>Well, that's true for the western Roman Empire. The eastern side (which included southernmost Italy, Greece, most of the mediterrenean, middle east - Syria, Le

>Well, that's true for the western Roman Empire. The eastern side (which included southernmost Italy, Greece, most of the mediterrenean, middle east - Syria, Lebanon, and balkans, and eastern (modern) turkey) persisted, kept and advanced the Roman civic structure, organization, legal system, etc and didn't collapse during the middle ages. So did the West. We went from a Late Imperial system in which the military had the power (so-called « barbarians ») to an Early Medieval system in which the military had the power and stopped paying lip service to the Emperor. That's it. Collapse happened in very localized area (like England), but it certainly doesn't apply to Gaul, Iberia and Italy. The big hole in the « Dark Ages » is due to the Islamic invasion of North Africa cutting off the supply of papyrus. But the papyrus left from the 6th and 7th centuries makes it extremely clear that those were literate societies keeping and iterating upon the Late Roman forms of administrations. The low point is around the 8th c., somewhere between the Islamic invasion of Spain and Charlemagne.