Some notes on the dark ages (and the problem thereof)
This one weird trick for annoying historians.
If you ever, for some reason, really wanted a historian to scream in your face, you could do worse than this: use the phrase “dark ages”. Honestly, it works every time.
It’s not just that the term implies a value judgement: it’s that it literally is one. The idea first appeared in the work of the Tuscan scholar Franceso Petrarca – Petrach – in the 1330s, as a way of contrasting the lack of great art and literature of his own time with the glories of the classical era that preceded it. All this was a deliberately contrarian attempt to critique the assumption of a highly religious age that it was actually the pre-Christian era which had been the dark one. “Can I just shock you?” he was saying. “I think the literature of people who didn’t even believe in your god was better than the nonsense produced by the people who do.”
In doing this, he may actually have been influenced by the literature he was praising – the Greeks and their Roman heirs had conceived of the world not developing but being in decline – but not everyone who followed felt the same. When the Renaissance really got going a century or so later, historians – by then feeling as ostentatiously smug about their own age as Petrarch had been ostentatiously down on his own – began using a three age system, in which classical glory and the light of their own age had been separated by a dark, “middle age”.
So, that was the original dark age – the bit between Rome and Renaissance, named as such at least partly to annoy the Catholic Church, which is all well and good but is hardly an objective comment. Gradually, though, the meaning of the term began to shift. Having once applied to nearly a thousand years of European history, it came to be restricted to roughly the first half of that: the centuries immediately after the fall of Rome, when the order of the day was mass migration and political instability (which were seen as bad), rather than castles, chivalry and crusades (which were, for some reason, seen as good).
All in all, you can probably see why historians don’t like the term. It’s subjective. It’s Eurocentric (there was no cultural decline in these centuries in, say, the Islamic world: quite the reverse). And it inevitably suggests a value judgement: anything termed “the dark ages” will always sound as if it was backwards and ignorant, which is unsurprisingly because that was literally what Petrarch was trying to suggest. And so, historians prefer other terms: late antiquity, early medieval, post-classical and so on.
There is however another interpretation of “dark ages” which is at least a bit more justifiable: the idea of a period which is dark to us because it left few records, making it hard for us to understand what happened. As it happens, historians hate this version of the phrase too – even if you intend “dark” to mean “we can’t see”, people may still hear it as “backwards” – and if you do insist on using it you really have to state where as well as when, because one region’s dark ages are another’s golden age. But this alternative understanding of the phrase “dark ages” isn’t quite so likely to get your yelled at by a passing medievalist, so here are a few examples.
The First Intermediate Period
The history of Egypt goes on for so much longer – thousands of years longer – than the history of almost anywhere else, that it includes old, middle and new kingdoms, followed eventually by the “late period”. That only ends when Alexander the Great, who you might reasonably assume to be a figure from ancient history, shows up in the 4th century BCE. Honestly, it goes on for ages.
Anyway: the thing that separates those various kingdoms are “intermediate periods”, periods when a) the social and political order seems to collapse, b) the unified kingdom seems to split into multiple bits ruled by different dynasties of pharaohs, and c) we can’t be sure of much of this because the records are so unclear. (The records are always unclear in ancient Egypt compared to more recent history, of course, but these things are relative.)
Anyway. The first intermediate period lasts about 125 years in the 22nd and 21st centuries BCE, and runs through a whopping five dynasties. The second takes place at roughly the same time as...
The Greek Dark Age
...which begins around 1100BCE with the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation that had been around for much of the 2nd millennium BCE, and lasts until around 750BCE. The New Kingdom in Egypt, the Middle Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia and the Hittite Empire in Anatolia all seem to wobble at more or less the same time, in an event known to history as the “bronze age collapse”.
What the hell happened? Competing explanations include climate change, earthquakes, economic and military change brought about by the arrival of ironworking, and the chaos wrought by mysterious arrivals known only as the “sea peoples”, who can’t possibly be as interesting as they sound. Fundamentally, though, no one really knows.
The original and best
This is the dark age we hear most about, because the world is so eurocentric: the centuries of western European history that come between the Roman era (which we know a lot about) and the medieval one (which we also know a lot about), but which we don’t know a lot about because all the political structures imploded, a lot of people started moving about in an occasionally aggressive fashion, and so everyone suddenly had rather more important things to do than to write stuff down. That, in turn, means that some people persist in the weird belief that those centuries never happened at all: a theory known as the “phantom time hypothesis”, which I wrote about in my book Conspiracy (co-written with the excellent Tom Phillips, who filled in for me a few weeks ago). You can read that extract here.
I’ve always found that period of British history – a 200 year gap in the records; the idea that history just stops – oddly fascinating. But, as the examples above show, it wasn’t that unusual: it’s just the only such lengthy gap in the continuing narrative of western history.1
The byzantine dark age
The eastern empire didn’t collapse in 476 – continued for nearly another millennium, indeed, before falling to the Ottomans in 1453. That doesn’t mean it didn’t have a dark age, though. In the early 7th century, what we’d later call the Byzantine Empire was still recognisably a continuation of Rome, a largely Latin-speaking Mediterranean Power whose main rival was the Sassanid Persian Empire to its east. By the late 8th, it was a much smaller Greek-speaking Anatolian/Balkan power, the size of a decent sized modern nation rather than a continental empire, and was relatively peripheral next to the caliphate to its east.
The thing that sparked this transformation was the Arab conquest, which reshaped the Mediterranean and far beyond. It’s sometimes referred to as a dark age, because in the chaos the Romans/Byzantines left relatively few records, compared to the period either before or after, and what histories we have of this period were written long after the event. It’s hardly sub-Roman Britain, but still.
The digital dark age
This one’s fun because it hasn’t happened yet. Vast chunks of the even vaster quantity of data the world has produced the last half century are stored either in forms that degrade (floppy discs, CD roms, etc.) or in file formats that may become obsolete and cease to be readable. That could mean we, perversely, end up with bigger gaps in our record of the early 21st century than we did the early 20th, simply because so much of our media is digital only and we can’t guarantee it’ll remain accessible in the way we can with, say, a photograph. (This is why a lot of corporations still rely, unexpectedly, on magnetic tape. Fascinating report on all this from the ambitiously named The World here.)
I’m not convinced this is quite the same thing, if I’m honest: the inability of future historians to look at those Facebook pictures of you smashed during freshers’ week is hardly the same as a complete gap in the record that followed the fall of the western empire. A bigger worry is how much a computerised society stands to lose in the event of a full on collapse in industrial civilisation. At that point, though, I suspect we’ll all have other things on our minds
The Gratuitous Dog Picture & Sales Pitch Bit
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The main reason for this aforementioned breakdown of central authority, and the administrative functions that implies. But there is another, more subtle one: Max Adams’ The Lost Kingdom points out that late the provincial government of the Roman era was to some extent superseded by government by a selection of military forts and civitates (tribal areas, anchored by towns). It isn’t just that we don’t know what was happening in Britannia: it’s that it had ceased to exist as a unit. It’d be like trying to write a history of, say, your year at school. Without a central character, the notion of history becomes meaningless.
The complete absence of written records probably matters more, mind.