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Name: Powers and Thrones
Rating: 4.6 (321 reviews)
Author: Dan Jones

Dan Jones

A New History of the Middle Ages

4.6 (321 Bewertungen)

32 Min.

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Kriege Europäische Geschichte Altertum

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What’s in it for me? Journey through a portal into the medieval world.

You might know the period of history after the fall of the Roman Empire as the “Dark Ages.” Even the term medieval is often used as a pejorative, signaling cruelty, stupidity, or unjustified violence. But the Middle Ages weren’t just a vacuum between the classical world and modernity. In many ways, this rich millennium of history shaped the world we know today.

Spanning from the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fourth century to the Protestant Reformation in the fifteenth, these blinks survey the rulers and forces that shaped the Middle Ages. You’ll get to know famous leaders such as Attila the Hun and Justinian I, as well as other kinds of power, such as migration, global networks, and new technologies.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

what climate change has to do with the collapse of the Roman Empire;
how the Crusades were more than a conflict between Christians and Muslims; and
how the rise of trading networks facilitated the spread of the Black Death.

Climate change and mass migration led to the collapse of the western Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire was a global force for more than one thousand years. During its heyday, it spanned northern Africa, Asia Minor, and most of Europe. Roman rule influenced the politics, culture, religion, and military of its dominions. It had transformed from its pagan beginnings to an empire-wide adoption of Christianity, solidifying Christianity’s status as a major global religion. Its official language, Latin, would influence languages across the European continent and remain the de facto written language in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

But by the fourth century CE, the Roman mega-state was beginning to collapse. And, surprisingly, a large factor in its fall was climate change – thousands of miles away from central Italy.

The key message here is: Climate change and mass migration led to the collapse of the western Roman Empire.

In the mid-fourth century, eastern Asia experienced the most severe drought recorded in the last two millennia. So the Huns, a nomadic people living in eastern Asia at that time, began to migrate across the Volga river, invading the lands of Germanic tribes known as the Goths. Since the Huns had an upper hand with their advanced archery capabilities, huge bands of Gothic tribes were forced to flee and seek refuge in the Roman Empire. Soon, eastern Europe was overwhelmed with a migrant crisis.

At first, the Roman Empire was able to control the crisis. Emperor Theodosius I made arrangements to settle and employ the Goths in the Roman army. But in the 390s, the Huns continued their march west, displacing an even larger population of non-Roman tribal groups. Over the decades that followed, waves of barbarian migrant tribespeople posed an increasing threat to Roman power.

Perhaps the most famous barbarian assault on the Roman Empire was led by Attila the Hun, who, in the fifth century, united the Huns and many Germanic tribespeople against Roman rule. Attila’s barbarian army pillaged its way from eastern Europe into Italy before he decided to retreat, his forces decimated by disease and a lack of resources. Ironically, Attila’s death the following year caused further chaos, as Germanic tribespeople freed from Hunnic rule scattered across Europe.

The power of the western Roman Empire had all but dissolved by the time a coalition of Gothic tribes led by Odoacer deposed the final Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, in 476. In the wake of the empire’s collapse, barbarian realms including the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Burgundians, and the Franks established themselves across Europe, laying the foundations for the kingdoms of medieval Europe.

In the sixth century, the eastern Roman Empire was remodeled as the Byzantine superstate.

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 seventh and eighth centuries, the foundation of Islam led to the establishment of the far-reaching Islamic 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.

After the Franks revived a Christian, pseudo-Roman Empire in the west, Viking invasions prompted the creation of Normandy.

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.

Around the turn of the first millennium, new forms of cultural soft power emerged amid changes in social organization.

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.

While the early Crusades were a tool for papal ambition, they were later used against enemies at large.

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.

Medieval merchants, scholars, and builders helped shape the world we know today.

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.

In the fourteenth century, the Black Death devastated medieval populations and radically reshaped the Western world.

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.

During the late Middle Ages, wealthy patrons funded artists, inventors, and explorers.

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.

The invention of the printing press and shifting religious dogma led to the Protestant Reformation, signaling the end of the Middle Ages.

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.

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Worum geht es in Powers and Thrones?

Powers and Thrones (2021) is a comprehensive history of the Middle Ages. Tracing time from the fall of the western Roman Empire to the Protestant Reformation, these blinks reveal how forces such as global networks, climate change, mass migration, pandemics, and technological innovation, as well as political leaders, the clergy, and knights, shaped the medieval world.

Wer Powers and Thrones lesen sollte

History nerds fascinated by the Middle Ages
Anyone curious about the history of pandemics
Sociologists, archeologists, and political scientists

Über den Autor

Dan Jones is a historian, broadcaster, and award-winning journalist. His books include Magna Carta, The Plantagenets, and The Templars, and have sold more than a million copies worldwide. He has written and hosted dozens of TV shows including the Netflix/Channel 5 series Secrets of Great British Castles. His writing has been published in newspapers and magazines including the Evening Standard, Sunday Times, and Spectator.

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