Dan Snow's History Hit - A New History of the Middle Ages with Dan Jones

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

Do the 21st Century and the Middle Ages really share that much in common? Climate change, pandemics, technological disruption, interconnected global trade and networks may all seem like modern phenomena but according to historian and author Dan Jones, they were very part of the Middles Ages as well. Examining a millennium of history Dan Jones guides History Hit's Dan Snow through a re-examination of the Middle Ages challenging the Eurocentric view of the period and questioning whether historians and history can ever be truly objective.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We got another Dan on the podcast this time.

We got Dan Jones. He's one of your favourites. I know, I don't mind. I'm fine with it. I've got no ego when it comes to this. Dan Jones, the more impressive of the various Dans who do public history in the UK, during lockdown, he has written a gigantic book, A New History of the Middle Ages. It is really good, this book. You're going to enjoy it a lot. He just tells a gigantic story of this fascinating millennia of history. You'll absolutely love it.

Without more ado, I think we're just going to get into it. Actually, I will just quickly say, lots of people at the moment watching Dan Jones on The Knights Templar. We got that TV show on HistoryHit.tv. Please go and check it out. Lots of people watching that at the moment. Made that a few years ago, but, you know, it stands the test of time. Head over to HistoryHit.tv. You get 30 days free if you sign up now, and you can watch lots of wonderful documentaries,

including by people like Dan Jones. But in the meantime, let's get on with it. Let's get into my chat with Dan Jones himself. Enjoy. Dan Jones, thanks for coming back on the pod, man. Oh, a pleasure. Absolute pleasure. I bet it's a bloody pleasure.

This is a triumph. This is a masterpiece. You're sitting there looking all happy. This is massive. Keep going. I like the praise. Let's do an hour of this. Yeah, exactly. We could. I like the praise. Let's do an hour of this. Yeah, exactly. We could definitely do this. Congratulations. It's such an achievement.

It arrived and I thought, there's no way I'm going to read that. And I've read a huge amount of your book. It's enormous, but it's a page turner. It's a page turner. And I guess why on earth did you decide to chew this bad boy off? Well, there's a couple of reasons. This was partly historical and partly just personal, psychological. The historical is I've written books about the Plantagenets, Templars, Crusaders, some sort of more sort of micro books, Peasants Revolt, Magna Carta. But as I've been writing and going along, the books have sort of got a bit bigger. And the last medieval book I did was about the Crusades.

I really like the big, the epic, the grand sweep of time. But I had this sort of feeling I wanted to do something that wasn't just military or religious or political, but stitched together politics, religion, art, architecture, dynasty, economics, all of those things into one book. And I wanted to just see how big I could go. So I decided, at the suggestion of my publisher, Anthony Cheetham, he's great at making difficult books sound as though they're a walk in the park. I bumped into him at a festival or a sort of history weekend somewhere or other. He said, why don't you do a book that starts with the Saccharine 410 and finishes with the Saccharine 1527? Call it Powers and Thrones. I said, sure. And then that was it. Then I'd kind of committed in his mind, so I had to write it. So A Big History of the Middle Ages felt like something

where there was loads of places to go historically. There would be a challenge narratively that would keep me sort of focused and interested. And then speaking personally and psychologically, I've just turned 40 and it was my 10th book. And I'm sort of superstitious about round numbers. So I felt like I wanted to do a big book that would come out when I was 40 and it would be book number 10. Then that would kind of seal off one chapter of my writing and I could go and do, I'm going to do something quite different next. Yeah, well, it's hard to go bigger. Hard to go bigger, man. So you've mentioned, it's really interesting go bigger hard to go bigger man so you've mentioned it's really interesting you said the older you get the more you find that the idea that historians should

be really objective you just think that's not so you think objectivity is impossible and so this is really reflected in this book particularly the conclusion to each chapters you draw parallels you say i find this speaks to me particularly in the present you don't pretend that you're a disembodied voice floating around just narrating the history of a thousand years ago. No, and I think you're right, or rather I think I'm right, that it's this sort of strive for absolute objectivity, which sometimes we can kid ourselves is the ultimate highest goal of history, is both impossible and in some ways quite silly to pretend we're ever going to get to. And the idea of being fair, balanced, rigorous, critical, self-analytical, all of those would be

components of the strive towards objectivity. I don't dispute any of those. In fact, the older I get, the more committed I am to them. But I think that as you go along as a writer, you just become more confident. And as you get older as a person, you just come to accept who you are and what you're like, and less bothered about trying to please me. I know the kind of history I like to read. And that's the kind of history I'm writing now, which is balanced and deeply researched and thoughtful, I hope, but does have a sort of element of personality to it. And not everyone will like it. But I hope that by injecting that sort of element of personality, I suppose that it makes the stuff leap off the page a little more.

Hip hop lyrics and Millwall football. Well, there's jokes in it as well. And that's the other thing. I used to be very scared about putting jokes in books. And now I like jokes. And look, as I'm going through, I'll give you an example. You mentioned hip hop lyrics. There's a chapter in the book that's about the Renaissance. And it's mostly Italy and the Netherlands. And it's a bit of painting, but it's also literature. And if you're talking about the Renaissance in the Middle Ages,

one of the people you have to talk about is Dante. You have to talk about Petrarch and you have to talk about Dante. And so I was writing a passage in the book about Terza Rima, you know, this tumbling, intricate, interlocking form of poetry that Dante famously used in the Divine Comedy, as we call it, the Commedia. Petrarch also was heavily into, and it'd be very easy to make that stuff extremely boring. As I was writing about it, I was like, this feels really familiar,

like a breakthrough in lyricism where new schemes of rhymes are used. And if you look at Dante, particularly in the Inferno, where these sort of lyrical geniuses are using their new rhyme scheme, their new flow to diss other people unbelievably and pursue really petty beefs. And those beefs are then spilling out, as I describe into the book, into stabbings in the street. I'm like, I've definitely seen this in my own life. This is like West Coast, East Coast hip hop beefing from the 1990s, or like drill rap beefs in East London, North East London today. And I think if I'm making those connections, why not put them in the book? Now, I've put most of the jokes like that, because they are slightly flippant in the footnotes. So you can skip them as you're reading the book,

if you find them irritating, which I'm sure some people will. I just thought it was funny, and worth putting in because if people read that and get a smile out of it as they're learning about the Italian Renaissance, then that's great. One of the things I thought was very striking about your objectivity point, let's get into some of the content, was climate and tech. I mean, it feels like the moment we can't read books about history without everyone talking about technological innovation, climate, disruptive technology here and there, and various different Renaissance's going on the whole time. Carolingians are having one there's one in paris there's loads and it feels like obviously that's because of what we're experiencing around times but it also feels valid right i mean talk to me about the big story climate is a very big story in in your book and can you give me a kind of pricey of what you see

across the entire period from the fall of the western empire up to and beyond the renaissance there's two parts to what you're saying there. I'll address the first first and that'll lead on to climate. So when I sat down to conceive a book about the Middle Ages, I had to be very clear about parameters. What's this book about and what's it not about and what are the things I'm interested in? Because otherwise 700 pages is nowhere near enough if you want to write a completist history of the Middle Ages. One of the greatest books written about the Middle Ages, Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which, looking back from the position of the 70s, investigated the calamitous 14th century as a mirror on the calamitous 20th century.

I thought, well, okay, in what ways can we use the Middle Ages as a mirror on the emerging 21st century? What are the things that get us going today? And are these legitimately things that we can find in the Middle Ages? So I scribbled on a bit of paper on the corkboard, five things, I'll probably forget one of them now and go um and oh a lot, but they were climate, mass migration, pandemic disease, note, I started writing this before COVID. I believe you, man. Don't worry. Technological change and global networks.

Those are the five things. So as I started writing, they were just there in the background to remind myself to come back to these themes. Because one of my observations from writing about the Middle Ages over the years was that you can often find these echoes over the centuries. And since history is, I think, about a dialogue between past and present, you shouldn't ignore them, or you shouldn't pretend they don't exist, or you should lean into them. So the big one turned out to be pandemic disease as I was writing, but now I think it's

climate that people are seeing as one of the important reflections in the book. If we look at the story of climate over the Middle Ages, and by the Middle Ages I'm talking to roughly 1100 years between the two sacks of Rome, 14 and 1527. I start the book with the Roman Empire in its waning days in the West, and say what had made the Roman Empire so successful? Well, there's lots of things that made the Roman Empire so successful. A gigantic military, enormous military spending, sophisticated architecture, a slave state, all of these things made it work. But one of the things was that they were blessed with good climate. The Roman climate optimum was relatively warm, relatively wet, conducive to agriculture around the Mediterranean basin, and made the conditions

for the Roman Empire to flourish. So then with the next chapter we look at, well, why did the Roman Empire in the West collapse in the sort of fourth, fifth centuries AD? One of the reasons can be connected to climate, because if you go back to the fourth century, there's a mega drought in the Far East, which sets in chain waves of migration, the Huns moving west, displacing Goths, the Alans, these quote-unquote barbarian tribes, many of whom seek refuge in the Roman Empire as what you might now call climate migrants, refugees, thereby setting in chain a long process of destabilising within the Western Roman Empire, which ended in its collapse in the 5th century. So all of these things are much more complex than simply saying climate did this, but climate is, or climate change rather, is the

backdrop to this story. The same could be said if we fast forward all the way through to the later Middle Ages, or the high Middle Ages, you know, around the turn of the first millennium, around the year 1000, you start to see climate conditions improving once more. And that may or may not produce, it certainly coincides with periods of rising population in Europe, a period of technological innovation, a period of growing crop yields, and this gives rise to greater wealth in Western European society. The rise of monasticism, the rise of knighthood, all have within their causes changes in the climate. Fast forward another couple of hundred years, 300 years, to the start of the 14th century, the onset of the little ice age,

300 years to the start of the 14th century, the onset of the Little Ice Age, famines, floods, weakening the population, and then in the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death, striking a weakened European population, Western population, producing 40, 50, even 60% mortality. Again, none of these things can simply be explained by reference to climate. However, as we are seeing today at the beginning of the 21st century, climate change provides a backdrop for other forms of change. And some of that is causative and some of that is coincidental. But you can tell a story of the Middle Ages in which there are these great waves of change which you can pinpoint to, in this case, natural fluctuations in regional, super-regional climate on Earth. It does loom so large in your book and reflects our generation,

which is obsessed by changing climate and is already starting to see the impact of what we might think of as quite small fluctuations in temperatures and rainfall. In the same way, China, I mean, I love the way that if you'd written this book 50 years ago, you would not have massive sections about China's lure and impact and the lunar pull that it exerts on Europe, right? Whereas now we think that's the most natural thing in the world. Of course, that's going to be a significant part of this book. Yeah. And again, we're touching on sort of Yeah, and again, we're touching on sort of really elemental historiographical things here. When I went to university in the late 90s, I can remember one of my interviews at Pembroke, Cambridge, where I went, was with John Parry, a brilliant modern 19th century historian.

And he raised a question about historiography and then sort of checked himself and said, oh, no, what have I done? You're just going to start talking about Richard Evans in defensive history, aren't you? Right? Of course I was, because when I was a sixth former, the one book everybody read about the study of history was Richard Evans in defensive history. In fact, a few years ago, I sat on a panel in Jaipur in India with Richard Evans, where we were still talking about Richard Evans in defensive history. It must have been 20 years. I'm actually looking at it now on my bookshelf. There it is. It's a great book, and much like E.H. Carr before it,

it's a text that you just had to absorb if you were from that generation. And Evans was setting out his stall against what he perceived as an attack on history as a discipline by postmodernists who said there's no such thing as objective truth, your whole discipline is futile. And Evans, I mean, I'm probably doing him a massive disservice in summing up his book in one sentence, but I'm sure he'll forgive me because he's a nice man. So look, just because this highest goal of objectivity is probably unattainable doesn't make the study of history unimportant. And I've sort of ruminated on that over the years. And as I made clear from my earlier comments, I've probably diverged somewhat from what I read there.

However, I do believe that we're in dialogue with the past. We shouldn't shy away from it. We have to recognise it. We have to recognise where our interests are leading our analysis and our framing of the past. But we shouldn't shy away from either, because what's the point? What are we doing this for? Why are we telling historical stories? We're engaging with the past. There's no point doing that if you're not going to recognise what motivates us in the present. We're in a situation where climate change is going to be an important challenge for human society across the world over the next century. It just is. It doesn't mean that the human race is going to end. It might not be apocalyptic. It probably

means we're in for a period of enormous worldly change. But it would be silly to ignore this in the past and not to go seeking for understanding of how a changing climate has affected human society in eras before us. Because these examples are here for us to think about, learn from, you know? So in that way, China, it looms larger than it might have done. Quite so. The setup, the preamble is the same. Again, in the early 21st century, China is emerging as a superpower. How long that position will hold, who knows? But it

is at the moment, and people are thinking about it, and it's on our minds. So it would be remiss of me to shy away from it in this story of the Middle Ages, because one of the chapters I enjoyed writing most in this book was the chapter on merchants and the commercial revolution of the later Middle Ages. And I started that chapter with Marco Polo, because one of the things I wanted to do in Powers and Thrones is, as well as have these sort of big ideas about the Middle Ages, have lively pen portraits of the characters from this time, one of whom is Marco Polo. Now, to what degree Marco Polo's reminiscences about his 25 years travelling around the Chinese emperor of the Mongols are fantasy and to what degree they're real. It's something we've been arguing about for generations. I tend to think he

tells the truth about a remarkable story, in the most part, with probably a few embellishments here or misrememberings here or there. But I found using Marco Polo and his travels around the empire of the Khans, a brilliant way to dive into or give us a snapshot of China as it was seen through Western eyes in the later Middle Ages. And I felt that that was important for us to have this vision of what was going on in the Far East, what the links were between Chinese culture, Chinese economy and Western culture and economies, what the understandings were, what the misunderstandings were.

I felt that was important because it was important at the time. I also felt it was important because it's important to us now. So again, we're talking about these reflections back and forth between past and present. You're listening to Dan Snow's History here. Talking dan jones about the middle ages or after this hello i'm james rogers and over on the history hit warfare podcast we're marking the 20th

anniversary of 9-11 we welcome joe ditmar who was on the 105th floor of tower 2 he takes us through his personal experience of surviving 9-11 and his escape on that day. We also welcome Jessica DeLong who provides a different perspective. She served at Ground Zero and she tells us about the efforts to fight the raging fires and evacuate thousands of people via boat. We're also joined by world-leading experts on the history of terrorist hijackings and the history of terror attacks on New York City going back to the 1920s. Join us for this special commemorative week on the History Hit Warfare podcast. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone,

including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Made me think when I was reading it, you're talking about universities and their place, they're supposed to be centres of learning and independent thought, but also supposed to maintain orthodoxies or politicians get very angry at them. China, which you present such a powerful case that Western Christendom is obsessed by what's

going on in the Far East and China. It made me think like, when I was reading these histories I've written in the 70s and 80s when I was younger, and I wasn't reading these things, what are we missing now? Like, what is the Dan Jones in 30 years going to be like? Well, of course, the Middle Ages. I mean, Jesus, it is all about religious schism. That's what I'm into now. You know, like, obviously, you do have a lot of religious schism in there. But what are the things that future Dan Jones is going to be able to

peel out of the Middle Ages, which will speak so profoundly to that audience? Well, I don't know. I mean, it's not Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, unfortunately. I can't go forward and find out. But I had this sneaking suspicion as I was writing. There's a chapter on scholars and on revolution in scientific understanding, particularly from the sort of 12th, 13th into the 14th centuries with the translation movements of the great Islamic libraries, places like Cordova. with the translation movements of the great Islamic libraries in places like Cordova, the reintroduction of Aristotle into the mainstream of Western thought, the introduction of brilliant new technologies, the astrolabe, clocks, windmills, things that were really transformative to society, both in thought and in technological terms.

And I suppose if we fast forward 30 years to what may be the end of the present technological revolution that we're living through, historians at that time may look back on the Middle Ages and place an even higher emphasis on developments in scientific understanding, mathematical understanding, astronomical understanding. You know, if Bezos and Musk have emigrated to the moon or Mars or wherever the hell they're going by that point then maybe we'll be more interested in the origins of astronomy yeah again I can't predict with any certainty what our obsessions will be in 30 years from now but I would bet that whatever they are will be reflected in the way people go

mining the middle ages and every other historical period for that matter. Go on then let's talk about pandemic so you obviously pandemic very important Justinian plague you were totally on trip for everyone else I get that but when pandemic struck and you were locked down with all of your material you're just churning out these words and luckily you had access I guess to all digital archives and you had all the books with you in the house so you you're fine. So you hold up in the house. How did that change your thinking, change your emphasis on pandemic issues in this book? Well, the pandemic changed this book in two ways. The first was it changed the whole way that I wrote it. When I conceived this book, I thought, right, we're going to do 16 chapters. They're going to be thematic as well as chronological, and they're also all going to

start in a particular place that was important in the middle ages i was going to go to one of these places for a week every month 16 months and i was going to write the chapter or make headway on the chapter while i was there so i started off because the book was going to start with the roman empire went to rome and pompeii did some work there second chapter was about the barbarians so i went to ravenna this was january 2020 spent a week in ravenna it was 17 degrees sky was blue i was the only tourist in town it was magnificent and i thought i tell you what i'm onto something here next trip's gonna be where was i gonna go cordova i think to do the first great islamic caliphates and then the pandemic

happened and i thought ah well this is going to delay my travel plans by three or four weeks but don't worry this book will still be a connected series of travelogue based essays about the middle ages and then it became very clear that all of that just had to be junked and go out the window and I'm actually glad in retrospect that that was the case because it would have been a very tedious book to read about my nice holidays and then a bit about the Middle Ages. So the writing of the book, as you've suggested, turned out to be me at home with my library, with Digital Archives, with the London Library very wonderfully staying open and sending books to members. And then, of course, it changed one's perspective on the pandemics of the middle ages it made the testimony

of witnesses to things like the justinianic plague of the 6th century or the black death of the 14th century suddenly far more credible than they might have been otherwise because i mean we had a little panda i mean i don't mean to to trivialise the mortality or the disruption or the misery it's caused people's lives, but in grand historical terms, we had a little piddly pandemic, really, and we were very well set up to cope with it, relatively speaking. Again, not to trivialise the losses. So when you read Procopius talking about the Justinianic Plague

and describing it in these kind of hellish apocalyptic terms of shuttered silent cities and the dead being burned in large numbers. What might have seemed to smack of rhetorical or poetic exaggeration had one read it three years ago, and in Procopius's case it would have smacked that anyway, because he specialised in rhetorical exaggeration. But put that aside, what would have seemed impossible to believe, or hard to believe at any rate, three years ago, suddenly seemed absolutely fair play and probably quite right. So that was part of the process. That being said, I had no idea COVID was coming. But I did have an idea that pandemic disease had played a very important part in the middle ages and was aware that it was likely to play a part in the 21st

century because it was listed as the biggest threat facing the UK higher than Islamic terrorism and I'd not that long before I in fact was I working on the book I may have been working on the book I went out to Tokyo for a week for leisure purposes and was astonished by how many people wearing face masks everywhere and then started thinking well SARS was what was SARS 2004 so thinking hang on that's so the legacy of this epidemic disease that happened really quite a long time ago is still there in the way people are interacting in large crowds so there was a sort of dim sense that this was important stuff but also look you can't really write about the middle ages without the black death playing an enormous part in your thinking it was such a transformative part of the later

middle ages and i knew that and that was very drilled into my thinking about the Middle Ages anyway, because I'd written about the Peasants' Revolt and because I'd written about Plantagenets and because I'd done a lot of work on that particular period and thought over and over and over again about the changes wrought by pandemic disease, particularly in the 14th century. I guess just following on from your earlier China point, a lot of this book takes place outside what we used to call kind of Western Christian when I was growing up. I think, again, 50 years ago, this book would have gone from the west coast of Ireland to

the Danube, right? Or maybe the Black Sea or something. And, you know, a lot of this book takes place in the Middle East, in Central Asia, in parts of Africa. And so many of these books do now that come out, Peter Frankopan's staff and Michael Scott's. We're realizing that the interconnectedness of the global economy of Eurasian and African economies long before it was once thought they were a thing. So that was something that once you write that up there on the court board,

presumably the evidence just starts flowing out. Yeah, well, I mean, there probably is a degree of confirmation bias. Once it's on the court board, you go looking for it, right? On the other hand, Peter Frankopan's Silk Roads is, for me, one of the greatest modern works of history, you know, of this century. And it's a superb work, and in some ways, it shifted paradigms for popular history, partly because Peter is such a brilliant historian and partly because it sold like hot cakes and showed that it was possible to write this kind of world history for a mass market and so anyone approaching a big epic work of history over a long period has to draw confidence and inspiration from that book in particular, and realise that the game has sort of shifted

and that you can't write these little sort of totally Eurocentric books. I think there's a very interesting history of the Middle Ages, which I am not presently competent to write, which is to write it with Europe effectively left out, if you like. The Middle Ages in the rest of the world is a very interesting book in which the perspective revolves through Africa, through Asia, through the Americas, and Europe is put in its global place as a sort of backwater. That's not what this book is, because that's not the historian that I am at the moment at any rate. But you're right, look, 50 years ago, it would have been

perfectly acceptable to sit down and say the Middle Ages and write it really as a history of popes and kings. And the centrepiece would have been Frederick Hohenstaufen at war with the papacy. And the Crusades would have been the kind of central part and the relationship between the great religions of the book in the Middle East would be about as far east as you went with your storytelling. But that's not the world we're in now. And to write that would be hopelessly old-fashioned

and would be to ignore a lot of great stories as well. And we've talked a lot about big, grand ideas, but one of the things I try and do with all my books is make them full of really great anecdotes and huge characters. And you're just cutting off an enormous source of those if you confine yourself to Western Europe. We've got the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan at the moment. When somebody uses medieval as a slur, meaning primitive and savage, how does that make you

feel? I just sort of roll my eyes a little bit. I think that it's just lazy, right? Just lazy terminology. It's lazy because it's hackneyed. And anyone who's read George Orwell's Politics in the English Language will bridle at the use of hackneyed phrases and platitudes. And so if your go-to adjective for something bad and cruel is medieval, that's just lazy thinking. There's a sort of wave of medievalist thought that bridles so enormously at the use of medieval as a pejorative

that people have started writing articles and books saying, no, no, the Middle Ages was actually completely fine. The Middle Ages was full of great art and really nice people. Stop having a go at it. Right, that's silly. The medieval world was no less cruel than our own world. There was access to fewer weapons of mass destruction and, in fact, more limited technology. And if we're being objective, what's the deadliest century of them all? I think it's the 20th century, isn't it? That being said, because I think it's lazy to just use medieval as a pejorative, I do think that gives you an opportunity as a medievalist to say, well, hang on a second, there's more perhaps to the Middle Ages than just people being beheaded

and oppressed and going to war over religion. And in some ways, I sort of welcome that opportunity to say, this is a pretty interesting time, and there's really cool stuff happening, as well as the usual human cruelty and misery, which is a part of every period of history, if you want it to be. That's true, buddy. You know, what's worse than medieval history being used as a pejorative? No one talking about it at all. Exactly. Look, I want people to talk about the Middle Ages, and maybe one could say any publicity is good publicity. Okay, I've got a question now.

It's a weird niche question here. Long-time listeners will forgive me. Can I come back to one of my little bugbears? You mentioned Hohenstaufen earlier, these extraordinary leaders that emerged and put together fairly short-lived empires, right? Whether it's Charlemagne, Henry II of England, Hohenstaufen. What is it about our little weird peninsula of Eurasia? Why are we so fractious? This question that many scholars have asked about the Middle Ages, why was no one able to put together a coherent successor to Rome in the West? Whereas in the East, you do get very successful gigantic empires, one of which China, lasts to this day. What's going on in our little neck of the woods?

Well, I suppose perhaps one argument would be the prisoners of geography approach. So you would say that actually this little peninsula of the Eurasian continent has quite a lot of mountain ranges and rivers, and quite an extraordinary variation in climate from south to north, and sufficient barriers to physically holding together empire and at the same time deep pockets of rich territory which can make individual rulers really quite powerful over relatively small areas. That might be one reason why it's been traditionally quite hard to hold together. That said, you know, the Roman Empire did a sound job of it for hundreds of years. But if we think about what had to be done in order to hold this area together under imperial rule, it required military spending on a scale that dwarfs what the Americans spend on the military today.

Even more militarised society than late 20th century United States, plus bigger spending. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. And a fully operative slave state in order to produce the infrastructure of empire.

That's a hell of a system to get going. Once it was going, as in the time of Augustus until the 5th century, it largely was possible to keep it going. But in order to construct something like that afresh, well, that proved beyond the ken of anybody between the Romans and Napoleon. I mean, Charlemagne, yeah, for his lifetime, really, held together something approximating what Napoleon held. But it's proven reliably extremely hard to do. Then again, you know, if we scale it up and look at your counter example, the Eastern Asian empires, let's look at the Mongols. Genghis Khan and his three, four successors do manage to create this absolutely enormous contiguous land empire. But what does it take? Again, it's the same question as the Romans.

What does it take to do this? It took Genghis Khan complete reorganisation of Mongolian tribal society, complete reorganisation on meritocratic militarised grounds, a system that was meritocratically militarised rather than tribal as it had been. Then it took an approach to conquest which said, if you give us the slightest hint of dissent, if you don't surrender immediately, as soon as you hear the first thunder of Mongol hooves in the distance, we will burn your city to the ground, kill every single person inside it, and pile your heads up. Baghdad, 1258. The slightest hint of dissent from the Abbasid caliph results in the global head of Islam being rolled up in a carpet and trampled over by horses, and all the books in his library thrown in the river

and half the population of Baghdad killed. That's what it takes, right? So perhaps one answer is, what does it actually take to build one of these big empires? Such extreme fortuity of conditions and then extremity of methods that all empire building is really quite difficult to do and much easier to undo than to

hold. Plantagenet family, too nice. You heard it here first. Too nice. Dan Jones, your big hero. Actually, okay, can we solve the debate? The medieval period is between the two sacks of Rome, is it? It's between the Goths in 410 and the Emperor, Henry VIII's goddamn uncle-in-law in the early, what, 1520? 1527. Charles V's out-of-control troops sack Rome, incidentally causing Henry VIII some marital difficulty. I think the longest possible definition of the Middle Ages is from 410 AD, Goths under Alaric sack Rome, 1527, out of control imperial troops loyal to Charles V sack Rome. Those are the biggest bookends you can put on the Middle Ages. Those are the bookends I've put on it in Powers and Thrones and I think that gives you the scope and shape to look at

everything from barbarian tribes creating the roots of modern European nations, the rise of one of the great world religions in Islam, the rise of monasticism and knights, commercial revolutions, artistic and architectural revolutions, religious schism. All of that is contained in the story of the Middle Ages. And that's the story I've told in Powers and Thrones.

From the fall of Rome to the printing press. Nice. Dan Jones, thank you very much indeed for coming on this pod again. You know, it's really why I keep writing in order to do this. I mean, I know. I get it.

But just write a little monograph next time you can come on anyway. I'm trying too hard. Is that what you're telling me? Exactly. You're overshooting the runway. Okay, man. Thank you.

Always a pleasure, man. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours,'s history i really appreciate listening to this podcast i love doing these podcasts it's a highlight of my career it's the best thing i've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic.

And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.