493, the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus sailed back from his first encounter with the Americas announcing in terms strikingly reminiscent of crusader rhetoric his discovery of a land of great wealth and many pagans, which could be claimed on behalf of all Christendom.”
― Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages