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Not correct. They were much worse indeed. Remember, Romans had a fairly advanced society, and buildings, architecture, and infrastructure. Roads crossing who

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.

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.