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Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. The whole continent was a basket case and hadn't advanced at all, and often regressed fro
by ardit33 6y ago
Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. The whole continent was a basket case and hadn't advanced at all, and often regressed from the complexity/organization of civilization of the Roman empire. Even some of the major battles of the time, had only few thousand combatant, not more than a couple of Roman legions. Kings couldn't field armies, even larger to ancient greece, or persian empire (we are talking about 400-500 B.C.). The regress in overall state structure and organization was astonishing.
It took the renaissance to change things up and for innovation and cultural progress to pick up. So, it was more than a 1000 years lost to petty warfare, destruction and general ignorance.
If the Roman Empire had endured, who knows how things would have evolved. We would have been a different civilization by now. We probably would have had colonized mars by now :)
Ps. The byzantine empire, the eastern side of the Roman empire, after the late 600s - 700s, was just a shade of its original, and kept losing territory and influence until it was just a city state conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.
- lou1306 6y ago> Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. Uhm, I'd say more like 378 (battle of Hadrianopolis) - 800 (Charlemagne is crowned Emperor). The idea that the whole medieval period is a "dark age" [1] is currently discredited among historians: from 800 until the Black Death of the mid-1300s, European culture and economy grew almost nonstop. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
- ciceryadam 6y agoSimilarly for central/eastern Europe the Mongol invasion in the 13th century was a major "dark age" setback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe
- Bayart 6y ago>Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. That's old but very sticky Early Modern propaganda, mostly due to anti-Catholicism. No serious historian today would make that claim, and frankly it's complete nonsense.