Powers and Thrones summary

While the western Roman Empire deteriorated, the eastern Roman Empire remained largely intact. The eastern Roman capital of Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, persisted despite Hunnic and Gothic attacks. And after Attila’s fall from power, the eastern Empire experienced a time of peace.

Following the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the eastern Roman Empire began to transform into what is known as Byzantium, or the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine Empire reached its height during the reign of Justinian I, who succeeded his uncle Justin I in 527. With the help of his wife and empress Theodora, Justinian launched an ambitious plan to restore the eastern Roman Empire.

In the early seventh century, Byzantium had just defeated Persia when another global superpower reared its head. Over 2000 kilometers from Constantinople, a man from Mecca named Muhammad was visited by an angel and came to understand himself as the Prophet and messenger of Allah. The rituals and prayers he was entrusted with were later collected as the Qur-an, forming the foundations of a new religion called Islam.

Muhamad quickly gained a following among ordinary Meccans. In 622, he and his Muslim followers left Mecca for Yathrib, where tribal elders had asked him to settle a feud between pagan tribes and Jews. Muhammad successfully united the splintered factions in an umma, or community. But this new community was unlike the tribes of the time. Muhammad’s umma was a monotheistic state characterized by religious obedience. It was, in essence, the first Islamic state. 

Among the barbarian kingdoms established in the fifth century, the most successful was that of the Franks. Originating as a coalition of German war-bands, the Franks had settled west of the Rhine during the age of barbarian migrations before slowly gaining power in the collapsed Roman state.

Over the two and a half centuries of the ruling Merovingian dynasty, the Franks gradually expanded to assume the land of neighboring tribes. Eventually, they occupied the majority of modern France, and received tribute from tribes in Bavaria, Thuringia, and portions of Saxony.

Empires and dynasties weren’t the only forms of power in medieval Europe. Around the turn of the first millennium emerged new forms of cultural soft power. These are the archetypes that likely come to mind when you think of the Middle Ages.

Around the year 1000, developments in agriculture began to provide landowners with disposable income from sales of abundant crops, thanks to a favorable climate known as the Medieval Climate Optimum. And those landowners chose to spend their money on their salvation. Copious donations funded the construction of magnificent monasteries, while the wealthy paid monks to pray on their behalf for forgiveness of their sins.

The new soft powers of knights and the clergy contributed to the emergence of a phenomenon that would define the next few centuries of life in the Middle Ages: the Crusades.

Around the late eleventh century, relations between the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium had become fraught. In 1054, a major schism had developed between the churches of Rome and Constantinople over disagreements about such matters as the duration of fasts. But when the Byzantine emperor Alexios I sent a plea for military support against a group of Muslims called the Seljuk Turks, Pope Urban II saw an opportunity. If he agreed to help, Christians could drive the Muslims out of the Holy City of Jerusalem entirely.

Trade has existed throughout human history. Yet even the scale of trade in the Roman Empire paled in comparison with that of the Commercial Revolution, which occurred during the Middle Ages.

Around the turn of the first millennium, the period of economic stagnation that had defined Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire began to shift. The expansion of overland trading networks in western Europe, combined with new farming technologies, facilitated the rise of a new culture of markets and fairs across Europe. And thanks to a surge in coin production and basic financial services such as moneylending, spending money was easier than ever before.

At the turn of the fourteenth century, temperatures began to drop sharply due to intense volcanic activity worldwide. At the same time, the population boom that had driven economic activity, commerce, and invention from the millennium on had reached its limits. Overpopulation combined with the so-called Little Ice Age resulted in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1321.

To make matters worse, around the early 1330s, a new mutation of the bacillus Y. pestis that had caused the Justinian pandemic in the sixth century began circulating in central Asia. Symptoms included fever, painful swellings, uncontrollable vomiting, internal bleeding, and death within days. Like the older strain of Y. pestis, this illness could spread via flea-bites or infected rodents. But this new illness was also airborne, and so could also be spread through the breath of an infected person.

Starting in the late fourteenth century, a cultural movement called the Renaissance, or “rebirth,” flourished in Italy and, later, across Europe. The Renaissance was a time of intellectual and artistic advancement that revived and built on ancient Greek and Roman culture while developing new inventions and ideas in art, architecture, literature, medicine, anatomy, and political philosophy.

In Florence, the rise of the Medici banking family as a political dynasty led to their patronage of the arts and sciences. They financed, among others, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica. In turn, patronage gave the wealthy a sophisticated edge, while portraiture became a new kind of propaganda for politicians.

Up until the late Middle Ages, making a book was a long and tedious process. A single book could take a scribe hundreds or even thousands of hours to finish. But during the 1430s, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg set out to revolutionize manuscript production. Borrowing money to fund equipment and labor, Gutenberg set out to build a machine that could replicate pages at a previously inconceivable speed.

Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in the 1450s. But the communications revolution it set off changed more than the nature of writing. In the span of a few decades, the invention of the printing press plunged the established order in Europe into a state of crisis.