Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

In Defence of the Dark Ages May 18, 2014

The Dark Ages is a much despised term for the period from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the tailing off of Viking raids in the tenth and eleventh centuries and the arrival of a new stability in Europe. Most historians agree that the period deserves a name, in other words it stands out from what came before and what came after. But to use any value laden words like ‘dark’ is just too much for our academic cherubins who get worried about descents into judgement: unless of course the judgement in question belongs to the canon of self-evident twenty-first century ‘truths’; women are equal, macs are better than pcs, Freud was right, trans fat kills, slavery is probably not a good idea, eating people is wrong, viva universal health care etc etc. (I happen to agree with most of these but I loathe smug double standards: namely we only do relativism when we like it.)

Two terms have been rolled out to replace ‘Dark Ages’: the first is the very unsatisfactory ‘Late Antiquity’ and the second the bland  ‘Early Middle Ages’. Late Antiquity doesn’t work because it suggests that the Roman Empire continued after three hundred western Roman cities had emptied, after the Imperial government had ‘withered into truth’ and after the Roman army had ceased to exist. This is a silly notion in Italy, but it is a downright ridiculous notion in northern Gaul or Britain and it is magic-mushroom ludicrous in Germany or Scandinavia (where it has sometimes been applied and where Rome never ruled). The early Middle Ages could work, and I have sometimes employed it in academic contexts to quieten anxious editors, but one of the reasons for giving names in history is to communicate with a wider public: in that sense Dark Ages has far more cachet than the inspid EMA, which seems to shout ‘annex’.

Dark Ages, on the other hand, expresses a couple of facts, one straightforward, one worth arguing over.

First, we have far less documentation than we do for the preceding period, whereas normally we have more documentation for every successive generation. This is the sense of Dark Age as used in other periods (e.g. Cambodian, Egyptian, Greek history) and it is a useful and straightforward epistemological concept.

Second, most men and women in the carcass of the western Empire saw their standard of living fall after the collapse of Roman rule and the crumbling of that Empire caused chaos on the ground as the successors to Rome fought over the crumbs of Romanitas. Here Dark Age hating historians would say: ‘but hold on, you are making the mistake of projecting our own values onto the past’. I would answer that it is difficult to find a significant minority in history from any settled society who would prefer wooden houses to stone, barter to a moneyed economy or anarchy to order.  It is true that we don’t have polling instruments for the fifth century, it is true that these are assumptions: but they are assumptions based on knowledge of the way that late Roman Christians saw the world. Late Roman Christians were, in fact far more intolerant than we are and far more intolerant than their Republicans ancestors. Of course, the second ‘fact’ works less well by the time we get to the seventh century.

Make no mistake, the Dark Ages matter. They break the trajectories of ancient history: la storia spezzata, in the words of one Italian historian. They are the period when the nations of modern Europe begin to coalesce. The Dark Ages see the fermentation of a Christian Europe. Indeed, this is the period when Europe comes into existence. The Dark Ages are the id of the western mind, while the renaissance is our facile do-gooding superego. None of these facts are damaged though by calling a spade a spade: keep the Dark Ages dark!

Other thoughts on the Dark Ages: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

PS Interesting that Ken Dark (no pun intended), an archaeologist with whom I would often disagree, wrote an article where he suggests that Dark Ages is a passable term. But being a weekend Dark Age historian I can’t find the reference, sorry.

PPS Wikipedia sums up the conventional cherubic academic position here.

28 May 2014 Michael D writes in with a fascinating reflection on all of this. I was struck by several things here but particularly how my epistomological take on Dark Ages works a lot less well outside Roman territory. ‘Though these days I work mostly on the contemporary Middle East, my doctoral work was on early Islamic history with minor fields in Medieval Europe and Byzantium. Coming at this question as a Mediterraneanist, if that’s a word, I really see these three terms as distinct, and applying to different periods in different places. To me at least, Late Antiquity makes me think of the work of the magisterial Peter Brown, who if he didn’t coin the term certainly owns it these days. To me it implies the Christianized Roman Empire after Constantine, though if you want to date it earlier (the Antonines, Diocletian) that’s OK too. In my own mind it ends when cultural romanitas or itd Greek-speaking eastern version ends, when urban life fades. As you rightly note this doesn’t work in the British Isles after the fifh century if not earlier, and never really worked beyond the old Roman limes; it crumbles gradually in Gaul, at first in the north, then in the south and in Spain. In North frica it lasts until the Vandals but maintains toeholds. Then under Justinian you have Belisarius’ and Narses’ reconquests of Italy and parts of North Africa. In Egypt, the Levant and Eastern Europe it endures, with the brief Persian interlude before Heraclius, until the rise of Islam. (Henri Pirenne’s thesis that the rise of Islam marks the end of the Classical Mediterranean world is outdated and oversimplified, but not false.) Late Antiquity, then, ends early in northwestern Euriope, has a brief renaissance in Italy uner Justinian, and lasts till the Arab conquests on the southern and eastern shores of the Med. You may argue that in southeastern Europe it endured until he last “Roman” Emperor fell on May 29, 1453. Again to me, Dark Ages refers to those times and eras where our sources are completely or largely silent. or where we are dependent on clearly legendary tales that may have some nucleus of historical memory — the Trojan War. CuChullain and Fionn MacCumhaill, or for the period under discussion, Arthur (also Roland in France and El Rey Don Rodrigo in Spain, not to mention the Niebelungenlied). But most of the true Dark Ages were in northwestern Europe. The main regions tha “went dark: after being historically clearer were Britain, northern Gaul and the Low Countries. The Roman Empire had no clue about Scandinavia and only hints about what was going on east of the Rhine anyway. Spain under the Visigoths or aspects of 5th century Italy are murky but not so dark. And at least to me, the Early Middle Ages refers to an age which is anything but dark, when art and architecture are struggling to re-emerge. In a few places where no real Dark Age occurred it may immediately succeed Late Antiquity. In Gaul/the Frankish Kingdom, it falls somewhere between the conversion of Clovis, the Battle of Tours/Poitiers, and the coronation of Charlemagne, but no later than the last. Somewhere in the 700s. In Britain, roughly when The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle starts to get reliable. In Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland, a bit later.’ Thanks so much Michael!

14 Aug 2014: Stewart writes ‘Everything you said in your post is eminently logical and any sane person would agree with it.  But, believe it or not, we have some barmy folk on this side (the American side) of the pond who actually think the conditions of the Dark Ages weren’t all that bad and that they serve as a positive role model.  There is a guy named Matt Stein who appeared on the radio recently has a website at http://www.whentechfails.com who believes that, when the dust settles after an extreme disaster (currently, he is fixated on a repeat of the 1859 Carrington event – a coronal mass ejection of epic proportions which produced auroras as far south as Panama and Hawaii and wreaked havoc on the telegraph system in the United States, but he also brings up climate change as another disaster), the feudal system would be the way to go.  He argues that those who own farms and large tracts of rural land would become the new lords and they would allow people to live on and work a portion of the property in return for a share of the crops. Then there are those oddballs who think the communal barter-based economy of the era is preferable to what we have now.  So it seems that the right wing does not have a monopoly on radio weirdoes. This nostalgia for the days of a nobility ruling subservient peasants is not unique to Stein or his radio buddies.  One gets the impression that the wealthy folks in the US would like to set themselves up as a kind of royalty.  I wonder if this is any relation to a phenomenon I read about in a book that discussed the rise of European civilization from the fall of the Western Roman Empire up through the 18th century.  The author said that during the late 19th century, some people started getting romantic notions about life in the Middle Ages.  This was when Sir Walter Scott wrote “Ivanhoe”.  One could also say that Lerner and Loew’s “Camelot” was rooted in the same notion.  The author of the book maintained that those who held such views were ignorant of the actual history and conditions of those times.  A good portion of the book describes in considerable detail how bad life was in those days.  Another example of someone who shed light on the real conditions of the Dark Ages was the late Eugen Weber, former Chair of History at UCLA and is mainly known due to a college-level telecourse “The Western Tradition” (www.learner.org/resources/series58.html).  On the telecourse (as well in his writing on the period) he described not only how bad conditions were back then, but times in that interval when things were even worse.  On a side note, my late mother thought that Weber looked like a sour version of the late American comedic actor Harvey Korman. Hopefully they still teach history in your country.  They just about phased it out in mine.  That’s because it’s not part of the standardized tests used to evaluate teachers and school systems.  Thank goodness there are film/TV documentarians who still try to impart historical knowledge and that there are people such as yourself who use the new media to spread history.’ Thanks Stewart!!