Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages, Jones - B

          This history begins with the fall of the Roman Empire and finishes with the Protestant Reformation. "By the end of the fifth century A.D., the Roman Empire in the west no longer existed." With its expiration, the west inherited traditions of slavery and Christianity, an infrastructure of roads and aqueducts, the Latin language, and a legal system. "It [Rome] was the foundation on which everything in the Middle Ages was built." The western empire had been lost to barbarians from the east. The Huns were forced to cross the Volga and enter Europe because of a 4th century 'megadrought' on the steppe. The Huns compelled the Goths, Alans, Suevi, Burgundians, and Vandals to move further west. Over the course of a century, the various barbarians, and the kingdoms they established, replaced the the greatest empire history has ever known. The century after the fall of Rome saw a rebirth in Constantinople. The Emperor Justinian led the way with a law codification that"set a gold standard for constitutional reform in the Middle Ages." He built the Hagia Sophia and recaptured North Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the Ostrogoths.  The empire was frequently at war with Persia, but it would be Arabia from which a monumental challenge arose in the 7th century. Syria, Palestine and Egypt quickly fell to the Muslims, thus severing from the empire lands it had ruled for seven centuries. All of North Africa and Spain followed. The Arabs even twice threatened Constantinople itself. When their efforts at conquering the imperial city failed, they turned east and went as far as Pakistan. When it was decreed that the Arab language must be used by all in government, a cohesiveness was brought to the vast empire that stretched from Spain to the Asian sub-continent.

        The 8th century in Europe saw an impressive consolidation of lands on both sides of the Rhine by Charlemagne and a concurrent assault by the Vikings from the north. On Christmas day in 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Roman Emperor. His empire extended from the Baltic to Tuscany and from Bavaria to the French coast.  The empire didn't last and was carved up by his heirs in the middle of the 9th century. At the same time, the Vikings descended on Europe conquering and wreaking havoc. They eventually settled down and established important political entities throughout northern Europe, and of particular import, the Danelaw in England, and Normandy in France. The 10th century saw a significant rise in the wealth and power of the monastic system, led by the rise of the Cluny monastery. William of Aquitaine endowed Cluny, and its abbots became international leaders in the golden age of monasticism. Cluny itself was the largest church in Christendom. The monasteries became "centers of literacy, education, hospitality, medical treatment, elderly social care, and spiritual counseling..." A Cluniac monk was elected Pope Urban II. 

           In the late 10th century, Otto, a German king, defended against a Magyar attack by utilizing heavy cavalry, horsemen fully armored and very capable of defeating the plains horsemen who had been threatening Europe for centuries.  "For the next two centuries, powerful, mounted warriors dominated battlefields, while also beginning to burnish their status in society at large." Knights became the epitome of chivalry, "which would inform art, literature, and high culture long beyond the end of the Middle Ages." In the late 11th century, the besieged Byzantines asked for help from their western brothers, a request that led to the Crusades. Pope Urban II urged a crusade to release the Holy Land from Islam's oppression. Anyone who died while crusading was assured a remission of sins and immediate entry to heaven. Spilling vast amounts of Muslim, Jewish and Christian blood, the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099. The crusader states in the Levant would survive for two hundred years. The first challenge came from a Kurdish warrior and leader, Saladin, who reconquered the Holy land in 1187. Europe responded with another crusade. Frederick Barbarossa, King Philip II of France and Richard the Lionheart of England all took part. They recovered Acre and the ports on the coast, but not Jerusalem. A new pope, Innocent III, directed the crusading spirit inward, inspiring troops to advance the reconquest of Spain, to conquer and convert the pagans in the north of Europe, and to wage war against heretics, particularly the Cathars in southern France. In 1291, the last crusaders left the Holy Land. "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 enduring poisonous ideas."

            The 13th century would see Europe threatened from the east by an extraordinary and powerful force - the Mongols, who would conquer Eurasia from Korea to Hungary.  As violent and brutal as they were, they rebooted trade between Asia and the west, enhanced the transfer of technologies, knowledge and people, established an efficient postal service and implemented a rule of law. Arguably, their achievements would not be surpassed for centuries. 

            The 13th and 14th centuries saw a commercial revolution that changed way the world traded.  Money and goods were flying around the world. Power was now in the hands of merchants and bankers; kings and emperors had to give way. In Italy, the city states of Venice, Padua, Florence, Pisa, and Genoa dominated the finances and politics of Italy and the Mediterranean. At the same time, there was a vast increase in the numbers of books published as scholarly pursuits took hold. Works of antiquity were translated and universities grew. The expansion of learning led to some of the first challenges to the established church by men such as Jan Hus and John Wycliffe. It was also an era of major construction projects.  "The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a golden age of monumental architecture in the west, in which some of the most iconic buildings in world history were erected." These structures sent "spires and towers soaring toward the heavens, telling interwoven stories of wealth, power, piety, and dominion." The progress Europe was making toward the future was shattered in the 14th century by famine and plague. The Little Ice Age contributed to a famine from 1315-1321. Twenty-five years later, the Black Death tore through Europe, killing an estimated half of the population. "The first economic consequence of the pandemic was to wreak havoc on prices and wages." Riots and revolts followed, the most famous of which was the Peasants' Revolt in England. The populist uprisings were suppressed, but did lead to the loosening of feudalism's ties.

            First in northern Italy, and later throughout Europe, the cultural movement known as the Renaissance began. There was an increased interest in the glories of Greece and Rome, and  rapid technological advances in painting, sculpture, construction and education. It was "the culmination of a long road back to civilization".  The art of Leonardo, the sculpture of Michelangelo and the dome of Brunelleschi highlight the extraordinary leaps made in this era. 

         When the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, trade with the east became more complicated and rulers in Portugal and Spain were motivated to seek alternative routes. This led to the historic world-changing discovery of the Americas and the European exploration of Asia. In 1522, Magellan's circumnavigation was completed, global empires were being created, and the Middle Ages were coming to a close. In 1455, Gutenberg published his Bible. "Mechanized printing changed western culture in the fifteenth century as fundamentally and profoundly as the creation of the smartphone changed it at the turn of the twenty-first." The availability of the printed word and the increasing exchanges of information throughout Europe led to the last act of this story - the Protestant Reformation. Ironically, the first item Gutenberg printed was a Papal Indulgence, the 15th century financial/confessional abuse that led the list of concerns about the church articulated by Martin Luther. The printed version afforded the church immeasurably more sales opportunities than was the case for those written by hand. The sale of indulgences transitioned from a service to scandal under Pope Sixtus IV in the 1470's. Luther's Ninety-Five Theses were published in 1517. His ideas spread completely throughout Europe in a year. "By the 1530's, the western world was no longer medieval." England withdrew from the Catholic church. Protestants and Catholics were fighting in France and Germany. An imperial army had sacked Rome in 1527. "The rise of the printed word, encounters with the New World, the collapse and fracture of the church militant, the demographic rearrangements caused by waves of the Black death, the humanistic and artistic revolutions of the Renaissance - all these things and more recast the shape and the feel of the west, in ways that contemporaries explicitly recognized, even as the process was taking place."