Review : Power and Thrones

Dan Jones seems best known as a TV historian, but he's a damn fine writer : far more purposeful and analytical than his TV shows might suggest. Of what I've read, his The Plantagenets is a clear winner, describing in gripping detail the life and times of and English dynasty that's shedloads more interesting that the poxy old Tudors (sorry Lucy Worsely, but it's true). There he covers how medieval kings won loyalty by divulging political power in exchange for military and/or financial support, and why King John's efforts to retake France were doomed by much more than battlefield prowess or lack thereof. He balances carefully between letting the text speak for itself and outlining the broad conclusions. And he's not afraid to pronounce judgement, without coming across as hopelessly biased either.

Power and Thrones is his latest offering, a weighty tome covering the whole of medieval Europe - from the fall of Rome to the birth of Protestantism. Jones' approach is to select a variety of specific events that are representative of the general trends, so rather than getting a breakneck speed account of a thousand years of history (which would average out to about two years per page), we actually get some considerable detail. It's an excellent, very well-balanced approach that never lacks for readability. Never before have I encountered the revenge of sacred chickens, or heard how St Martin exorcised demons from cows and set fire to the Emperor Valentinian's buttocks.

My favourite aspect is the analogies. If Jones has a goal here, it's to show that both the circumstances of the past and the very people living through them were remarkably similar to those of today - not in detail, of course, but nevertheless in general. We might think that the myriad of social institutions in which we participate have an instrumental role in shaping our behaviour, and they do... but the parallel responses to ostensibly very different situations are interesting.

For example, offsetting. In the modern era this is synonymous with climate change : it's pretty unavoidable for all of us to have to burn at least some carbon, but we try and atone for our sins by paying other people to plant trees on our behalf. In the medieval era, the unavoidable activity was sin itself, especially of the hack-thy-neighbour-and-steal-his-land variety. Instead of a fearsome planetary response, they feared divine wrath. Hence the evolution of monasteries to offset the sin of the wider world, quite literally by praying it all away. Monasteries, in some ways, are not so very different from the aviation industry. Or perhaps, as Jones suggests, to multi-national tech corporations, having power and influence far beyond their physical locations.

Political parallels are of course ten-a-penny : from the "build back better" approach of the Emperor Justinian, to concerns over mass migration or the fragmentation of Europe into a plethora of petty kingdoms; censorship in universities*; or crusades against heretics as foolish as any "war against abstractions... see, in our times, the War on Terror, War on Drugs, etc." But in popular culture too, with Arthur and Roland being the superheroes of their day, and sports : with jousting described as a cross between polo, gambling, rugby and cage fighting. Jones does a commendable job, perhaps better than anyone else, of making the people of the past feel just like us were it not for their different conditions. Despite concentrating heavily on the great and the good, it's a marvellously de-romanticised tale of basically normal people. The ineptitude of modern politicians begins to seem a lot more understandable when set against the idiots of the past, who have plagued us since time immemorial.

* Jones is quite clearly not one of the libertarian "free speech" ilk, and the comparison is interesting. The importance of actually having good-faith discussions and speaking truth to power, and not just saying things because you want to offend people, is sometimes overlooked. 

Possibly the most interesting comparison is the invention of the printing press. Suddenly information could be distributed at massively larger rates at low cost. As with social media today, the effects were complex and unpredictable. While initially the sale of indulgences were a boon for the Church, when Luther's theses went viral, the result was just the opposite. And it was this, Jones argues, that brought about the end of medieval Europe and instigated the transition to the modern world.

Jones is careful not to push his analogies too far. If I have a critique, it's that if anything he's too cautious about this. A bit more development on this underlying themes would have been most welcome : I would have liked for him to venture a thesis on what defines the similarities and differences to our ancestors. It feels a bit like there's something deeper under the surface that Jones never quite reaches for, which is a shame. But should he ever decide to do something a bit more explicitly about drawing parallels and lessons from the past, I would be all over it.

Not that this really spoils anything. As an introductory overview to medieval European history - and it's pretty well exclusively European - this feels as good as anything you'll find anywhere. I'm going to give this one a solid 8, maybe 9/10 - excellent stuff, does exactly what it says on the tin, but just a bit too limited in intent.