
Were There Dark Ages? - megaman22
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
======
benbreen
Disclaimer: am an historian and agree with the basic premise of OP. Without a
doubt, it would be preferable to have been born in 100 CE as opposed to 800
CE, in most parts of Christian Western Europe. But I think he dismisses point
#1 far too hastily. Go a little bit south of the Visigoths, and you have one
of the world's largest libraries to date and a city to rival ancient Athens in
size (Muslim Cordoba).

The point I try to make when I teach this stuff is not that there was no
period of decline in Christian Western Europe after the fall of the Western
empire. That's a given. But the culture of the Greeks and Romans also had a
home in places like Morocco, Afghanistan and Egypt. Those places were doing
great during the "Dark Ages" and were just as much the inheritors of the
Classical world as, say, Germany and Ireland.

In other words: fixating on a Dark Age that only befell something like 1/4 of
the zone of Greco-Roman influence gives a misleading impression because it
imposes much more modern geographic boundaries. Many of those "lost" classical
texts rediscovered in the Renaissance were still readily available in places
like Isfahan and Shiraz. Likewise with population: I would wager that, taking
a century-level view, the regions encompassed by Alexander's empire increased
steadily in urbanization and GDP from his time to that of the Mongols.

~~~
adrianratnapala
> I would wager that, taking a century-level view, the regions encompassed by
> Alexander's empire increased steadily in urbanization and GDP from his time
> to that of the Mongols.

There is evidence of a medeival decline, even in those areas, although
obviously not as bad.

In _" Why The West Rules, For Now"_, Ian Morris defines "The West" very
broadly, and definately includes everything you are talking about. He then
comes up with various metrics which are not averages, but which focus the most
successful part of the region (e.g. population of the biggest city).

Not surprisingly, the most successful parts of the west by his reckoning, were
in the Islamic world during the middle ages. But even then his overall metric
shows a medeival dip for the west, which his "east" (aka China) did does not
see.

~~~
benbreen
Before the Mongol invasions? That would surprise me, if so. Would be
interested to see his evidence, if anything from the book is online.

~~~
nl
I haven't read this book, but it is on my list.

This data would surprise me too, but the author is fairly well credentialed
and has done reasonable work at estimating this kind of thing before. He is
one of the authors of [https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/cambridge-
economi...](https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/cambridge-economic-
history-greco-roman-world)

His work on city size seems to be in this PDF, pages 109-117:
[http://www.ianmorris.org/docs/social-
development.pdf](http://www.ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf)

I'm far from an expert on this. The only thing I noted was that his estimate
of 125K in 1000CE Baghdad is lower than I expected. He argues it may actually
have been lower given the documented size, and he notes the 500K-700K
estimates for Baghdad imply a much higher density to anywhere else at that
time.

I'd note that I don't see the OP's point (that population declined in the
Muslim cities during this period) reflected in the numbers I'm seeing in this
document. That is mostly because it isn't clear about the whole area
population as opposed to the largest cities.

------
HarryHirsch
In the West we must give thanks to the Irish monasteries, where manuscripts
were preserved that were lost in the rest of Europe to the chaos of the
_Völkerwanderung_ , and to Charlemagne, whose advisor Alcuin brought the
knowledge back from his Islands. Heinrich Böll called Ireland "Europe's
burning heart". Nonetheless, the amount of literature lost in Late Antiquity
is staggering.

------
MichaelMoser123
it did take several centuries to create a framework for economic cooperation
that works for large geographic areas and that was not based on the classical
Greek regime of slavery (that might work as a summary).

For an individual of low birth serfdom seems preferable to slavery, however it
must be more difficult to organise a 'big' economy on top of that

The western Roman empire needed grain from North Africa and the Middle East -
it needed ships to transport all that and would pay with silver from Spanish
mines - you need a slave regime to maintain all that. A system with more
independent actors that achieves the same level of trade / cultural exchange
is inherently more complex (needs more complex system of laws, finances,
everything) , but is in turn more scalable.

I think Europe 'won' because it was a distributed system. A country/ruler can
go bad, but as a whole connected by trade and cultural ties it kept going
further (each ruler had to keep up if not to be swallowed by the neighbours) .
However big unified realms like China or Russia all rise and fall as one
entity - and it takes longer to recover from a big crisis.

------
otabdeveloper1
Ctrl-F "Byz..."

Ctrl-F "Consta..."

No offense, but this dude should stop posting anything history-related.
Historical memes aren't history.

~~~
AndrewDucker
The linked article explicitly makes this point:

"Every other historical age name is instantly understood by everyone to refer
to both a time and a place. [..] let’s just agree to call it the Western
European Dark Ages, as long as we can also agree it existed and was bad."

~~~
otabdeveloper1
No, let's not.

Talking about the Dark Ages and failing to mention the Eastern Roman Empire is
like talking about the Cold War and failing to mention the USA.

It means that the article is a kaleidoscope of mismatched, unconnected memes
instead of something holistic and grounded in reality.

Some reality-based facts:

a) The western part of the Roman Empire collapsed a few centuries prior to the
fifth century.

b) The southern shore of the Mediterranean and the Middle East collapsed
during the Muslim invasions. (And never recovered, even to this day.)

c) The eastern part of the Roman Empire only started collapsing during the
13th century, give or take.

d) The flow of civilization from the eastern part to the western parts of the
Roman Empire was blocked by Muslim piracy. (There is no overland route between
Italy and Greece.)

e) The German-speaking parts of Europe were never any part of any Roman
Empire, and saw no collapse. (Only improvement.)

f) Spain has its own history and its own historical cycles.

------
vacri
Meh. In Roman times, France, Germany, Spain, and the British Isles were all
relative backwaters (Germany not even that) that didn't have much innovation
anyway, so considering those places 'darker' in 500-1000CE is somewhat
misleading. Culture, money, and learning was in the central mediterranean and
eastern Roman empire.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>so considering those places 'darker' in 500-1000CE is somewhat misleading

Standards of living declined dramatically, war and violence were more
widespread. Most people would call that darker.

------
Taniwha
To be fair WW1 wasn't invented until WW2 came along, before that it was mostly
the "Great War"

------
boomboomsubban
"The Dark Ages" is one facet of the extreme Western Europe focus on history
taught in much of America and presumably Europe. I had lessons on Greece and
Rome, then on the Norman invasion. Everything I was taught has this extreme
slant, but combined with learning almost nothing about anywhere during the
Dark Ages you're left thinking nothing happened.

So yes, if you're goal is an exclusively Christian Western Europe focused view
of history, the term is fine. If that isn't your stated goal, why use it over
Early Middle Age?

~~~
smsm42
That sounds like saying "well, if you only care for Russia, Ivan the Terrible
is surely an appropriate term, but he wasn't particularly terrible for Africa
or Americas, so using this nickname betrays you are exclusively interested in
only Russian history and don't care about the rest, otherwise you'd call him
Ivan the Fourth Vasilyevich!". Doesn't sound very convincing to me.

~~~
boomboomsubban
You're arguing from a position of someone with some history knowledge, which
is not the problem. Knowing that Ivan the Terrible was a Russian Tsar is
uncommon, and if he comes up you probably will be exclusively focused on
Russian history.

People don't know a ton about the Dark Ages either, but "Rome collapsed
leading to the Dark Ages," and "The Discovery of America/the Renisance/The
Scientific Revolution led us out of the Dark Ages" are often things you will
have heard. And given the context you can hear them, it's not clearly
referring to Western Christian Europe.

~~~
pwinnski
That non-historians often misunderstand the shape and scope of the Dark Ages
doesn't seem like a problem of definition, but of widespread ignorance. People
who elevate the discovery of America, the renaissance, or the scientific
revolution to the degree you describe are not going to be dissuaded by any
sort of renaming, because those views aren't factually based in the first
place.

~~~
boomboomsubban
I started this off by saying it was one piece of a much wider problem. Calling
it the Dark Ages can make your ignorance seem correct in a way that other
names don't.

Calling them the Early Middle Ages gets rid of the false narrative of later
events ending the Dark Ages, and it doesn't accidentally imply nothing
happened anywhere. It's not going to end ignorance, just remove confusion.
What reason is there to keep calling it the Dark Ages?

As for the isolated demand for rigor, I would not expect most people to know
anything about the examples given. If I were talking about them, I would
immediately add a qualifier explaining what they are. The Dark Ages are a more
common term, being widely used outside of history.

