The Dark Ages…

It is no longer an acceptable shorthand to refer to the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the west and the rise of Charlemagne, as the Dark Ages. That is, it is only acceptable as long as you make it clear that you are well aware that life went on in the west and that… stuff happened. There was comparatively little writing; the buildings constructed were much simpler, more transient and smaller and the quantity and sophistication of the pottery was enormously reduced. Oh! and the roads! Not only were no more roads of the Roman type constructed but those in existence were not maintained. There was still a lot of people going about their daily lives though, as the remnants of the Roman world decayed about them.

The problem here is the word “Dark”. Some people don’t like it. It sounds negative, prejudicial. With the Renaissance and the reacquaintance of the West with its Classical past, it was clear to the people in the 15th century that the Romans and Greeks had been able to do things that they would like to do. They were the ones who first referred to the Dark Ages. In the last hundred years or so we have begun to get a much better picture of what happened during the Dark Ages and so, well, they aren’t so Dark.

As you might have guessed, I am reluctant to let the phrase go. Can’t we just agree that we don’t mean anything nasty by it? The issue I guess, is that people are quite twitchy about making value judgments about different cultures. It could be argued that the removal of the exploitative Roman regime and the reversion to an agrarian economy was a Good Thing. It is easy to imagine being a high ranking person living in a Roman villa with plentiful food, reading material and a bathhouse but it is more sobering to imagine being a slave working in a tin mine in Wales until you die very young. However, I can’t help but feel that the collective happiness may have been greater in Britain in 250 AD than it was in 550 AD.

The Grey Ages perhaps?

2 thoughts on “The Dark Ages…”

  1. hey… good story on dark ages.. the trouble is that Francesco Petrarca did actually mean it to be ‘nasty’ as he was having a slash at late latin literature that would have sat well in the op ed pages of the Australian newspaper (which is itself deep in a dark age of no news and all opinion)

    your note made me wonder about whether what was going in in that time. you say ‘stuff happened’ but don’t give any examples. didn’t anything great happen?

    what sort of things did happen do you reckon? besides birth, death, eating and reproduction and pothole avoidance (owing to state of roads)?

    and the invasion of england by the people living in the eurozone…

    and the rise of nation states…. (which shows your model of human gang size is a fractal concept.. ie fully scalable.. nations can behave as thuggish, dangerous units also..)…

    and the voyage of Marco Polo

    and the creation of Islamic religion

    and the colonisation of Easter Island, followed shortly by a near-extinction experience..

    ok.. I suppose stuff did happen. just not so much in Western Europe

    great blog of yours, cheers.

    Reply

    1. Thanks for the great answer.
      Yes, up until recently the label the “Dark Ages” was definitely meant to be a derogatory term. I guess I was just saying that I find the label useful and not entirely without foundation. It certainly only refers to the remnants of the Western Roman Empire though.
      Actually, people insist on doing stuff relentlessly – it’s just one damn thing after another. So the “Dark Ages” are packed with fascinating incident. You could make the argument that the Empire had enforced an artificial stasis and that this ended with the retreat of the legions. People began flowing freely all over the place. Usually not as far as the legions used to march though and the lower classes were, as always, fairly stationary.
      I like your fractal comment. Each person in the hierarchy only has to relate to a small group of people but the concept “stacks”. I suppose my point would be, why are we comfortable with stacks of a certain size? I don’t think that it is just; that’s how many people you can shout at at once, because that would be some hundreds. I think it is how many you are capable of relating to, becoming friends with, dominating. A platoon sized group works.
      I think of Marco as after the Dark Ages. Except for Spain, Islam was more a phenomenon of the Eastern Roman Empire. What had been the Western Roman Empire managed, amazingly, to pull together an army and defeat the Muslims at Tours in 732. Now there’s a major event in the Dark Ages.
      Widespread literacy. The more cosmopolitan view (which sprang from having legions moving from one end of the Empire to the other quite frequently). Major public works that were built to last. These are what was missing in the Dark Ages in north western Europe. Of these, the loss of the first was probably the most socially pernicious in the long run.

      Reply

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