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> Europe was entering the Dark Ages The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. There was a genuine decline at the fringes, which in

by graemep 9mo ago

> Europe was entering the Dark Ages The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. There was a genuine decline at the fringes, which includes Britain which maybe why it was so ingrained in Anglophone culture, but also history written by imperialists like Gibbon who thought the decline of Empires an intrinsically bad and regressive thing. The Eastern Roman Empire went on, the western broke up into successor states. Some things got worse, some things got better, there was progress made (especially for women and people at the bottom like slaves), and the early medieval period laid the foundations for progress later on. > Muhammad was having his visions Is that a bad thing? I know less about the history of that region than some others, but I think you need to look at prior conditions in places such as the Arabian peninsula to assess that.

reactordev 9mo ago
>"Is that a bad thing?" I think they were just setting the Age of Man here. Time framing it in history so others would know when we are talking about. It's fine.
helterskelter 9mo ago
The European Dark Ages was also a narrative largely invented by the Renaissance, which was trying to distinguish itself from what came before. Material wellbeing did improve overall, but that was because a huge portion of the population was killed off from the plague, freeing up tons of resources.
- WalterBright 9mo ago
  The Dark Ages were a period after the Romans left Europe where there are little to zero records of what went on then.
  - helterskelter 9mo ago
    Depends on who you ask, it's sometimes used to refer to as late as the 1400's.
    - anthk 9mo ago
      It wasn't a straight jump from Columbus or the Iberian unification, the Enlightenment and the late Middle Ages overlap a lot. I'd say from 1200's things began to 'instituonalize', from first proto-parliaments, to Iberian Fueros, to different merchants and thinkerers eroding the Ancient Regime a little by supporting capable people with the money of rich people (Maecenas? in Latin).
pessimizer 9mo ago
> The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. They definitely did. Books stopped being published, even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution, and basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments that make current postmodern academic culture look reasonable. We don't know what normal people were doing, technology advanced at a snail's pace, we don't even know where many cities and towns were located. We know far more about the Romans and the Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe. We're very lucky that some sense of religious nostalgia for the Classical age (from the fact that the Christian religion was an outgrowth of the late Roman state) kept them from losing or destroying all of the knowledge and documents of antiquity. The Western world was saved from 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants. It wasn't that they were geniuses, but that they thought that there was some value to the individual other than service to the imbred descendants of Roman generals. This reinvented the concepts of philosophical disagreement and intellectual productivity in Europe. The "there was no Dark Ages" revision is from people who would love to take us back to the Dark Ages. Nostalgic for the rule of elites, unfettered by the opinions of a population kept uneducated and on the edge of starvation. People associate the slaver culture of the US South with hillbillies, but they associated themselves, with their elaborate gowns and ballrooms, with a renewal of European culture, with the slaves playing the part of the serfs. Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. Somehow, with their weakness, Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness. We've gone from a history described entirely in terms of nobles arguing with and sleeping with each other to a present entirely described in terms of oligarchs arguing with and sleeping with each other. The last few hundred years will one day probably be described as the "Popular Period." Historians will describe it as the short span of history in which it is trivially easy to find the price of a loaf of bread, or the rules of card games. "At least 20% of the commercial writings from that period have survived."
- pqtyw 9mo ago
  > even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD. > basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to > Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap. > 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)? > Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.
pqtyw 9mo ago
There was a collapse though. The plague, climate change and warfare lead to significant population declines. Especially in Italy.
- lurk2 9mo ago
  You are referring to the Black Death and that didn’t occur until around 350 years after the end of what are colloquially known as the Dark Ages.
  - whobre 9mo ago
    There was also The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century which may have been more devastating than the Black Death.
  - pqtyw 9mo ago
    So you both can read other people's minds yet are also entirely ignorant about major well known historical events? Fascinating.
thisislife2 9mo ago
They probably meant that Muhammad was on his way to become a prophet and a future leader who would lay the foundation of the Islamic empires that would span around most of the world (while at the same time, Europe's decline had begin).
tsoukase 9mo ago
From the peak-civilization of Ancient Greeks a steady slow decline started and continued until the calamity of 5th cent AD. Pick your start of middle ages sometime there. For a very long time a dark cloud was hiding the sun of wisdom until the scientific and other conquests came over. Pick your end there. All that in the Western part of the world...

by graemep 9mo ago

reactordev 9mo ago

>"Is that a bad thing?" I think they were just setting the Age of Man here. Time framing it in history so others would know when we are talking about. It's fine.

helterskelter 9mo ago

The European Dark Ages was also a narrative largely invented by the Renaissance, which was trying to distinguish itself from what came before. Material wellbeing did improve overall, but that was because a huge portion of the population was killed off from the plague, freeing up tons of resources.

WalterBright 9mo ago
The Dark Ages were a period after the Romans left Europe where there are little to zero records of what went on then.
- helterskelter 9mo ago
  Depends on who you ask, it's sometimes used to refer to as late as the 1400's.
  - anthk 9mo ago
    It wasn't a straight jump from Columbus or the Iberian unification, the Enlightenment and the late Middle Ages overlap a lot. I'd say from 1200's things began to 'instituonalize', from first proto-parliaments, to Iberian Fueros, to different merchants and thinkerers eroding the Ancient Regime a little by supporting capable people with the money of rich people (Maecenas? in Latin).

pessimizer 9mo ago

> The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. They definitely did. Books stopped being published, even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution, and basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments that make current postmodern academic culture look reasonable. We don't know what normal people were doing, technology advanced at a snail's pace, we don't even know where many cities and towns were located. We know far more about the Romans and the Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe. We're very lucky that some sense of religious nostalgia for the Classical age (from the fact that the Christian religion was an outgrowth of the late Roman state) kept them from losing or destroying all of the knowledge and documents of antiquity. The Western world was saved from 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants. It wasn't that they were geniuses, but that they thought that there was some value to the individual other than service to the imbred descendants of Roman generals. This reinvented the concepts of philosophical disagreement and intellectual productivity in Europe. The "there was no Dark Ages" revision is from people who would love to take us back to the Dark Ages. Nostalgic for the rule of elites, unfettered by the opinions of a population kept uneducated and on the edge of starvation. People associate the slaver culture of the US South with hillbillies, but they associated themselves, with their elaborate gowns and ballrooms, with a renewal of European culture, with the slaves playing the part of the serfs. Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. Somehow, with their weakness, Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness. We've gone from a history described entirely in terms of nobles arguing with and sleeping with each other to a present entirely described in terms of oligarchs arguing with and sleeping with each other. The last few hundred years will one day probably be described as the "Popular Period." Historians will describe it as the short span of history in which it is trivially easy to find the price of a loaf of bread, or the rules of card games. "At least 20% of the commercial writings from that period have survived."

pqtyw 9mo ago
> even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD. > basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to > Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap. > 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)? > Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.

pqtyw 9mo ago

There was a collapse though. The plague, climate change and warfare lead to significant population declines. Especially in Italy.

lurk2 9mo ago
You are referring to the Black Death and that didn’t occur until around 350 years after the end of what are colloquially known as the Dark Ages.
- whobre 9mo ago
  There was also The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century which may have been more devastating than the Black Death.
- pqtyw 9mo ago
  So you both can read other people's minds yet are also entirely ignorant about major well known historical events? Fascinating.

thisislife2 9mo ago

They probably meant that Muhammad was on his way to become a prophet and a future leader who would lay the foundation of the Islamic empires that would span around most of the world (while at the same time, Europe's decline had begin).

tsoukase 9mo ago

From the peak-civilization of Ancient Greeks a steady slow decline started and continued until the calamity of 5th cent AD. Pick your start of middle ages sometime there. For a very long time a dark cloud was hiding the sun of wisdom until the scientific and other conquests came over. Pick your end there. All that in the Western part of the world...