Powers and thrones, p.1
Powers and Thrones, page 1
POWERS
AND
THRONES
ALSO BY DAN JONES
Summer of Blood:
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
The Plantagenets:
The Kings Who Made England
The Hollow Crown:
The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors
Magna Carta:
The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter
Realm Divided:
A Year in the Life of Plantagenet England
The Templars:
The Rise and Fall of God’s Holy Warriors
Crusaders:
An Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands
WITH MARINA AMARAL
The Colour of Time: A New History of the World, 1850–1960
The World Aflame: The Long War, 1914–1945
POWERS
AND
THRONES
A New History of the Middle Ages
DAN JONES
AN APOLLO BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
An Apollo book
First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © 2021 Dan Jones
The moral right of Dan Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781789543537
ISBN (E): 9781789543551
Maps by Jamie Whyte
Head of Zeus Ltd
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
www.headofzeus.com
For Anthony,
who thinks of everything
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
‘See, this is new’?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
ECCLESIASTES 1:9–10
CONTENTS
Also by Dan Jones
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Maps
Author’s Note
Introduction
PART I: IMPERIUM
(C. AD 410 – AD 750)
Chapter 1: Romans
Chapter 2: Barbarians
Chapter 3: Byzantines
Chapter 4: Arabs
PART II: DOMINION
(C. AD 750 – AD 1215)
Chapter 5: Franks
Chapter 6: Monks
Chapter 7: Knights
Chapter 8: Crusaders
PART III: REBIRTH
(C. AD 1215 – AD 1347)
Chapter 9: Mongols
Chapter 10: Merchants
Chapter 11: Scholars
Chapter 12: Builders
PART IV: REVOLUTION
(C. AD 1348 – AD 1527)
Chapter 13: Survivors
Chapter 14: Renewers
Chapter 15: Navigators
Chapter 16: Protestants
Plate Section 1
Plate Section 2
Plate Section 3
Notes
Bibliography
Picture credits
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
LIST OF MAPS
p. 14 The Roman Empire at its greatest extent c. AD 117
p. 74 Europe and the Mediterranean world c. 476
p. 160 The Arab Conquests c. 750
p. 192 Charlemagne’s Empire c. 800
p. 238 Pilgrimage roads to Santiago de Compostela c. 1000
p. 310 The Crusader States c. 1160
p. 360 The Mongol Empire at its largest c. 1280
p. 506 First wave of the Black Death 1347–51
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS BOOK COVERS MORE THAN A thousand years and its geographical scope encompasses every continent save Australasia and Antarctica. You are about to encounter lots of different languages, currencies and cultures. Some will be familiar. Others will not. In the interests of clarity and enjoyment, I have not tried to apply any rigid system of monetary conversion or spelling convention. I have opted instead for familiarity over strict propriety, and common sense above everything else. I hope you understand.
INTRODUCTION
In the sixteenth century the English historian John Foxe looked over his shoulder at the great sweep of the near, and distant, past. History, thought Foxe (or ecclesiastical history, which was the stuff that really mattered to him), could be sliced into three great chunks.
It began with ‘the primitive time’, by which he meant those ancient days when Christians hid in catacombs to dodge persecution by wicked, faithless Romans, and tried to avoid being crucified or worse. It culminated in what Foxe called ‘our latter days’ – the era of the Reformation, when the grip of the Catholic Church on life in Europe was challenged, and when western navigators began to explore the New World.
Sandwiched between these two periods was an awkward slab consisting of about one thousand years. Foxe called this ‘the middle age’. It was, by definition, neither fish nor fowl.
Today we still use Foxe’s label, although we have added a plural. For us, the years between the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD and the Protestant Reformation are ‘the Middle Ages’. Anything relating to the time is ‘medieval’ – a nineteenth-century adjective, which literally means the same thing.1 But if we have added an extra letter, our periodization is largely the same. The Middle Ages were (it is usually supposed) the time when the classical world had vanished, but the modern world was yet to get going; when people built castles and men fought in armour on horseback; when the world was flat and everything very far away. Although some twenty-first century global historians have tried to update the terminology, speaking not of Middle Ages but of a Middle Millennium, that has not yet caught on.2
Words are heavily loaded. The Middle Ages are often the butt of a big historical joke. Medieval is frequently deployed as a dirty term, particularly by newspaper editors, who use it as shorthand when they want to suggest stupidity, barbarity and wanton violence. (An alternative popular name for this period is the Dark Ages, which does much the same job: caricaturing the medieval past as a time of permanent intellectual night.) For obvious reasons, this can make today’s historians quite tetchy. If you should happen to meet one, it is best not to deploy ‘medieval’ as an insult – unless you want a lecture or a punch on the nose.
The book you are about to read tells the story of the Middle Ages. It is a big book, because that is a big task. We are going to sweep across continents and centuries, often at breakneck pace. We are going to meet hundreds of men and women, from Attila the Hun to Joan of Arc. And we are going to dive headlong into at least a dozen fields of history – from war and law to art and literature. I am going to ask – and I hope, answer – some big questions. What happened in the Middle Ages? Who ruled? What did power look like? What were the big forces that shaped people’s lives? And how (if at all) did the Middle Ages shape the world we know today?
There will be times when it may feel a little bit overwhelming.
But I promise you, it is going to be fun.
I have divided this book into four broadly chronological sections. Part I looks at what one brilliant modern historian has labelled the ‘inheritance of Rome’.3 It opens with the Roman Empire in the west in a state of retreat and collapse, rocked by a changing climate and several generations of mass migration, among other things. It then looks at the secondary superpowers that emerged in Rome’s wake: the so-called ‘barbarian’ realms that laid the foundations for the European kingdoms; the remodelled eastern Roman superstate of Byzantium; and the first Islamic empires. It takes the story from the beginning of the fifth century AD to the middle of the eighth.
Part II opens in the age of the Franks, who revived a Christian, pseudo-Roman empire in the west. The story here is partly but not exclusively political: besides tracing the rise of the dynasties who carved Europe into Christian royal realms, we will also look at the new forms of cultural ‘soft’ power that emerged around the turn of the first millennium. This part of the book asks how monks and knights came to play such an important role in western society during the Middle Ages – and how the fusion of their two mindsets gave birth to the crusades.
Part III begins with the stunning appearance of a new global superpower. The rise of the Mongols in the twelfth century AD was a sharp and hideously brutal episode, in which an eastern empire – with its capital in what is now Beijing – achieved fleeting domination over half the world, at the cost of millions of lives. Against the background of this dramatic shift in global geopolitics, part III also looks at other emerging powers in what is sometimes called the ‘high’ Middle Ages. We will meet merchants who invented extraordinary new financial techniques to make themselves and the world richer; scholars who revived the wisdom of the ancients and founded some of today’s greatest universities; and the architects and engineers who built the cities, cathedrals and castles that still stand 500 years on, as portals b ack to the medieval world.
Part IV of this book brings the Middle Ages to a close. The section begins with a global pandemic that ripped through the world, from east to west, devastating populations, reshaping economies and changing the way that people thought about the world around them. It then looks at how the world was rebuilt. We will meet the geniuses of the Renaissance, and travel alongside the great navigators who struck out in search of new worlds – and found them. Last of all, we will see how shifting religious dogma, allied to new communication technology, brought about the Protestant Reformation – an upheaval which (as Foxe recognized) brought the curtain down on ‘the middle age’.
That, then, is the basic shape of this book. I should also say a few words about its preoccupations. As the title suggests, this is a book about power. By that I do not simply mean political power, or even human power. We will come across many mighty men and women (although since this is the Middle Ages, there are inevitably more of the former than the latter). But I am also interested in mapping great forces beyond human control. Climate change, mass migration, pandemic disease, technological change and global networks: these sound like very modern, or even post-modern, concerns. But they shaped the medieval world too. And since we are all, in a sense, children of the Middle Ages, it is important that we recognize how similar we are to medieval people – as well as acknowledging our real and profound differences.
This book focuses mostly on the west, and sees the history of other parts of the world through a western lens. I make no apology for that. I am fascinated by the histories of Asia and Africa, and I have tried to show throughout this story how deeply intertwined the medieval west was with the global east and south. But the very notion of the Middle Ages is one that is specific to western history. I am also writing in the west, where I have lived and studied for most of my career. One day I – or most likely someone else – will write a complementary history of the Middle Ages that turns this perspective on its head, and sees the period from ‘the outside’, as it were.4 But today is not that day.
This, then, is the shape of things to come. As I have already said, this is a big book. Yet it is also a hopelessly short one. I have covered more than one thousand years of history here, in less than one thousand pages. Every chapter of this book has an entire scholarly field dedicated to it. (The endnotes and select bibliography will help readers to dip further into the fields they find interesting.) So while there is plenty to see here, there is also much that has been left on the cutting-room floor. All I can say is that my aim with all my books is to entertain as well as inform. If this one does a little bit of both, I shall consider it a blessing.
Dan Jones
Staines-upon-Thames
Spring, 2021.
Part I
Imperium
c. AD 410 – AD 750
1
ROMANS
‘Everywhere… the name of the Roman people is an object of reverence and awe.’
AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS,
ROMAN HISTORIAN AND SOLDIER
They left the safety of the road and tramped out into the wilderness, lugging the heavy wooden chest between them. How their limbs must have ached as they carried it some two miles across the uneven landscape – for the box, while only a metre in length, was well built, densely filled and sealed with a large silver spring-lock. To move it any distance required at least two people, or a small cart, for crate and contents together weighed half as much as a person.1 But the value of the goods inside far exceeded the cost of a human being. A slave imported from Gaul, brought across the British Sea (Oceanus Britannicus – today the English Channel) and converted into cash on the markets of London (Londinium) might in those days cost 600 denarii – assuming he or she were fit, young and either hard-working or good-looking. This was no small price: around twice an ordinary soldier’s annual wages.2 But if it was a lot, it was also nothing at all for an elite citizen of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. Inside the oak box that creaked as they hiked across the gently sloping countryside was a fortune sufficient to pay for a whole houseful of slaves.
The precious load inside the oaken case included nearly 600 gold coins known as solidi. These jangled against 15,000 silver siliquae and a couple of handfuls of random bronze pieces. The coins were stamped variously with the faces of emperors from three dynasties, the most recent of them the ill-fated usurper Constantine III (r. 407/9 – AD 411). Nestled among the coins were even greater treasures: an assortment of gorgeous gold necklaces, rings and fashionable body chains designed to cling to the curves of a slender young woman’s body; bangles etched with geometric patterns and lifelike hunting scenes; tableware including silver spoons, and pepper-pots in the shape of wild beasts, ancient heroes and empresses; elegant toilet utensils including silver earwax-scrapers and toothpicks made to look like long-necked ibises; bowls, beakers and jugs; and a tiny elephant-ivory pyxis – the sort of trinket that rich men like Aurelius Ursicinus, whose name was etched into many of the items, liked to buy for refined women like the lady Juliane (Iuliane). A bespoke bracelet was personalized with a loving message spelled in tiny strips of beaten gold: VTERE FELIX DOMINA IVLIANE (Use this happily, Lady Juliane.) And ten silver spoons advertised the family’s devotion to the young but pervasive religion of the day: each was stamped with the symbol known as the Chi-Rho – a monogram made up of the first two Greek letters in the word ‘Christ’. This would have been instantly familiar to fellow believers – Christians – who were part of a community of the faithful which stretched from Britain and Ireland (Hibernia) to north Africa and the Middle East.3
This hoard of coins, jewellery and home furnishings was by no means the sum total of the family’s valuables, for Aurelius and Juliane were members of the small, fabulously wealthy Christian elite of Britain – a villa set who lived in similar comfort and splendour to other elites right across Europe and the Mediterranean. But it was a significant nest-egg all the same – and the family had taken some trouble in selecting what to include in it. That was only right, because this rich cache was effectively an insurance policy. The family had instructed that it be buried somewhere discreet for safekeeping, while they waited to see whether Britain’s increasingly turbulent politics would tip over into governmental collapse, civil unrest or something worse. Only time would tell what fate held for the province. In the meantime, the best place for an affluent clan’s riches was underground.
The bustle of the busy road – the route that joined the eastern town of Caister-by-Norwich (Venta Icenorum) with the London-to-Colchester (Camulodunum) thoroughfare – had long receded into the distance, and the small group carrying the box found themselves alone and out of sight. They had walked far enough that the nearest town – Scole – was more than two miles away; satisfied that they had found a good spot, they set the box down. They may have rested awhile, perhaps even until nightfall. But soon enough, shovels hit the earth, the soil – a mixture of clay and sandy gravel – heaped up, and a shallow hole emerged.4 They did not need to dig far – there was no need to waste effort, for they would be only making work for themselves in the future. So when the hole was just a few feet deep, they carefully lowered the box into it and backfilled the soil. As they did so, the stout oak case containing Aurelius’ spoons and silverware, Juliane’s delicately wrought jewellery and many handfuls of coin disappeared: buried like grave goods, those prized possessions of the deceased which had been laid to rest with their owners in half-remembered days of generations past. The diggers took note of the spot, then set off, relieved and unburdened, back towards the road. They would, they may have said to themselves, be back. When? It was hard to say. But surely, once the political storms battering Britain eased, and the barbarous invaders who attacked the eastern seaboard with wearying regularity were finally driven away, and the loyal soldiers returned from their wars in Gaul, Master Aurelius would send them back to dig up his valuable cargo. In AD 409, they did not know – and could not have begun to imagine – that Aurelius Ursicinus’ treasure trove would in fact remain under the ground for nearly 1,600 years.a
