Dark Ages
The "Dark Ages" is a term invented in the early 14th Century to describe the preceeding 900 years in Europe, begining with the fall of the western Roman Empire in 410 through to the renewal embodied in the Renaissance begining in the 14th Century.Before the term and concept was invented, people did not see themselves as part of a Dark Age and to understand why the period is called "Dark", with its negative connotations, it is helpful to know when, how and why the term was invented, how the term has been variously used in the 700 years since its creation, and how the term is viewed today in modern times.
For a history of what happened during the period, such as the signifigance of new social and economic forms which emerged, such feudalism and medieval literature, see the Middle Ages.
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2 Other labels for the Dark Ages 3 Other Dark Ages 4 Cosmology |
Origin and history of Dark Ages concept
(1530-1602), ceiling painting in the Sala di Constantino, Vatican Palace. Images like this one symbolize the destruction of ancient pagan culture and the "victory" of Christianity.'']]
In order to understand the origin of the concept of the Dark Ages it is helpful to understand how the people of the time saw their own place in history. If you had asked anyone in that period if they had ever heard of the Dark or Middle Ages they would have not. Rather they followed the ideas of St. Augustine (5th Century) who believed history has 6 stages based on religion, such as the period of Christs birth, death, second coming, etc.. they believed, as St. Augustine said, they were living in the sixth and final phase of history, the end of earthly man was coming after Christ returned to earth and the events of Revelations could happen at any time. This idea prevailed for nearly 900 years from the 5th Century to the early 14th Century.
How did the concept of the Dark Ages or Middle Ages come about and why? It is generally accepted that it started with a 14th Century Italian Renaissance humanist by the name of Petrarch who invented the concept of a Dark Age in the 1330s. For Petrarch, who spent much of his time traveling through Europe re-discovering and re-publishing the classic Roman and Greek texts, any work not of Classical origin was unworthy of study and beneath contempt. As a humanist he desired to restore the classic Roman language, art and culture to original Roman purity and any changes since the fall of Rome in 410 were cultural and social rot. He interpreted the 900 year period of Classics stagnation as the "Age of Darkness". Even though Petrarch did not use the exact phrase "Age of Darkness" or "Dark Age", he created the concept which later contemporaries then coined. Petrarch saw history not on the religious terms of St. Augustine, but along social ones, through the progressive developments of Classical culture, literature and art. Thus he concluded history has two periods: the Classic period of the Romans and Greeks, and an "Age of Darkness" which Petrarch bemoaned he was still living in. Petrarch believed that one day the Roman Empire would rise again and restore the Classical culture. Those who followed Petrarch were inspired by his and his fellow humanists vision of a rebirth of Classic culture, became convinced in the late 14th and early 15th Century that they had achieved this, and thus a 3rd Modern Age had started and a "Middle Age" thus created. The first use of the term "Middle Age" appears in Latin in 1469 while the concept "Age of Darkness" appears with Petrarch in the 1330s.
Historians since Petrarch have viewed the Dark Ages or Middle Ages with various degrees of contempt and praise, but mostly with a negative view.
Petrarch and his contemporaries created the term Dark Ages and thus saw it as beneath contempt and unworthy of study, focusing instead on the Classics as the way forward.
During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th Century, Protestants wrote about it as a period of Catholic religious corruption. In response to these attacks Catholic reformers developed a counterimage, depicting it as a period of social and religious harmony, and not "dark" at all. While these polemical views were highly partisan, the scholars of the 16th and 17th Century managed to copy and preserve many source documents that have not survived to this day which modern historians owe a great deal of gratitude.
During the 17th and 18th Century, the age of Enlightenment, the Dark Ages were once again assaulted. For them the problem was the period was religious, not just corrupt, but religious period. Religion to the Enlightenment was against reason, which by definition was therefore against the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant, for example, believed that the human race had experienced collective insanity that interrupted the forward march of progress and reason; while Voltaire believed the period should be studied if only to find more reason to mock and make fun of the period. Many of the modern conceptions of the "Dark Ages" come from the Enlightenment authors who took great strides to discredit it.
In the early 19th Century the Romantics reversed this negative trend and created an idyllic image of the period being full of social harmony where everyone accepted their place in society, full of open emotion and environmental harmony living close to the earth. This image was in reaction to a world dominated by Enlightenment rationalism in which reason trumped emotion, and the environmental destruction and pollution of the emerging Industrial Revolution created a romantic desire for a more natural time. The Romantic view of the Dark Ages can still be seen in modern day fairs and festivals that celebrate the period with costumes and events.
After the Romantics there have been advancements in archaeology, starting in the later half of the 19th Century, for example the famous Sutton Hoo burial treasure, which have made available additional material not available to previous scholars.
Today, the two contrasting visions of the Dark or Middle ages continues to exist, the Romantic positive image and the negative image.
For the most part the negative image is still the most predominate. This can be seen in such popular phrases as "Let's get medieval", or "that is medieval" when speaking of somthing negative or backwards. Another example is records, because the period is lacking good source material compared to other periods, Dark Ages is often used in this context. Many will say the period was actually a positive one and counter these claims, but the popular image of the Dark Ages today is still a predominatly negative one.
For historical working purposes the negative connotations of the word "dark" in Dark Ages have made it an unpopular expression among modern historians and so the term Middle Ages is often preferred. However the term "Dark Ages" does have signifigant historical meaning in shapeing views of that period.
Depending on country of origin, historians will call the Dark Ages diffrent things. For example in English, Russian and Icelandic speaking countries it is called the Middle Ages (plural), meaning there are sub-groups such as the Late Middle Ages, High Middle Ages and Early Middle Ages. By contrast in most major European languages -- French, German, Spanish, Italian -- where a large majority of research of the period originates, it is spoken of in the singular, Middle Age, and not broken into sub-groups. This creates confusion on what the timeline of the period is, so it is often safe to assume, without other context, it means the entire period from the fall of Rome in 410 through to the start of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th Century. In a 3-period view of history (Antiquity, Middle, Modern) the period would end in 1500.
The term "Dark Ages" is also used for the period in the history of Ancient Greece between the 11th and 8th century BC from which no records, and only scant archaeological evidence, survive.
In cosmology's Big Bang theory, the term dark ages refers to periods of comparatively little starlight emission, during the early formation of the universe. This would have occurred after decoupling and before the first burst of star formation.
Origin of the Dark Ages concept
"Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage."--Petrarch
History of the Dark Ages concept
Dark Age concept today
Other labels for the Dark Ages
There are no internationally accepted starting or ending points for the Dark Ages, though in most English speaking countries historians consider the roughly half-millennium period from the Visigoth sack of Rome (410CE) to the year 1000CE as commonly accepted. Some consider Charlemagne in 800 to represent the end of the Dark Ages, while others take it up to the start of the Modern Age in 1500.Other Dark Ages
In the Ancient Near East there are consistent gaps in structures, writing or works of art at many urban sites between 1200 and 850 BCE, the "Dark Ages" of the Ancient Near East.Cosmology