Petrarch, who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. 1450
The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages, that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.
The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records). The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity. The phrase "Dark Age" itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries.
The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time
of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; this became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.
As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in
the 18th and 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the "Dark Ages"
appellation to the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century).
The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its
negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. The original definition remains in popular use,
and popular culture often employs it as a vehicle to depict the Middle
Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and
expanding its scope.
History
Petrarch
Triumph of Christianity by Tommaso Laureti (1530–1602), ceiling painting in the Sala di Constantino, Vatican Palace. Images like this one celebrate the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of Antiquity.
The idea of a Dark Age originated with the Tuscan scholar Petrarch in the 1330s.
Writing of the past, he said: "Amidst the errors there shone forth men
of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom". Christian writers, including Petrarch himself, had long used traditional metaphors of 'light versus darkness' to describe 'good versus evil'. Petrarch was the first to give the metaphor secular
meaning by reversing its application. He now saw Classical Antiquity,
so long considered a 'dark' age for its lack of Christianity, in the
'light' of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's own time,
allegedly lacking such cultural achievements, was seen as the age of
darkness.
From his perspective on the Italian peninsula, Petrarch saw the Roman and classical period as an expression of greatness. He spent much of his time traveling through Europe, rediscovering and republishing classic Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore the Latin language to its former purity. Renaissance humanists saw the preceding 900 years as a time of stagnation, with history unfolding not along the religious outline of Saint Augustine's Six Ages of the World, but in cultural (or secular) terms through progressive development of classical ideals, literature, and art.
Petrarch wrote that history had two periods: the classic period of Greeks and Romans, followed by a time of darkness in which he saw himself living. In around 1343, in the conclusion of his epic Africa,
he wrote: "My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But
for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me,
there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not
last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can
come again in the former pure radiance." In the 15th century, historians Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo
developed a three-tier outline of history. They used Petrarch's two
ages, plus a modern, 'better age', which they believed the world had
entered. Later the term 'Middle Ages' - Latin media tempestas (1469) or medium aevum (1604) - was used to describe the period of supposed decline.
Reformation
During the Reformations
of the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants generally had a similar
view to Renaissance Humanists such as Petrarch, but also added an Anti-Catholic
perspective. They saw classical antiquity as a golden time, not only
because of its Latin literature, but also because it witnessed the
beginnings of Christianity. They promoted the idea that the 'Middle Age'
was a time of darkness also because of corruption within the Roman
Catholic Church, such as: Popes ruling as kings, veneration of saints' relics, a licentious priesthood, and institutionalized moral hypocrisy.
Baronius
In response to the Protestants, Catholics developed a counter-image to depict the High Middle Ages in particular as a period of social and religious harmony, and not 'dark' at all. The most important Catholic reply to the Magdeburg Centuries was the Annales Ecclesiastici by Cardinal Caesar Baronius. Baronius was a trained historian who produced a work that the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1911 described as "far surpassing anything before" and that Acton regarded as "the greatest history of the Church ever written". The Annales
covered the first twelve centuries of Christianity to 1198, and was
published in twelve volumes between 1588 and 1607. It was in Volume X
that Baronius coined the term "dark age" for the period between the end
of the Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first stirrings of Gregorian Reform under Pope Clement II in 1046:
| Century | Migne Volume Nos | Volumes |
|---|---|---|
| 7th | 80–88 | 9 |
| 8th | 89–96 | 8 |
| 9th | 97–130 | 34 |
| 10th | 131–138 | 8 |
| 11th | 139–151 | 13 |
| 12th | 152–191 | 40 |
| 13th | 192–217 | 26 |
The new age (saeculum) which was beginning, for its harshness and barrenness of good could well be called iron, for its baseness and abounding evil leaden, and moreover for its lack of writers (inopia scriptorum) dark (obscurum).
Significantly, Baronius termed the age 'dark' because of the paucity
of written records. The "lack of writers" he referred to may be
illustrated by comparing the number of volumes in Migne's Patrologia Latina
containing the work of Latin writers from the 10th century (the heart
of the age he called 'dark') with the number containing the work of
writers from the preceding and succeeding centuries. A minority of these
writers were historians.
Medieval production of manuscripts.
The beginning of the Middle Ages was also a period of low activity in
copying. Note that this graph does not include the Byzantine Empire.
There is a sharp drop from 34 volumes in the 9th century to just 8 in
the 10th. The 11th century, with 13, evidences a certain recovery, and
the 12th century, with 40, surpasses the 9th, something the 13th, with
just 26, fails to do. There was indeed a 'dark age', in Baronius's sense
of a "lack of writers", between the Carolingian Renaissance in the 9th century and the beginnings, some time in the 11th, of what has been called the Renaissance of the 12th century.
Furthermore, there was an earlier period of "lack of writers" during
the 7th and 8th centuries. So, in Western Europe, two 'dark ages' can
be identified, separated by the brilliant but brief Carolingian Renaissance.
Baronius's 'dark age' seems to have struck historians, for it was
in the 17th century that the term started to proliferate in various
European languages, with his original Latin term saeculum obscurum
being reserved for the period he had applied it to. But while some,
following Baronius, used 'dark age' neutrally to refer to a dearth of
written records, others used it pejoratively, lapsing into that lack of
objectivity that has discredited the term for many modern historians.
The first British historian to use the term was most likely Gilbert Burnet,
in the form 'darker ages' which appears several times in his work
during the later 17th century. The earliest reference seems to be in the
"Epistle Dedicatory" to Volume I of The History of the Reformation of the Church of England
of 1679, where he writes: "The design of the reformation was to restore
Christianity to what it was at first, and to purge it of those
corruptions, with which it was overrun in the later and darker ages."
He uses it again in the 1682 Volume II, where he dismisses the story of
"St George's fighting with the dragon" as "a legend formed in the
darker ages to support the humour of chivalry". Burnet was a bishop chronicling how England became Protestant, and his use of the term is invariably pejorative.
Enlightenment
During the Age of Enlightenment
of the 17th and 18th centuries, many critical thinkers saw religion as
antithetical to reason. For them the Middle Ages, or "Age of Faith", was
therefore the opposite of the Age of Reason. Kant and Voltaire were vocal in attacking the Middle Ages as a period of social regress dominated by religion, while Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire expressed contempt for the "rubbish of the Dark Ages".
Yet just as Petrarch, seeing himself at the cusp of a "new age", was
criticising the centuries before his own time, so too were Enlightenment
writers.
Consequently, an evolution had occurred in at least three ways.
Petrarch's original metaphor of light versus dark has expanded over
time, implicitly at least. Even if later humanists no longer saw
themselves living in a dark age, their times were still not light enough for 18th-century writers who saw themselves as living in the real Age of Enlightenment, while the period to be condemned stretched to include what we now call Early Modern
times. Additionally, Petrarch's metaphor of darkness, which he used
mainly to deplore what he saw as a lack of secular achievement, was
sharpened to take on a more explicitly anti-religious and anti-clerical meaning.
Nevertheless, the term 'Middle Ages', used by Biondo and other
early humanists after Petrarch, was in general use before the 18th
century to denote the period before the Renaissance. The earliest
recorded use of the English word "medieval" was in 1827. The concept of
the Dark Ages was also in use, but by the 18th century it tended to be
confined to the earlier part of this period. The earliest entry for a
capitalized "Dark Ages" in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference in Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England in 1857.
Starting and ending dates varied: the Dark Ages were considered by some
to start in 410, by others in 476 when there was no longer an emperor
in Rome, and to end about 800, at the time of the Carolingian
Renaissance under Charlemagne, or alternatively to extend through to the end of the 1st millennium.
Romanticism
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Romantics reversed the negative assessment of Enlightenment critics with a vogue for medievalism. The word "Gothic" had been a term of opprobrium akin to "Vandal" until a few self-confident mid-18th-century English "Goths" like Horace Walpole initiated the Gothic Revival
in the arts. This stimulated interest in the Middle Ages, which for the
following generation began to take on the idyllic image of an "Age of
Faith". This, reacting to a world dominated by Enlightenment rationalism, expressed a romantic view of a Golden Age of chivalry. The Middle Ages were seen with nostalgia as a period of social and environmental harmony and spiritual inspiration, in contrast to the excesses of the French Revolution and, most of all, to the environmental and social upheavals and utilitarianism of the developing Industrial Revolution. The Romantics' view is still represented in modern-day fairs and festivals celebrating the period with 'merrie' costumes and events.
Just as Petrarch had twisted the meaning of light versus
darkness, so the Romantics had twisted the judgment of the
Enlightenment. However, the period they idealized was largely the High Middle Ages, extending into Early Modern
times. In one respect, this negated the religious aspect of Petrarch's
judgment, since these later centuries were those when the power and
prestige of the Church were at their height. To many, the scope of the
Dark Ages was becoming divorced from this period, denoting mainly the
centuries immediately following the fall of Rome.
Modern academic use
The term was widely used by 19th-century historians. In 1860, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt delineated the contrast between the medieval 'dark ages' and the more enlightened Renaissance, which had revived the cultural and intellectual achievements of antiquity.
However, the early 20th century saw a radical re-evaluation of the
Middle Ages, which called into question the terminology of darkness, or at least its more pejorative use. The historian Denys Hay spoke ironically of "the lively centuries which we call dark". More forcefully, a book about the history of German literature published in 2007 describes "the dark ages" as "a popular if ignorant manner of speaking".
Most modern historians do not use the term "dark ages", preferring terms such as Early Middle Ages.
But when used by some historians today, the term "Dark Ages" is meant
to describe the economic, political, and cultural problems of the era.
For others, the term Dark Ages is intended to be neutral, expressing
the idea that the events of the period seem 'dark' to us because of the
paucity of the historical record. The term is used in this sense (often in the singular) to reference the Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent Greek Dark Ages, the dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450-1863), and also a hypothetical Digital Dark Age which would ensue if the electronic documents produced in the current period were to become unreadable at some point in the future. Some Byzantinists have used the term "Byzantine Dark Ages" to refer to the period from the earliest Muslim conquests to about 800, because there are no extant historical texts in Greek from this period, and thus the history of the Byzantine Empire
and its territories that were conquered by the Muslims is poorly
understood and must be reconstructed from other contemporaneous sources,
such as religious texts.
The term "dark age" is not restricted to the discipline of history.
Since the archaeological evidence for some periods is abundant and for
others scanty, there are also archaeological dark ages.
Since the Late Middle Ages significantly overlap with the Renaissance, the term 'Dark Ages' has become restricted to distinct times and places in medieval Europe. Thus the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain, at the height of the Saxon invasions, have been called "the darkest of the Dark Ages", in view of the societal collapse
of the period and the consequent lack of historical records. Further
south and east, the same was true in the formerly Roman province of Dacia, where history after the Roman withdrawal went unrecorded for centuries as Slavs, Avars, Bulgars, and others struggled for supremacy in the Danube basin, and events there are still disputed. However, at this time the Arab Empire is often considered to have experienced its Golden Age rather than Dark Age; consequently, usage of the term must also specify a geography. While Petrarch's
concept of a Dark Age corresponded to a mostly Christian period
following pre-Christian Rome, today the term mainly applies to the
cultures and periods in Europe that were least Christianized, and thus
most sparsely covered by chronicles and other contemporary sources, at the time mostly written by Catholic clergy.
However, from the later 20th century onwards, other historians
became critical even of this nonjudgmental use of the term, for two main
reasons.
Firstly, it is questionable whether it is ever possible to use the term
in a neutral way: scholars may intend this, but ordinary readers may
not understand it so. Secondly, 20th-century scholarship had increased
understanding of the history and culture of the period, to such an extent that it is no longer really 'dark' to us. To avoid the value judgment implied by the expression, many historians now avoid it altogether.
Modern popular use
Medieval artistic illustration of the spherical Earth in a 14th-century copy of L'Image du monde (c. 1246)
Science historian David C. Lindberg criticised the public use of 'dark ages' to describe the entire Middle Ages as "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition" for which "blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church, which is alleged to have placed religious authority over personal experience and rational activity". Historian of science Edward Grant writes that "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason,
they were made possible because of the long medieval tradition that
established the use of reason as one of the most important of human
activities".
Furthermore, Lindberg says that, contrary to common belief, "the late
medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and
would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural
sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led". Because of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire due to the Migration Period a lot of classical Greek texts were lost there, but part of these texts survived and they were studied widely in the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate. Around the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the High Middle Ages stronger monarchies emerged; borders were restored after the invasions of Vikings and Magyars;
technological developments and agricultural innovations were made which
increased the food supply and population. And the rejuvenation of
science and scholarship in the West was due in large part to the new
availability of Latin translations of Aristotle.
Another view of the period is reflected by more specific notions such as the 19th-century claim that everyone in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. In fact, lecturers in medieval universities commonly advanced the idea that the Earth was a sphere. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers
write: "There was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who
did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate
circumference". Other misconceptions such as: "the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages", "the rise of Christianity
killed off ancient science", and "the medieval Christian church
suppressed the growth of natural philosophy", are cited by Numbers as
examples of myths that still pass as historical truth, although unsupported by current research.
