“We’re back to the Dark Ages” or “What is this? The Dark Ages?” These expressions have
become a part of the common talking points for many languages around the world. Indeed,
the idea that a good chunk of Europe’s middle ages was spent in social, technological, and political
stagnation, an era of darkness if you will, is a well-enduring idea in our collective imaginations.
However, is this rooted in the reality of how historians have come to understand the
medieval era? What are these famous Dark Ages? And did they even exist? Today,
we will explore historiography in an attempt to shed some light on this commonly heard, but
rarely understood period of history. Welcome to our video where we explore the question: what were
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The Medieval era is as fascinating as it is complex: a time when burgeoning trade
coexisted with bloody conflicts, and deadly plague coexisted with brilliant
literary works. An age characterized by moments of technological stagnation,
yet constellated with remarkable innovations in many fields. With this complexity, comes the
challenging task of dividing and categorizing the Middle Ages into different phases.
While there is no definitive date to signify the beginning of this historical chapter, the most
popular one is the year 476 A.D, which coincides with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
The moments picked to signify the Middle Ages’ end also vary: from the Fall of Constantinople in 1453
to the more classic discovery of the Americas in 1492. Whatever the preferred date might be,
it is clear that this massive, millennium-long period as a whole needs to be fractured into
different phases. Historians from Romance-speaking countries typically divide the Middle Ages
into two periods: the "High" and the "Low." English-speaking historians, on the other hand,
commonly split the Middle Ages into three time periods: “Early”, “High”, and “Late”,
or, in some cases, four, with the “Low Middle Ages” added between “High” and “Late”. All of
this leads us back to our original question: where do the “Dark Ages” fit into all this?
In the 1330s, the Tuscan scholar Petrarch was the first to introduce the theory of a “Dark Age”.
Writing some nine centuries after the fall of western Rome, he stated: “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, had long employed classical
metaphors such as “light versus darkness” to express “good versus evil” in spiritual matters.
Petrarch, however, was the first to give the metaphor secular significance. He saw classical
antiquity, the era of Caesar and Augustus, in the “light” of its cultural achievements, whereas
Petrarch's own time, allegedly without such artistic triumphs, was regarded as a “dark” age.
Petrarch considered classical antiquity to be an expression of splendor,
especially since he was a native of the Italian peninsula, once the beating heart of what had
been the greatest ancient civilization in Europe. As an itinerant scholar, Petrarch
traveled extensively across Europe, uncovering and republishing classical Latin and Greek writings.
These volumes influenced him into believing that ancient times were “enlightened” when compared to
the relative scarcity of surviving literary works from more recent centuries. In 1343,
Petrarch would solidify his concept of a “Dark Age” in the conclusion of his epic, Africa:
“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.” The trend set by Petrarch would continue
throughout the centuries by way of other authors’ works. In the 15th century, Italian historians
Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo established a three-tier model of history. They defined
history using Petrarch's two ages: the enlightened antique era and the dark, ignorant middle ages,
while also adding on a new age, a current, “better age”, which they thought their world had entered.
The word “Middle Ages,” derived from the Latin media tempestas, storm of the middle,
was used to denote that period of apparent decline between the enlightenment of the
ancient Romans and the rediscovery of their glory in the 1400s: the so-called ‘renaissance’.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, as Europe was thrown into bloody religious wars,
the birth of Protestantism and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation gave rise to new
interpretations of the “Dark Ages”. Although Protestant thinkers generally held views
comparable to humanists such as Petrarch, they added an anti-Catholic stance. They saw classical
antiquity as a golden age, not just for its Latin literature, but also since Christianity began in
that era, the ancients witnessed the faith of Jesus in its purest, most sincere form.
The Protestants pushed the notion that the Middle Ages were a period of darkness due to corruption
inside the Catholic Church, such as pope's ruling as kings, worship of saints' relics,
a debauched priesthood, and institutionalized moral hypocrisy. In reaction to the Protestants,
the Catholics created a counter-image that portrayed the High Middle Ages in
particular as a period of social and religious stability in contrast to the religious schisms
and ensuing wars that plagued the 16th and 17th centuries, rather than a period of “darkness”.
At the center of this movement was Italian cardinal and historian Cesare Baronio (Baronius).
His widely acclaimed Annales Ecclesiastici was published in twelve volumes between 1588
and 1607 and covered the first twelve centuries of Christian history up to the year 1198. The epithet
“dark age” was coined by Baronius in his Annales to describe the period between the collapse of the
Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first stirrings of Gregorian Reform under Pope Clement II in 1046:
“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 [could be called] dark (obscurum)”. Significantly, it was mainly because of the
scarcity of written records that Baronius referred to the period as “dark.” There was a “dark age”,
in the sense of a “shortage of writings”, between the Carolingian Renaissance in the
9th century and the beginnings of what has been dubbed the Renaissance of the 12th century.
Furthermore, there was a “shortage of writings” period in the 7th and 8th centuries too.
As a result, two “dark ages” can actually be traced in Western Europe, separated by the
luminous but short Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century. Baronius' “dark age” appears to have
inspired historians, as the term began to spread to various European languages in the 17th century,
with his original Latin name saeculum obscurum reserved for the period he had applied it to.
However, although some, like Baronius,
used the term neutrally to refer to a lack of written records, many others used it negatively.
The first British historian to adapt Baronius’ term probably was Scottish bishop Gilbert Burnet,
in the late 17th century. In his works, his usage of the term was universally negative and
tinged in the worldview of a Protestant thinker with anti-Catholic views. In 1679 he writes:
“The design of the [Protestant] 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,”
Thus once more invoking the Protestant view of the dark ages as an era of debauched church corruption
in the middle ages. He again uses the term a few years later, dismissing the legend of St. George
fighting the dragon as “a legend formed in the darker ages to support the humor of chivalry”.
So far we have covered the story of how the idea of a “Dark Age” progressed throughout
time up until the 17th century, but it would be in the centuries after this that the term took
on its most pessimistic meaning. In the 18th century, the advent of “Enlightenment” brought
with it a general air of hostility toward religion and “irrationality” in academic and
philosophical circles all over Western Europe. Many thinkers of the period saw religion as
antithetical to reason. For them, the Middle Ages, or “Age of Faith” as they called it,
was the polar opposite of the Age of Reason they currently lived in, and something to be deplored,
as it embodied the despotic, priest-infested world they were working to change. Spinoza,
Kant, Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau, and Diderot among others, were extremely blunt in their
critique of the Middle Ages as a period of social regress driven by religion and superstition.
In trying to explain why the Middle Ages were the way they were, German philosopher Immanuel
Kant came up with the idea that humankind had lost its mind during the Middle Ages. He claimed that a
time of collective insanity had halted the onward march of development and reason, which had only
been restarted with himself and the Enlightenment. This meant that even the period between the Middle
Ages and the Enlightenment was now considered part of the “Dark Ages”. Voltaire, meanwhile,
went so far as to encourage contemporaries to study medieval history just to find more things
to mock and better ridicule the period. Even an English member of Parliament and historian,
Edward Gibbon, expressed contempt for what he called the “rubbish of the Dark Ages”.
As we have seen, Enlightenment thinkers were condemning centuries before their own,
feeling themselves on the verge of a “new age”, just like Petrarch had done four centuries before.
Knowing all this, we can see that, by the 18th century, the concept of a “dark age” had changed
significantly over time. Petrarch's original metaphor of light versus darkness has evolved.
Even the later humanists of the 15th and 16th centuries, who did not see themselves as living
in a dark age, were not enlightened enough for 18th-century writers who considered themselves
as living in the true Age of Enlightenment, while the period to be condemned extended
up to what we now call Early Modern times. Furthermore, Petrarch's metaphor of darkness,
which he primarily used to lament what he viewed as a lack of secular progress,
was sharpened to take on an explicitly anti-religious and anti-clerical significance.
In the early 19th century, things would shift. The opinion on the Middle ages would flip on its
head and take a surprisingly positive turn. In contrast with the Enlightenment thinkers, a new
growing movement, the Romantics, held a particular attraction to the remote and the mysterious,
and a strong resentment toward the emerging Industrial revolution. They liked to portray the
Middle Ages as a time of great social harmony when everyone accepted his or her place in society.
They described the Middle Ages as an aesthetically attractive age. The water was clear, and the green
fields that were now being supplanted by grey factories dominated the landscape. They also
saw it as a time when emotion was allowed to run wild, not dominated by cold reason.
Again, in contrast with the Englightenment. The literary works glorifying the Middle Ages
produced in this time are many, but outside of that, one particular example is the revival of
Medieval-style Gothic Architecture. The word "Gothic" had so far been a derogatory one,
similar to "Vandal". But in the early 19th century, Romantic enthusiasts of the Middle Ages
gave the term a new meaning through the so-called “Gothic Revival”. The Gothic Revival drew on
medieval elements such as lancet windows, finials, and ornamental patterns, and numerous Gothic
cathedrals and basilicas started being built all over Europe and beyond. By the mid-nineteenth
century, Gothic had risen in popularity as the dominant architectural style in the Western world.
In the second half of the 19th century, especially during what is known as the Victorian Era,
the Romantic movement had died. With its fall out of fashion, the Middle Ages started to
be seen as a period of overall backwardness again. But, surprisingly, the era of Knights
and castles held an aura of mystery and charm to the literate masses of the Victorian age.
Most Victorians likely considered the Middle Ages as a time of contrasts: of beauty, romance,
and chivalry as well as oppression, ignorance, and fanaticism. People of the time largely derived
their opinions about the wonders of the Medieval period from art, literature, and architecture,
as well as from Enlightenment literature, which carried preconceptions against Medieval ignorance.
Unfortunately, the notions spread by the many pieces of literature about the Middle Ages,
like Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”, were more often than not born out of myth.
The end result was a knowledge of the period very low in historical accuracy, which birthed
many misconceptions still alive today, but as we’ve seen, it was still accompanied by general
interest and fascination with the period. This routes us back to our main point:
that the meaning of the term “Dark Ages” has changed over time. While Petrarch’s initial
idea was that of an era lacking in cultural achievements and literary works, the protestants
of the 16th and 17th centuries warped it into a critique of the church’s corruption; and their
catholic counterparts, led by Baronius, shifted the attention to a scarcity of written production.
Then, in the 18th century, the Enlightenment thinkers started a harsh condemnation of the
past’s supposed superstitiousness and lack of critical thinking, only for the Romantics a few
decades later to start idealizing the period as a hub of social harmony and lush natural landscapes,
and for the Victorians to see it as an often bleak yet fascinating phase of history.
Within all these different and evolving viewpoints, the timespan identifiable with these
“Dark Ages” also changed depending on the period and who you asked. Petrarch thought they extended
from the Fall of Rome to his own times. The counter-reformist historian Baronius completely
changed things, claiming that the “Dark Ages” only started with the fracturing of the Carolingian
State in 888 and ended in 1046 with the first Gregorian reforms. Finally, Enlightenment
authors like Kant affirmed the period in question lasted throughout the whole Middle Ages all the
way up to the 18th century. As we can see, it’s a very complicated subject. Luckily,
modern historians have shed some light on the confusing mess that is the notorious “Dark Ages”.
The 20th century saw a major re-evaluation of the Middle Ages, which called into doubt the
word "dark" used to define the time up to that point, or at least its more derogatory meaning.
Denys Hay, a historian, exemplified the new academic stance on Medieval times when he
talked sarcastically in 1977 of "the lively centuries which we call dark".
Most modern historians don’t use the term “Dark Ages” anymore, and while some still use it, they
do so only referring to specific circumstances and moments in history, inside and even outside of
the Middle Ages. Others believe the term must be instead used neutrally, claiming that periods like
the Medieval one only appear dark to us because of the scarcity of surviving written sources,
which tends to cover the time’s reality in mystery. However, beginning in the late twentieth
century, other historians began to question even this nonjudgmental usage of the term.
The reason behind this stance is their belief in the fact that the Medieval period is not “dark” to
us any more thanks to the better understanding we now have of its culture and history.
While the scholarly debate is still open, the whole period is now finally being looked at
through a more objective lens, after centuries of misconceptions, misinterpretations, and even
ridicule. With modern studies, the Medieval age, for so long classified as one of backwardness,
was proven to have been one of vibrant colors, flowering trade, intellectual liveliness,
and innovations that range from the economic field to the legal and manufacturing ones…
But that is a story for another time. Thanks again to our sponsor, Established
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We will explore more of the Middle Ages’ fascinating history in the future,
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