The New York Times bestselling author returns with an epic history of the medieval world—a reappraisal of an era whose legacy and lessons we are still living with today.
... [a] magnificent doorstop ... A thousand years race by in a terrifically colourful and compelling narrative history, with all the confidence, bravura and swift judgments essential to an overview of such a vast time span. Jones also possesses a keen eye for how the ideas and passions of the medieval era are with us still ... Equally praiseworthy is its freedom from any queasy, muddy undercurrents of obsequious apology and guilt that dog so much contemporary western historiography. It’s always reasonable and fair ... There is plenty of fresh research here too, especially to do with historical changes in climate ... explains the movements of the period with crystal clarity, but it’s as a sequence of potted biographies that it really excels ... Jones’s history is a hugely impressive achievement, bustling and sizzling with life on every page — he even makes the invention of double-entry book-keeping (Italy, 14th century) interesting. This is now simply the best popular history of the Middle Ages there is.
Jones presents a procession of kings, clerics, conquerors and artists, producing a lively history that often reads like a novel. But he enriches his narrative by carefully balancing the flow of personalities with historical anecdotes and era-defining events ... He reduces his seemingly unending collection of stories, anecdotes, potential digressions and alluring tangents to their essentials, highlighting the common threads that run through history ... As each piece of the puzzle is placed into position, the modern world gradually comes into view ... Even his footnotes are designed to connect the story line to the contemporary world... These are notes meant to engage the reader and carry the major themes of the book forward ... the narrative sometimes skips around...But it permits Jones to explore the issues that defined the Middle Ages and demonstrate how each development was a step in the evolution of Europe. It’s an approach that allows the reader to connect all the dots ... To be sure, Powers and Thrones is not without its limitations. The book retraces a lot of familiar ground covered by other scholars, and the reader should not expect a deep dive into the period’s military, linguistic, literary or legal history. But, in the end, Powers and Thrones does what a general history of the Middle Ages should do. It provides the reader with a framework for understanding a complicated subject, and it tells the story of an essential era of world history with skill and style.
If you’ve never thought about the Middle Ages, or assumed it was too distant to be relevant, this book is a good place to start. Jones has a knack for gripping detail and vivid evocation ... Jones gives us a complex, ambivalent Middle Ages where East and West are deeply intertwined, and where you have to understand Islam, the Mongols, the steppe and the Baltics as much as the monasteries of Italy, the universities of France, the fortresses of Wales and the knights of, okay, everywhere ... None of his many stories have cardboard heroes or villains, only humans facing tough decisions ... organized chronologically around social groups that, at any given time, were enjoying a moment of prominence. This approach humanizes the past, but it also leaves out a lot of important people ... This is still an exclusively political and military history. Readers new to the Middle Ages might be left thinking that’s all there is ... These omissions weaken Jones’s overall mission; he really wants to convince us that the Middle Ages are worth our time and inform our era. Asterisks throughout the book reach for similarities with our own experiences...Some of these associations are more convincing than others ... he never acknowledges how extensively we already live with the Middle Ages, and he never tells us exactly why we should care. Where are we most like medieval people, and where are they unrecognizable to us? ... In an age when medieval culture is easily and explicitly repurposed for ill, we are lucky to have a book that insists on portraying Europe’s deep connections with other parts of the world and that wants to rehydrate the Middle Ages back from the flat, racist version. We are luckier still to have a book that narrates the past so thoroughly, vividly and joyfully. But writing a history of empire, pillage, bloodthirstiness and dogma cannot be done in a vacuum, ignoring the dark side of their appeal. Jones slightly underestimates his readers if he thinks it can.
