Something Doesn’t Add Up About the Dark Ages

In 476 AD, the lights went out all across Europe. For a thousand years, there was nothing. No art, no science, no progress. Just mud, plague, and men in ditches. But the people who actually study this period say it never happened. They argue the Dark Ages were invented by writers with a point to prove. And you've been repeating them ever since. Hey people, welcome back. If you're new here, I'm Michael, and on this channel, we explore the recurring patterns that shape and shatter civilizations. Let's get into it. The Dark Ages. A time when Europe fell into a pit of technological stagnation. Culture might as well not have existed. Death tolls rose to new highs, as lawless bandits and disease ravaged the continent. It was truly a time of terror and desperation. A time when civilization went missing for hundreds of years. Or was it? Because, as it turns out, the Dark Ages weren't anywhere near as dark as people would have you believe. Historians have actually been trying to tell us for years that this period is filled to the brim with culture, technological advancements, and philosophical developments. So, it's time to shine a light on the Dark Ages. When someone says a Dark Age in history, or really in any context, it refers to a time when progress stops, or is even reversed. Nothing significantly positive happens, and misery reigns supreme. If your football club doesn't win a trophy for a long time, and consistently loses matches, that would be a Dark Age. Now, the argument people make is that Europe went through a time when it not only wasn't winning trophies, but was genuinely a horrible place to live in. Law and order had vanished overnight, leaving behind nothing but chaos and death. But where did this idea come from, and why do people still believe it today? Well, first things first, it would help to know when exactly the Dark Ages actually were. There's a lot of disagreement over when the Dark Ages ended. Some historians argue that the entire medieval era was a period of backwards debauchery. Petrarch, the first historian to reference the term, wrote about it in the 1330s, and helped popularize the idea that the centuries following Classical Rome were an age of darkness. And yes, he fully believed he was actively living in the Dark Ages himself. These historians argue the Dark Ages only truly ended with the Renaissance, around the 15th century. Enlightenment historians say it only truly ended with, well, the Enlightenment, when thoughts of reason, a rejection of religion, and a focus on humanist or scientific principles really took hold in society. But while the end of the Dark Ages isn't firmly set, almost everyone agrees on when they started, 476, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Although still, it's just a convenient historical marker, not a moment when Europe suddenly entered a clearly defined Dark Age. Picture this, it's the 5th century CE. You're an inhabitant of the Roman Empire, the most glorious and advanced civilization to have ever existed. You walk the marble streets of Rome every day, partake in vigorous philosophical debate with your fellow citizens, in the shadow of the most beautiful buildings ever created. All of this virtue is protected by a strong army, commanded by a righteous emperor. The world is at peace. But for the last few years, the barbarians have been knocking on the gates of the empire. The Visigoths finally break through. They ride through the streets of Rome, pillaging and destroying everything your ancestors worked so hard to create. You weep at the loss of the most prosperous city in human history. And the Visigoths leave nothing in their wake. They have no interest in society. They care only for barbarity. Rome goes up in flames and for the next few hundred years, Europe is doomed to darkness. Its people live in backward ditches, desperately trying to survive without the societal structures the Romans had so generously established. That's what these historians would have had you believed actually happened, more or less. But is it actually true? Well, the answer is no. Not even close. As is almost always the case in history, the reality isn't so black and white. There's far more nuance and a lot less grand spectacle in reality. The notion that human progress suddenly stopped after the fall of the Western Roman Empire is beyond outdated, and modern historians largely hate using the term. And just for a second, hold on to one word for me. The. Not a dark age. The dark ages. That word is carrying more weight than anything else in this story and by the end, you'll see exactly how much. But anyway, why didn't this happen the way some historians say? Well, first off, Rome at this point wasn't anything close to the idealized utopia you might imagine. The Roman Empire had been split in two long, long ago. But even before that, the true center of power didn't lie in Rome anymore. It was here, in Constantinople. Emperor Constantine I recognized in the 4th century that the West was dwindling in importance. He relocated the capital of the Empire to his new city of Constantinople to be closer to Eastern riches and Rome's chief rivals, the Sasanian Empire. So if you were looking for a real center of academic progress and human ingenuity in the 5th century, Constantinople was a far better bet. Rome and the West in general lost more and more importance over the decades and centuries. The Empire as a whole also just went into steady decline due to corruption, economic troubles, and troubles on the borders with barbarians. By the time the Western Roman Empire fell for good, it was already a shadow of its former self. The Visigoths also didn't ride into Rome in 476 and destroy the city. The sack of Rome actually happened 66 years before Romulus Augustulus, traditionally considered the last Western Roman Emperor, was deposed by Odoacer. The Western Roman Empire actually went through a number of internal civil wars before this point too. So very long story short, the West fell in a slow, deteriorating crumble rather than one big bang collapse. Roman society actually looked a lot closer to the barbarians that took over Europe after its fall. Than they would have ever liked to have admitted. It's a tough pill for some historians to swallow. But this sudden fall to foreign debauchery just never happened. But maybe you could still argue that the period that followed was not great for human progress. But that too doesn't really hold up when you look at the facts. Okay, maybe Rome didn't all collapse in one go, the historian says. But surely the loss of such a massive civilization and all its knowledge did irreversible damage to human progress. The societies that followed must have been backwards and brutish. And yes, it's easy to think that, but it's not true for a number of reasons. Let's actually look at what society looked like from 476 CE to around 900 CE in Europe. We see a dramatic rise in the influence of Irish monasticism around the continent. Irish monks wrote hundreds of new pieces and spent centuries traveling around, sharing their works and spreading their philosophy. Meanwhile, in the East, the Roman Empire was still standing. Byzantine Empire is simply the name later historians gave it because its inhabitants still considered themselves Romans. Constantinople prospered during the 5th century and Justinian even reconquered parts of the former Western Empire during the 6th. But it was not standing as strong as before throughout this period. In the 7th century, it suffered devastating war with Persia and lost Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and eventually North Africa to expanding Islamic states. It survived, but in a much smaller and profoundly transformed form. Meanwhile, Charlemagne inherited and dramatically expanded the Frankish kingdom. On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor, creating a rival imperial clan in Western Europe. The fact that a woman, Irene, ruled in Constantinople helped some Western writers justify the coronation. But the Eastern Romans did not accept that Charlemagne had replaced their emperor. In Britain, Anglo-Saxon migrants arrived from the continent and established a number of local kingdoms. These were initially pagan and converted gradually to Christianity from the late 6th century onwards. We still find plenty of pottery and metalworks from this era, showing that while we're not seeing the peak of Roman civilization here, a different kind of society was developing. The Vikings, who we often see as nothing more than savage pillagers, are traveling up and down the northern coasts, establishing trade routes between kingdoms. Yes, raids happened, but the Vikings also made incredible journeys across the continent, discovering new lands Europeans had never seen before, like Iceland and even North America. Nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, the Vikings had already set foot on the continent themselves during a Dark Age. How exactly does that add up? And on top of this, technology did continue to develop. Water mills were not invented during this period, because Greeks and Romans had used them centuries earlier, but medieval communities continued using and adapting water power. Heavy ploughs and new crop rotation techniques also spread unevenly across parts of Europe, increasing agricultural production in suitable regions. Churches, monasteries and fortified settlements transformed the landscape too. So, we're seeing new technologies and architecture. Great manuscripts written by Irish monks. Tapestries woven by the Anglo-Saxons. Holy kingdoms established by the Franks. And the Byzantines continuing to develop in the east. We're seeing art, politics, culture and technology all steadily progressing. And there's another problem when calling this period a Dark Age. What about the rest of the planet? It's not like every other civilization suddenly died just because a dwindling empire they'd never met finally petered out. In fact, a Muslim would argue the exact opposite. The prophet Muhammad was born in 570, which of course led to the foundation of Islam as a religion. Not long after, the Rashidun Caliphate spread and conquered across the Middle East and North Africa, establishing a new kind of society. And from the 8th century to around the 14th, philosophy, medicine and mathematics went through tremendous developments. This is known as the Islamic Golden Age. A stark contrast to the supposed Dark Age happening in Europe, with the city of Baghdad at its core, Islamic culture and sciences really flourished during this time. China produced extraordinary art, literature and technology under the Tang Dynasty. But it also suffered major crises. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755 to 763 devastated parts of the empire and severely weakened the Tang court, while further rebellions and political fragmentation followed during the late 9th century. So the point is not that the rest of the world experienced uninterrupted progress and no issues. No, it's just that there was no single global descent into darkness following the fall of Western Rome. In fact, the idea of Western Rome's fall heralding a Dark Age is just incredibly Eurocentric. Take a look at the rest of the planet, even just neighboring kingdoms, and you'll see a totally different picture. So no, the Dark Ages were far from a period shrouded in darkness and terror. Europe and beyond went through the usual ebb and flow of societal developments. New technologies and ideas appeared the same way they always do, throughout history. But then, why did historians insist on this classification for so long? After all of this talk about why these scholars were wrong, is there actually some truth to their words? The answer is simple. Yes, the final fall of the Western Roman Empire did herald a period of time where we see a marked drop in the creation of pottery, art, and social contracts. Life for the average person would have been more difficult, shorter, and more filled with danger. These are undeniable facts. There was a sort of Dark Age following 476 AD. But how could there not be? The Roman Empire had stood for a thousand years by this point. Losing the societal fabric and structures that kept it in place was undoubtedly going to cause disruptions. This part of the world had to go through growing pains, so to speak, in order to find itself in the years that followed. But think about it for a second. The era isn't called A Dark Age, it's called THE Dark Ages. Remember, that's the word I asked you to hold onto and it's important. Saying THE means this period was unique and significant in human history. But the disagreements over the term come from historiography, not from the study of history itself. History matters. A lot, funnily enough. But what matters even more is our framing of history. How we present it and write about it. This is what we call historiography. A historian can tell you what happened in Germany in 800 AD. A historiograph will place that event in a specific era and tie the event to a broader cultural movement taking root during that period. So when we call an age of history dark or golden, we're engaging in historiography. After all, to the people living at the time, they just saw one day blend into the next. It's us who come round later down the line and set that historical marker. And how we set those markers can shape a narrative that applies in the present day. That's exactly what historians of the past were doing. An Enlightenment scholar would call the fall of Rome the end of a rational enlightened civilization, with the rise of Christian kingdoms and feudalism as a dark age because they're standing in firm opposition to the influence of the church and religious ideals dominating their society. Perhaps a modern anti-immigration advocate would mark the fall of the Western Roman Empire as a telltale point of what happens when foreign barbarians invade an established society with laws, inevitably leading to its demise. You can really frame this point of history any way you want to fit any narrative you want about a civilization in decline. So the reason why the term the Dark Ages stuck is because some historians had a point to prove. And yet, the more time has gone on and the more we've uncovered about this period, the more this ideological distinction has come apart at the seams. Today, most historians see it this way. The fall of the Western Roman Empire threw this part of Europe into disarray for a time. But thanks to the cultural vacuum, other people's works took on more meaning and Europe as a whole began restructuring itself to fit a new order. New ideas, works of art, political structures all took hold to replace the ones that had been in place for centuries. But most importantly, this period of time was not unique for this. We see the same thing happen with the fall of other powerful structures like the Chinese dynasties or even the USSR, for a modern example. Brief periods of unrest after the collapse of ingrained social structures, followed by other ideas taking root and remaking new political and cultural states. Now, if I had to finish on one point to remember, I'd say that the Dark Ages weren't anywhere near as dark as you might think and that they weren't really the Dark Ages at all, more just an ordinary age of history that starts to dim and then lightens up as time goes on. But even that is just my interpretation of history. Who knows what interpretations we'll have in the future? It might sound crazy, but what if historians in a few hundred years call the time we're living in now a Dark Age? Would you agree with that? Guys, if you want to hear about these ideas in more detail, catch me in a more relaxed format and help support my work, then consider joining my substack. The link's in the description below. Thanks so much for watching. Check out these videos on your screen now. Let me know what you think in the comments. Like, subscribe to the channel, all of that. And I'll see you next time.