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The so-called dark ages are not much worse than other periods of human history when there is were no large government institutions. With the end of the Roman Em

The so-called dark ages are not much worse than other periods of human history when there is were no large government institutions. With the end of the Roman Empire in the west, Europe came to be ruled by local tribes, in the same way that happened throughout history. Europeans demonstrated to be as barbarians as any other group of people in the world that had no strong institutions to protect society from their immediate power urges. It took centuries for larger government institutions to form again.

ardit33 8y ago
Not correct. They were much worse indeed. Remember, Romans had a fairly advanced society, and buildings, architecture, and infrastructure. Roads crossing whole regions, (the highways of the time), aqua-ducts, ways to dispose sewage, etc... This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire. Stone building were replaced by mud huts, and I don't know about you, but not having running water in your town, or paved roads to the next town or port seem like huge drawbacks to life quality. The first Anglo-saxons that came in Britania, after the Roman left lived in what you would call downright primitive huts made by either mud or wooden planks with mud in them. That and the constant warring, in many ways, it was a huge set-back for the people there.
- ghaff 8y ago
  I think you misread the parent: "The so-called dark ages are not much worse than other periods of human history when there is were no large government institutions." It's not a comparison to the Roman Empire.
- llukas 8y ago
  > This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire. BULLSHIT. How on earth you can present blatantly false presumptions as information? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Romanesque_art_and_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Romanesque_art_and_archite... "In most of western Europe, the Roman architectural tradition survived the collapse of the empire. The Merovingians (Franks) continued to build large stone buildings like monastery churches and palaces." BTW we still have Roman aqueducts, roads and bridges all over Europe.
  - jschwartzi 8y ago
    Yeah, I mean it's not as if people haven't learned new things from their conquerors throughout the ages. For a modern example look at Japanese society now versus Japanese society pre-WWII. The US completely remodeled their society. While we have long since handed over control of their government to the Japanese people they continue to have strong Western influences in their buildings, fashion, and culture. It has a distinctly "Japanese" tint to it but if you visit Japan you'll observe largely the same social mores around commerce as exist in the US. Within that context it's hard to believe that the European tribes simply forgot how to build roads or monuments or architecture after Rome ceased to influence them.
  - ardit33 8y ago
    Read my comment. I specifically mentioned Britannia. The Franks (i.e. Merovingian), had less than 20% of the former Roman Empire in control. About 18%. The rest of Europe was extremely fragmented, and territories changing hands often (and always through war). Mentioning that there were plenty of building and construction happening in some part, doesn't negate that the rest (80%) was being ravaged and in continuous decline to the point of whole populations being displaced. Only the Eastern Roman Empire (aka. Byzantine empire), had a unified government structure, yet it was struggling with the Slavic invasions/incursions from the north, and the wars with the Sassanid empire and the succeeding caliphates. They did attempt to re-unify the empire with the Justinian Restoration (with Belisarious being the main general re-conquering vast territories), but that didn't last long either. As the economy was lagging the region was ravaged by the Black Plague, where it is estimated that 25–50 million people in two centuries of recurrence died, equivalent to 13–26% of the world's population at the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian To me, late Antiquity end, and the true dark ages begin after the death Justinian, and the decline of the Eastern Roman Empire to the point that it couldn't defend or keep its territories from the Slavic invasions.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > Stone building were replaced by mud huts, and I don't know about you, but not having running water in your town, or paved roads to the next town or port seem like huge drawbacks to life quality. I read somewhere that skeletal remains show people got taller after the end of the Roman empire. And then started getting shorter through the Renaissance right up till the agricultural revolution in the early 20th century.
  - _jahh 8y ago
    they no longer paid their Roman taxes and could eat more of their own harvest
    - ido 8y ago
      Yet somehow the population still declined significantly[0]? The Early Middle Ages saw relatively little population growth with urbanization well below its Roman peak...Estimates of the total population of Europe are speculative, but at the time of Charlemagne it is thought to have been between 25 and 30 million Where as at its peak the Roman Empire alone had a population of 70 million. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography
  - Bayart 8y ago
    That's the thing with urbanization : it's great for production and capital but it's terrible for your health. The industrial revolution was very much a low point in human welfare.
- scarmig 8y ago
  You can't compare Britain in the post-Roman area with Rome at the height of empire. London in the "Dark Ages" didn't have aqueducts. But Londinium was part of the periphery of the empire, and it also never had aqueducts. There's not that much information to be gained by cherry picking the elements of the central core of the Roman Empire and asking why they weren't present in far flung areas in the post-Roman era. Skeletons show that people were relatively healthier (at least in the periphery) after Rome had fallen than when Rome had dominated these regions.
  - orthoxerox 8y ago
    I'd wager that if the modern globalized economy were destroyed, people everywhere would become healthier, going from single-crop intensive farming, garment working and assembly lines back to localized farming and manufacturing. The populations would dwindle, of course, but the survivors would be healthier and happier.
  - atoav 8y ago
    It was always my impression that the term “dark ages” was never about quality of life, but created in opposition to the enlightenment (partly because we don’t know much about that age, partly because of the role superstition and belief held in documented cases). In Austria and Germany most people descripe the Nazi era also as “dark times”, despite there beeing roads built (although the Nazis were so in debt at the beginning of the war already that you can hardly call this a success). So dark has multiple definitions. I thought the most.common one was about a time where rational thought and humanism didn’t really win, but tribal rivalry (on any scale) and radical beliefs did
    - scarmig 8y ago
      The concept of the Dark Age was, indeed, invented in the Enlightenment, and contemporaneous rhetoric did use it to portray the Enlightenment project in a favorable light as a break from a benighted past. The issue is that the Enlightenment wasn't a project to move human beings to some better plane, but to rationalize society and its members in a way that made it more amendable to control and planning. And so centralized power could use Enlightenment ideology to eliminate alternative power centers, centralizing power in the hands of a single state that could reorganize society for its own ends. That itself had pros and cons, with the biggest con being the newfound ability for states to execute projects of mass violence more effectively.
wallace_f 8y ago
This seems so overly simplistic, and perhaps misleading. Not just because, as evidenced in the article and is consensus among scholars, that the pejorative term, Dark Ages, itself is misleading. But There seems to be so much other blatant evidence which calls your premise into question. After all, Caeser made his name as he led a conquest with what was not fundamentally different to a warring tribe, and marched it back into Rome as a final affront to Cato and the state of Rome.
- UnhelpfulYoda 8y ago
  Meh, this is just the latest fad with 'scholars' ...the whole thing about how The Dark Ages weren't really dark, has been going on for about 20 years now... there are good reasons that this period is called the dark ages. I suspect it will die a slow death, just like the 'The Civil War wasn't about slavery' schtick.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    >I suspect it will die a slow death, just like the 'The Civil War wasn't about slavery' schtick. The dark ages I seem to have a more-clear picture of: derth of historical record, rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, technological progress, and unfortunate disease, all each contributed, and amalgamated into the public conscious of defining the era as 'dark.' The civil war thing is really confusing. I grew up on slavery as the reason, then in uni had a prof tell me it was really about states rights. I've talked to others who had the exact opposite experience. Anyways, it's a super political and emotionally sensitive topic to people... But I had the impression the states rights narrative was not a recent thing.
    - Marazan 8y ago
      The state's right they were fighting for was the right to keep slaves. It is super clear, the states say it in their succession documents. Claiming it is about abstract states rights and not slavery is Lost Cause revisionism.
Bayart 8y ago
>Europe came to be ruled by local tribes, in the same way that happened throughout history. Europeans demonstrated to be as barbarians as any other group of people in the world that had no strong institutions to protect society from their immediate power urges. It really wasn't. As Roman imperial faded in, agents that were Roman auxiliaries filled the void with the support and help of local authorities, chiefly senatorial families and the Church (filled with members of senatorial families), which kept being a structuring force for society during lulls in civil government. Stable government recovered relatively quietly and frankly certain areas were better off in terms of peace after the Western part of the empire « collapsed » than during the strife preceding it. Areas that were really worst off got ravaged by civil war, not tribal violence (such as is the case with Italy). I recommend Karl Ferdinand Werner's books on the subject, the transition between Imperial Roman Gaul and Frankish(-Roman) Gaul. But his paper La "conquête franque" de la Gaule : itinéraires historiographiques d'une erreur (The "Frankish conquest" of Gaul : historiographical itineraries of an error) is enlightening and short, if you can read French. The narrative of the Late Antiquity/Early Medieval "barbarian invasions" is known to be complete rubbish, don't fall for it.

ardit33 8y ago

Not correct. They were much worse indeed. Remember, Romans had a fairly advanced society, and buildings, architecture, and infrastructure. Roads crossing whole regions, (the highways of the time), aqua-ducts, ways to dispose sewage, etc... This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire. Stone building were replaced by mud huts, and I don't know about you, but not having running water in your town, or paved roads to the next town or port seem like huge drawbacks to life quality. The first Anglo-saxons that came in Britania, after the Roman left lived in what you would call downright primitive huts made by either mud or wooden planks with mud in them. That and the constant warring, in many ways, it was a huge set-back for the people there.

ghaff 8y ago
I think you misread the parent: "The so-called dark ages are not much worse than other periods of human history when there is were no large government institutions." It's not a comparison to the Roman Empire.
llukas 8y ago
> This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire. BULLSHIT. How on earth you can present blatantly false presumptions as information? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Romanesque_art_and_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Romanesque_art_and_archite... "In most of western Europe, the Roman architectural tradition survived the collapse of the empire. The Merovingians (Franks) continued to build large stone buildings like monastery churches and palaces." BTW we still have Roman aqueducts, roads and bridges all over Europe.
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Yeah, I mean it's not as if people haven't learned new things from their conquerors throughout the ages. For a modern example look at Japanese society now versus Japanese society pre-WWII. The US completely remodeled their society. While we have long since handed over control of their government to the Japanese people they continue to have strong Western influences in their buildings, fashion, and culture. It has a distinctly "Japanese" tint to it but if you visit Japan you'll observe largely the same social mores around commerce as exist in the US. Within that context it's hard to believe that the European tribes simply forgot how to build roads or monuments or architecture after Rome ceased to influence them.
- ardit33 8y ago
  Read my comment. I specifically mentioned Britannia. The Franks (i.e. Merovingian), had less than 20% of the former Roman Empire in control. About 18%. The rest of Europe was extremely fragmented, and territories changing hands often (and always through war). Mentioning that there were plenty of building and construction happening in some part, doesn't negate that the rest (80%) was being ravaged and in continuous decline to the point of whole populations being displaced. Only the Eastern Roman Empire (aka. Byzantine empire), had a unified government structure, yet it was struggling with the Slavic invasions/incursions from the north, and the wars with the Sassanid empire and the succeeding caliphates. They did attempt to re-unify the empire with the Justinian Restoration (with Belisarious being the main general re-conquering vast territories), but that didn't last long either. As the economy was lagging the region was ravaged by the Black Plague, where it is estimated that 25–50 million people in two centuries of recurrence died, equivalent to 13–26% of the world's population at the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian To me, late Antiquity end, and the true dark ages begin after the death Justinian, and the decline of the Eastern Roman Empire to the point that it couldn't defend or keep its territories from the Slavic invasions.
Gibbon1 8y ago
> Stone building were replaced by mud huts, and I don't know about you, but not having running water in your town, or paved roads to the next town or port seem like huge drawbacks to life quality. I read somewhere that skeletal remains show people got taller after the end of the Roman empire. And then started getting shorter through the Renaissance right up till the agricultural revolution in the early 20th century.
- _jahh 8y ago
  they no longer paid their Roman taxes and could eat more of their own harvest
  - ido 8y ago
    Yet somehow the population still declined significantly[0]? The Early Middle Ages saw relatively little population growth with urbanization well below its Roman peak...Estimates of the total population of Europe are speculative, but at the time of Charlemagne it is thought to have been between 25 and 30 million Where as at its peak the Roman Empire alone had a population of 70 million. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography
- Bayart 8y ago
  That's the thing with urbanization : it's great for production and capital but it's terrible for your health. The industrial revolution was very much a low point in human welfare.
scarmig 8y ago
You can't compare Britain in the post-Roman area with Rome at the height of empire. London in the "Dark Ages" didn't have aqueducts. But Londinium was part of the periphery of the empire, and it also never had aqueducts. There's not that much information to be gained by cherry picking the elements of the central core of the Roman Empire and asking why they weren't present in far flung areas in the post-Roman era. Skeletons show that people were relatively healthier (at least in the periphery) after Rome had fallen than when Rome had dominated these regions.
- orthoxerox 8y ago
  I'd wager that if the modern globalized economy were destroyed, people everywhere would become healthier, going from single-crop intensive farming, garment working and assembly lines back to localized farming and manufacturing. The populations would dwindle, of course, but the survivors would be healthier and happier.
- atoav 8y ago
  It was always my impression that the term “dark ages” was never about quality of life, but created in opposition to the enlightenment (partly because we don’t know much about that age, partly because of the role superstition and belief held in documented cases). In Austria and Germany most people descripe the Nazi era also as “dark times”, despite there beeing roads built (although the Nazis were so in debt at the beginning of the war already that you can hardly call this a success). So dark has multiple definitions. I thought the most.common one was about a time where rational thought and humanism didn’t really win, but tribal rivalry (on any scale) and radical beliefs did
  - scarmig 8y ago
    The concept of the Dark Age was, indeed, invented in the Enlightenment, and contemporaneous rhetoric did use it to portray the Enlightenment project in a favorable light as a break from a benighted past. The issue is that the Enlightenment wasn't a project to move human beings to some better plane, but to rationalize society and its members in a way that made it more amendable to control and planning. And so centralized power could use Enlightenment ideology to eliminate alternative power centers, centralizing power in the hands of a single state that could reorganize society for its own ends. That itself had pros and cons, with the biggest con being the newfound ability for states to execute projects of mass violence more effectively.

wallace_f 8y ago

This seems so overly simplistic, and perhaps misleading. Not just because, as evidenced in the article and is consensus among scholars, that the pejorative term, Dark Ages, itself is misleading. But There seems to be so much other blatant evidence which calls your premise into question. After all, Caeser made his name as he led a conquest with what was not fundamentally different to a warring tribe, and marched it back into Rome as a final affront to Cato and the state of Rome.

UnhelpfulYoda 8y ago
Meh, this is just the latest fad with 'scholars' ...the whole thing about how The Dark Ages weren't really dark, has been going on for about 20 years now... there are good reasons that this period is called the dark ages. I suspect it will die a slow death, just like the 'The Civil War wasn't about slavery' schtick.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  >I suspect it will die a slow death, just like the 'The Civil War wasn't about slavery' schtick. The dark ages I seem to have a more-clear picture of: derth of historical record, rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, technological progress, and unfortunate disease, all each contributed, and amalgamated into the public conscious of defining the era as 'dark.' The civil war thing is really confusing. I grew up on slavery as the reason, then in uni had a prof tell me it was really about states rights. I've talked to others who had the exact opposite experience. Anyways, it's a super political and emotionally sensitive topic to people... But I had the impression the states rights narrative was not a recent thing.
  - Marazan 8y ago
    The state's right they were fighting for was the right to keep slaves. It is super clear, the states say it in their succession documents. Claiming it is about abstract states rights and not slavery is Lost Cause revisionism.

Bayart 8y ago

>Europe came to be ruled by local tribes, in the same way that happened throughout history. Europeans demonstrated to be as barbarians as any other group of people in the world that had no strong institutions to protect society from their immediate power urges. It really wasn't. As Roman imperial faded in, agents that were Roman auxiliaries filled the void with the support and help of local authorities, chiefly senatorial families and the Church (filled with members of senatorial families), which kept being a structuring force for society during lulls in civil government. Stable government recovered relatively quietly and frankly certain areas were better off in terms of peace after the Western part of the empire « collapsed » than during the strife preceding it. Areas that were really worst off got ravaged by civil war, not tribal violence (such as is the case with Italy). I recommend Karl Ferdinand Werner's books on the subject, the transition between Imperial Roman Gaul and Frankish(-Roman) Gaul. But his paper La "conquête franque" de la Gaule : itinéraires historiographiques d'une erreur (The "Frankish conquest" of Gaul : historiographical itineraries of an error) is enlightening and short, if you can read French. The narrative of the Late Antiquity/Early Medieval "barbarian invasions" is known to be complete rubbish, don't fall for it.