Transcript

EP16 Powers Thrones and Dan Jones

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 33 min · 16,383 words · 95 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "EP16 Powers Thrones and Dan Jones", an episode of Dan Carlin published November 5, 2021 (1 h 33 min, about 16,383 words). It mentions 33 people, works and ideas, including Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones, The Middle Ages, Roman Empire, The Franks.

What this episode is about

Dan Jones's book, "Powers and Thrones," offers a sweeping exploration of the medieval period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, covering significant cultural and historical developments across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. With its blend of established and newly uncovered historical insights, the book serves as an engaging and comprehensive resource for anyone interested in the complex interplay of cultures and trends that shaped this pivotal thousand-year era.

Key takeaways

  • History isn't static; it's a living dialogue, constantly reshaped by fresh discoveries and societal concerns.
  • Dan Jones marries medieval nostalgia with cutting-edge research, making history feel like delicious comfort food.
  • Interdisciplinary collaboration—radiologists and climatologists—informs historical narratives, proving the past is ripe for modern reinterpretation.
  • The Viking expedition to the Americas is just one surprise; climate change has always narrated our historical dramas.
  • A thousand years of history in 656 pages? That's not audacious; that's a time-traveling Netflix binge for history buffs!

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Dan Jones, The Middle Ages, Powers and Thrones, The Plantagenets
  2. – 20:00: Roman Empire, The Franks, The Middle Ages, Charles the Great (Charlemagne)
  3. – 30:00: Charles the Great (Charlemagne), The Franks, The Middle Ages, Leonardo da Vinci
  4. – 40:00: The Middle Ages, Powers and Thrones, Roman Empire, The Crusades
  5. – 50:00: The Franks, The Crusades, The Middle Ages, Charles the Great (Charlemagne)
  6. – 1:00:00: Roman Empire, The Franks, Crusaders
  7. – 1:10:00: The Black Death, Justinian, Dan Jones, Roman Empire
  8. – 1:20:00: Roman Empire, The Middle Ages
  9. – 1:30:00: Powers and Thrones, The Middle Ages, Dan Jones, Crusaders

Notable quotes from "EP16 Powers Thrones and Dan Jones"

  • So i am a dan jones fan and many of you are too no doubt he's one of our finest writers of history for the period in the middle ages you know the fall of rome to the renaissance a lot of stuff that made up.
    about Dan Jones · at
  • Books forever but all of a sudden you have new stuff on old stories right who doesn't love that and powers and thrones has a bunch of those or you're going oh really so this…
    about Powers and Thrones · at
  • I yeah right so you're completely and utterly and 100 correct you know the framing of the middle ages has to be wrong you know that's that's that's how the when the middle ages first was conceived in the 16th century it was.
    about Roman Empire · at
  • Famous for producing charlemagne the king of the franks who had himself crowned in the year 800 as the first roman emperor of the reborn western roman empire which claimed to be the holy roman empire.
    about Charles the Great (Charlemagne) · at
  • A process like nuclear fusion between the franks and the vikings so the franks under charlemagne around the turn of the eighth into ninth centuries had begun expanding from a…
    about The Franks · at
  • The crusades and i think the crusades 30 years on from the norman conquest the first crusade that really is a historical turning point that's something that everybody in the whole of the western.
    about The Crusades · at
  • And then it rips into the byzantine the eastern roman empire and you have these accounts from byzantine chroniclers of lockdowns of thousands of people dying each day of bodies piling up in the.
    about The Byzantine Empire · at
  • To 60 percent of populations wherever it struck this was pretty apocalyptic traditionally we've you know i think that the the historians have been on a journey towards saying well i mean maybe the.
    about The Black Death · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Dan Jones — Person · Main guest · 8 mentions · first at
    Interview subject; discussed his new book on the Middle Ages and how modern research (climate, pandemics, networks) reshapes historical narratives.
  • Charles the Great (Charlemagne) — Person · Referenced historical figure · 6 mentions · first at
    Used as a key example of Carolingian power and the attempt to revive Roman imperial legitimacy in the West (crowned emperor in 800).
  • Justinian — Person · Referenced historical figure · 4 mentions · first at
    Referenced as the namesake of the Justinianic Plague; discussion centers on pandemic disease in the 6th-century Eastern Roman (Byzantine) world.
    Pandemics or terrible disease outbreaks the justinianic plague in the sixth century unnamed for the great byzantine emperor justinian is a form of yesenia pestis it's this it's it's.
  • William the Conqueror — Person · Referenced historical figure · 2 mentions · first at
    Central example in the discussion of Norman “success” and the role of exceptional leadership in 1066 and the remaking of England.
    Who is it makes these great plays that puts them out there well in england william the conqueror all bets are off for a norman conquest of england without william the conqueror i find very hard to imagine not you know not just the sort of.
  • Leonardo da Vinci — Person · Referenced historical figure · 2 mentions · first at
    Serves as an accessible “bridge” figure at the end of the Middle Ages/early Renaissance—used to illustrate how evidence and empathy increase as sources become richer.
    Like us you know recognizable to a modern eye and so and somewhat more sympathetic so for example it's much easier for us to sympathize and empathize and feel some kind of fraternity with leonardo da vinci at the end of the middle ages.
  • Alaric — Person · Referenced historical figure · 2 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as the leader associated with the Sack of Rome (410), used as a landmark event in the slow “collapse” of the Western Roman Empire.
    Western roman empire there are cataclysmic events the sack of rome by alaric and the goths in 410 a.d being the most obvious of them it's not like the western roman empire just falls to bits in one day.
  • Robert C. Davis — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Cited for a framing quote about historiography: history is not simply present politics projected onto the past—used to discuss objectivity vs perspective.
    That's the kind that's the big philosophy of what i've been doing anyway there's a line i like from an ohio state university historian named robert c davis who says history is often is not our present politics projected on to the past.
  • Paul Cobb — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Identified as likely author of a book presenting the Crusades from an Arabic/Islamic perspective; used to highlight the rarity of cross-tradition scholarship.
    German scholarship and islamic scholarship and there are very few writers you mentioned earlier on a book about the crusades from the islamic perspective and i'm going to i'm going to place a small bet that you're thinking about paul cobb.

Books & papers

  • Powers and Thrones — Book · Primary recommendation · 7 mentions · first at
    Dan Jones's new book covering the entire period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance in the European, Middle Eastern, North African zone.
  • Crusaders — Book · Referenced work · 7 mentions · first at
    A previous book by Dan Jones mentioned in passing.
    Probably already read his stuff the plantagenets was great the wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta the book covers the entire period from the fall of rome to the renaissance in the european middle eastern north.
  • The Plantagenets — Book · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at
    A previous book by Dan Jones mentioned in passing.
    Then you need to pick up dan jones's new book powers and thrones he's with us today to talk about it but you've probably already read his stuff the plantagenets was great the wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta.
  • Magna Carta — Book · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at
    A previous book by Dan Jones mentioned in passing.
    Plantagenets was great the wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta the book covers the entire period from the fall of rome to the renaissance in the european middle eastern north african sort of zone.
  • A Christmas Carol — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at
    A previous book by Dan Jones mentioned in passing.
    Then you need to pick up dan jones's new book powers and thrones he's with us today to talk about it but you've probably already read his stuff the plantagenets was great the wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta.
  • The Wars of the Roses — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    A previous book by Dan Jones mentioned in passing.
    Then you need to pick up dan jones's new book powers and thrones he's with us today to talk about it but you've probably already read his stuff the plantagenets was great the wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta.

Concepts & topics

  • The Middle Ages — Concept · Core topic · 17 mentions · first at
    Central theme of the episode, discussing the period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance.
    The wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta the book covers the entire period from the fall of rome to the renaissance in the european middle eastern north african sort of zone 656 pages i looked it up covering a.
  • Roman Empire — Concept · Core topic · 11 mentions · first at
    Central theme of the episode, discussing the fall of Rome and its impact on the Middle Ages.
  • The Franks — Concept · Key argument · 14 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a significant tribe that moved into the territories ruled by the Western Roman Empire.
  • The Crusades — Concept · Key argument · 4 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a significant event in the Middle Ages, with comparisons to modern conflicts.
  • The Black Death — Concept · Key argument · 4 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a significant event in the Middle Ages, with comparisons to modern pandemics.
  • The Byzantine Empire — Concept · Key argument · 4 mentions
    Discussed as a significant empire that continued after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
  • new renaissance — Concept · Key argument · 2 mentions · first at
    Discussed as the period marking the end of the Middle Ages.
    The wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta the book covers the entire period from the fall of rome to the renaissance in the european middle eastern north african sort of zone 656 pages i looked it up covering a.
  • The Mongol Conquests — Concept · Key argument · 3 mentions
    Discussed as a significant event that impacted the Middle Ages.
    I think maybe so the speed of conquest and this is something you've obviously worked a lot on is comparable with genghis khan's conquests you know that.
  • The Huns — Concept · Key argument · 2 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a significant tribe that impacted the Roman Empire.
    These favorite topics of mine with all the latest stuff right the latest evidence and theories and i mean i remember for example when you got to the part about the famous arrival of the huns into the roman world and you threw the.
  • The Carolingians — Concept · Key argument · 2 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a significant dynasty that emerged after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
    By politicians and then they were done away with by a dynasty who we now call the carolingians named after charles martel but most famous for producing charlemagne the king of the franks who had himself crowned.
  • The Age of Enlightenment — Concept · Referenced concept · 3 mentions
    Mentioned in passing as a period following the Middle Ages.
  • The Age of Imperialism — Concept · Referenced concept · 3 mentions
    Mentioned in passing as a period following the Middle Ages.
  • The Age of Reason — Concept · Referenced concept · 3 mentions
    Mentioned in passing as a period following the Middle Ages.
  • The Age of Revolution — Concept · Referenced concept · 3 mentions
    Mentioned in passing as a period following the Middle Ages.
  • The American Civil War — Concept · Referenced concept · 2 mentions
    Mentioned in passing as a modern event compared to historical events.
  • The Great Plague — Concept · Referenced concept · 2 mentions
    Mentioned in passing as a historical pandemic.
  • The Tudors — Concept · Referenced concept · 2 mentions
    Mentioned in passing as a dynasty following the Middle Ages.
    Or see the foundations of them in the past so that's why we can write new histories of be the tudor dynasty the plantagenet dynasty the second world war you know as you know…
  • The Plantagenet Dynasty — Concept · Referenced concept · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in passing as a dynasty during the Middle Ages.
    Or see the foundations of them in the past so that's why we can write new histories of be the tudor dynasty the plantagenet dynasty the second world war you know as you know…
  • The Second World War — Concept · Referenced concept · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in passing as a modern event compared to historical events.
    Or see the foundations of them in the past so that's why we can write new histories of be the tudor dynasty the plantagenet dynasty the second world war you know as you know…

Full transcript with timestamps

it's hardcore history so i am a dan jones fan and uh many of you are too no doubt he's one of our finest writers of history for the period in the middle ages you know the fall of rome to the renaissance a lot of stuff that made up what a lot of us grew up with loving i mean knights in shining armor crusades norman saxons i mean this is pretty par for the course for a lot of history fans and um if that's your jam then you need to pick up dan jones's new book powers and thrones he's with us today to talk about it but uh but you've probably already read his stuff the plantagenets was great the wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta the book covers the entire period from the fall of rome to the renaissance in the european middle eastern north african sort of zone 656 pages i looked it up covering a thousand years that's audacious isn't it but just like there's a lot of interesting stuff you can glean from a

very narrowly focused you know targeted work on a on a small chunk of history so you can really delve into it turn over every stone uh examine it to the nth degree there are advantages to doing the opposite you get much larger sense of how cultures are working together and pinging off each other larger sense of trends impacting over time right they all have their place and and jones's book is one of those that um if you actually retained what's in it it would fill in your foundational knowledge base for a huge chunk of time and a large important region geographically speaking it's a page turner there's a lot of historical figures that we've all fallen in love with that fall into a book like this what i love about it though is is at the same time that it's comforting if you've always been interested in this stuff to read this book it's comforting for me anyway he's got all the new stuff right

all the new discoveries all the clarifications all the overturned myths we've talked before about how interesting it is now that the area of historical knowledge is aided not just by historians and archaeologists the people that have always sort of had that as their purview but tons of other scientific disciplines that working with these people are making the kinds of discoveries and datings possible that we never could have imagined i mean just the other day there was a story and you may have seen it confirming certainly what many of us had already known that the vikings had arrived in the americas but but coming up with a pretty solid date for it and they they said 10 21 you know 1021 adce and when you read the story of how they came up with the date the radiologists that are involved the climatologists that are involved i mean it is so many um experts from so many varied fields working together to get us this

information anyway it's fascinating it's it's a part of what makes the modern historical uh study so interesting to people you know who've been reading the books forever but all of a sudden you have new stuff on old stories right who doesn't love that and powers and thrones has a bunch of those or you're going oh really so this major invasion happened because of a climate change that they can now prove was going on i mean it's that kind of thing so i loved it um i think you'll enjoy it too and if you're a dan jones fan i don't have to tell you uh what he writes are sort of page turners uh in in terms of being able to pick out really interesting things uh it's it's fabulous and so is he and he's on the show today um and so without further ado and i hope you like this but i'm just sort of fan going out it's more for me than for you but you know you guys pay the bills around here so i'll let you listen in

uh dan jones ladies and gentlemen the first thing i want to say is that this book you know i think i tried to describe it once as comfort food for a history fan like yours truly because i grew up reading stuff like this but what i love about your book is it incorporates all these favorite topics of mine with all the latest stuff right the the latest evidence and and theories and i mean i remember for example when you got to the part about the famous uh arrival of the huns into the roman world and you threw the the climate element in there and talked about is it is it called a killian juniper plant or whatever that they used for climate dating i was absolutely enthralled so start off i mean there's a lot of people that think that history is sort of a set thing and because once you know what happens nothing changes but talk to me about you know like i said a guy yours truly i was reading this stuff at 14 years old

1312 and there's so much new stuff in a story that i thought i knew um that's pretty normal though isn't it i mean we're always updating stuff aren't we well firstly i mean thank you for those kind comments and i'm glad it did like the book reminded you of of those classic histories that you like to read because i like to read those histories too and i i wanted to to create a book that had that feel like you want to turn the pages like i could give this to an intelligent 13 year old and get them like buzzed on medieval history um but if we're talking about i suppose we're going pretty deep here early on like what is history and history is a dialogue i think between the past and present although in a book like i've just written it's narrative it's chronological it starts at the beginning of the middle ages and follows the story through to the end there's always new research going on in lots of different areas

there's always and even more than that every generation has its own preoccupations it seeks to somehow see reflected or uh or see the foundations of them in the past so that's why we can write new histories of be the tudor dynasty the plantagenet dynasty the second world war you know as you know the mongol conquest or whatever each generation because there's there's always new research to draw on but even more than that there's new there's new societal preoccupations to reflect you know what so one of those classic books that um that you've referenced i don't know i mean tell me if you enjoyed this book as well when you were growing up was uh barbara tupman's a distant mirror oh sure sure have it up in the bookshelf yeah i can see it from here i mean that's that's that's a great book that's that's a book that takes the for the calamitous 14th century and it's written in i think 1974 and uses the the 14th century as as the

title suggests a distant mirror on the 20th another time of war and uh instability in europe and plague and social turmoil and when i started writing powers and thrones i set out to write this history of the middle ages i thought how do we do that for the 21st century how do we look at the middle ages with with a sense of what matters to us today and and and thereby create a form of empathy in the mind of the the reader and so when i when i tackled the middle ages i was looking for things that i actually had a list of things i thought were were going to be important were already important we're going to become more important as the first half of the 21st century went on and that list was climate change mass migration pandemic disease technological change and global networks so as i was putting together this new history of the middle ages i didn't seek to just only look at those things but i thought

if if we can lift those out of the research lift those out of the storytelling then this will make the middle ages somehow seem approachable to this you know be an intelligent 13 year old reading history for the first time or you know someone of our kind of generation reading history for the 15th time that's the kind that's the big philosophy of what i've been doing anyway there's a line i like from an ohio state university historian named robert c davis who says history is often is not our present politics projected on to the past and that makes it sound artificial but the way i look at it is like when i'm reading your book and you're you're referencing climate change tipping off certain major historical events i recall that when i was younger they still talked about climate change doing this but because we understand and are living through more climate change than we were when i was younger i think we get it better if

that makes sense like you had talked about like globalized networks well you know you understood that in 1982 also but boy you understand it's so much better now when we live in it and it's so in your face so i think that's just reflective of our of a better understanding that we have of how those things go now in our world and then it's easier to imagine how they might have impacted an earlier world yeah and i think that his history as you know well goes through like trends yeah in terms of it's it's kind of scholarly because it's a fashion yeah and some fashions right and sometimes that every so often someone will come along and say you know what history should be objective it should be about truth seeking and truth alone and the facts let's stick to the fact and that that will be fashionable for a little while and then some bright spark will go you know what there is you don't have to be a kind of french

relativist philosopher to realize there is no objective truth there's there's perspectives you know the the relativity defines how we think about the world and uh so as a historian as i've gotten older and a bit more confident i suppose i've stopped um trying to shy away from this feeling that we or i've tried to avoid this feeling we shouldn't project our own concerns into the our study of the past because otherwise what's history for history's like about creating a context for the now and so it's it's not just inevitable it's natural and it's probably advisable that we take with us or as long as we acknowledge them we take with us our our preconceptions our prejudices our concerns our angst our worries when we go looking at the past man otherwise why are we bothering what are we going to learn from it if you know if it's not there to give us context somewhere now well and i think sometimes if you're not looking for

something you don't find it and sometimes you don't know you should be looking for it and i think certain things like i'll just reference the climate again because to me that was such an obvious i mean i remember as a kid hearing about the the the collapse of the bronze age and climate was one of the things that they threw out there drought starvation all those things but i think when you look at our situation say well what's our situation gonna be like climate wise in 100 years 200 years it helps sort of inform the listener to go back and go well gee how bad can it get and when was it bad and how did they deal with it how does an ancient society deal with some of the problems we're looking at so i mean i find it um not it's funny it's not just informative and useful as a comparative tool to me there's a little bit of something that's comforting i mean um you know if you've been through something before it's a

little less scary um even if you've never been through it quite this way so let me talk because you have you have to frame something like this right if you're going to start a story in the in the middle as you do right the middle ages start in the middle you have to have sort of a touchstone right and the touchstone is the obvious one it's it's rome right so you have you have a civilization that starts as a city-state around the time you know the persians are invading greece right so the 500s it's really and then it goes through the republican period and then it goes through the imperial period and by the time the middle ages start you have this ancient and i mean i try to think about our modern world now which hasn't existed if you say the modern world starts in the renaissance or i mean we haven't existed now as long as rome was around as a as a as a civilization that could trace its roots back to something real

um explain a little bit on how this on what happens to a world when a touchstone that's that concrete goes away i yeah right so you're completely and utterly and 100 correct you know the framing of the middle ages has to be wrong you know that's that's uh that's how the when the middle ages first was conceived in the 16th century it was conceived as by definition the bit between the collapse of the roman empire in the west and the reformation and the the sort of the as you know it's a protestant idea but the scales falling away from the eyes of the of the great enlightened new christians of the 16th century and you're also absolutely right to say to point to this longevity of rome as compared to the longevity of our quite quite modern world if we go back to 16th century to date the origins of that what happens when an empire like that falls to bits i think is in one sense the answer is not very much

because it happens relatively slowly now even though in the collapse of the western roman empire there are cataclysmic events the sack of rome by alaric and the goths in 410 a.d being the most obvious of them it's not like the western roman empire just falls to bits in one day i suppose here's a here's a a not very encouraging dystopian read on the 21st century okay if we were to if we were to hypothesize and i personally hope this doesn't come to pass but if we were to hypothesize that we're seeing the end of the american the end of the united states as a superpower right and we're some future historians writing from the the 22nd century we might look back on say 9 11 as a spectacular uh you know assault on the heart of america that wrought uh great uh chaos and and tragic death and uh and was horrifying and shocking uh around the world but what we wouldn't say was and at that moment the amer you know

america ceased to be a superpower would say that was that that was some that was some crazy you know there were there were crazy repercussions to that uh that one event but to everybody who lived in the 20 years subsequently it didn't really look like america collapsed it okay let's hope that's a dystopian uh sort of uh conjecture on my part but i think you see what i'm saying so i think if we if we project that idea back to the collapse of rome there were big moments such as well rome's being sacked by alex or i don't know i'm talking to you from the uk uh britannia being sort of um jettisoned like booted off into into into space from uh from the roman empire these in retrospect look like huge moments but on the other hand i think if you were living through it there'd just been a time of rising instability uh in different places and at different times which over the course of several generations added up to the final

collapse of the western roman empire but you know even if we think about the distance in time between 410 a.d sac of rome and 476 you know the last recognized western roman empire that's 66 years like in terms of human lifespans of any age that's that's quite a long time so it's a what am i looking what's the analogy i'm looking for it's it's a boiling of the frog i suppose does that make sense absolutely absolutely absolutely no it makes sense i always describe it as um you know being cut off from the equivalent of the global information super highway if you're britain when when uh rome says you're on your own and whatnot but as many historians have pointed out if you're actually living in italy at this time period closer to where the center of of roman activity was things continued differently it's the hinterlands that feel it first and most strongly and recover the slowest so let's talk a little about the recovery

because that's one of those periods that um i don't think enough people yours truly included know enough about and that's the the carolingian uh the attempts to recreate something of rome's grandeur from the ashes a couple centuries later and they're connected to these people that it's funny because the terminology will kill you when you start using terms like franks to talk about a tribe that the romans had dealt with and you're still using franks to describe crusaders in the 1100s um who maybe talk about this because it's almost like when you talk about the roman ashes the the entities that begin to arise from the ashes as you said that you look at and say they didn't know then that they're going to play a huge role but we looking back on it now realize these francs are going to be an important entity whatever those francs are who are the franks well the franks are one of i mean originally one of many

tribes who move into the uh the territories that were ruled by the western roman empire and ceased to be ruled by the western roman empire as these barbarian tribe quote unquote barbarian tried to move in but you're you're absolutely right i mean look if we're placing bets in let's say the sixth or even the seventh century a.d as to who's who's gonna be around in a thousand years is it the franks is it the begundians is it the lombards is it the visigoths the austrogoths the vandals the swaby you know there's all of these different tribal groups moving around what had been the western roman empire um and at different times a lot different different of them were ascendant but by the eighth ninth century the franks who traced in their own mythology they said that they'd come a wandering from the trojan wars originally but they come are wandering from uh eastern europe probably is a germany

um central and eastern europe across the rhine into the the broadly speaking the area that we now call france and had over several generations coalesced uh into a a a kingdom let's call it a kingdom it was ruled by kings first the merivingians the long-haired kings you know in which the the king was connoted by his the jew by growing his hair very long and could be deposed by having his hair cut off and by and by the merivinjin dynasty became um less politically influential govern the the frankish territories were governed on their behalf by mayors of the palace by politicians and then they were done away with by a dynasty who we now call the carolingians named after charles martel but most famous for producing charlemagne the king of the franks who had himself crowned in the year 800 as the first roman emperor of the reborn western roman empire which claimed to be the holy roman empire

so we have a barbarian tribe which over many generations becomes collectively a kingdom and then they become for a time under charlemagne and his descendants the the preeminent force in western europe the way they sort of absconded with the roman reputation title and all that reminds me of one of those companies that that has a great old lineage like in the united states it might be like a t and t or something and then a t and t goes out of business but somebody buys the name and then they get to be the new a t and t and they and they get to inherit all that cachet even though they had nothing to do with the original entity for those who don't know or maybe those in germany right now the name for france and germany is still frank reich the empire of the franks i also like and i never made this connection when i was reading um the crusades from the middle eastern viewpoint i forget what the book

was called and they referred to the crusaders from europe as the french and i remember thinking that's but yeah it's it just turns frank into french right there and then you begin to see the connections because frank doesn't mean anything to most people who speak the english language but french obviously does and when you and when you see one word morph into the other you kind of the light bulb goes on in your head and you go oh okay i see the connection um so so this is interesting though also because we did a show a long time ago on um on that transition period so from mirror of indians to carol indians and when you read the accounts of what these merovingian franks were like they sound like vikings when you look at pictures and they're you know the the contemporary type stuff but they're they're sort of ideal i don't know if they're idealized or if we've barbarized the merovingians in their true but they

all look so civilized and so king arthur like and and uh they look they look uh clean and washed and well dressed and they look like they're they look very very civilized and then when you read the accounts of people like um some of these some of the one charles martel is a perfect example but some of the merovingian kings what's the one who who would would have people bend over to bow for him and then he'd split their skull with the battle axe i mean they had all these wonder so let me ask you i guess what i'm saying in my typically long-winded question i am getting to somewhere is that if looking back on it with your eye which of those two impressions of the merovingians the franks before charlemagne um and and pepin his father uh what which of those two interpretations seems more like to you have we barbarized a bunch of people that were more civilized than we thought or or have the chroniclers made a bunch of

viking types look better than they actually were i think you know so much is what you want them to be and i think particularly in the early middle ages late antiquity early middle ages the evidence is so scant you know i'm a late medievalist by inclination by training so when i came to writing this new book i a lot of the early middle ages was kind of virgin territory for me and that was one of the reasons i enjoyed doing it um of course as it always you know you're um you can be swayed very easily at first by the account that you're reading now of course if you're reading a council of romans watching the barbarians uh swarm over once solid roman territories they are barbarians they're the sort of hideously uncivilized folk who um who have no right being where they are but of course as time goes by and those hideously uncivilized folk who have no right being where they are become the ruling power

the chronicles become somewhat more um somewhat kinder to them i i'm a sucker for uh grave goods dan and so if you take someone like childrex the first um probably the first mayor of indian king we know very much about at all you start fighting all those bees in the grave goods don't you find the gold bees and you know so we're talking about a guy who died at the end of the fifth century around probably a 481 and yeah i mean in the innocent ornamental gold bees signet rings spears axes um garnet garnet everywhere i love it oh garnet everywhere you know you've made it when

here is a society that has a a luxurious material culture accessible at least to the people at the very very top of it here probably is also a society that like most societies in human history doesn't really offer very much for the ordinary joe at the bottom of it just sort of uh subsisting as best he she and and and family can do um so i think it yeah it look it's it's totally a question of what who you're looking at and from what perspective uh certainly i think as here's the thing about the middle ages in general to sort of blow back into a big point as the middle ages wear on the evidence becomes fuller and the people start to seem a little bit more like us you know recognizable to a modern eye and so and somewhat more sympathetic so for example it's much easier for us to sympathize and empathize and feel uh some kind of fraternity with leonardo da vinci at the end of the middle ages

you know the universal genius the man designing machines and dissecting bodies and and painting great pages than it is for us even to put ourselves into the the mind of childrex first with his lovely bees and garnets do you know what i mean it's just it just is easier because the time brings us closer to those people so inevitably i think when we look back very very deep into the early middle ages we can be um somewhat appalled by the uh the barbarity of the time you know you make me think of something that i've always been fascinated with and i don't know i'd be very interested maybe maybe this is a future book i need to work on or something but but i'm fascinated so so like when we look back at leonardo da vinci like you just said we understand that there has been tremendous amount of change and we're comfortable with the idea that leonardo would have dressed differently look differently lived in a

different sort of milieu than what we do and that's understandable but when you look at for example uh a portrayal so you had mentioned the later middle ages or the solid middle ages let's just say the uh 14th century right 1300s um somebody you'll see manuscripts with them portraying a much earlier historical event so maybe something from rome or maybe something from the carolingians or what have you but they portray it in contemporary terms right so the people will be wearing the same sort of armor that they would be wearing in the 14th century rather than armor that would have been you know something more in other words we acknowledge that the things in leonardo's time are not going to be like our own they don't necessarily do that in the artwork did people and this may not be a question that dan jones is is the right person to ask but but do people back then when they're when they're talking about the

kings of yore or whatever do they understand that they're going to be different living in a different sort of technological sort of situation or is the assumption back then that everything is as everything was well i this is this is a really good result because we do the same thing today so let's take these uh uh let's let's drill down into the example you gave um let's imagine a sort of 14th century french chronicle depicting the song of roland's the most probably the most famous story of the the told in the later middle ages right in spain or southern france right right he's yeah he's on his way back from from northern spain fighting the saracens in northern spain and he's ambushed and rossvalle and blows the horn to summer to warn charlemagne you know the great king of the franks uh that there's trouble afoot and in blowing the hall and his temples burst and he dies a hero's death okay

the big story told in the 14th century telling a heavily romanticized version of a story set in the late eighth century so what is what is that what 14 minus eight by madison very good 600 years previous i just watched okay and in that 14th century telling you're right the drawings will happen in 14th century armor and the more rays of the of all the characters will essentially be 14th century these will be 14th century people gathering about 600 years earlier now i just watched ridley scott's uh the last duel about a 14th century duel between two dudes over uh whether adam driver the cat and a driver character jacqueline had uh raped the wife of matt damon jean de carroge and of course what in the hands of the the writers dave and affleck and the director ridley scott this has become a a movie that is that is really about um hollywood politics and american gender politics uh in the 21st century it's just put

into um it just happens to be taking place in the 14th century now the costume in that movie is the 14th century so they're not all wandering about in um skinny jeans with iphones i'll grant you that we don't really do that anymore but what is obvious throughout that entire movie is that this is one big analogy for the modern world so we're we're doing exactly the same thing in the 21st century as was being done in the 14th century and we're aware that we're doing it now the big question is to what extent in the 14th century are they aware that this is a sort of fabricated vision of life or that that maybe it wasn't quite like this under charlemagne i this this is only really speculation but i think that we must credit our historical forebears with some intelligence and self-awareness i think we often write self-awareness out you know we don't credit self-awareness uh in our in historical

figures enough i think people realize that that this is not maybe quite how it was but this is also the best way to make this story recognizable to a modern audience um and so the attitudes between then and now i don't think that radically different just just the technologies are i think that's a great answer and i think we should i should have made a distinction between the highly educated members of society and those um who'd never had any education at all and that you were just pointing out may not even know about these events so you have to make them relatable so let's talk about because you know when when i was a kid and i was so interested in european history you tend to forget all of the outward pressures of the other civilizations that are impacting that history and you mentioned uh the saracens in the song of roland situation so let's talk about that for a minute one of the more interesting and and

little-known i would think and and something that we should study more here in the west is the great original muslim conquests of the arab and and byzantine and the other worlds that can we talk a little bit about this and can you because i was trying to figure out if there was anything i could think of historically speaking from any era that was an analogy that made sense to that that to me seems a singular when you start you know looking at all the different angles a sort of a singular event talk to me a little bit about the the original arab muslim conquest you know when when islam first appeared on the stage and rolled over several traditional superpowers it's one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole of the middle ages i mean arguably in i would say anything anytime yeah any time um i think maybe so the speed of conquest and this is something you've obviously worked a lot on uh is comparable with

genghis khan's conquests you know that scale that speed that rapidity of a sort of a new movement but what's different what's different between the early islamic conquests you know out of arabia through half of byzantium through the whole of north africa into sicily into spain all the way up to the pyrenees you know in no time at all the edges of china think about i mean right and and leaving an imprint in all of those places from transoxania to the iberian peninsula you know half the known world that is in alma almost everywhere that the first arab caliphs after muhammad the russians you know the rightly guy the russians ali through to the uh well all the way to say 750 the the splitting point between the caliphate and the abbasid almost everywhere that was conquered by the arabs by the muslim arabs in the those first generations of islamic expansion remains islamic today that imprint has lasted

as long as all of the imprints the middle ages have left in terms of you know in the in the western christian world the uh the rule of law the cathedrals the castles that are all over you know western europe and england and wales in particular um the the music the art the the elements of the political thought just as much in the uh arabic and persian worlds the the first islamic conquerors have left their mark however there is and there is a schism that exists in scholarship between christian western anglophone as well as the french and german scholarship and islamic scholarship and there are very few writers you mentioned earlier on a book about the crusades from the islamic perspective and i'm going to i'm going to place a small bet that you're thinking about paul cobb uh his book of the crusades through arab yeah yeah i think i think it's that but fantastic book but a very very rare book

almost nobody on either side is doing that and and because so we still had this enormous historical schism when i wrote the chapter in powers and thrones entitled arabs which narrates the story from you know muhammad's life all the way up to 7 50 and and to sort of the the end of the um the expansions i went into a totally new scholarship and i had to talk to completely new scholars i called up my friend samir rahim he's a brilliant uh i've known for more than half my life brilliant journalist he's also a fantastic scholar of early islam and i said samia you know what i'm going to need a reading list here and he sent me a a long reading list which i dug straight into but there was no crossover with anything else that i was reading yeah this was this was a scholarship that sat on its own away from you know the the rest of what i what i was reading for this history of the middle ages and so we don't tend to think about

and the early islamic caliphates as being part of quote unquote medieval history and yet they were yeah chris wickham brilliant um scholar of the early middle ages wrote uh an amazing book called the inheritance of rome and it asked the question after the fall of the western roman empire what comes what what comes into that space and and he looks and wickham looks at the barbarian kingdoms he looks at byzantium and east around constantinople he looks at the franks and he looks at so he's one of the few scholars who looks at the the islamic caliphates now when i think about that the big question who has the best claim out of those groups to really call themselves the heirs of rome i would argue it's probably it's probably the early islamic caliphs because they put together the biggest empire on you know on rome's patch bonded by the a single language arabic whereas rome had latin bonded by

something approaching a common um bureaucratic imperial culture that's all the way from you know transoxania to spain there is this sort of common feeling bonded by a coinage bonded by a faith above everything um capable you know military militarily fearsome you know all of these arguably it's it's the it's the arabs who are the real heirs of rome but i can almost feel people bristling as they hear that because we just don't connect these two things as being part of the the same historical story well and maybe forget that i mean again if we're looking at this from a geopolitical standpoint and you put a map down from this era you're gonna see i mean this is how american military planners would look at it right they would say well look look you're surrounded over here in spain which is moorish north africa is all islamic the middle east is islamic byzan the byzantines are under siege and

in the north you have uh non-christian people and this would have been where where christianity was considered almost a power block the way we saw you know communism and and the free world as power blocks so it's not your power block in the north it's not your power block in spain it's not your power block in north africa and then if you're if you're looking at this from a european point of view you also have and and i love the these cultures you also have what what you could call sort of the the the the the um what would you what would you what would you refer to you you'd call it the berlin wall of europe but it's it's it's it's it's what it's what happens once you get to the to the plains of hungary and the more flat territory that becomes the great step and you've always had i mean herodotus is talking about chimerians and scythians and the romans would use those same terms for much

later people but but you have you know we mentioned the huns earlier you've got an area there that just not only keeps the europeans from expanding in that direction but is continually pressuring towards the european direction and it's one people's after another after another you know from magyars and huns and avars and cell jokes and and talk to me a little bit about this this um this great wall on the eastern side of european culture that is the step people who also of course you know the other side of them is touching chinese civilization and they're acting as a conduit between the the two worlds that are not only not connected but in a lot of cases don't even know of each other's existence right and maybe the analogy is is the way we sometimes talk about bodies of water being either that's a good one very good roads or walls right you know on a tiny scale it's the english channel is either a barrier or it's a or it's a

bridge and the same is probably true of the the great step that conjoins uh eastern europe with with northern china now i think you're absolutely right for the most part that sort of keeps these big power blocks these different peoples apart however when you come to it suddenly the mongols appear end of the 12th century it becomes like a superhighway and uh for the the right um military superpower as the mongols turn out to be it's that's that's a road that's like a that's a super highway for them to charge along um i think if we're thinking about those big blocks that emerge in the middle ages and to connect this a little bit with uh with the role of of islam and the the arab-speaking and persian world it's interesting after the eighth century roughly those those blocks don't really move very much and it's only in well there's an expansion of the of the western christian world in spain and portugal something

interesting happens the wreckage is very very unusual unlike the crusades to egypt unlike the crusades to the middle east you know to the near east eastern mediterranean it had there's a there's a permanent change in the sort of faith groups which which govern that territory we can look at northern europe the baltic scandinavia that too there's a christianizing process there the christianizing process in poland and hungary and so on uh but it does that that remains the block where europe doesn't it's not likely the crusaders go along that step you know marauding their way all the way to um you know modern beijing it's for the most part i think you're right i think that that great stepland is a barrier and it's not um it doesn't become a uh a conduit west to east it's only ever really east to west one of the really interesting periods of history i think is the one where you know it it's analogous i think to the

american so-called conquest of the old west when the the russians begin to push you know 16th century 17th century they begin to push east going after the various step tribes in that direction and and the chinese simultaneously are pushing west and it's only with the change in technology or whatever that they're able to master this weapon system that had dominated that area and kept those powers out for millennia uh let me shift a little bit because i got another interesting people and i really want your take on it because i've never known how to classify them or put them into the proper um the proper sort of place talk how do we classify normans i mean to me this is this is one of the great great i mean for those who don't know we have this this group of people and i'll let i'll let dan explain um the background or the fusion that's always been you know blamed for creating these people but they they arrive on the world

stage i mean this is a giant play right human history is a giant play you have certain characters you know we have american soap operas here in the united states so we have this giant play and there are certain characters that are always there there's always the chinese there's always you know the persians there's but then there are these these characters that come in and are really important to the story for a short period of time and then just sort of disappear talk to me a little bit about the normans in that kind of a context well first we've got to think about what the word actually means yes don't we yes it's connected with north man and the reason it's it's connected with that is because the normans you use the word fusion i think that's exactly the right word the normans are a people who are created in a in a sort of a process like nuclear fusion between the franks and the vikings

so the franks under charlemagne around the turn of the eighth into ninth centuries had begun expanding from a state that bridged modern france and germany you know it's the original european union it's france germany luxembourg austria and northern italy it's it's like the 1950s uh version of the united of an economically united europe that's the core of the carolingian frankish world and then there are there's sort of dual process processes of expansion of the frankish world south over the pyrenees into uh muslim liberia and then north into the pagan land of saxony and up up towards what becomes a danish march a sort of a liminal zone between the the christian frankish people of the frankish world the carolina frankish world and the vikings the scandinavian pagan people of the north now over time those people start to come into more and more regular contact with one another and i'm quite

persuaded by the line of thought that says the reason you start to see viking raids in you know the reason the vikings set up at lindisfarne and in the mountains of rivers all you know down modern france at the end of the eighth century is because the franks are starting to make themselves known you know make themselves known as a a wealthy people who like to build monasteries i undefended uh wealthy places that are easy to rate so anyway the bigger point is little by little franks and the vikings come into more and more regular contact with one another so that by the end of the ninth century there's constant viking raiding into the frankish world and a succession of frankish kings have to sort of scratch their heads and wonder what on earth they're going to do about this this is sort of settled eventually with the creation of normandy with the award of land around the river seine and the

city of uh you know the important city of what's now ruin this is settled upon effectively a bunch of vikings and they're the appeasement of the vikings is by giving them a little portion of the franco state in which to live now their accommodation with the frankish world is most notably conversion to christianity and then over over a few generations you know by the time we get to the the middle of the 11th century you have a sort of quite unique people the people that produce famously william the conqueror the bastard of normandy who invades england or robert giscard and uh and count roger of sicily down in southern italy and sicily and scourges of byzantium and popes all at the same time but really what are these normans they are a hybrid of franks christian but quite warlike franks and vikings you know out and out uh traveler robber pillager uh trader and this i try yes and trader of course you mustn't forget trader uh

after they pillaged you they'll trade with you that's right wonderful news um so these but they're an extraordinary people i i here in england where i'm sitting right now 1066 is you know one of those turning point dates in history it's one of the biggest states in the whole of english history um better known even um than our loss of the american colonies you know we're still much more hung up on the invasion by um by william duke of normandy than we are by the sort of the you know the loss of the colonies so uh the normans get about but it's not just england because as i've i've just mentioned it's also southern italy and i think the arrival of the normans in southern italy and the norman conquest of arab sicily is as is a judgingly important historical moment because it becomes that those norman territories in southern indian sicily become pivotal to the crusades and i think the crusades

30 years on from the norman conquest the first crusade that really is a historical turning point that's something that everybody in the whole of the western european world hears about 1066 in england is is not in that order of magnitude at all the fall of jerusalem in 1099 to ephraim yes the franks but driven by the normans you know uh beaumont and uh and crew at the heart of them um i think you know i think i think the expansion the creation normandy and the expansion of the normans into other parts of europe that's that's a really central part of the heart of the story of the high middle ages there are some interesting historical ironies if i'm not if i it's funny you don't you want to mention these historical ironies but then you catch yourself and say okay is this a real historical irony or is this something that just appears that way you know looking back from our modern eyes but for example here you have these frankish

people that are continually um tying themselves to ancient roman sort of behavior the franks themselves come into possession of the territories they're in because of roman policies that brought barbarian people in and made deals with them right you defend this territory for the emperor and you can have it well now you have the franks who are hundreds of years later essentially adopting the same policy with these viking peoples you can have a little of our frankish territory which was originally given to us by the romans so we could defend it so you can defend it and they just did what the franks did too and ended up creating their own empire um based in normandy but it's it's interesting because it's not like the other empire so if you think about like a frankish empire in what's now modern-day france morphing into france if you think about uh uh what becomes the holy roman empire morphing into

germany but the normans are more like a free agent people if you will like the first question someone should have when you say the normans in sicily is you go wait a minute how did the normans find themselves in sicily and are these norman soldiers or are these so in other words trying to figure out and relate them to peoples i mean i was trying to figure out what the proper word for normans is do you call normans a tribe do you call them a family are they like proto-habsburgs they go around everywhere and rule multiple you had mentioned at one point that that you have normans who are up at the wall uh between the the scottish and and english borders up at hadrian's wall at the same time that they're all the way down at sicily they're moving towards the middle east i mean who are these guys and and who makes up the soldier i mean is there a norman ethnic group how does one how does one put them

in the normal boxes we're used to working with yeah i mean it's interesting i think part of this i'd be interested to know what you think about this isn't part of it just the fact that uh by accident of history there there aren't really norman there's not a sort of autonomous normandy anymore because we could say the same for the burgundians you know that or um or maybe even the gas guns you know these these people from different regions that have since been swallowed up yeah do you say they're absorbed maybe i mean is that the or do they do is absorbed or die out better i mean how does one associated they they are um i mean the history of normandy normandy's rolled into france isn't it after 1204 right because the normans become kings of england and then it splits up again but by and large in the early plantagenet era the normans have become kings and so the the duchy of normandy is no longer the

grander of grandest of their possessions uh they've also fused with accounts of you know in the plantations you have dukes of normandy council vong you and then they they take on equity and they're ruling england but france is the language french is the language they speak to each other correct french they're ruling england yeah so but but by this time we we're not really talking about them in terms of a people or a tribe we're not in that barbarian era anymore because really we've switched our our thinking as historians by this point uh to thinking about ruling dynasties and so when we talk about the normans are in you know in the early in the late 12th century early 13th century what we really mean is a very small aristocratic you know a tiny royal family a very small aristocratic group connected to that family and and really you could be anybody as long as you're connected to the duke

of normandy then you're quite unquote a norman um and similarly in in the south you know count roger of uh of sicily well before he's count roger of sicily he's a norman dude in this in southern italy but once he becomes count roger of sicily and then subsequently you know king roger the second of sicily um the the fact of normanness is now uh hidden underneath the grander title of king of sicily or you know whatever it happens to be um and because we're not talking about tribal groups anymore because we can we can draw in much clearer detail as historians the the pictures the portraits you know the pen portraits i mean of of ruling individuals we stop really being concerned with peoples in general and start concentrating on people in specific now that ought to lead us to think well hang on a second then when we're in the barbarian period and we're talking about the franks the burgundians the visigoths the

ostrogoths are we are we really talking about a people who are going around singing hey ho we're the franks hey ho we're the visigoths watch out for us mate are these just historical terms we have to use because of the paucity of evidence we're just aware that a group of people are ruling groups people moved into a certain area this is a problem of um of wildly different evidence i think between the early middle ages at the high slash later middle ages it's funny because when we think we just mentioned the arab conquest earlier and when you think about that military terms there's like a domino effect where they'll conquer people and they become larger and larger and more powerful and more capable and but the normans are kind of an opposite sort of thing and and i'm trying to figure out what accounts for their success like over the eras the the viewpoint had changed i remember when when we used to war game

the normans they always tried to figure out some sort of war gaming uh advantage you can give them to try to to try to provide on the battlefield some semblance that that um that displayed the fact that these guys are doing amazing things i mean if you read the byzantine chroniclers for example who thought all franks were were irresistible chargers and whatnot but but even they seem impressed by normans and norman leaders and whatnot talk to me a little bit about what might explain um a relatively small number of people the normans are not some giant state they're not creating the same sort of domino effect and absorbing other people's as step peoples did as the arabs did what the heck did these guys bring to the table whether it's on a personal level a personality level or a military level that might account for this success well i think on a personal personality level uh it's always tempting to see the kind of

viking outwardly mobile mentality right describe what these guys looked like for a second describe what what what the byzantines were seeing when they ran into normans as people you know so so the the best images that we have and particularly you could tell a norman by the sort of long teardrop shaped shield but they look like dolph lundgren don't they the descriptions of it yeah right well then anaconda writes about beaumont oh bomb on the toronto uh you know one of the most prominent normans among the first crusaders oh sure i mean there's she's so conflicted in her account of beaumont because on the one hand he's a he's a bastard but on the other hand he's super handsome and he's got his broad chest and he's really really quite dishy and short and short blonde hair and clean shaven i mean what the heck is that come on he's he's sort of he's a model but i look i think in your in your war

game or certainly in england look at the normal conquest in england in your war game it's castles norman's a great castle builders yeah that's that's their their military that's their super super source isn't it they come very well organized uh and very capable of building these these fortifications which house bodies of of knights who are similar to frankish knights you know the frankish night as the byzantine chronicles you're talking about um make a hole through the walls of babylon right and that's the line through the walls of babylon yeah that that frankish charge you know couched lance charge that's dangerous that's that's a battlefield leveler against the traditional sort of lights cavalry mounted art shows can uh feign retreats and then pepper you and you're going to chase it but i think that you know the normans in england it's it's castle building that's their don't you think

well i do except you have a hard time sometimes trying to put into perspective i mean if if annoy you know this is the kind of conversations you'd have on a wargaming table i apologize to people but i mean you would sit here and say something like okay is is a norman just another night and are knights the people that we consider to have this see everything is rock paper scissors i'm talking to the audience now but everything is rock paper scissors when it comes to this kind of warfare because we can extol the value of a western knight for example in hand-to-hand combat or charging through the walls of babylon as the as the byzantine uh chronicler said and yet that's useless against a a magyar or an avar or a hun if you can't catch them or a saracen in the holy land so everything is sort of the rock paper scissors kind of thing what i can't figure out is if a norman knight is no better than a frankish

knight then then how does one differentiate i mean there's so many more frankish knights right and they build castles too and they all use the same weaponry so you try to figure out see in the old days when people would talk about different ethnic groups having different tendencies they would talk about you know 100 years ago they would say the normans were possessed with the spirit of their viking ancestors and the same sort you know and they're trying to explain what accounts for this dominance um 15 years ago they would have talked about economic differences and and savvy you know capitalist traders i mean i'm still trying to figure out how you explain the rise of a people that don't have the traditional sorts of things that one would look at an economic base a population base a religious explanation they seem like they they seem like they shouldn't be where they are if that makes sense

and yet there but then maybe you know this is this has been super unfashionable for a long time but i just have a sense it might be coming back this great man theory of history which we will great person theory of history let's call it now um we've been we've been we haven't almost beaten out of us haven't we yes beaten out of us is a good way to put it it's not that however i have this little suspicion that into the next the historical trends to come around as we've already discussed and in a society as we live in now which is super super super individualistic and completely focused on the you know the the the individual as being the most important thing and society is being really not very important at all unless it bends specifically to the will of the individual and of course we're living politically in an age of strong men and uh and would be tyrants this the influence of the sort of

remarkable individual might just be coming back into fashion and history and i don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing because what are we really talking about in terms of the normans who are the ones who who is it makes these great plays that puts them out there well in england william the conqueror all bets are off for a norman conquest of england without william the conqueror i find very hard to imagine not you know not just the sort of military organization but then the the vision to completely redesign england to move the bishop bricks about to bring across this new sort of colonizing group now that is the brainchild of one extraordinary leader and similarly down in sicily we are talking about a pair of brothers robert giscard and roger it's funny too because energy was the word i recall hearing when i was young energy the normans had such energy they had energy but maybe just like

a few of them had some energy guess what they went and did right and and after that who knows it was it's uh is it as you were saying is it really the normans at all i mean certainly the arab well again as you're saying the arabs couldn't tell the difference could they not really they say well they're all the friend franks they all look the same to me they all look the same to me so let's let's talk for a minute because we had mentioned earlier um uh looking back and and taking you know what was the line from the ohio state historian right that that history is the present politics projected onto the past and we talked about climate change there's another one though that i found you know and it's funny because we've talked extensively about this too so it's funny how on one level you can know about it and on another level not think about it but um i mean you you had gone into the justinian plague so well let's talk

everybody knows about the black death and and but the justinian plague is really isn't that the black death part one or or if this if this is a movie trilogy the black death is the original godfather or exorcist or jaws let's talk a little bit about that and maybe give us an idea because these people in the time of the justinian plague are accustomed to disease being a terrible and regular occurrence but how does something like that stand out in an era where they're accustomed to to uh pandemics or or terrible disease outbreaks the justinianic plague in the sixth century unnamed for uh the the great byzantine emperor justinian is a form of yesenia pestis it's this it's it's plague it's the same as a black death and insofar as we can tell because the evidence is much scantier for the justinian plague and is also back projected from the black death which probably might get into in a minute

it's it seems to do a similar thing to what happens in the 14th century the black death which is it mutates and becomes very infectious it's i mean it's a just as as covid19 is a coronavirus one of a group of viruses that became incredibly virulent and incredibly infectious so you sometimes see with plague it just mutates and becomes super super super infectious and that's what you have in the sixth century with the justinianic plague and it seems to spread from may well if i'm sweating to egypt maybe from zanzibar maybe from east africa it's very very hard to know for sure and then it rips into the uh the byzantine the eastern roman empire and you have these accounts from byzantine chroniclers of lockdowns of thousands of people dying each day of bodies piling up in the streets of everybody being complete and terrified of catching this disease and having you know scarcely enough living to bury the dead

there is uh there's evidence that the disease found its way as far afield certainly as germany into western europe um there is massive disparity in the estimates of how many people died of the justinianic plague which ranges from tens of millions to about a hundred thousand we just don't know um the accounts give us the impression that this was just as a black death in the 14th century was which we do know killed up to 60 percent of populations wherever it struck this was pretty apocalyptic um traditionally we've you know i think that the the uh the the historians have been on a journey towards saying well i mean maybe the justinianic plague wasn't as bad as we thought and these these accounts of play of pandemic disease do seem very overblown but i tell you what you read them during a global pandemic and suddenly you know you're back to thinking well maybe actually these guys had a point you know

i found that certain writing about just indiana plague and and the black death during a pandemic it's impossible not to have your perspective as a historian changed let me give the listeners an example of your writing here on the justinian plague this is a quote from dan jones's book quote john of ephesus was sent off by the emperor to baptize pagans in asia minor but he found himself traveling through a death zone in town after town the sick and suffering staggered through the streets their bellies swollen and mouths hanging open eyes bloodshot pus leaking from their mouths grand houses in which entire families and their servants had died stood silent every room occupied by corpses contorted bodies lay unburied their midriffs rotting and bursting in the heat of the day the flesh half eaten by hungry dogs the roads and highways were empty the usual thrum of trade and traffic interrupted in desolate villages no one

was left to harvest crops and fruit trees animals were left unshepherded to roam the countryside as they pleased end quote um that's heavy-duty stuff and all of a sudden makes you feel like the pandemic you're living in now um well you you become very grateful for modern uh medical uh technology don't you yeah you look you sure do and but let me tell you i mean all of that passage that you quoted there i i've drawn on the reason john of ephesus is presented as the lead character is that that's that's his account i mean that's just my putting it into the sequence and so this isn't some sort of purple prose flight of fantasy this is what your man saw and wrote down um and as a as i say you know i was writing that right at this i think i wrote that in march maybe april 2020. so that's that's that's peak covert terror lockdown and it's impossible to write that without you know during a pandemic

without um feeling a degree more sympathy for john of ephesus than one might have done had i written it a year earlier when you began pandemic well you know really kenneth have been quite so bad um it's it's but this goes back to the beginning of our conversation which is um what i don't do in in that chapter that you just quoted is then really push the point much harder and say see see this is just like clovid 19. you just let that rise out of the text and i think anyone i well i hope anyone reading that in the next say five ten years will go my god yeah that that sounds really familiar man maybe i've got a little more in common with these these medieval people than i thought i might have thought i did i wrote a chapter in my book which came out four months before the pandemic called pandemic prologue question mark and then in four months it was completely outdated and obsolete so so so i know exactly what you're talking

i would have loved the perspective of maybe being able to look at our own time and draw some comparisons i probably would have done it in too heavy handed away so the way you know the way the way you did it is wonderful so but i think you you'd have done you'd have done it brilliantly and um because you're a fantastically skilled historian i think but i think it is just look when i made that list i told you about climate change mass migration pandemic disease technological change global networks pandemic disease was third on the list for a reason like this was before cobit and i was like it was actually the um the thing i thought might be hardest to sell look i knew i was going to have to write about just indiana plague i knew i was going to have to write about the black death but i was like how am i going to sell this to a 21st century audience as being something that connects the modern to the medieval when

the closest thing we've had is sars and that's 2004 and that's the far east like is an american audience really gonna buy the danger of pandemic in the 21st century now i was aware that actually uh clever people in sydney the uk government and i think in the us government as well who who are pulling risk assessments for the biggest dangers of the present day we're putting pandemic disease right at the top but dang i mean i didn't i didn't see one coming did you no no well i mean i was you know you would hear people like bill gates talking um for a very long time talking about it's a law of averages thing right eventually you're going to right it's going to turn the die roll is going to turn up wrong and uh and we're going to get unlucky and then you hope that your ability to to pivot medically speaking can help you avoid this sort of tragedy uh john of ephesus was writing about um so so maybe

now because we've we've we've dealt with a bunch of different things and i'm jumping around but but looking at my notes there's one little jump i'd like to make and it's it's a perspective question right and maybe this is another one of those things that let's hope not but that has some echoes in our own times i was curious about the way and this is really how you know your book starts with the roman empire and then moves on from there i i'm fascinated by the the way that the transition from a roman republic which you know if if we're looking at it from our perspective now whether it's the uk or the united states you would say oh a represent you know these terms don't really apply to rome but we'll use them anyway a representative government is the superior form of government to something like an autocracy or a totalitarian state or an empire or an imperial system that has an emperor who

has control of people but that's not how someone like augustus caesar's changing you know and of course he had several successors afterwards who helped codify these changes but i mean they didn't look at that as as a totalitarian ruler uh uh coming to power on the on the ashes of a superior system right a a system of of representation and and wide distribution of power um how come we don't look at someone like augustus caesar as as taking i mean if it happened in germany in 1932 we would say that a republic was destroyed and on its back was a dictatorship but but it would be seen completely different how come we view the roman transition from a republican form of government to something else in a more positive light is it because compared to what the republic was at the very end it was a more positive light or is this more of us viewing it from um you know i mean i suppose the british empire in the late 19th century might

have viewed it differently but but it seems to me that you're celebrating something that if it happened today we would consider to be a terrible thing yeah but i i think it's a it's a special case isn't it um and it's it's a good way to say so so the turn against empire as a historical trend right now is profound right and i mean you've got in in london here people actually you know people defacing churchill statue you know i talked to my one of my kids about churchill i was i was doing something to do with churchill uh the other day tv wise and i said i mentioned winston churchill to one of them they're uh ages 12 and nine the oldest ones and the 12 year old said churchill churchill yeah i heard of that guy he's the racist guy right i'm like wait hold on a second hold on hold on uh there are other things i might need to tell you about winston churchill as well as that very salient fact

um you know the turn against the british empire is is well it's turned um the turn against imperialism per se it's a and yet we still remain sort of strangely um sort of in love with rome just as as medieval forebears were despite the fact this is one of the very few pure true slave states in the history of the world yes and we're like yeah but i mean the statues and the the the underfloor heating man the underfloor heating like yeah i challenge anybody to go to the ruins of a roman villa probably built by slaves on wealth pillaged from people the romans considered inferior to themselves on what we'd now call eugenic basis and everyone wander around goes [ __ ] man the floor must have been super nice and warm these people they had it they had it you know they had it right you know for some reason we're just we we hive roam off into a special case the turn from republic into empire wasn't a good thing i mean i actually

the best the best representation of this i've ever seen isn't um oh it's one of robert harris's novels in which he he you know through cicero's eyes spells out pretty clearly what a what a corrupt stitch up this destruction of the republic and creation of the empire really was but we still we're still not quite inclined to see it that way because just as our medieval forebears were we're still we're still uh blindly in love with rome you know you bring up i i you know it's unfortunate perhaps that this late in the conversation you bring up something like this question of um of context in the way we view the past now because it's such a big thing here in the states for example and i know you know you so so this is it but it's worth delving into it just a tad i think because i have you here and i'm going to exploit the moment but um but but it seems to me that there that that if you're going to be fair

it is it is wrong to hold people from say the the middle ages because that's what your book is about to our modern standards of behavior ethics morals and and those sorts of things and i think most people would agree with that and then it's perfectly fine to do that to people from 10 years ago so there's going to be some time period between those two when all of a sudden the the forgiveness that comes with living a very long time ago goes away and you're penalized for not jumping on board the um the more shall we say modern ethical bandwagon when you did so it seems to me that a guy you know we do it with the the people the so-called founding fathers here who were all born british citizens let's remember uh people who look back on the glorious revolution is one of their main uh influences that you look at those so thomas jefferson's my favorite because to me wrapped up in that figure is all of the

contradictions and hypocrisies um that are built into the american founding right here's the guy who all by himself is respond almost all by himself uh along with the earlier enlightenment thinkers who who influenced him are responsible for the greatest marketing messages to ever come out of this country right uh freedom liberty the rights of man you know all men are created all the all the stuff that we emphasize in our own marketing campaigns as a country and yet obviously the man owned slaves he was having i'm going to say a relationship which is a really wrong word for this with his own slave i mean you look at him and and it's clear from his own view he's trying to eliminate slavery long term on one hand but he's doing nothing to eliminate it in his own life so you look at someone like that you say okay here's a guy who's going to be trapped because he doesn't come from 300 years earlier which probably would

have exempted him from modern moral moral questions and he doesn't come from 200 years later which would have made it absolutely you know there's no excuse for it he's in that transition period where some people realize that this practice is wrong so you need to jump on the bandwagon one can say the same thing about churchill here's a guy born into a world where so many of his peers and the way he was raised and everything thought the way he did and then he lived to be 90 something right and all of a sudden you know things changed and he was left you know and i i was i remember reading in the 1920s and 1930s they were already thinking of him as an almost embarrassing political dinosaur in some british circles how should we and this may be something that's not fair to even ask you but how should we roll with the punches here and trying to figure i mean with jefferson i always try to say well

laud him for the good stuff and punish him for the bad stuff how should someone look at someone like churchill who's from whose lifetime extends over a period where the morality even in his own world in the circles he ran with evolved past his opinion well look churchill was old-fashioned even in his own time uh and was a you know in many made many many many many many mistakes um was constantly behind the curve uh was in some ways living a sort of uh a strange slightly masochistic tribute act to his father yes who nevertheless in the 1930s or the you know at the end of the 1930s into the into 1940 at the point at which this this person would in almost every other circumstances have just been written out of public life was there at the right moment and was exactly the the right person for that role of leadership now that's the story of churchill and we the the correct historical thing to do is

say look what were the moral standards ethics and mores of the day put aside whether you agree with them or not what were they in that day what was right in that day and what was considered wrong in that day and how did that person fit into that moral world now you do that with churchill you still don't come out with super great guy you come out with person who people thought was it was you know there were many people had a problem with even in his own day who cometh the hour cometh the man everyone said you know what actually this maybe this is the right person now that's the grown-up way of doing history but oh dear i'm going to sound like such a such an old man now but we're in such a sort of childish cultural space at the moment and such an individualistic um space at the moment that that many historians and many non-historians sort of dipping their toes in the water think that history's all about them

and that the the practice of history is about going around telling people off for not having lived up to an ideal moral standard and that that is really the most important thing that uh that a historian or someone engaging in history can do that and and it's it's pathetic but i think the uh the point in general is is that we are in this moment and and what i also didn't mean stress with this was a unique moment in human history it's it's a cycle you know yes um there what was the book that would um there's a book about that transition from the georgian to the victorian um called the age of cat and i think that there's a similar sort of moralism in in its uh k-a-n-t correct k-a-n-t no no no no not the philosopher c-a-c-a-n-t okay thank you yeah uh from kentucky so the the um it's by vic gattrell and it's about uh this sort of well the the verb is this canting pious rhetoric which uh which pervades public

discourse in which everyone is trying is trying to say the the the most moral thing and that to slip up will be to uh to invite ridicule scorn and possibly um you know the uh disadvancement in one's career uh there's a similar sort of uh pious sensoriousness about um public discourse now now i think it may be and i write about this in powers and thrones at the end of the book i think it may be in fact it is connected to new communications technology so let's take a good medieval example of an age of kant c-a-n-t uh from printing the printing press in the 1450s right comes along and makes it vastly easier to communicate uh to communicate on mass to communicate at speed and what do you see happening in public discourse in the decades afterwards it becomes incredibly um moralistic incredibly sensorious people attacking one another all over the place and you have a culture war that emerges which is what we call the

reformation now there's there's an analogy to be drawn there with the age of the iphone and social media the immediacy that the availability of publishing and of publishing at scale and what do you see happening immediately to human discourse it becomes it becomes very very fractious and very very sort of pompous and that's the moment we're living in at the moment that's the movement we're living in right now so it's um but definitely definitely not anything new in terms of the long view of human history it's just um for me as you can tell quite irritating to actually live through well let me let me let me validate what you said about cycles too and i'm going to blame the british i'm going to blame the british for this since i haven't since i have one of them but i mean in in the early history of the americas with when you have puritans and all this sort of thing we were shunning we were shaming we were

banishing from the public sphere i mean this is how things were done i feel like we've just taken that quintessentially proto-american quality added social media to it made sure that there is no see at least the the public shaming and all those things that were going on in those puritan communities there was one moral standard now we have multiple moral standards and you can be shamed for any of them by the groups that associate with those morals i mean it's public shaming on steroids with social media so i mean i feel like this is the same cycle with some amplification amplification involved so um so we'll blame that on the british and call it good right you brought up georgian stuff i'm just going a little earlier listen is there anything i did is there anything i didn't bring up that you want to i mean first of all the book is wonderful um uh it is one of those books and i can hear my mother's voice in my head who if you

read this book from cover to cover and remembered it you would have a giant chunk of your western historical knowledge completely filled in is there anything because it's a thousand pages almost i'm sure i left out all the best parts what did i leave out that we should we should get into oh man i mean this there's there's just so much i had such a blast writing i i look i i enjoyed i'd written a lot of dynastic history plantagenets mores the roses before this i've written to religious military history with templars and crusaders i've done some you know constitutional history with magna carta i actually really enjoyed getting into the architectural the uh the literary the stuff on the carolingian script was fascinating but even the sort of later stuff you know i read there's a chapter in the book on um called builders which is about it's sort of said in the 13th century and it's about castle building

which i you know i've done made some tv shows from netflix about castles and it's about gothic architecture and i just got to pull into that all my experience i was running in lockdown so i couldn't travel a lot but i got to pull in all my all my memories and experiences and notes about about traveling to great gothic cathedrals in in england and elsewhere and i i loved bringing that aspect of it i loved doing the chapter called renewers which is goes from petrarch and dante and tetsurima and this sort of new poetry of the of the 13th century into um into a great painting van ike you know moving oil painting somewhere never been before to da vinci you know the universal genius and as we've said already this figure who connects the um the medieval and the modern so brilliantly um and so what i suppose what am i trying to say i'm trying to say that actually my takeaway from the middle ages or what i hope people will

take away from my book about the middle ages is that there's yes there's a lot of dudes slaying each other and that's uh that's a constant history but there's also i hope more than any book i've done this sort of a much richer texture to them to life in the middle ages and the greater sense of the the legacy the visual artistic cultural legacy that this extraordinary age uh brought to us but i mean we could we could be talking another two hours and we'd still get nowhere and dan let's not be surprised that you come on this show and somehow artwork gets the short shrift it was just gonna happen okay you knew there was gonna be charging through the walls of babylon and not enough da vinci that's just my that's how it goes that's how it goes that's how it goes but look um i could talk to you all day because uh you know i'm a huge fan of yours i think what you've done for the history and the public

um you know the way you fed the public appetite for history and this in this medium and with your books is it's extraordinary and you're doing a great thing and uh and i know that you know well you know this and i'm just flattering you but i'm not uh that's when it's time for the show to end yeah that's that's that's no that's where we know it's time for the show to end once we start complimenting the host it's done okay my friend thank you so much the book is fantastic powers and thrones everybody should get a copy uh i read the pdf i'm hoping to get a copy of myself someday uh i will buy it don't worry we don't need any freebies around here it was worth it it's fantastic and ladies and gentlemen dan jones has been doing good for work for a while this is i have to be honest and maybe it's just because the subject matter is so comprehensive it was so far it's my favorite book you've ever written so

thanks brother that's super kind my thanks to dan jones for coming on the program that was a lot of fun his new book powers and thrones a new history of the middle ages is scheduled to come out november 9th 2021 so may or may not yet be out by the time you get this show there's other books of course currently available and worth getting if you've not been exposed to that the plantagenets crusaders the templars magna carta you know if if the middle ages and this region of the world is something you really like or think you might dan jones is one of the really good people to tell you all about it i'm being strenuously reminded um because i am and there ought to be a registered trademark symbol after this phrase the worst marketer in the world that i should probably tell everyone or remind everyone that as the holiday gift-giving season approaches um you know if you can't think of anything else out there or you run out

of time or whatever it might be really hard weird person to buy for maybe uh that we do sell the archived hardcore history shows either singly or in bunches from the website i think we worked it out so that it's priced at like if you buy the whole catalog it's like a dollar an hour works out too content-wise i hope that's fair we also have some new merchandise on the way different design stuff but i don't know when it's coming in frankly hope it makes it for the holidays not sure yet we do have gift certificates available and we have another method we just hooked up recently that we're trying out to give another option to people who buy again you know as the worst marketer in the world i'm told to to make sure i explain this but it it involves another way to get our our premium feed so that it works better with for example people with certain kinds of pod catchers than our than our old system or our

current system on the website so more options we figure is better for everyone so check that out if that sounds good to you and for those who ask because i know you always do we are currently working on the next big hardcore history show i don't know when it's going to be ready it's the same old problem that it always is and i hope we can get these little you know appetizers out to keep you from starving to death you know between main courses but thank you for everything everybody as always i'm very grateful stay safe support us with patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash dan carlin or go to our donate page at dan dot com forward slash dc dash donate thanks again for all your bucka show donations they're the reason we're still here at the end of the last hha show we mentioned uh the folks over at battle guide virtual tours and i'm going to continue to do that for a little while because i think you if

you're interested in military history and not everyone is so let's just say that right off the bat but if you are you know how difficult it is sometimes to get your mind around what's going on at some of these battles if you pull out a map or you're reading a book or you're watching a documentary or whatever it might be um there's so much going on at so many different levels that even if you are on the ground like one of these tours that you can go on uh there's still it's hard to get a sense through the fog of war and the terrain what's hidden from i mean battles are complicated things right so the during the pandemic that happened i was in touch with a group called battle guide virtual tours who were people that did real tours and like so many businesses around the world were trying to figure out how to pivot and keep some sort of a business going when no one knew when there were going

to be any tourists or anyone who wanted to visit battlefields in person anymore right but the way that they figured out how to do this and this is just my opinion i mean they may have a different opinion but i think it's like the hershey's peanut butter cup commercial you got your chocolate in my peanut butter and oh it it's better than ever i love what they did to create something you could download at home and as i told them i mean it's wonderful to be able to take one of those once in a lifetime trips to a battlefield somewhere that you've always wanted to go to but what if you want to go to another one the week afterwards or something like that i mean this opens the door to people getting to see lots of battlefields with this sort of approach and the approach is you'll have to see it for yourself and that's what i'm really here to tell you is that uh you can do that for free and just see if

you like it and then if you like it you know you can take it from there i'm not going to convince you one way or the other i just wanted you to get an idea from from a perspective of somebody who's always trying to understand these things without all these elements it's hard and the way that they put it together is something i think is pretty cool and if you're into military history and if you feel like i do that you'd really like to better understand everything going on at some of these battles go see if you like any of these battles that they offer uh go to go to battleguide dot co dot uk forward slash karlin battle guide dot co dot uk forward slash karlin and get one of the free shows that's put aside for you and just see what you think

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP16 Powers Thrones and Dan Jones"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Dan Jones (Guest).

What is "EP16 Powers Thrones and Dan Jones" about?

Dan Jones's book, "Powers and Thrones," offers a sweeping exploration of the medieval period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, covering significant cultural and historical developments across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. With its blend of established and newly uncovered historical insights, the book serves as an engaging and comprehensive resource for anyone interested in…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

33 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones, The Middle Ages, Roman Empire, The Franks, Charles the Great (Charlemagne). Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP16 Powers Thrones and Dan Jones"?

The episode runs 1 h 33 min; the transcript is about 16,383 words in 95 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 26, 2026.