Yes and no… It depends on what you are thinking of when you use the term "Dark Ages".

In the context of the Middle Ages, the "Dark Ages" usually refer to a period of European history that loosely stretches from the so-called barbarian invasions of the late 4th century up to the Carolingian Renaissance in the late 8th century. Some make it last it all the way to the year 1000 to include the Viking and Magyar invasions and the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Nowadays, historians prefer to refer to the "Early Middle Ages" rather than the "Dark Ages".

There are some concrete reasons as to why that particular period in history was traditionally seen as "dark" by histography. Some of the main culprits are the chroniclers that lived back then, who often gave a rather dismal picture of their own time period and speak in extremely pessimistic terms. So pessimistic, in fact, that the adjective "eschatological" (a fancy way of saying "the end is nigh!") is often used to describe the works of chroniclers like Jordanes, Saint Gildas, Gregory of Tours or Isidore of Seville.

Now, to be fair, these chroniclers were not without good reasons to be pessimistic:

• They were living during a period of great migrations and invasions, conflict, recurrent civil wars and massive social changes. It was also, to some degree, a period of religious wars, as conflict would often oppose Catholics to Aryans, Christians to Pagans, and later on, Muslims to Christians.
• This period of time also corresponds to a demographic collapse in Europe. Various causes have been suggested, like disease (Antonine Plague, Cyprian Plague, Justinian Plague...), constant warfare, famines due to bad harvests, and possible climate change. Anyhow, there are many signs that during the "Dark Ages", Europe was greatly depopulated, and would remain stagnant at a low level of population for centuries. This is particularly true for cities: starting from the 3rd century, city walls enclose an increasingly smaller area. By the 6th century, cities house a mere fraction of what they used to, with large cities rarely exceed 10,000-20,000 inhabitants. For instance, Rome went from a peak of 1.2 million inhabitants in the 2nd century to 30,000 by the mid-6th century. This must have been quite a blow to a civilisation centred around urban life like the Romans. The countryside is not spared either. Roman written records of Late Antiquity show a constant concern about agrarian lands being deserted and the loss of tax revenue it entails. The Romans tried various ways to force people to resettle there (agri deserti laws), but the fact that such laws were regularly reissued imply that the problem didn't go away. Over time rural villas are deserted and small hamlets become the norm, and many settlements are abandoned, often without even any indication of violence.
• This demographic collapse wasn't without consequences. One of the most obvious is a shrinkage of the economy. Long-distance trade declines a lot, many of the roads built by the Roman are no longer well kept, and travelling is made increasingly difficult. Later on, exchanges in the Mediterranean are even more restricted by the Muslim conquests in the Levant, North Africa and Spain, as well as the progressive rupture between West and East. Many economies become local and self-reliant. Some historians have also argued that the abandonment of the trimetallic coinage for a bimetallic one during the 7th century is the symptom of an economy that lost a lot of its sophistication.
• Another consequence was a drop in literacy. The written sources for that period of time are sparse, and often of low quality. This lack of sources is made even worse around the 7th century, when Europe no longer has access to a reliable source of papyrus and has to switch to parchment, making record keeping exponentially more expensive. In various parts of Europe, for periods that are sometimes centuries-long, we only have a very vague idea of what was going on. This decline in literacy is something that the contemporaries of this period were keenly aware of. For example, one of the main chroniclers of the 6th century, Gregory of Tours, opens his chronicle by lamenting the fact that there is barely anyone left in his era that is able to write about current events, and that he has to do it himself in spite of only being able to use vulgar Latin. The generations of chroniclers that follow him (known collectively as "Fredegar" or "pseudo-Fredegar") see an even sharper drop in quality.

So as we can see, the term "Dark Ages" is not completely without merit. That being said, the term is quite misleading, and a lot nuance has to be added:

• We must not think of the "Dark Ages" as a period of anarchy where everyone has to fend for themselves. When much of the Roman Empire in the West comes under new management, one of the first things the barbarian leaders did was publish law codes in Roman style (Theodosian Code, Salic Law, etc.) rather than rely on their Germanic oral traditions. In many places in Europe, Roman infrastructures and institutions were maintained, and quite often, the elites who knew how to run things were kept in place rather than replaced. Some groups, like the Visigoths and the Franks, were quite remarkable in adapting themselves to the Roman way of doing things rather than the opposite, and a lot of continuity with the past was maintained. We have many letters from a 5th century diplomat called Sidonius Apollinaris who travelled a lot through barabrian-occupied Gaul. While he complains a lot about the state of the roads, he paradoxically also complains about how the new rulers are acting like tyrants by forcing the locals to maintain the roads. Also, he never really seems concerned about his personal safety, even when travelling alone, even in territories at war. This suggests that infrastructures are still maintained, and law and order are still kept, even under barbarian management. Now, this isn't necessarily true of all of Europe: in the British Isles, the transition was more abrupt, and it may not be a coincidence that the term "Dark Ages" is mainly used by anglophones.
• A decline in literacy doesn't mean a complete lack of literacy. Documents that have survived from this period show that the administration is rather sophisticated and relies a lot on writing. For instance, there is a rather remarkable 7th-century document called the Formulae Marculfi, which is, essentially, a collection of administrative templates with many examples of judicial acts and proclamations, likely intended to help new civil servants or serve a learning material. It is worth noting that this document was copied (various manuscripts have survived to this day), and that it has inspired similar collections like the Formulae Turonenses which were also copied, which implies that there was a great need for such documents, which, in turn, suggests a rather sophisticated and literate administration.
• A decline in trade doesn't mean a lack of trade at all. There is still trade within, as well as in and out of Europe. For instance, many Merovingian artefacts are made of ivory, amber, or even date seeds, which implies exchanges with Africa and the East. Another example is the Sutton Hoo treasure that was discovered in Britain, which features Frankish coinage minted from all across the Frankish kingdoms, which implies not only trade within the Frankish kingdoms but also outside of them.

There are a lot of scholars today who consider the Dark Ages as a myth, pointing out that what makes it so ‘dark’ is simply the lack of sources from this period. I would say it did exist but with a few caveats:

1. It was not peculiar to Europe. The period beginning around 200 AD saw a contraction of the civilized zone throughout Eurasia. Aside from the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty collapsed in China and it would be nearly four centuries before we would see another Empire in China. With that contraction north west Europe was left outside of the civilized zone. From a world historical context, China will be the first to recover with the rise of the Sui and Tang Dynasties. The rise of the Abbasid Empire made the Middle East once again the chief conduit of trade.
2. The Dark Ages does not cover the entirety of the Middle Ages and ends long before the Renaissance. Europe pulls out of it later than anyone else but by the time we get to the High Middle Ages the sophistication (but not the size) of European civilization matched those of Asia.

Well yes, but actually no

Was Medieval Europe more backwards than Rome, in some aspects yes in other aspects no and in a few other aspects the Medieval people were more advanced than those in antiquity.

Was there a Dark Age following the Fall of Rome? Yes there was, but it started before Rome fell. Before Rome fell you had some real nasty instances of book burning in Alexandria and Saint Cyril of Alexandria brutally tortured and killed the famed scientist Hypatia. After the fall of the Roman Empire, many trade routes halted and after the muslims conquered the southern shore of the Mediterranean and pirates infested the sea, the transmission of knowledges ground to a halt. The people didn’t forget all that much, and most knowledge was recorded by monks living in monasteries. When the Franks and Visigoths and Ostrogoths/Lombards built stable realms in Europe, trade and transmission knowledge started up once more. This is called the Caroliginan Renaissance, but had very little to do with the Caroligians.

When the Vikings showed up, they destroyed a lot of the knowledge stored within monasteries, but this was balanced by the vast Nordic trade networks which enabled the transfer of knowledge.

The Dark Ages were a tiny period, and when compared to the Bronze Age Collapse the Medieval Dark Age never happened. At the end of the Bronze Age, civilisation quite literally ended for centuries, writing mostly disappeared, knowledge went out the window and cities emptied. During the medieval Dark Age we forgot the formula for good Roman concrete, but didn’t actually forget how make concrete, we also stared to use religion as a basis for some forms of education instead of philosophy (which is just an different form of religion fight me I dare you), but most education was practical anyway.

So yes there was a late antiquity/early Medieval Dark Age, but no nothing that important was lost. Lots of people still knew the word was round, we didn’t forget how to write, we didn’t forget most of what we invented and kept on inventing things. If you want to talk about that Greek dude’s steam engine shut up, they didn’t have the resources to actually use it for anything industrial. If the medieval people had a Dark Age and then so are we, cause no one knows has to make fire (norm napalm) that burns in water, but the Eastern Roman Empire did.

If you want a real Dark Age, look at the Bronze Age Collapse or a married couples sex life after 20 years together

Apparently, the "Dark Ages" of Medieval Europe are a complete myth. Is this true?

No, but they are not nearly as dark as was once thought, nor did the night last as long as was believed.

There are still some parts we know nothing about. What did happen in Hen Ogledd in the fifth century? Your guess is as good as anyone else's, as neither the Cumbric tribes nor those of the ‘Anglo-Saxons' wrote anything down at the time. Something happened as the old kingdoms emerge as parts of new kingdoms ruled by the Irish, Angles and still largely Cumbric peoples. All we really have are some vague stories about Arthur and some scraps of ‘facts' written well after the events.

The Dark Ages are not the same as the Middle Ages. The former lasted from about 476 AD to 1000 AD and are called ‘dark’ because civilization did indeed backslide from what it had been in Roman times. That is, fewer roads, fewer public utilities, less public order, fewer people who knew who to read, etc. But: this was not true for all of Europe. It was mainly true for Britain, Gaul and Italy. Not for Spain, which fell under the sway of a brilliant Islamic civilization. Not the East, where the Byzantine empire continued for another 1000 years. Not most of northern Europe, which had been less influenced by Rome to begin with. Not Ireland which—though never Roman—did an amazing job of preserving Roman heritage in its monasteries.

As Francis McCarthy details, it is an exaggeration.

There is a striking lack of written records for much of Europe. We have only very hazy accounts of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, for instance.

Often just one source, probably biased. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was written from the viewpoint of the winners of various power-struggles.

In terms of material civilisation, city life declined drastically.

But at the same time, agriculture improved. Many new inventions were made, or else defused from West Asia.

Block Printing was one. It took centuries to cross Asia from its Chinese origins in the 3rd century. But it was maybe as important as printing with movable type, which gets hyped because it happened independently in Europe.

I beg to differ with Dr. Schrader. It’s true that the period from the year 500 to 1200 was not stagnant, but quite a few of the inventions she mentions came from China, and some weren’t invented until the high Middle Ages, which is not what Victorians called the Dark Ages. A great deal of Roman technology was lost, which is why it got that label in the first place - that, and the intense reversion to superstition and religious fanaticism.

Glass making was only one of the many technologies that was lost. The German and Celtic tribes had no idea how to make glass. The knowledge survived in Egypt, and was taken up by Venetians after the year 1,000, but certainly not in the period usually called the Dark Ages.There is some glass in Saxon jewelry and a few windows, but as far as I know this glass was imported. The barbarians had no idea how to maintain plumbing, which means that they couldn’t build new public baths, or new sewage systems. Even worse, Roman government was public, whereas feudal governments were private. Revenues for lords in the feudal period were spent on parties, horses, weapons, armor, war, clothing and jewellery, but not very much on bridges, roads, aqueducts, or reservoirs, much less on libraries. Medical knowledge too fell into a black hole of ignorance. Roman medicine, as faulty as it was, was increasingly based on observation. Medieval medicine was strongly focused on prayer and astrology. Christianity was based upon persecution and the fear of heresy, something almost unknown to the pagan Roman world (but not of course to the Christian pagan world). Romans understood water wheels, gears, and complex mechanics, something not achieved again until the Renaissance. The Antikythera mechanism is proof of this.

There is a long and complicated history to the term; I have posted on the subject several times before. The simple fact is, no reputable historian uses the term today. As used in the 18th century and a good deal of the 19th, it is indeed a myth, and a damaging one at that. The current periodization of the Middle Ages—that is, the period after the fall of the Western Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance—is:

Late Antiquity—depending on how you see it, either some time in the late 4th century AD, 476 AD, or 481 AD to the the coronation of Charlemagne in 800.

Early Middle Ages: 800–1100 AD.

High Middle Ages: 1100 to either the 1330s (Petrach), 1415–1422 (Brunelleschi's rediscovery of vanishing point perspective) or 1440 (end of the Council of Florence and the last attempt to reunite the Eastern and Western Churches).

No — and to use the term “Dark Ages” to refer to the one thousand years of history from the Fall of Rome to the rise of Absolutism is both arrogant and ignorant.

It is quite impossible to address all the prejudices that are wrapped up in this stupid designation of a period of history lasting a thousand years during which some of the most significant advances in technology occurred. It was an age that saw the invention of the compass and of ocean-going nautical architecture including the central rudder. The Middle Ages saw huge strides in land-based architecture as well — the great cathedrals soaring hundreds of feet into the air as well as the military architecture such a the great concentric castles of the crusader states. It saw the introduction of brakes to wagons, and swivel axles, both radical innovations in their day. It saw the introduction of clocks and eye-glasses and of accurate artillery fire — including the use of gun powder etc. etc. etc.

Dark and primitive?

I really don’t have time or space to catalogue all the technological progress made in the so-called Medieval Period, which people increasingly label “the Dark Ages” out of sheer ignorance, bigotry and prejudice. Let me focus on debunking a few key myths that have contributed to this inaccurate perception of the Middle Ages.

Myth 1: The Middle Ages were Anti-Scientific, Bigoted and Superstitious

Let's start with the simple fact that the Church, notably monasteries and nunneries, were the most effective centers for the preservation of classical literature and thought in the period immediately following the "fall" of the Roman Empire. This was especially so in the Eastern Roman Empire where monasteries were not immediately threatened, but more important in the West where they were.

It is important to understand that it was in these religious institutions that the teachings not only of Christ but of Aristotle and Plato were preserved, copied, read, studied and analyzed.Monasteries continued to be centers of learning -- not rote learning as in the Koran schools familiar across the world today -- but as centers of inquiry and study, even after the political situation had stabilized. By the 11th century they were very much centers of intellectual inquiry and debate. Peter Abelard (unfortunately more famous for his affair with Heloise than for his philosophy) is just one example of a critical thinker as a theologian, philosopher and logician. Hildegard von Bingen is, of course, another example from the same century. She wrote treatises on medicine and natural history characterized by a high quality of scientific observation. Later scholars of note included Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas.

Indeed, the very concept of universities - places dedicated to learning and debate protected by the notion of academic freedom -- evolved out of the Cathedral schools of the Middle Ages. Pope Gregory VII in a papal decree from 1079 regulated Cathedral schools and is credited with thereby providing the framework for independent universities. The first such university was established just nine years later in 1088 at Bologna, Italy. It was followed by the University of Paris in 1150 and the University of Oxford in 1167.

The learning taught in these universities was not confined to scripture. On the contrary, study of ancient Greek and Roman texts was an essential component of medieval higher education. It is a fallacy -- but a frequently repeated and propagated one -- that knowledge of classical texts were "re-discovered" in the Renaissance after such knowledge was "preserved" by the Muslims. This is nonsense. The University of Bologna at its inception was focused on teaching Roman law -- that is ancient Roman not canon law! The principal sources used for teaching medicine in medieval universities were Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna. Aristotle and Plato were hotly debated in studies of law, politics, logic, and philosophy. Universities also provided study of mathematics and the natural sciences, based largely on classical but also Byzantine and even Muslim scholars.

The university culture at this time, furthermore, was based on debates, disputations, and the requirement to read extensively in order to pass examinations, which entailed defending ones ideas before a panel of established scholars. The concept of "peer review" and defense of a doctoral dissertation today is based on this medieval tradition.

Just one small example, the knowledge that the earth was a sphere was widespread in intellectual circles in the Middle Ages. In the 6th century, for example, Bishop Isidore of Seville included the fact that the earth was round in his encyclopedia. The Venerable Bede writing roughly a century later described the earth as an "orb" at the center of the universe. Hildegard von Bingen writing the 11th century described the earth as a sphere, no less than did Dante's Divine Comedy written in the 14th century. Galileo was condemned NOT in the Middle Ages, but in the so-called Renaissance; furthermore, he was condemned not for saying the earth was round, but rather that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the reverse.

This brings us to the fact that fundamentalism, the belief that all knowledge is contained in scripture, is inherently more bigoted and anti-science than was the medieval church. It was the Reformation, with its emphasis on the Bible -- and the Bible alone -- that bred religious bigotry in the West. Likewise it is Islamic fundamentalism, not enlightened Islam, that poses a threat to peaceful co-existence between peoples holding different religious beliefs to this day.

Myth 2: Feudalism was Arbitrary and Autocratic.

The notion that kings and nobles were all-powerful, and their subjects were oppressed, intimidated and utterly without legal protections is one of the most ridiculous, ignorant and persistent of the misconceptions about the Middle Ages. People appear to project backward the characteristics of totalitarian states upon medieval feudalism ― mixed together with images of Hollywood kings (usually Henry VIII) shouting “off with her head.” Aside from the fact that Henry VIII was a “Renaissance” king and not medieval at all, the entire notion of absolutism is a post-feudal concept or, more correctly, anti-feudal.

The essence of feudalism was a hierarchical pyramid of mutually beneficial agreements. Simplified: between the king and his barons, barons and their knights, knights and their peasants. Feudal oaths bound both parties and established duties on both sides. In its simplest form, the subordinate pledged loyalty in exchange for a promise of protection from the superior.

Feudalism evolved because in the early feudal period life was very uncertain and only powerful men had the resources to build castles and hire fighting men to protect ordinary peaceful farmers. Those peaceful farmers, often the descendants of slaves agreed to till the land in exchange for being protected by their feudal lord from bandits, raiders, and enemies. Knights too entered a contract with a lord, but rather than tilling the soil, they brought service with horse, sword, and lance. The important point was that they did this in exchange for land (a fief) which gave them both income and status.

Although at the top of the pyramid the contract is most difficult to grasp because the power relationships between kings and their vassals were not always straight-forward (e.g. Henry Plantagenet and Louis VII of France), in theory it too entailed loyalty on the part of the vassal (baron) in exchange for good-governance by the king.

The operative point is that kings had obligations to their subjects. They owed them good governance which entailed not just defense but also the administration of justice, i.e. the maintenance of “law and order.” A king who failed to deliver good governance could legitimately be challenged by his barons for breach of contract. Thus from Magna Charta and the Oxford Provisions to the wars against Frederick Hohenstaufen in the Holy Land, barons challenged their king because of real or alleged abuses of royal power or failure to ensure peace and good governance.

A major criticism that came up again and again in English history, for example, was the failure of a king to consult his barons, i.e. to prefer his “favorites” (who were often men of lower birth) to his “natural” advisors, i.e. the great magnets/barons of the realm. This epitomizes the contractual nature of feudal oaths: while barons pledged to advise the king, in return he pledged to consult his barons. This obligation on the part of the king to consult with his barons was the basis of Parliament in England, the High Court in Jerusalem, and the Curia Regis inFrance. In short, medieval kings needed to take into account the advice and interests of their tenants-in-chief (which included the most important ecclesiastical lords because of their vast land-holdings), but they were also expected to ensure “good governance” for the lowliest in the land as well.

Myth 3: The Middle Ages was Lawless

Because feudalism was based on mutual consent and obligations in both directions, the right of either party to sue for breach of contract was implicit in the system. Thus peasants and serfs, although in the first instance subject to the courts of their direct lord, could appeal to the royal courts. Louis IX, one of the most outstanding medieval monarchs, went so far as to institute special courts of inquiry to investigate allegations of corruption on the part of his own administrators and officers.

This leads us to another important component of medieval justice: the right to judgment by one’s peers. What this meant was that, although a seigniorial officer presided over a court, the judgment itself was given by a jury composed of people from the defendant’s own class. The idea that a lord could legally order punishment without a trial is erroneous. Of course, the operative word here is “legally.” Men with power often act illegally, and in an age where wealth and weapons were generally held in the same hands, it was particularly easy to abuse power.

Yet it is still important to remember medieval justice was jury justice ― still common in the Anglo-Saxon world but replaced across most of Europe with justice handed down by trained judges, who rarely share the social status, background or problems of the defendants.

Feudalism ended slowly as powerful monarchs across Europe gradually consolidated their power at the expense of their barons and then evolved an ideology, “the divine right of kings,” to justify their usurpation of power. The concept of “the divine right of kings” ended the notion of a contract between ruler and subjects, and replaced it with the idea that the kings derived their power directly from God. While history books still tend to describe this as “progress,” it was in fact regressive. It weakened the checks-and-balances on the abuse of royal power that had been inherent in the feudal system.

Myth 4: Serfs were no better off than Slaves

The 20th century popular image of serfs was expressed in the Hollywood film “The Kingdom of Heaven” when the lead character (I hate to call him Balian d’Ibelin because he bore so little resemblance to the historical figure) says to the Hollywood Imad ad-Din that he “had been a slave ― or very like” meaning (inaccurately) that he had been a serf before coming to the Holy Land.

The conflation of slavery and serfdom is not only inaccurate, it fundamentally inhibits our understanding of feudal society. As I noted above, feudal society was based on the concept of mutual contracts ― a fact that made medieval Europe very litigious by the way. The fundamental difference between slaves and serfs was that the former (slaves) had no rights, while the latter (serfs) had very clear rights.

Let us start by looking at slavery. Slaves own nothing ― not even their own bodies. They can be mutilated, tortured, raped and killed by their masters without the latter committing a crime. Anything slaves produce, even their own children, belongs to their master. Even their children belong to their master, who can choose to kill or sell them. As a result, slaves cannot and do not have families. They rarely even know who their parents, siblings, and children are. The products of their hands, from crops to works of art, also belong to their masters.

Serfs historically derived from Roman slaves. With the spread of Christianity in the 4th century AD, however, slavery became increasingly unacceptable because Christianity viewed each human as a soul loved by God. Within a few hundred years it was universally accepted in the Latin Church that no Christian could be held as a slave. But the economy of the period was still utterly dependent on the labor of those former slaves to plant and harvest the food needed by all. So the status of slaves was altered and became one of serfdom in which the former slave was still required to till the land and was not free to leave it, but was granted control over his person and with it the right to marry, have a family, and above all retain 50% or more of his produce depending on locality. Compared to slaves, serfs lived a very privileged life!

From the Duke of Berry's Book of Hours

Furthermore, at the time this status evolved, the concept of being “tied to the land” was not seen as a brutal violation of “human rights.” On the contrary, the contract between serf and lord gave the serf both physical and economic security. The lord was responsible for providing armed protection against outlaws and raiders, and the serf not be thrown off the land any more than he could walk away from it; he was guaranteed his share of the harvest not just one year at a time but for as long as he and his children and his grandchildren and their children etc. lived.

Renowned French historian Regine Pernoud points out in her book Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths (Ignatius, 1977, p.88):

It was this intimate connection between man and the soil on which he lived that constituted serfdom, for, in all other respects, the serf had all the rights of a free man: he could marry, establish a family, his land, as well as the goods he was able to acquire, would pass to his children at his death. The lord, let us note, had, although on a totally different scale, the same obligations as the serf, for he could neither sell nor give up his land nor desert it.

Furthermore, archaeology increasingly provides evidence of the very high standard of living serfs could attain. Clever peasants, like clever lords, made judicious marriages. Through good marriages and careful husbandry, peasants could accumulate more and more hereditary plots of land. It mattered little that they did not “own” the land in the modern, capitalist sense of the word; feudal lords didn’t own it either. The point was that some serfs accumulated the right to use the land and harvest its produce. Peasants that accumulated more land than they could themselves cultivate, hired laborers to work it for them. A wealthy serf could build a large house, purchase furnishings, and other luxuries, and live like a lord ― just as long as he didn’t try to leave his land.

From the Duke of Berry's Book of Hours

The standard of living among peasants increased as Europe became more prosperous and new technologies, from the horse collar and horseshoe to axles that swiveled and plows that could turn the soil, were introduced. These new technologies increased farm productivity dramatically. By using horses rather than oxen, for example, the amount of land one farmer could cultivate doubled. These technologies also enabled land that had previously been considered marginal to be brought under cultivation. With more land under cultivation, it was possible to introduce (in the eighth century) the three field system, which left one-third of the land fallow each year. This enabled the soil to regenerate and so the sustainability of agriculture increased.

As a result of these innovations, European serfs “began to eat far better than common people anywhere, ever. Indeed, medieval Europeans may have been the first human group whose genetic potential was not badly stunted by a poor diet, with the result they were, on average, bigger, healthier, and more energetic than ordinary people elsewhere.” (Rodney Stark. God’s Battalions. HarperCollins, 2009, p. 70.)

From the Duke of Berry's Book of Hours

As prosperity increased, so did the demand for goods, spawning an increase in industry and trade. This, in turn, led to greater urbanization, and with improvements in transportation technology (think of the splendid naval architecture of the Vikings), trade started to spread farther and farther afield. The First Crusade (1097-1099) re-established regular contact with the Byzantine Empire and the Near East, and for the next three hundred years, Europeans dominated the sea lanes of the Mediterranean. Pilgrim traffic, crusades, and trade with the Levant produced a great economic boom that financed the great palaces and cathedrals, monasteries and guild halls, and many more humble dwellings as well.

Yet, urbanization also made serfdom increasingly burdensome. Serfs no longer feared losing their land but longed for the greater opportunities in crafts, industry, and trade that beckoned from the cities. Thus by the twelfth century, serfs were demanding their freedom and more and more mechanisms for emancipation evolved. By the end of the Middle Ages, there were, in fact, many more free peasants than serfs in Western Europe.

Myth 5: Medieval Man had no understanding or appreciation of hygiene

A favorite Hollywood convention is to portray people in the Middle Ages as filthy. Mice run across dinner tables while dogs fight over bones at their feet. Noblemen wipe their mouths on their sleeves (or hair!), and toss the bones from their plates over their shoulders. The poor are consistently depicted in drab, filthy (and usually ragged) clothing with mud encrusted boots. Yet the evidence we have from the Middle Ages belies this image.

First, we should remember that although the "Middle Ages" started with the "fall" of Rome that refers to the political and military might of Rome not Roman civilization. The customs and habits of people across what had been the Roman Empire from Yorkshire to Palestine were not suddenly extinguished or forgotten simply because the political and military structures that had made it possible to rule an Empire from Rome were gone. Rome fell, Roman thought, customs and knowledge remained in the hearts and minds of people all across the former Empire. That culture included bathing....

Image courtesy of romanbaths.co.uk

Across the Middle East and Muslim controlled territory in Cyprus, Sicily and Spain as well as in the Eastern Roman Empire bathing and bath-houses remained a feature of daily life just as it had been in Roman times.

In the West, the situation was less clear cut because this is where the “barbarians” had the greatest impact. Nevertheless, we know from the rule of St. Caesarius, writing in the very start of the 6th century, that nuns and monks were expected to bathe regularly for hygienic purposes. Other texts recommend washing face and hands daily, as well as washing and brushing hair frequently, and keeping teeth "picked, cleansed, and brushed [sic!]" (Pernoud, Regine. Women in the Days of the Cathedrals. Ignatius Press, 1989, 84.)

Furthermore, bathing and washing are referred to in romances and depicted in manuscript illustrations throughout the Middle Ages. Washing hands before meals was part of the ritual at every manor and castle as well as in monasteries and convents. Washing clothes was so important that washer women ― always identified as older, respectable women very different from prostitutes ― accompanied armies. Women washing and hanging out clothes to dry are also a motif in medieval manuscript illustrations.

By the 13th century, possibly as a result of renewed contact with the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire and with the Muslim world during the crusades, bathing became very popular and prominent. Not only did public bath houses become numerous, but wealthier citizens invested in elaborate baths which by the 15th century including hot-and-cold running water fed from roof-top tanks. Even before that, the Franks in the Holy Land built aqueducts, bath-houses and sophisticated sewage systems.

Obviously, “popular” and “frequent” bathing in the medieval context was fundamentally different than in the 21st century. It took much more effort to heat water over fire and coals, and (except for the very wealthy) it meant pumping or hauling water from a well and lugging it to a tub or going to a bathhouse. The later cost money. Not necessarily a lot of money, but it was not entirely free, and it was certainly less convenient than stepping into a shower at home today. So, yes, hygiene would not have been at the same standards as today, but that is still a far cry from kings wiping their sleeves on their velvet robes or having mice running across their banquet tables.

Other myths include: that medieval medicine was brutal and did more harm than good, that women were “mere chattels,” and many more provided by other answers to this question, but this answer is already long enough and anyone interested in more can ask a new question.

The label is innacurate, since it makes reference to the traditional light-versus-darkness imagery, under the concept of the black and white methaphoric (light or white means knowlege and black or darkness means lack of knowlege). It was at the very church who some people were able to preserve the works of greek philosophers as well as make tremendous contributions to the study of sciences like astrology, phichology, economics, pedagogy, politics and ethics. The greatest scientists of those areas, since most of them came to the picture after the Enlightment, woudn’t be able to produce the amount of work that they did if the Dark Ages were indeed dark.

Check the works of Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine and the Patristics.

1. People lived like pigs, never cleaned their teeth and they were rotten to the point that when they reached 20 years old they would be lucky if there were still 2 teeth in their mouth, didn’t wipe their butts, bathed once or twice a year. This is easily debunked by reading manuals of hygiene of the time. Of course hygiene was not as good as today, because there was no way to draw like 10 buckets of water from a well, heat them (that took hours), filling a bathtub and then throw the water away that frequently, but that didn’t mean thay they didn’t wash themselves with a jug and a rag. Medieval people didn’t know germs, but were not stupid and associated bad smells with the spread of disease, so they were as clean as possible by the means they had. They wore linen underwear that covered the whole body and was changed often (sometimes once a day, or if you were so poor that you happened to have only 2 sets, once a week) and washed regularly with soap, lye or ashes. Outer garments didn’t get dirty easily because the underwear absorbed sweat and oils, but were washed once they became dirty. Teeth were rubbed with rags, brushes made from hog bristle, or steams from certain trees with antiseptic properties. Wealthy people even had toothpasted made from clay and spices like clove and black pepper, that prevented tooth decay. They would wash their hands, feet, armpits and privates daily.
2. Peasants lived miserable lives of near starvation, ate spoiled food without salt or seasons, had to wear greyish and brownish rags, lived in shacks and worked until they fell dead. In fact, they had many holidays, feasts full of food, music and dance, made their clothes at home for very little cost so they could easily replace ragged clothes, could easily dye their clothes with dyes readily available at the nearest woods, had herbs grown locally (they couldn’t afford the spices imported from Asia, but they had herbs), lived in small, simple, but well-built houses of wood or stone. Roofs weren’t just piles of straw thrown at the top, they were held strongly, anyone who have ever seen a beach kiosk knows how straw roofs are. Starvation and malnutrition was actually common, because they depended on the crops, and bad crops meant starvation. Europe has a harsh climate. But it was not like this for everyone, all the time.
3. Women lived like chattel, locked up at their homes and castles. In a society that depended on co-operation, no one would starve their wives and daughters and risk losing a helping hand. There were laws that prevented a husband to kill his wife (altough he could beat her). Women had to work in the fields to help their fathers, wives and daughters of merchants had to help them in their businesses and had to be at least basically literate, castle ladies had to manage the servants and political affairs whenever thir husbands were off to war. So, better treat your wife well, or she may take vengeance. Infanticide was a crime punishable by death, so no killing of baby girls. Plus, although the Church preached the ideal of submissive wives, not everyone took Church teaching seriously. Some professions were dominated by women and there were women-only guilds.
4. People were religious fanatics. Not everyone took Church teachings seriously. Actually most people had limited knowledge of Church teaching, to the point heretical movements often popped up (even reaching alarming dimensions, like Catharism).
5. People were prudes. Drawings of the time show people bathing butt-naked in groups, sometimes both sexes and swimming butt-naked too. Of course, the Church condemned this, but they couldn’t care less.
6. The Church condemned knowledge and chained books. In fact the Church was the greatest producer, keeper and transmitter ok knowledge. Monks copied books by hand (because the press had not yet been discovered) and books were so expensive that people could steal them, so they were chained, but people could just sit and read them. They also kept the universities.
7. Women were barred from learning. In fact many women were doctors, scientists, poetresses, theologians, philosophers. Noble women were more likely to be literate than men, because men had to be always training for war while women could go about other business.
8. There was no concept of childhood, children were considered to be mini-adults, and parents didn’t love their children. Debunked at least 30 years ago.
9. Inquisition raiding villages in search of witches and burning eccentric old women. There was not “The Inquisition”. There were instances when Inquisition tribunals were set up to combat obvious heresies. Also, you wouldn’t be burnt just because. You received a notification that you were teaching stuff contrary to Church dogma and told to stop. Only if you persisted you would go to trial.
10. People were old and emaciated at their 30s and wrote their testaments expecting to be deat by 40. Although life expectancy was very low, it’s based on an average. Infant mortality was very high because most diseases had no treatment and children were most vulnerable. About 50% of children would die before their 5th birthday. However, if you managed to survive your first years, you had great chances to live up to your 70s and 80s.

The list could go on and on.

Here's a big myth that is ingrained despite gigagrams of contrary evidence. Yes, gigagrams, as I think 'ton' (megagram) is too small a word to convey the scale of evidence. This myth turned up 3 times while I was in Sixth Form studying The Church in England under Henry VIII. It got so bad that I ended up snapping at one fellow pupil, felt a strong desire to thrown a heavy object out of a window, and asked a teacher to make an announcement destroying the myth. I hate this myth: There were no guns during the Middle Ages.

What’s this medieval reenactor holding then?

The reason I felt so strongly about this was that this was a History course. Students who have chosen to study this period believed this nonsense. I would have been fine with non-history enthusiasts or primary schoolchildren, but not Sixth Form students! There are children’s books which go into detail about the nature of medieval guns and their effects on society, not to mention popular media (both non-fiction and fiction) that depict medieval firearms, so to see questions like the following are infuriating:

In a fantasy world, for what reason would there be early (the 1800s) gunpowder weaponry available but go unused?

Apparently, these things never existed!

(This applies not only to medieval guns, but to any before 1800.)

Right now, I'm reading Richard Holmes et al (2006), Weapon: A Visual History of Arms and Armour, (London: Dorling Kindersley). Looking at the list of authors who put so much effort in and the acknowledgements , I wonder how they feel whenever some twit says that there were no guns during the Middle Ages.

• There’s evidence of gunpowder weapons around 1326. An example was found in Europe at the castle of Monte Varino in Italy (from 1341). These guns were tubes with a hole drilled at one end to allow the ignition of powder [Holmes et al, 2006, p14].
• The English used cannon at Crecy, the Ottomans used cannon at Constantinople, and the French used them at Castillon. John the Fearless of Burgundy in 1421 had 4000 handguns (I have rechecked the source and there is a slight problem with dating here). Granted, most changes in warfare didn't happen until the late 15th century, but this demonstrates without any doubt that there were handguns. [Ibid, p61].
• During this period, full mail shirts were still in use, such as that of Rudolf IV of Austria [Ibid, p93] and plate armour appeared around the same time as many of the above examples (mid-15th century) [Ibid, p94]. The crossbow was still in widespread use [Ibid, p80], and the longbow infamously so (Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt) [Ibid, p78]. So was the poleaxe and halberd [Ibid, p72].

As you can see, all the classic medieval warfare tools and firearms coexisted! Guns were right there in the Middle Ages, and so would definitely be around in Henry VIII's time.

Please, correct this myth whenever you see it!

UPDATE: Based on the responses received over the last 3 years, I’ve begun to wonder if this myth is as widespread as I originally thought it was. Perhaps it’s something only a certain group of people thought. Alternatively, the commenters here are mostly subject enthusiasts, so would know the truth already. Who knows?

This answer previously had 2 updates about a weird trend that only appeared recently. Before then, everyone understood exactly what was being said here, but suddenly there were people who did not. Since the updates were almost as long as the actual answer, I have moved them to Richard Jones's answer to How is deleting others' comments on your answer justified?

No. The Dark Ages refer to period from downfall of Western Roman Empire (476) to Carolingian renaissance (800).

That era was ‘dark’ because there are few surviving literary sources of the era. Parchment was expensive and papyrus does not survive in the European climate. The lack of suitable writing medium meant also decline of literacy.

The situation improved during the Carolingian Renaissance, and the Early Middle Ages (800–1066) meant overall rise in economy, statehood, education and technology.

Paper was introduced in High Middle Ages (1066–1300) and that meant also recovery on literacy and literary output, including Scholastics.

There’s a few big ones relating to marriage.

1. Marriage was a sacred union between a man and a woman.
1. Marriage was declared a sacrament at the Council of Trent in the 16th century. Prior to that, the church only recognized and performed marriage ceremonies for those with wealth and titles of nobility for financial and/or political purposes. The poor and landless had common law marriages, but with little to no government or church involvement.
2. People married young - often in their early teens.
1. The wealthy and the aristocracy married young - in their early to mid-teens, primarily to secure wealth and titles as quickly as possible. For the poor and landless, the average age of marriage for a male was 21–24. The average age of marriage for a female was 17–20. Still very young by modern standards, but not as young as many people believe.
3. Divorce was outlawed.
1. Divorce was uncommon, but not unheard of. Remember, the poor and landless entered into common law marriages at will, with no official involvement and therefore, were free to live them at will as well, at least in theory. Economic and social pressure often made this difficult, if not impossible. For nobility, they had to secure church permission to divorce first. And it was granted more than one might expect. Look up Eleanor of Aquitaine for perhaps Medieval Europe’s most famous divorcee.
2. Henry VIII’s attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon was denied for largely political reasons. Pope Clement VII inherited a greatly weakened and disgraced papacy after the terrible abuses of Pope Leo X. Clement needed what allies he could find and perhaps his most powerful was Ferdinand of Aragon, Catherine’s father. He wasn’t about to risk his alliance with Spain by granting the divorce.

1. That being a peasant was awful

Being a peasant wasn’t all that bad. In fact, in many ways, Medieval European peasants lived very comfortable lives. Most peasants had a labor arrangement known as “tenant-laborer,” where they worked for a Landowner in exchange for housing, among other benefits. The peasantry’s head of household therefore never had to worry about making a mortgage/rent payment. Many lived in self sustainable ecosystems, where the farm provided enough food for everyone, so no one was struggling to eat. And medical care was largely free since the Church was responsible for providing care for the sick. The Church also provided services that we would see today as mental healthcare and social services. And so long as the peasant paid their annual 10% tithe to the Church, and stayed on good terms with the Landowner, everything was largely taken care of.

Occasionally, the Landowner/Landlord turned out to be a tyrant. But it’s not like the peasants had no legal recourse to get the Landlord off their backs. There are several instances where a group of peasants took their grievances against their Landlord to a Baronial or Ducal Court, and won. And while our history books are filled with stories about peasant revolts, historically these were actually very rare.

The word peasant translates to “countryman,” taken from the French word for country, “pais → pais-ant.” In Spanish, the word is “Campesino.”

2. Being an Atheist/Non-Believer was a death penalty

I recommend reading Alec Ryrie’s research on this topic. Many of us have been under the impression that the Catholic Church stamped out any and all opposition, even at the individual level. But this wasn’t exactly the case. The Catholic Church only became antagonistic if a non-Catholic entity tried to reach the institutional level, like in the case of the 16th century Protestant movement. The Catholic Church enforced institutional supremacy via blasphemy laws. But blasphemy laws were actually hard to prove in court in many cases. According to Alec Ryrie’s research, skepticism and incredulity/agnosticism were barely ever prosecuted. The vast majority of atheists/agnostics were left to believe whatever they wanted to, so long as they didn’t challenge any existing institutions with those beliefs.

With that said, being labeled an atheist wasn’t exactly something you wanted to be publicly accused of. Many people accused of being atheists weren’t prosecuted by the law, but many were socially outcasted. Being called an atheist was synonymous with being labeled as impulsive, having no morals or being weak-willed. And while legal action was rare against atheists, there were instances where it did result in imprisonment, excommunications or even execution; albeit the latter being extremely rare.

Below - a portrait of Kazimierz Lyszczynski, a 17th century Polish author of “De non-existentia Dei,” which listed out all his opinions as to why God does not exist. After the publication of the book, he was arrested, and the case went all the way to the King’s Court, similar to a modern day Supreme Court. Polish King Jans Sobieski ordained a Warsaw Confederation Court hearing, and even personally interceded on behalf of Lyszczynski. But Lyszczynski was ultimately condemned to death by the Court, and publicly beheaded in 1689.

3. Life expectancy for everyone was 33 years

The issue with measuring life expectancy of pre-industrial societies is the fact that so many children died in childbirth or infancy. But for those that survived past their childhoods, more than 50% of them lived into their 50s. And while survival into the 60s & 70s wasn’t exactly common, it wasn’t exactly a rare phenomenon either. The life expectancy for European Nobles in 1500 was 71 years of age, given that they had the most resources to maintain good health.

4. Everyone thought the earth was flat

To the extent that anyone had knowledge of the Universe, it was from the Book of Genesis. But even Ancient Greek philosophers hypothesized of a spherical earth. Most educated thinkers in the Roman/Byzantine Empire would have had some knowledge of a spherical earth concept. When Christianity spread into Europe, most Greek & Latin Christian theologians accepted a spherical earth concept.

The idea of a flat earth was never dominant in Soutern Europe. Instead, it was dominant in early Norse & Germanic mythology. When Christianity spread into Europe, the cultural distinction between the former Roman Europe and former Germanic Europe separated what they believed. Greek & Latin writers wrote about a spherical earth, while Germanic writers were more likely to write of a flat earth.

Below - a depiction of Norse mythology containing a flat earth and the realms beyond. A serpent was believed to patrol the oceans at the edge of the earth with the sole purpose of killing anyone who dared to enter the waters.

There are many misconceptions about Medieval Europe. Being a peasant wasn’t necessarily a brutal existence with severe oppression from the top. Nor was the Catholic Church necessarily obsessed with non-institutional/ individual opposition. And not everyone died at age 33. Nor did everyone think the earth was flat. The Medieval Era was a self sustainable ecosystem that survived for 1,000 years. If it was as brutal and oppressive as we have been taught, I don’t think it would have lasted that long.

With that said, I wouldn’t trade living in the modern era with living the medieval era. I’ll take minimal infant mortality, seeing all my children surviving into adulthood, and the freedom to make my own financial and personal decisions any day over the way our ancestors lived.

Edit - There is a lot of disagreement about the comfortability of life as a peasant. Some have mentioned that peasants worked 12+ hour days (which isn’t true), along with the physical toll of life on the farm.

Medieval peasants were very serious about their leisure time. Below is a description listed by Juliet Schor, a Boston College Economist:

Because the need for agricultural labor in the Middle Ages was season-dependent, the average peasant had about eight weeks to half the year off. Plus, the Church knew the opportunity to rest would keep workers happy and orderly, so they ordered frequent mandatory holidays.

“The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed,” said Schor. “Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”

Here is a 16th century description from an English Bishop of life as a peasant:

The labouring man will take his rest long in the morning; a good piece of the day is spent afore he come at his work; then he must have his breakfast, though he have not earned it at his accustomed hour, or else there is grudging and murmuring; when the clock smiteth, he will cast down his burden in the midway, and whatsoever he is in hand with, he will leave it as it is, though many times it is marred afore he come again; he may not lose his meat, what danger soever the work is in. At noon he must have his sleeping time, then his bever in the afternoon, which spendeth a great part of the day; and when his hour cometh at night, at the first stroke of the clock he casteth down his tools, leaveth his work, in what need or case soever the work standeth.

There are countless examples like the passage above ranging from England, to France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, etc.

Were the “Dark Ages” really dark in Europe?

Here is an example of early(ish) medieval handwriting:

This is the handwriting created in the “Carolingian renaissance” (gotta put scare quotes around “renaissance”), a period when many ancient manuscripts were preserved. It is so marvellous a handwriting that the scholars of the Renaissance thought it had to be ancient, and so it has become the basis of modern alphabetic typefaces.

This is the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, one of the most glorious examples of Gothic architecture (“Gothic” was intended as a put-down when selfconsciously modern people started using the word, implying barbarism, ignorance, and, well, darkness). Unfortunately, you don’t get to see it like this any more, as it’s normally packed with people.

This is the Wilton Diptych, painted for (and including) Richard II of England. You might think belief in angels is benighted, but that blue is not dark.

Medieval thought was also characterised, on the whole, by a deep respect for reason; it took the Renaissance to really get into magic, necromancy, and belief in witchcraft.

I’m assuming that by “Dark Ages” you’re thinking of the period roughly 600–1400 CE. There were lots of dark aspects in that period, as in any other, and variation from time to time and place to place, and some people will deplore the importance of religion in the period. But it’s worth remembering that Bede, a monk who could spin history when it suited him, tried to understand ocean tides, and to do that collected a whole bunch of empirical data in a way which people who know about things apparently find impressive. And then there’s the poetry. So, you don’t have to like much about that period of European history, but you could make a better case for the 20th century as a Dark Age, and things don’t seem to be getting better.

No the entirety of the Middle Ages were not dark. The term Dark Age emerged from Petrarch, he conceived of the idea that Middle Ages was an age of darkness and that Classical Antiquity was an age of light.

Unfortunately this was carried on into the Renaissance and Early Modern Period. Recently many scholars have found evidence that contradicts the narrative by Plutarch and Early Modern scholars and disproves the ignorant stereotypes.

Medieval Europe had lots of warfare, disease and other bad things but Europe had wonderful art and architecture during the Middle Ages like cathedrals.

Notre Dame

Saint Chapelle

Aachen

Much knowledge was lost after the fall of the Western Roman Empire but there were efforts to translate manuscripts.

These were actually very civilized times.

First, commerce was highly regulated to maintain a stable society where food and basic products were equally distributed. A lot of attention was paid to make sure nobody would go hungry.

The Church took care of education and most people got at least some basic education. The Church also took care of poor people, the sick, and infirm, and the elderly if the need arose.

The local church would be used as a community hall. Events would take place here and on rainy days the market would take place inside.

Law was harsh for our norms but the rule of law was firmly ingrained in society. Stealing would carry the death penalty yet murder would carry a fine. But crime rates were very low. The mayor was usually also the constable and tax collector.

When important issues needed to be discussed and decided upon, a Jury was elected among the local people. This Jury of 12 would deal with the matter. Daily problems were taken care of by the mayor.

From the 8th to the 11th century there was a single currency, the Solidus.

Each country was allowed to mint a certain number of coins based on its population. This kept the economy stable.

So the classic tales of how rich the Church was with all that gold and silver is just bollocks. in unminted form, gold and silver were worthless.

Merchants trading in luxury goods would use caravans for short distances and ships for longer distances. These luxury goods included spices from the Far East that made their way to Europe via the Middle East.

Since just goods were very expensive, the merchants were well insured … yes, they had insurance companies back then.

Piracy existed in the Mediterranean and the North Sea. To combat piracy, trade was even more regulated. Certain expensive goods had to be shipped from one specific port to another specific port and would be distributed by caravan later on. If pirates captured the cargo, they had a hard time selling it as everybody knew the merchants who had a proper license in a specific port.

Churches and public buildings were painted in bright colours, as were plenty of private houses.

Some countries had specific laws as to who was allowed to wear what kind of clothing and what fabrics were allowed.

It as not a time of lawlessness, it was an extremely regulated society.

It isn’t. Not any more, anyway.

The idea of a “dark ages” came from Europeans who knew essentially nothing about the rest of the world, but rather were looking at their own history. The idea started with some more specificity in the later Middle Ages, but by the Renaissance, there were historians who saw their own era as a time of rebirth of the classical learning, sadly lost at the end of the Roman empire (in the west). Between the enlightened classical era and their own newly enlightened time, there was a “dark age” of ignorance and superstition.

Later historians, though, started to push back on the notion. At least as early as the Victorian era, historians were coming to grips with all manner of intellectual and technological changes which took place during the later Middle Ages: the return of some classical texts like Aristotle, the proliferation of water power and attached devices, the invention of the broken arch and Gothic architecture, and so on. The Middle Ages were looking significantly less “dark,” and so the “dark ages” were pushed back to the little-understood early part of the era, running from around the fall of Rome to about the time of Charlemagne.

More recent scholarship has repeated the process for the earlier era. More recent historians began to identify increasingly long lists of literary works and other intellectual endeavors from the early Middle Ages which have since been lost. The so called dark ages, clearly, aren’t nearly as dark as we thought, or at least to the extent that they’re dark, it’s a consequence of what was going on being obscured from us.

And so historians have largely discarded the use of “dark ages” when it comes to Medieval history. It’s a prejudicial term which no longer seems valid. It lurks as a synonym for the early Middle Ages because it’s familiar and popular, but historians don’t take it seriously these days.

But, to return to the point, it has nothing to do with how advanced European technology may or may not have been relative to other places. It’s a purely internal comparison between European historical conditions.

The reason for the perception the “Dark Ages” were less advanced is largely political and ideological. After the Reformation, Protestants spread the idea that the Papacy had created a wasteland in everything it had done prior to Protestantism. The Enlightenment era was anti-religion of all kinds and spread the concept that while it was ‘enlightened’ all that had come before it had been ‘dark.’ And so this view of the Middle Ages moved into western culture and became the unquestioned view.

Until people did start asking questions like this one. I think we will find that, upon examination, they aren’t that different at all.

Comparing the entire Roman era and the ‘Dark Ages’ is difficult—one’s too large and the other too small. But perhaps if we limited the comparison to Rome’s first thousand years, beginning when it was still a small farming/trading town, and enlarged the ‘dark ages’ to include most of the Middle Ages, we might be able to do some justice to the spirit of this question.

Roman civilization is as ancient as Greek civilization. Legend says it was founded in 753 BC as a tiny city-state ruled by kings. By 248 AD, under Marcus Julius Philippus, (aka ‘Philip the Arab’), the Romans celebrated the one thousandth anniversary of their city—an almost unbelievable accomplishment.

Rome began as most cities did at that time—with an agricultural base. Even though Rome swiftly moved beyond this humble beginning, Rome never forgot how it started.

The Romans were practical people. From the start, they showed a talent for borrowing—and improving upon—the skills and concepts of other cultures. They had strong views on what constituted morality—though it varied by class and gender—they were suspicious of those with over-much ‘brilliance,’ cultivated seriousness (gravity) and emotional self-control.

The Greeks thought them dull.

They were gifted administrators and governors and it was foundational to their society that everyone must live within their means and submit to the ‘order of nature’ (predetermined by the fates who placed each person in their appropriate class, geographic location, and gender). You were who you were because the fates had determined that’s what you deserved. In Roman eyes, the state did not live to serve the individual so much as the individual lived to serve the state.

The sanctity of the family was important to Romans. Divorce was virtually unheard of until the late Republican era. The roles of man and wife, mother and father, were strictly defined. Dad had the authority and the legal power of life and death over his entire household. In general, a Roman matron had more freedom than a Greek one, and participated in educating her children and was present in society more as well, but was not in any sense a legal equal.

Religion was important. Every reasonably prosperous Roman household kept a fire burning for the goddess Vesta to ensure the family’s continuity. Above these hearths stood statuettes of Lares the outdoor spirits guarding the fields, and Penates, the protector of the home’s interior. A Roman family revered its ancestors and kept their funeral masks on the walls and used them in domestic rituals.

The Kingdom of Rome grew rapidly from a trading town to a prosperous city between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, but this is partly because, in the late seventh century BC, Rome was subjugated by the Etruscans. From the Etruscans the Romans learned how to conduct profitable trade, how to put their language into writing, and how to use the Etruscan numbers we call Roman numerals. From this the Romans developed the alphabets that are widely used in all European languages, including English, and all the ‘romance’ languages still contain some Latin.

But it was war which made the city a powerful force in the world. In 509 BC, Romans threw off Etruscan control, and after defeating Carthage, became dominant over the entire Mediterranean region.

Romans are probably best known for their feats of engineering: the aqueducts, the paved roads, bridges, and the construction of sewers and drains. The Romans were the ones who discovered concrete. Roman architecture wasn’t entirely original, but many amphitheaters, theaters, stadiums, public spas, Temples, and city squares were still feats of construction. The Romans invented spiral stairs.

The ancient Romans formulated many of the laws that most countries use even today. The Roman administration came up with the idea of a census for keeping tabs on the number of citizens under its empire, and their personal and professional details, for better governance and implementation of laws. Under such gifted administration, Rome became wealthy and powerful.

Rome’s greatest legacy is probably in the image of what a healthy civilization looks like: orderly, law abiding, multi-ethnic and prosperous.

When the aristocrats abolished the monarchy and set up the Republic, they denied citizenship to poor farmers and poor urban dwellers—a policy of exclusion that laid the groundwork for centuries of class conflict.

As prosperity increased, Rome began to suffer from the effects of corruption, greed and over-reliance on foreign slave labor. Gangs of unemployed Romans, put out of work by the influx of slaves brought in through territorial conquests, hired themselves out as thugs to do the bidding of whatever wealthy Senator would pay them. The wealthy elite of the city, the Patricians, became ever richer at the expense of the working lower class, the Plebeians.

This is the Rome of the pre-Christian era.

None of their institutions, per se, have survived, but it is still fair to say Western civilization is built on the ruins of Rome. Western languages, law and education were all based on Roman ideals up to the modern era.

Slowly, the Roman empire of late antiquity began to come apart. The barbarians were relentless: Rome was sacked by barbarian invaders three times in the fifth century. The bureaucracy was increasingly incompetent and corrupt; the masses were politically inert and seemed to become more and more apathetic; there was rampant inflation; a crushing and inequitable tax system; and above all else—there was the army: the army became uncontrollable, bringing havoc on state and society.

By the time the last Roman emperor was overthrown by the barbarian Odoacer in 476 and he became the first non-Roman king of Roman territory, Anglo-Saxon invaders had already established a German kingdom in the England that Rome had recently lost.

The great Roman empire disintegrated into more than two dozen petty kingdoms and baronies with each independent from the others. They raided and fought one another on an almost constant basis.

And thus it was that Roman Law and Order passed away.

When governments fail, chaos ensues. Businesses die, economies break down, trade is inhibited. People have trouble finding food, shelter, medical care. Education—the arts—all ‘non-necessities’—go by the way side. There is no instance in history where any government has failed catastrophically that has not been followed by violence and disorder.

When Rome fell it had little to no effect in the east. The Eastern Roman empire—the Christian Byzantine empire—continued on for another thousand years.

But in the West, the fall of Rome was nothing less than catastrophic.

In the first years after the fall, life was precarious. People huddled together in search of what little safety and security could be found under the auspices of the Christian church and its spreading network of monasteries and convents. These were not military forts. They were simple ‘villages’ operating at the simplest economic level, with barter as the medium of exchange. Like Rome in its beginnings, it was an agrarian form of existence accompanied by a decline in trade and a lowering of the standard of living.

Monasteries generally grew their own food and were self-sustaining, while also supporting their works of charity. Monks divided their days into periods of work, prayer and study—with no real time for what we would call “leisure”— and their monasteries were models of productivity and economic resourcefulness. They were havens for the poor, hospitals, hospices for the dying, and centers for copying texts which were then protected in their libraries.

The study of classical and secular texts continued in most monasteries just as it had before the collapse. The idea that many great texts of the Classical period would have been lost without the dedication of the monks, is very real. It may even be said that they saved—for the West—many of the Classical Greek texts from extinction.

Christian leaders like the monk St.Benedict (480–543), who vowed a life of chastity, obedience and poverty, instituted rigorous intellectual training and self-denial, and monks were required to live by the “Rule of Benedict”: work and pray. This “Rule” became the foundation of thousands of monasteries across what is modern day Europe affecting all levels of society.

This ‘effect’ is partly because virtually all the leaders of western civilization for the next few hundred years were taught by monks. Monasteries established schools called Monastic schools, for local young men, (since the tradition of not educating most women above 12 years old also continued after Rome fell), and these schools were the source of all the education available except for private tutoring. And generally private tutors were monks.

The society of the Middle Ages combined the Germanic warrior tradition, Roman and Greek ideals and philosophy, with Judeo-Christian values, morals and religious faith. Medieval society was an amalgam, a syncretism, a melting pot, of all that had gone before it in the West. Middle Ages culture was never just one thing—that’s important to recognize. That sets it apart from the Roman empire in distinctive ways.

For example, women had played a major role in the founding and spread of early Christianity, and women continued to play a role in the church in influential ways until about 1200.

God creating humans in His image as both “male and female” along with Paul declaring a Christian is a Christian, male or female, produced a kind of “metaphysical” equality not found elsewhere at the time. As a result, while women were routinely excluded from scholastic, political and mercantile life in medieval society, they were not fully excluded from service in the church.

Medieval abbesses and female superiors of female monastic houses were powerful figures whose influence could rival that of male bishops and abbots. There was a rite for the ordination of women deacons in the Roman Pontifical up through the 12th century. The popularity of the Virgin Mary secured respect for maternal virtue as a central cultural theme in the later middle ages and helped form the concept of chivalry.

Though this is not, by any means, what moderns would consider equality, such powers had, as a rule, never before been available to ordinary women in previous Roman or Germanic societies.

By the 600’s barbarians were beginning to settle down in their new previously Roman-held territories. They don’t stop raiding each other completely, but mostly they don’t stray farther than next door either.

By the early 800’s, The Franks established enough of a kingdom they bring about what is sometimes referred to as the “Early Rennaissance” or the “Christian Rennaissance.” Taking his inspiration from the Christian Roman Empire of the fourth century, Charlemagne imported intellectuals to his court, set up schools and supported the arts. There was an increase in literature, writings, the arts, architecture, jurisprudence, liturgical, political and legal reforms, and scriptural studies.

Charlemagne built the most efficient and centralized state the West had seen since Rome. It had a capable bureaucracy and a fair judicial system. He granted large tracts of land to local warriors and then held them responsible for maintaining law and order in their domains. This administrative system represented a fusion of the Roman approach to governing with the Germanic warrior tradition.

By the time the barbarian invasions were over, an enduring western culture had been born, centered in Europe, rather than in the Mediterranean basin.

This echoed Rome in its prime, and it worked as long as Charlemagne lived. His grandsons divided his empire into three parts and the divided empire could not hold back the rampaging Viking hordes. This too seems to echo Rome.

Charlemagne’s ambitious hopes for restoring what had been lost with Rome did not survive the barbarian invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. But society grew more settled by the eleventh century and a brighter era—the High Middle Ages—began to unfold in the West.

The rediscovery of Aristotle’s works in the Middle Ages led to a cultural ferment that spawned some of the greatest achievements of medieval times, including the founding of the first Western schools of higher education since the sixth century: the universities.

The University was a new phenomenon in European history.

These were the first establishments of higher learning since the fall of Rome, but in fact, nothing quite like these schools had ever existed before—not in ancient Greece or in Rome.

Twice a year a medieval university would hold a quodlibeta - a multi-day tournament of rigorous logical disputation where anyone could propose and defend any position on any subject. Masters and doctors maintained their positions (and their reputations) by their ability to win such debates, often throwing open the floor to all comers.

Brilliant students could rise quickly in reputation and renown by taking on the masters and beating them. Often highly radical or even heretical ideas were presented and participants had to defend or attack them using logic and reason alone.

The idea of a rational free-for-all where the finest minds of the time used reason alone to bat around ideas like "God is evil" or "the universe had no beginning in time" certainly does not fit most people's ideas of the Middle Ages, yet this was a regular event.

The University that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, comes to us directly from the Middle Ages.

The High Middle ages gave us Danté, vernacular literature, and epic poetry such as King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Stained glass windows and the art of tapestry develop in this era. The Bayeux Tapestry is embroidered during this time period, probably in England, with an illustration of the Battle of Hastings. Not only is this textile an important early work of art but it is also a valuable historical document, as the military events are described in abundant detail.

There is artistic innovation in this era. Italian painter and mosaicist Cimabue combines aspects of Byzantine painting with an interest in volume and human emotions that forever after influenced art. In the frescoes the Florentine painter Giotto paints for the Arena Chapel in Padua, he develops a new naturalism and emphasis on emotion that also exerted a strong and lasting influence on art. Mystery plays, Miracle plays, and Morality plays all begin in the Middle Ages—aspects of which we still see in drama today.

Musical notation—the basic system for writing down music—upon which all music has since been built—was developed in this age. Gregorian chants with their complex harmonies and the music of medieval troubadours contribute to this rich musical environment that will eventually give rise to classical music and its many offshoots.

Architecture such as that at St Pierre in Moissac, decorated with complex figural scenes and porches, are one of the primary innovations of the Romanesque art of this era and represent the earliest examples of large architectural sculpture in Europe since ancient times.

Gothic architecture begins in this era giving us such famed structures as the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. This soaring structure boasts the first use of the architectural technique of flying buttresses, and for a long time, is the tallest building in the Western world.

The foundation of modern science begins here, in the High Middle Ages. Medieval scholars discovered elements in physics and mechanics that have long been attributed to much later scientists like Galileo and Newton. These Medieval scientists have been wrongfully ignored and neglected since the Enlightenment, largely for political and ideological reasons.

It was actually within the vigorous intellectual environment of the new universities, that Medieval Europe saw the first real flowering of scientific innovation since the ancient Greeks.

In the early 1200s Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) proposed that scholars should use experiments to verify what they had derived from logic. Shortly thereafter, Roger Bacon (1214–1292) developed this idea further, proposing a method based on a repeated cycle of observation, hypothesis, and experimentation. We call it the scientific method.

Within the fifty years that followed, scholars developed the idea for making conclusions even more precise by using mathematics as the language of physics. This is probably the most revolutionary of all the many Medieval contributions to the rise of true modern science.

The greatest mind of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas the Dominican friar, wrote two monumental works arguing that reason is in harmony with faith. Thus began the rationalist tradition in the West.

The Middle Ages gave us the first English Parliament. It was first convened in 1215, with the creation and signing of the Magna Carta, one of the most important documents in history as it established the principle that everyone is subject to the law, even the king, and it guarantees the rights of individuals, the right to justice, and the right to a fair trial.

The Middle Ages gave us the marketplace and trade fairs, banks, the horse drawn plow, the horse collar and horse shoes, three-field crop rotation, the mace, the flail, and suits of armor. It gave us the code of chivalry and heraldry.

These are a few of the major contributions of the Middle Ages.

But late Roman civilization still had a legacy to give to the Middle ages.

From late Rome came the sharp division between aristocratic landowners and dependent agricultural laborers, the emergence of the church as a state within the nation states and its entanglement with the secular, and the development of the military power of the large landowners.

With all its prosperity and achievements, the feudalistic Middle Ages were nearly as divided by class as Rome.

Likewise, the nation states of Europe were unable to overcome the divisiveness of their barbarian beginnings and unite as Rome had. They continued to fight each other up into the modern era.

At its peak, the Middle Ages had as many innovations and achievements—and perhaps as many problems—as Rome ever did.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire most of Europe had decentralized and tried to sustain themselves in smaller groups. Labor became much more expensive. This lead to the disuse and eventual state of disrepair of systems that were common throughout the Empire. The ability to read and write wasn’t common in the Roman Empire and it didn’t really change that much. The common populace still couldn’t read or write, the nobility and clergy retained this position. But staying alive in this era was more important than poetry, culture has changed, a warrior elite emerged who protected the land (knights), a new form of political system was implemented that based off wealth from the amount and quality of land and therefore food you had instead of coinage. A lot of technological advancements took place in this era but I’ll let @Tim O'Neill talk about it in detail.

Tim O'Neill's answer to What level of technology was in place during the Middle Ages?

(Absolutely recommend Tim on history, he’s very knowledgable much more than I am)

The dark ages were called (nowadays historians don’t like this term) the thing they were called simply because the lack of written documents from the period. But since then we have found more and more documents and it shows to me that people didn’t revert to cavemen, they lived their lives the best they could. It is not true that the Church discouraged science however.

They’re not.

Smug Renaissance humanists referred to the period between the fall of Rome and their own era as a “middle age” or a “dark age” without the benefit of classical learning, which they were recovering. Later scholarship pushed back on the idea of the Middle Ages as a period of ignorance. By the 19th century, scholars were able to point to a variety of technological innovations and important philosophical and literary works as well as increasing political sophistication. The idea of a “dark age” was pushed back to the early years of the Middle Ages, from the fall of Rome until Charlemagne.

And in more recent decades, even that’s become less popular. We’re finding more and more evidence of intellectual sophistication, like lists of lost works, things we knew people wrote at the time but have since been lost. “Dark Ages” is, frankly, hanging on by a thread. It survives with a different meaning: an age where we can’t see well rather than an age where there was nothing to see. And in time, we may learn enough that even that approach may fail.

Europe start getting out of its dark ages after the end of the medieval cold snap and the beginning of the medieval climatic optimum. During the cold snap, agricultural productivity was very low. The peasants barely had enough food to feed themselves. The cities disappeared, only the Burgs with a population of up to 1,000 people remained. It is enough to read the instructions on the management of the royal household of Charlemagne to understand that the royal domain was an ordinary large farm. Even in Italy, which was least affected by climate change, the population of Rome has dropped to less than 30,000. With the onset of warming in the 9th century, agricultural productivity skyrocketed, and Europe in less than a hundred years was covered by a dense network of cities.

As for the dark ages, this term refers to a period of medieval history for which we have practically no written evidence. They appear suddenly out of nowhere just in the period of Charlemagne. There are two reasons for this. The first - in the same cold snap that led to the transition to a subsistence economy, a decline in trade, the absence of a centralized bureaucracy and public finance (the entire budget of the English parliament fit in one bag, on which the head of the parliament literally sat). As a result, there was no need for writing and literacy.

Another reason is the Catholic Church. It is well known that all of Europe, except Italy and Byzantium, was Arian. When Arianism was exposed as heresy, the Catholic Church began the systematic destruction of everything related to Arianism, and primarily written sources. This campaign, which has been conducted continuously for hundreds of years, has led to remarkable results: for example, from two magnificent Gothic kingdoms - the Visigothic in Aquitaine and Spain and the Ostrogothic in Italy - there is NOTHING left. Despite the fact that Theodoric in Italy had an extensive administration and carried out extensive construction in Rome, which simply could not but be accompanied by an intensive workflow, and his reign saw a flourishing of culture in Italy. From these two kingdoms with 400 years of history, there is only ... the Catholic Bible of Wulfila. At the same time, the history of the Catholic kings of England, starting with Alfred the Great, is well preserved. If King Arthur had been a Catholic, I think we would have known about him firsthand.

The history of the Franks essentially begins with the baptism of the Carolingians. The story of the deal between the Carolingians and the papacy, as a result of which the papacy received recognition of its rights to the Roman throne and domination in the Christian world on the basis of the forged Donation of Constantine, and the Carolingians received rights to the Merovingian throne, which they did not have by their origin, is well known.

Thus, from the point of view of written sources, the dark ages were not always dark everywhere, and ended with the eradication of Arianism. The decline of culture and writing, caused by the medieval cold snap, ended with the onset of warming.

Your hunch is right, to an extent. It's clear that there was a collapse in learning and much technical capacity as a result of the fragmentation and chaos that followed the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe. In places, such as southern Gaul or northern Spain, this collapse was a slow decline over several hundred years. In others, such as Britain, it was much more sudden and catastrophic. Modern surveys of archaeological and documentary evidence, such as those summarised by Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (2005) show that this means a clear decline in material culture and technical capacity between the later Roman Era and the seventh century AD.

Factory made, mass-produced ceramics which had been exported to the furthest corners of the Empire were replaced with rough, home-made pottery. Evidence of luxury goods traded over long distances disappears from the record in all but the most elite grave site finds. Learning was not extinguished completely thanks to the Church's teaching that "pagan" philosophy was valuable for its own sake and to be preserved. But much was lost in the turmoil. We have, for example, some correspondence between two monks from the Ninth Century where they are discussing mathematical problems that, to modern eyes, look totally elementary but which were cutting edge at the time.

This was not due to any lack of "intelligence". People in the early Middle Ages were every bit as intelligent as their Roman Era forebears and also just as smart as we are. But when the whole infrastructure of the earlier culture falls apart under a complex combination of economic and political failures and your region is assailed on all sides from successive waves of invaders and wracked internally by political division and warfare, there tend to be more important things to apply that intelligence to than building aqueducts or translating Aristotle from the Greek. If our civilisation collapsed, we would still have the intelligence to design computer games or decorate loft apartments, but we would be using it to grow food, protect our crops and survive.

The myth of the Middle Ages as a "dark age" does not lie in the fact that things declined markedly after the fall of Rome - they did. It lies in the idea that this situation persisted until the dawning of something called "the Renaissance", which somehow rescued western Europe from the clutches of the Catholic Church, revived ancient Greek and Roman learning, reinvented "good" (i.e. realistic) art and made everything okay again.

This is the part of the story that is the myth.

The revival of material culture came long before the so-called "Renaissance". It began as early as the eighth century and was driven by the needs of early medieval farmers to achieve more with less. With long distance trade at a low ebb, European farmers had to be far more self-sufficient and with populations lower, they had to be more labour effective. Technologies and farming techniques which reduced labour and increased yields became increasingly required and saw an adoption of changes in the period between 500 and 1200 AD that revolutionised agrarian production. The adoption of the horse collar and horseshoes made ploughing more effective and the wider use of the heavy mouldboard plough meant that heavy, fertile northern European soils could be brought under production for the first time. Watermills began to proliferate through Europe, mechanising not just flour production but also a range of other processes once done manually. This mechanisation spread to widespread use of tidal mills and, eventually, to the invention of lateral windmills and the range of processes driven by these new machines increased to including everything from sawing masonry to driving trip hammers and automated forge bellows.

The resultant rise in production levels and standards of living from these technologies, combined with the end of the waves of invasion and greater political stability paved the way for an upswing in the later Middle Ages. Contact with Jewish and Muslim scholars in Spain saw lost works by Aristotle, Ptolemy, Archimedes and many others translated into Latin and returned to the West. In the same period universities began to appear across Europe, setting up a network of scholarship. This Medieval revival also saw further technological innovation, with major inventions such as the mechanical clock, eyeglasses, effective gunpowder weapons and the printing press.

So the idea that there was no innovation in the Middle Ages is simply wrong - it was a period of remarkable inventiveness. And the idea that Greek and Roman learning was forgotten until the "Renaissance" is complete nonsense. It had always been preserved by the Church and when conditions in Europe stabilised in the later eleventh century western Christian scholars went in search of the works that had been lost. The revival came in the twelfth century, long before the "Renaissance". What the scholars and artists of the Renaissance movement did do is elevate the idolisation of the Greeks and Romans to a new and, at times, strangely regressive level. So they denigrated the beautiful and technically advanced architecture of the later Middle Ages as barbaric (it's still called "gothic" to this day) and aped Greek and Roman styles. They also didn't pay much attention to Greek and Roman science, logic and philosophy, since that had already been revived in the Middle Ages, and idolised Greek and Roman literature, drama and history instead.

The idea of the whole Middle Ages as a "dark age" therefore actually comes from the Early Modern "Renaissance" and humanist movements and their denigration of their immediate forebears and idolisation and idealisation of the Greeks and Romans. Thus the period between the Romans and this idealisation in the Early Modern Era became called the medium aevum - the "ages in the middle" or the Middle Ages. They became traditionally characterised as a backward step, where art became "primitive" (because only realistic art could be "good" art), architecture was "barbaric" or "gothic" and innovation was stagnant.

These false ideas are still current partly because historians have only begun to revise our understanding of the Middle Ages quite recently and this is taking some time to seep into popular consciousness. But the prejudice against the Middle Ages is also driven by some strong cultural currents in our own time. Those with an animus against Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular like to cling to the old idea of the Middle Ages as a "dark age" because it suits their preconceptions about religion and forms a neat little fable where modernity is "good" and the medieval period is "bad". Historians avoid these simplistic value judgements and reject the assumptions on which they are made, but simple pseudo historical fairy tales are hard to budge.

See also Tim O'Neill's answer to What level of technology was in place during the Middle Ages? and Tim O'Neill's answer to Why did science make little real progress in Europe in the Middle Ages?

No, of course not - the Middle Ages were fairly advanced and free-thinking. It was the Renaissance which brought witch-burnings, the Inquisition and widespread slavery. Nowadays we think of the Renaissance as some sort of modernist movement, but it began life as a conscious revival of the customs of 2,000 years previously, and only later began to generate advances in science and architecture.

But the darkest periods are going to be local, not worldwide. The Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, the Aztecs, the Rwanda genocide and the sinister madness of Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible and Vlad the Impaler, apartheid, the Balkan War - these are probably our darkest periods.

> Everyone wore brown, dark/dull-colored attire. Or that Europe was perpetually under a dark blue filter (and Middle East was/is under a Mexican/light brown filter).

I’m not sure which movie started it, but I remember it did start at the movies. Now, everyone wore leather-like shirts for no reason at all. And it’s not like there aren’t any historical references for it:

This needs to end. Dull-colored shirts only became part of men’s fashion in the modern age, from around late 19th century.

> Middle Ages was a time of European stagnation but Asian/Muslim renaissance. It’s an oversimplication of things. Learning and technology did advance throughout the Middle Ages even in Europe; some of the oldest universities still operating dated back from those years (say, Oxford). It’s not like there’s some kind of Renaissance Switch for the entire continent.

> Europe was a brutal place and the Arabs/Asians were more civilized. Not really. Everyone was horrible and brutal back then.

> Genghis Khan was a simple, bloodthirsty savage conqueror. Honestly, the only thing that separated him and his horde from everyone else was how amazingly successful he was despite how little they had at the beginning. In terms of cruelty, the Mongols were not that different from everyone else at the time. He is still considered the greatest cavalry commander/general of all time.

His “issue” was that the Mongol conquest had been used by racists to “other” and separate Asians from White Europeans during the height of imperialism and nationalism in the 19th century.

> That there’s a clear “start” and “end” of the Middle Ages. You can debate endlessly which exact year this is since it’s not an exact science. It gets worse if you stop taking the Eurocentric view because then it really was just a “European Middle Ages” and the experience was not universal.

Yes I´d say it is exaggerated, or rather it was formerly exaggerated. Nowadays the trend is towards a more balanced perspective while studying what happened or did not happen in Western Europe in the 2nd. half of the 1st. millenium, to restrict the discussion to what is usually called the High Middle Ages.

And how come this urge to put certain labels on these five centuries that followed the disintegration of the ancient world in what had been the Western half of the Roman Empire? Why ….?!

Instead of calling it dark, innovative, backwards or whatever, it is our disciplined duty to look at the period, inasmuch as it is a period, in all its complexity and without any pre-concieved value-laden agendas.

And pray forget all that about evidence, which goes to show a lack of understanding of what the theory & method of history is all about. The evidence is written texts, maps, coins, diverse objects, buildings, forensics, etc- which are meticulously assessed and compared and then interpreted. That´s what you get, intepretations, so no more insisting on “evidence” !!