TheDark Ages is a term for theEarly Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th centuries), or occasionally the entireMiddle Ages (c. 5th–15th centuries), inWestern Europe after thefall of the Western Roman Empire, which characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.
The concept of a "Dark Age" as a historiographicalperiodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholarPetrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" ofclassical antiquity.[1][2] The term employs traditionallight-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's supposeddarkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods oflight (knowledge and understanding).[1] The phraseDark Age(s) itself derives from the Latinsaeculum obscurum, originally applied byCaesar Baronius in 1602 when he referred to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries.[3][4] The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness in Europe between thefall of Rome and theRenaissance, and became especially popular during the 18th-centuryAge of Enlightenment.[1] Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of written records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages.
As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 19th and the 20th centuries, scholars began restricting theDark Ages appellation to the Early Middle Ages;[1][5][6] today's scholars maintain this posture.[7] The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether because of its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate.[8][9][10][11][12] Despite this, Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use,[13][14][15] particularlyin popular culture, which oftenoversimplifies the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness.[16][17]
The idea of a Dark Age originated with theTuscan scholarPetrarch in the 1330s.[15][18] Writing of the past, he said: "Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they weresurrounded by darkness and dense gloom".[19] Christian writers, including Petrarch himself,[18] had long used traditionalmetaphors of 'light versus darkness' to describe 'good versus evil'. Petrarch was the first to give the metaphorsecular meaning by reversing its application. He now sawclassical 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.[18]
From his perspective on the Italian peninsula, Petrarch saw theRoman period and classical antiquity as an expression of greatness.[18] He spent much of his time traveling through Europe, rediscovering and republishing classicLatin andGreek 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 ofSaint Augustine'sSix Ages of the World, but incultural (or secular) terms through progressive development ofclassical ideals,literature, andart.
Petrarch wrote that history had two periods: the classic period ofGreeks andRomans, followed by a time of darkness in which he saw himself living. In around 1343, in the conclusion of his epicAfrica, 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."[20] In the 15th century, historiansLeonardo Bruni andFlavio 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' – Latinmedia tempestas (1469) ormedium aevum (1604), was used to describe the period of supposed decline.[21]
During theReformations of the 16th and 17th centuries,Protestants generally had a similar view to Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch, but also added ananti-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 theCatholic Church, such as popes ruling as kings, veneration ofsaints' relics, a licentious priesthood and institutionalized moral hypocrisy.[22]
In response to theProtestants,Catholics developed a counter-image to depict theHigh Middle Ages in particular as a period of social and religious harmony and not 'dark' at all.[23] The most important Catholic reply to theMagdeburg Centuries was theAnnales Ecclesiastici by CardinalCaesar Baronius. Baronius was a trained historian who produced a work that theEncyclopædia Britannica in 1911 described as "far surpassing anything before"[24] and thatActon regarded as "the greatest history of the Church ever written".[25] TheAnnales 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 theCarolingian Empire in 888[26] and the first stirrings ofGregorian Reform underPope Clement II in 1046:
| Century | Volumes | # of volumes |
|---|---|---|
| 7th | 80–88 | 8 |
| 8th | 89–96 | 7 |
| 9th | 97–130 | 33 |
| 10th | 131–138 | 7 |
| 11th | 139–151 | 12 |
| 12th | 152–191 | 39 |
| 13th | 192–217 | 25 |
"The new age (saeculum) that 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)".[28]
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 inMigne'sPatrologia 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.
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 that the 13th, with just 26, fails to do. There was indeed a 'dark age', in Baronius's sense of a "lack of writers", between theCarolingian Renaissance in the 9th century and the beginnings, sometime in the 11th, of what has been called theRenaissance of the 12th century. Furthermore, there was an earlier period of "lack of writers" during the 7th and 8th centuries. Therefore, in Western Europe, two 'dark ages' can be identified, separated by the brilliant but brief Carolingian Renaissance.
Baronius' 'dark age' seems to have struck historians, for it was in the 17th century that the term started to spread to various European languages, with his original Latin termsaeculum obscurum being reserved for the period to which he had applied it. Some, following Baronius, used 'dark age' neutrally to refer to a dearth of written records, but others used it pejoratively and lapsed into that lack of objectivity that has discredited the term for many modern historians.
The first British historian to use the term was most likelyGilbert 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 ofThe 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."[30] 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".[31] Burnet was a bishop chronicling how England became Protestant, and his use of the term is invariably pejorative.
During theAge 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 theAge of Reason.[32]Baruch Spinoza,Bernard Fontenelle,Immanuel Kant,David Hume,Thomas Jefferson,Thomas Paine,Denis Diderot,Voltaire,Marquis De Sade andJean-Jacques Rousseau were vocal in attacking the Middle Ages as a period of social regress dominated by religion, whileGibbon inThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire expressed contempt for the "rubbish of the Dark Ages".[33] 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 adark age, their times were still notlight enough for 18th-century writers who saw themselves as living in thereal Age of Enlightenment, while the period to be condemned stretched to include what we now callEarly 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 explicitlyanti-religious andanti-clerical meaning.
In the late 18th and the early 19th centuries, theRomantics reversed the negative assessment of Enlightenment critics with a vogue formedievalism.[34] The word "Gothic" had been a term of opprobrium akin to "Vandal" until a few self-confident mid-18th-century English "Goths" likeHorace Walpole initiated theGothic 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 Enlightenmentrationalism, expressed a romantic view of aGolden Age ofchivalry. The Middle Ages were seen withnostalgia as a period of social and environmental harmony and spiritual inspiration, in contrast to the excesses of theFrench Revolution and, most of all, to the environmental and social upheavals andutilitarianism of the developingIndustrial Revolution.[35] The Romantics' view is still represented in modern-dayfairs and festivals celebrating the period with 'merrie' costumes and events.
Just as Petrarch had twisted the meaning of light and darkness, the Romantics had twisted the judgment of the Enlightenment.[citation needed] However, the period that they idealized was largely theHigh Middle Ages, extending intoEarly Modern times. In one respect, that 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.
The term was widely used by 19th-century historians. In 1860, inThe Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,Jacob Burckhardt delineated the contrast between the medieval 'dark ages' and the more enlightenedRenaissance, which had revived the cultural and intellectual achievements of antiquity.[36] The earliest entry for a capitalized "Dark Ages" in theOxford English Dictionary (OED) is a reference inHenry Thomas Buckle'sHistory of Civilization in England in 1857, who wrote: "During these, which are rightly called the Dark Ages, the clergy were supreme." The OED in 1894 defined an uncapitalised "dark ages" as "a term sometimes applied to the period of the Middle Ages to mark the intellectual darkness characteristic of the time".[37] Since theLate Middle Ages significantly overlap with the Renaissance, the term 'Dark Ages' became restricted to distinct times and places inmedieval Europe. Thus the 5th and 6th centuries inBritain, at the height of theSaxon invasions, have been called "the darkest of the Dark Ages".[38]
The term "Dark Ages" was increasingly questioned from the mid-twentieth century as archaeological, historical and literary studies led to greater understanding of the period,[39] In 1977, the historianDenys Hay spoke ironically of "the lively centuries which we call dark".[40] More forcefully, a book about thehistory of German literature published in 2007 describes "the dark ages" as "a popular if uninformed manner of speaking".[41]
Most modern historians do not use the term "dark ages" and prefer terms such asEarly Middle Ages. However, when used by some historians today, the term "Dark Ages" is meant to describe the economic, political and cultural problems of the era.[42][43] 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 thehistorical record.[10] For example, Robert Sallares, commenting on the lack of sources to establish whether theplague pandemic of 541 to 750 reached Northern Europe, opines that "the epithetDark Ages is surely still an appropriate description of this period".[44]
However, from the later 20th century onward, other historians became critical even of this nonjudgmental use of the term for two main reasons.[10] Firstly, it is questionable whether it is ever possible to use the term in a neutral way: scholars may intend it, but ordinary readers may not understand it so. Secondly, 20th-century scholarship had increased understanding of the history and culture of the period,[45] to such an extent that it is no longer really 'dark' to modern viewers.[10] To avoid the value judgment implied by the expression, many historians now avoid it altogether.[46][47] It was occasionally used up to the 1990s by historians of early medieval Britain, for example in the title of the 1991 book byAnn Williams,Alfred Smyth andD. P. Kirby,A Biographical Dictionary of Dark Age Britain, England, Scotland and Wales, c.500–c.1050,[48] and in the comment byRichard Abels in 1998 that the greatness ofAlfred the Great "was the greatness of a Dark Age king".[49] In 2020,John Blair, Stephen Rippon and Christopher Smart observed that: "The days when archaeologists and historians referred to the fifth to the tenth centuries as the 'Dark Ages' are long gone, and the material culture produced during that period demonstrates a high degree of sophistication."[50]
A 2021 lecture byHoward Williams ofChester University explored how "stereotypes and popular perceptions of the Early Middle Ages – popularly still considered the European 'Dark Ages' – plague popular culture";[51] and finding 'Dark Ages' is "rife outside of academic literature, including in newspaper articles and media debates."[52] As to why it is used, according to Williams, legends and racial misunderstandings have been revitalized by modern nationalists, colonialists and imperialists around present-day concepts of identity, faith andorigin myths i.e. appropriating historical myths for modern political ends.[52]
In a book about medievalisms inpopular culture by Andrew B. R. Elliott (2017), he found "by far" the most common use of 'Dark Ages' is to "signify a general sense of backwardness or lack of technological sophistication", in particular noting how it has become entrenched in daily and political discourse.[53] Reasons for use, according to Elliott, are often "banal medievalisms", which are "characterized mainly by being unconscious, unwitting and by having little or no intention to refer to the Middle Ages"; for example, referring to an insurance industry still reliant on paper instead of computers as being in the 'Dark Ages'.[54] These banal uses are little more thantropes that inherently contain a criticism about lack of progress.[53] Elliott connects 'Dark Ages' to the "Myth of Progress", also observed byJoseph Tainter, who says, "There is genuine bias against so-called 'Dark Ages'" because of a modern belief that society normally traverses from lesser to greater complexity, and when complexity is reduced during a collapse, this is perceived as out of the ordinary and thus undesirable; he counters that complexity is rare in human history, a costly mode of organization that must be constantly maintained, and periods of less complexity are common and to be expected as part of the overall progression towards greater complexity.[16]
InPeter S. Wells's 2008 book,Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered, he writes, "I have tried to show that far from being a period of cultural bleakness and unmitigated violence, the centuries (5th - 9th) known popularly as the Dark Ages were a time of dynamic development, cultural creativity, and long-distance networking".[55] He writes that our "popular understanding" of these centuries "depends largely on the picture of barbarian invaders that Edward Gibbon presented more than two hundred years ago," and that this view has been accepted "by many who have read and admire Gibbon's work."[56]
David C. Lindberg, ascience and religion historian, says the 'Dark Ages' are "according to wide-spread popular belief" portrayed as "a time ofignorance,barbarism andsuperstition", for which he asserts "blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church".[57] Medieval historian Matthew Gabriele echoes this view as a myth of popular culture.[58] Andrew B. R. Elliott notes the extent to which "Middle Ages/Dark Ages have come to be synonymous with religious persecution, witch hunts and scientific ignorance".[59]
Petrarch was the very first to speak of the Middle Ages as adark age, one that separated him from the riches and pleasures of classical antiquity and that broke the connection between his own age and the civilization of the Greeks and the Romans.
The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages — or the Middle Age — used to be the same; two names for the same period. But they have come to be distinguished, and the Dark Ages are now no more than the first part of the Middle Age, while the term mediaeval is often restricted to the later centuries, about 1100 to 1500, the age of chivalry, the time between the first Crusade and the Renaissance. This was not theold view, and it does not agree with theproper meaning of the name.
In terms of the sources of information available, this is most certainly not a Dark Age.... Over the last century, the sources of evidence have increased dramatically, and the remit of the historian (broadly defined as a student of the past) has expanded correspondingly.
In the course of recent decades, the very expression 'Dark Ages' has fallen into disrepute among historians.
These used to be called the Dark Ages. That label is best set aside. It is hopelessly redolent of Renaissance and Enlightenment prejudices. It altogether underestimates the impressive cultural vitality and enduring spiritual legacy of the entire period that has come to be known as "late antiquity". At the same time we do not have to euphemize the realities of imperial disintegration, economic collapse and societal disintegration.
According to widespread popular belief, the period of European history known as the Middle Ages was a time of barbarism, ignorance and superstitious. The epithet 'Dark Ages' often applied to it nicely captures this opinion. As for the ills that threatened literacy, learning, and especially science during the Middle Ages, blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church...
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