It was a long period of history that was reportedly dark, gloomy, and characterised by a lack of human progress.
But was this really true?
In today's episode, we'll look at who gave this period this name and why, and find out whether it was really "dark" at all.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Dark Ages.
[00:00:26] It’s a period of history that, according to some, was dark, gloomy, and characterised by a lack of human progress, a time between the fall of Rome and the start of the Renaissance when human progress ground to a halt.
[00:00:42] But, as we’ll see, this is quite far from the truth, and calling this period “The Dark Ages” is highly problematic.
[00:00:51] So, in this episode, we’ll look at why this period was given this name, by who, what this tells us, and find out whether it really was “dark” at all.
[00:01:05] OK then, How Dark Were The Dark Ages?
[00:01:10] When you hear the term “Dark Ages”, what do you think about?
[00:01:14] In English today it’s often used as a negative term to describe something.
[00:01:20] You can say that something is like going back to the Dark Ages, meaning that it’s a reversal of progress.
[00:01:27] Or you can say that someone is living in the “Dark Ages”, meaning that they are failing to keep up with the times, to accept modern technology.
[00:01:37] They are both negative terms, going back to, or living in the “Dark Ages” is hardly a compliment.
[00:01:45] So, when it comes to an entire period of history that is called “The Dark Ages”, what does this actually mean?
[00:01:53] Well, let’s start with a reminder of what period we’re actually talking about, who first called it this, and for what reasons.
[00:02:02] So, when did it start?
[00:02:05] The period called The Dark Ages is believed to have started in the late 5th century, after the fall of the Roman Empire, and continued for a period of about 900 years, right up to the 14th century.
[00:02:20] The idea of darkness being associated with a period of history first started to come to prominence with the Italian, Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch.
[00:02:33] In 1343 he wrote, and I’m quoting directly, "for you, if you should long outlive me…there is perhaps a better age in store; this slumber of forgetfulness will not last for ever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past".
[00:02:57] For Petrarch, he was still living in The Dark Ages.
[00:03:01] He looked back on the achievements of Classical Rome and Greece, compared it to the world he lived in, and the world that had existed since then.
[00:03:13] According to Petrarch, the achievements of civilisations that had come after the fall of the Roman empire paled in comparison, they were worse, less commendable societies.
[00:03:27] The ancient Greeks and Romans had produced great philosophers, poets, great empires, wonderful cities.
[00:03:34] They had left behind them great texts documenting their history and culture.
[00:03:39] And what had everyone left since then?
[00:03:43] Not much at all, in Petrarch's opinion at least, it was nothing in comparison.
[00:03:50] Five hundred years later a British Victorian historian, Henry Thomas Buckle, would build on this idea, and become the first person to use the term “The Dark Ages” to describe this period of history.
[00:04:05] In his 1857 book, called History of civilisation in England, he wrote “In the Dark Ages, men were credulous and ignorant”.
[00:04:18] Credulous here means believing things without questioning, and it’s in particular reference to religious beliefs, of believing something because you are told it is true, rather than examining it to verify for yourself.
[00:04:34] And this term that he coined, “The Dark Ages”, is one that is still in use today to describe this extended period of history, which starts at around the year 500 and goes through to, by some estimates the year 1400 or even 1500, a thousand years of European history.
[00:04:57] Even Carl Sagan, the famous American astronomer, referred to it as a “millennium gap … a poignant lost opportunity for the human species”.
[00:05:09] An entire thousand years wasted, of human beings merely treading water, making zero progress, a millennium of standing still.
[00:05:21] These are some bold claims, right?
[00:05:24] So, why were these people referring to this period of history in such a derogatory way, and is there any truth to it?
[00:05:34] To answer these questions, let’s first remind ourselves of exactly why this period of history was thought to be “dark”.
[00:05:41] There are two main reasons, and two related meanings of “dark”.
[00:05:47] Firstly, the “dark” refers to the lack of knowledge that we have about what actually happened in this period.
[00:05:55] The ages are “dark” because we don’t know what happened, or at least our understanding isn’t as deep and developed, as it is for earlier periods of history, such as Classical Rome or Greece.
[00:06:09] The Romans and Greeks left behind great works of poetry, philosophy, and theatre. We know quite a lot about life in ancient Rome and Greece precisely because of what was written down, what was left behind.
[00:06:24] The Dark Ages, so the argument goes, are dark because we simply know less about them as there is less literature left behind.
[00:06:35] Secondly, the “dark” refers to an intellectual and cultural dark period, a period where people deferred to religion and superstition for their truth rather than reason.
[00:06:49] It’s this “darkness” that the English Victorian historian Buckle referred to when he wrote about men being “ignorant”.
[00:06:57] And of course the two are closely linked - a society that places value on knowledge, one like that of ancient Rome or Greece, understands the value of recording and documenting history and literature.
[00:07:12] On the other hand, a society that doesn’t place a value on knowledge doesn’t record history or create literature to the same degree, therefore there isn’t so much to “lose” in the first place.
[00:07:24] So, let’s dig a little deeper and see how much truth there actually is to these claims, whether these thousand years were as dark as they were accused of being.
[00:07:36] As to our first definition of dark, of a lack of information about what happened in the period after the fall of the Roman empire, there is certainly some truth that we know less about this period, at least in most of western Europe, than any time since the Romans arrived in Britain, in the 1st Century AD.
[00:07:56] In Britain this is particularly true before the arrival of William the Conqueror, in 1066.
[00:08:03] This, incidentally, is when historians such as Buckle would have defined the Dark Ages as ending, and British “modern” history starting.
[00:08:14] Indeed, the numbering system of Kings of England started in 1066, with William I. It’s almost as if British history ignored the presence of any king that came before him.
[00:08:28] For example, the first King Edward, King Edward I of England, was crowned in 1272, but there were three Kings of England called Edward that came before him.
[00:08:40] They just ruled before 1066, in the so-called "Dark Ages”, and therefore don’t count.
[00:08:47] Getting back to our story, or our question, of whether it’s fair to say that we don’t know much about what happened during The Dark Ages, there are plenty of 20th and 21st-century historians who completely refute this idea, they say it's rubbish, it simply isn’t true.
[00:09:05] Instead, they say, there is a vast amount of information that we have from this period, western European societies weren’t just living in some kind of dark cloud where nobody wrote anything down or created anything of cultural value, and everyone spent their days not doing much more than working the fields and drinking.
[00:09:25] Compared to the ancient Romans and Greeks, yes there might have been less written history, less poetry, fewer great buildings, and less information left behind for historians to consult.
[00:09:39] There were, in fact, plenty of sizable literary achievements in this period, some of which we’ll discuss shortly, and most modern historians would argue that labelling this entire period as “dark” is a great simplification of reality.
[00:09:56] First of all, putting the entire 1,000-year period into the same category and saying it was all “dark” isn’t helpful at all.
[00:10:07] The period directly after the fall of the Roman empire was very different from the period in which Petrarch was living.
[00:10:15] When the Roman empire fell, much of the stability and order that had existed in Western Europe for centuries disappeared.
[00:10:22] The collapse of Rome created a power vacuum, and smaller tribes fought for regional power.
[00:10:30] And of course, when you are fighting for power, and fighting for your own survival, this leaves less time and mental bandwidth for cultural activities, writing poems, plays, creating art and building great buildings.
[00:10:45] To call this period directly after the fall of the Roman empire “dark” might be semi-justified, at least from the point of view of there not being as many great additions to cultural history.
[00:10:58] But fast-forward a few hundred years and it is hard to say the same thing about the world that Petrarch lived in, for example.
[00:11:08] Petrarch was born in 1304, just four years before Dante started writing his seminal work, The Divine Comedy, a poem that is to this very day the most important work of poetry in the Italian language. And later on that century, in northern Europe, Geoffrey Chaucer was writing one of the most important works in English literature, The Canterbury Tales.
[00:11:32] Hardly “dark” from a cultural point of view.
[00:11:36] What’s more, some of the first universities in Europe had been founded several centuries before Petrarch’s comments.
[00:11:43] The University of Bologna was founded in 1088, The Sorbonne in Paris was founded in 1150, and the University of Oxford was founded in 1167.
[00:11:56] It’s hard to argue that the founders of these world-famous universities were living in the “Dark Ages”.
[00:12:02] But by Petrarch’s definition, they were.
[00:12:05] So, what else was happening in “The Dark Ages”?
[00:12:09] Well, it’s a 1,000 or so year period, so we will have to be very selective here.
[00:12:15] Of course, there was plenty of uncivilised activity, fighting, and bloodshed, the sort of activities that are associated with classical definitions or stereotypes of “The Dark Ages”.
[00:12:28] The Vikings don’t exactly come top of many lists of the “world’s most cultured societies”, and the reality that European literacy rates were typically in the single digits meant that people simply weren’t able to write great works of literature.
[00:12:44] But, when you compare this to Petrarch’s example of a civilisation to admire, Ancient Rome, there are, of course, plenty of Ancient Roman examples of not-so-civilised behaviour.
[00:12:57] They might have built beautiful buildings that stand to this very day, but if the purpose of these buildings was to watch men fight each other to the death or be torn apart by lions, it wouldn’t meet many modern definitions of high civilisation.
[00:13:14] So, to go back to what actually happened in the so-called “Dark Ages”, there was a lot that was far more civilised than the so-called shining lights of Ancient Rome.
[00:13:25] There was the rise of the papacy, of the pope, and the great monastic orders.
[00:13:30] King Charles of the Franks became Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, uniting Western and Eastern Europe under one ruler.
[00:13:39] Trade networks continued to develop. Although transportation was long and arduous, there is evidence of European trade that goes against the narrative of people simply living in isolated villages, surviving off subsistence farming and trying to avoid being killed by neighbouring tribes.
[00:13:59] From a technological point of view, there were several significant agricultural inventions, mainly around improved ploughing. Sure, this might not sound so impressive nowadays, but figuring out how to generate food more efficiently is clearly a pretty useful technological development.
[00:14:20] It’s clear that there was not “nothing” going on, even in the Eurocentric worlds that Petrarch and Buckle were referring to.
[00:14:29] And, perhaps most importantly, outside Europe, this period was far from dark, it was very bright indeed.
[00:14:38] The Middle East experienced a blossoming of scientific, mathematical and economic development.
[00:14:44] Baghdad was founded in 762, and swiftly became a trade and cultural centre for the Arab world.
[00:14:52] Further East, there was no such “Dark” period in China, with some of the most impressive dynasties overseeing the country during these supposed “Dark Ages”.
[00:15:03] Clearly, outside Europe, in many other areas of the world civilisation was moving forward at a breakneck speed.
[00:15:12] But, as non-Europeans will be all too familiar with, Europeans are not always very good at looking outside Europe.
[00:15:22] In the time of Petrarch, in the 1300s, perhaps we can forgive them slightly, as knowledge of what lay outside Europe was more limited.
[00:15:32] But fast forward to the Victorian era, to Henry Thomas Buckle in 1857 and his coining of the term “The Dark Ages”, and it’s hard to be particularly forgiving.
[00:15:46] Indeed, most modern historians have pretty much cast the term aside, agreeing that describing this period of history, even if we limit it to European history, or even Western European history, describing it as “dark”, uncultured and lacking in development, simply isn’t true, and probably tells us more about the people describing it as “dark” than the people being described as living in The Dark Ages.
[00:16:15] Labelling a thousand-year period as “dark”, a period where men were credulous and ignorant, where progress stood still, life was harsh and culture non-existent is, in fact, about as ignorant a comment as someone could make, and reveals the sense of superiority that a man like Buckle, and perhaps to a lesser extent Petrarch, felt about the worlds they lived in.
[00:16:41] So, to answer the question we posed at the start of the episode, or even the title of this episode, “How Dark Were The Dark Ages?”, the much simplified answer is most probably “not very dark at all”.
[00:16:58] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Dark Ages, or rather, the Early Middle Ages as we should call them.
[00:17:08] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that if you previously thought that this period of history was characterised by a lack of progress,a stagnation of civilisation, well, I hope you’ll now know that this was not really the case.
[00:17:21] Perhaps it will even inspire you to find out about some of the marvellous things that did go on during this period, things we didn’t have the time to properly get into today.
[00:17:32] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:36] How is the history of The Dark Ages taught in your country? And is the period still called The Dark Ages?
[00:17:43] What do you think this term tells us more about…the people it refers to, or the people who coined it?
[00:17:50] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:54] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:02] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:07] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Dark Ages.
[00:00:26] It’s a period of history that, according to some, was dark, gloomy, and characterised by a lack of human progress, a time between the fall of Rome and the start of the Renaissance when human progress ground to a halt.
[00:00:42] But, as we’ll see, this is quite far from the truth, and calling this period “The Dark Ages” is highly problematic.
[00:00:51] So, in this episode, we’ll look at why this period was given this name, by who, what this tells us, and find out whether it really was “dark” at all.
[00:01:05] OK then, How Dark Were The Dark Ages?
[00:01:10] When you hear the term “Dark Ages”, what do you think about?
[00:01:14] In English today it’s often used as a negative term to describe something.
[00:01:20] You can say that something is like going back to the Dark Ages, meaning that it’s a reversal of progress.
[00:01:27] Or you can say that someone is living in the “Dark Ages”, meaning that they are failing to keep up with the times, to accept modern technology.
[00:01:37] They are both negative terms, going back to, or living in the “Dark Ages” is hardly a compliment.
[00:01:45] So, when it comes to an entire period of history that is called “The Dark Ages”, what does this actually mean?
[00:01:53] Well, let’s start with a reminder of what period we’re actually talking about, who first called it this, and for what reasons.
[00:02:02] So, when did it start?
[00:02:05] The period called The Dark Ages is believed to have started in the late 5th century, after the fall of the Roman Empire, and continued for a period of about 900 years, right up to the 14th century.
[00:02:20] The idea of darkness being associated with a period of history first started to come to prominence with the Italian, Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch.
[00:02:33] In 1343 he wrote, and I’m quoting directly, "for you, if you should long outlive me…there is perhaps a better age in store; this slumber of forgetfulness will not last for ever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past".
[00:02:57] For Petrarch, he was still living in The Dark Ages.
[00:03:01] He looked back on the achievements of Classical Rome and Greece, compared it to the world he lived in, and the world that had existed since then.
[00:03:13] According to Petrarch, the achievements of civilisations that had come after the fall of the Roman empire paled in comparison, they were worse, less commendable societies.
[00:03:27] The ancient Greeks and Romans had produced great philosophers, poets, great empires, wonderful cities.
[00:03:34] They had left behind them great texts documenting their history and culture.
[00:03:39] And what had everyone left since then?
[00:03:43] Not much at all, in Petrarch's opinion at least, it was nothing in comparison.
[00:03:50] Five hundred years later a British Victorian historian, Henry Thomas Buckle, would build on this idea, and become the first person to use the term “The Dark Ages” to describe this period of history.
[00:04:05] In his 1857 book, called History of civilisation in England, he wrote “In the Dark Ages, men were credulous and ignorant”.
[00:04:18] Credulous here means believing things without questioning, and it’s in particular reference to religious beliefs, of believing something because you are told it is true, rather than examining it to verify for yourself.
[00:04:34] And this term that he coined, “The Dark Ages”, is one that is still in use today to describe this extended period of history, which starts at around the year 500 and goes through to, by some estimates the year 1400 or even 1500, a thousand years of European history.
[00:04:57] Even Carl Sagan, the famous American astronomer, referred to it as a “millennium gap … a poignant lost opportunity for the human species”.
[00:05:09] An entire thousand years wasted, of human beings merely treading water, making zero progress, a millennium of standing still.
[00:05:21] These are some bold claims, right?
[00:05:24] So, why were these people referring to this period of history in such a derogatory way, and is there any truth to it?
[00:05:34] To answer these questions, let’s first remind ourselves of exactly why this period of history was thought to be “dark”.
[00:05:41] There are two main reasons, and two related meanings of “dark”.
[00:05:47] Firstly, the “dark” refers to the lack of knowledge that we have about what actually happened in this period.
[00:05:55] The ages are “dark” because we don’t know what happened, or at least our understanding isn’t as deep and developed, as it is for earlier periods of history, such as Classical Rome or Greece.
[00:06:09] The Romans and Greeks left behind great works of poetry, philosophy, and theatre. We know quite a lot about life in ancient Rome and Greece precisely because of what was written down, what was left behind.
[00:06:24] The Dark Ages, so the argument goes, are dark because we simply know less about them as there is less literature left behind.
[00:06:35] Secondly, the “dark” refers to an intellectual and cultural dark period, a period where people deferred to religion and superstition for their truth rather than reason.
[00:06:49] It’s this “darkness” that the English Victorian historian Buckle referred to when he wrote about men being “ignorant”.
[00:06:57] And of course the two are closely linked - a society that places value on knowledge, one like that of ancient Rome or Greece, understands the value of recording and documenting history and literature.
[00:07:12] On the other hand, a society that doesn’t place a value on knowledge doesn’t record history or create literature to the same degree, therefore there isn’t so much to “lose” in the first place.
[00:07:24] So, let’s dig a little deeper and see how much truth there actually is to these claims, whether these thousand years were as dark as they were accused of being.
[00:07:36] As to our first definition of dark, of a lack of information about what happened in the period after the fall of the Roman empire, there is certainly some truth that we know less about this period, at least in most of western Europe, than any time since the Romans arrived in Britain, in the 1st Century AD.
[00:07:56] In Britain this is particularly true before the arrival of William the Conqueror, in 1066.
[00:08:03] This, incidentally, is when historians such as Buckle would have defined the Dark Ages as ending, and British “modern” history starting.
[00:08:14] Indeed, the numbering system of Kings of England started in 1066, with William I. It’s almost as if British history ignored the presence of any king that came before him.
[00:08:28] For example, the first King Edward, King Edward I of England, was crowned in 1272, but there were three Kings of England called Edward that came before him.
[00:08:40] They just ruled before 1066, in the so-called "Dark Ages”, and therefore don’t count.
[00:08:47] Getting back to our story, or our question, of whether it’s fair to say that we don’t know much about what happened during The Dark Ages, there are plenty of 20th and 21st-century historians who completely refute this idea, they say it's rubbish, it simply isn’t true.
[00:09:05] Instead, they say, there is a vast amount of information that we have from this period, western European societies weren’t just living in some kind of dark cloud where nobody wrote anything down or created anything of cultural value, and everyone spent their days not doing much more than working the fields and drinking.
[00:09:25] Compared to the ancient Romans and Greeks, yes there might have been less written history, less poetry, fewer great buildings, and less information left behind for historians to consult.
[00:09:39] There were, in fact, plenty of sizable literary achievements in this period, some of which we’ll discuss shortly, and most modern historians would argue that labelling this entire period as “dark” is a great simplification of reality.
[00:09:56] First of all, putting the entire 1,000-year period into the same category and saying it was all “dark” isn’t helpful at all.
[00:10:07] The period directly after the fall of the Roman empire was very different from the period in which Petrarch was living.
[00:10:15] When the Roman empire fell, much of the stability and order that had existed in Western Europe for centuries disappeared.
[00:10:22] The collapse of Rome created a power vacuum, and smaller tribes fought for regional power.
[00:10:30] And of course, when you are fighting for power, and fighting for your own survival, this leaves less time and mental bandwidth for cultural activities, writing poems, plays, creating art and building great buildings.
[00:10:45] To call this period directly after the fall of the Roman empire “dark” might be semi-justified, at least from the point of view of there not being as many great additions to cultural history.
[00:10:58] But fast-forward a few hundred years and it is hard to say the same thing about the world that Petrarch lived in, for example.
[00:11:08] Petrarch was born in 1304, just four years before Dante started writing his seminal work, The Divine Comedy, a poem that is to this very day the most important work of poetry in the Italian language. And later on that century, in northern Europe, Geoffrey Chaucer was writing one of the most important works in English literature, The Canterbury Tales.
[00:11:32] Hardly “dark” from a cultural point of view.
[00:11:36] What’s more, some of the first universities in Europe had been founded several centuries before Petrarch’s comments.
[00:11:43] The University of Bologna was founded in 1088, The Sorbonne in Paris was founded in 1150, and the University of Oxford was founded in 1167.
[00:11:56] It’s hard to argue that the founders of these world-famous universities were living in the “Dark Ages”.
[00:12:02] But by Petrarch’s definition, they were.
[00:12:05] So, what else was happening in “The Dark Ages”?
[00:12:09] Well, it’s a 1,000 or so year period, so we will have to be very selective here.
[00:12:15] Of course, there was plenty of uncivilised activity, fighting, and bloodshed, the sort of activities that are associated with classical definitions or stereotypes of “The Dark Ages”.
[00:12:28] The Vikings don’t exactly come top of many lists of the “world’s most cultured societies”, and the reality that European literacy rates were typically in the single digits meant that people simply weren’t able to write great works of literature.
[00:12:44] But, when you compare this to Petrarch’s example of a civilisation to admire, Ancient Rome, there are, of course, plenty of Ancient Roman examples of not-so-civilised behaviour.
[00:12:57] They might have built beautiful buildings that stand to this very day, but if the purpose of these buildings was to watch men fight each other to the death or be torn apart by lions, it wouldn’t meet many modern definitions of high civilisation.
[00:13:14] So, to go back to what actually happened in the so-called “Dark Ages”, there was a lot that was far more civilised than the so-called shining lights of Ancient Rome.
[00:13:25] There was the rise of the papacy, of the pope, and the great monastic orders.
[00:13:30] King Charles of the Franks became Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, uniting Western and Eastern Europe under one ruler.
[00:13:39] Trade networks continued to develop. Although transportation was long and arduous, there is evidence of European trade that goes against the narrative of people simply living in isolated villages, surviving off subsistence farming and trying to avoid being killed by neighbouring tribes.
[00:13:59] From a technological point of view, there were several significant agricultural inventions, mainly around improved ploughing. Sure, this might not sound so impressive nowadays, but figuring out how to generate food more efficiently is clearly a pretty useful technological development.
[00:14:20] It’s clear that there was not “nothing” going on, even in the Eurocentric worlds that Petrarch and Buckle were referring to.
[00:14:29] And, perhaps most importantly, outside Europe, this period was far from dark, it was very bright indeed.
[00:14:38] The Middle East experienced a blossoming of scientific, mathematical and economic development.
[00:14:44] Baghdad was founded in 762, and swiftly became a trade and cultural centre for the Arab world.
[00:14:52] Further East, there was no such “Dark” period in China, with some of the most impressive dynasties overseeing the country during these supposed “Dark Ages”.
[00:15:03] Clearly, outside Europe, in many other areas of the world civilisation was moving forward at a breakneck speed.
[00:15:12] But, as non-Europeans will be all too familiar with, Europeans are not always very good at looking outside Europe.
[00:15:22] In the time of Petrarch, in the 1300s, perhaps we can forgive them slightly, as knowledge of what lay outside Europe was more limited.
[00:15:32] But fast forward to the Victorian era, to Henry Thomas Buckle in 1857 and his coining of the term “The Dark Ages”, and it’s hard to be particularly forgiving.
[00:15:46] Indeed, most modern historians have pretty much cast the term aside, agreeing that describing this period of history, even if we limit it to European history, or even Western European history, describing it as “dark”, uncultured and lacking in development, simply isn’t true, and probably tells us more about the people describing it as “dark” than the people being described as living in The Dark Ages.
[00:16:15] Labelling a thousand-year period as “dark”, a period where men were credulous and ignorant, where progress stood still, life was harsh and culture non-existent is, in fact, about as ignorant a comment as someone could make, and reveals the sense of superiority that a man like Buckle, and perhaps to a lesser extent Petrarch, felt about the worlds they lived in.
[00:16:41] So, to answer the question we posed at the start of the episode, or even the title of this episode, “How Dark Were The Dark Ages?”, the much simplified answer is most probably “not very dark at all”.
[00:16:58] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Dark Ages, or rather, the Early Middle Ages as we should call them.
[00:17:08] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that if you previously thought that this period of history was characterised by a lack of progress,a stagnation of civilisation, well, I hope you’ll now know that this was not really the case.
[00:17:21] Perhaps it will even inspire you to find out about some of the marvellous things that did go on during this period, things we didn’t have the time to properly get into today.
[00:17:32] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:36] How is the history of The Dark Ages taught in your country? And is the period still called The Dark Ages?
[00:17:43] What do you think this term tells us more about…the people it refers to, or the people who coined it?
[00:17:50] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:54] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:02] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:07] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Dark Ages.
[00:00:26] It’s a period of history that, according to some, was dark, gloomy, and characterised by a lack of human progress, a time between the fall of Rome and the start of the Renaissance when human progress ground to a halt.
[00:00:42] But, as we’ll see, this is quite far from the truth, and calling this period “The Dark Ages” is highly problematic.
[00:00:51] So, in this episode, we’ll look at why this period was given this name, by who, what this tells us, and find out whether it really was “dark” at all.
[00:01:05] OK then, How Dark Were The Dark Ages?
[00:01:10] When you hear the term “Dark Ages”, what do you think about?
[00:01:14] In English today it’s often used as a negative term to describe something.
[00:01:20] You can say that something is like going back to the Dark Ages, meaning that it’s a reversal of progress.
[00:01:27] Or you can say that someone is living in the “Dark Ages”, meaning that they are failing to keep up with the times, to accept modern technology.
[00:01:37] They are both negative terms, going back to, or living in the “Dark Ages” is hardly a compliment.
[00:01:45] So, when it comes to an entire period of history that is called “The Dark Ages”, what does this actually mean?
[00:01:53] Well, let’s start with a reminder of what period we’re actually talking about, who first called it this, and for what reasons.
[00:02:02] So, when did it start?
[00:02:05] The period called The Dark Ages is believed to have started in the late 5th century, after the fall of the Roman Empire, and continued for a period of about 900 years, right up to the 14th century.
[00:02:20] The idea of darkness being associated with a period of history first started to come to prominence with the Italian, Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch.
[00:02:33] In 1343 he wrote, and I’m quoting directly, "for you, if you should long outlive me…there is perhaps a better age in store; this slumber of forgetfulness will not last for ever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past".
[00:02:57] For Petrarch, he was still living in The Dark Ages.
[00:03:01] He looked back on the achievements of Classical Rome and Greece, compared it to the world he lived in, and the world that had existed since then.
[00:03:13] According to Petrarch, the achievements of civilisations that had come after the fall of the Roman empire paled in comparison, they were worse, less commendable societies.
[00:03:27] The ancient Greeks and Romans had produced great philosophers, poets, great empires, wonderful cities.
[00:03:34] They had left behind them great texts documenting their history and culture.
[00:03:39] And what had everyone left since then?
[00:03:43] Not much at all, in Petrarch's opinion at least, it was nothing in comparison.
[00:03:50] Five hundred years later a British Victorian historian, Henry Thomas Buckle, would build on this idea, and become the first person to use the term “The Dark Ages” to describe this period of history.
[00:04:05] In his 1857 book, called History of civilisation in England, he wrote “In the Dark Ages, men were credulous and ignorant”.
[00:04:18] Credulous here means believing things without questioning, and it’s in particular reference to religious beliefs, of believing something because you are told it is true, rather than examining it to verify for yourself.
[00:04:34] And this term that he coined, “The Dark Ages”, is one that is still in use today to describe this extended period of history, which starts at around the year 500 and goes through to, by some estimates the year 1400 or even 1500, a thousand years of European history.
[00:04:57] Even Carl Sagan, the famous American astronomer, referred to it as a “millennium gap … a poignant lost opportunity for the human species”.
[00:05:09] An entire thousand years wasted, of human beings merely treading water, making zero progress, a millennium of standing still.
[00:05:21] These are some bold claims, right?
[00:05:24] So, why were these people referring to this period of history in such a derogatory way, and is there any truth to it?
[00:05:34] To answer these questions, let’s first remind ourselves of exactly why this period of history was thought to be “dark”.
[00:05:41] There are two main reasons, and two related meanings of “dark”.
[00:05:47] Firstly, the “dark” refers to the lack of knowledge that we have about what actually happened in this period.
[00:05:55] The ages are “dark” because we don’t know what happened, or at least our understanding isn’t as deep and developed, as it is for earlier periods of history, such as Classical Rome or Greece.
[00:06:09] The Romans and Greeks left behind great works of poetry, philosophy, and theatre. We know quite a lot about life in ancient Rome and Greece precisely because of what was written down, what was left behind.
[00:06:24] The Dark Ages, so the argument goes, are dark because we simply know less about them as there is less literature left behind.
[00:06:35] Secondly, the “dark” refers to an intellectual and cultural dark period, a period where people deferred to religion and superstition for their truth rather than reason.
[00:06:49] It’s this “darkness” that the English Victorian historian Buckle referred to when he wrote about men being “ignorant”.
[00:06:57] And of course the two are closely linked - a society that places value on knowledge, one like that of ancient Rome or Greece, understands the value of recording and documenting history and literature.
[00:07:12] On the other hand, a society that doesn’t place a value on knowledge doesn’t record history or create literature to the same degree, therefore there isn’t so much to “lose” in the first place.
[00:07:24] So, let’s dig a little deeper and see how much truth there actually is to these claims, whether these thousand years were as dark as they were accused of being.
[00:07:36] As to our first definition of dark, of a lack of information about what happened in the period after the fall of the Roman empire, there is certainly some truth that we know less about this period, at least in most of western Europe, than any time since the Romans arrived in Britain, in the 1st Century AD.
[00:07:56] In Britain this is particularly true before the arrival of William the Conqueror, in 1066.
[00:08:03] This, incidentally, is when historians such as Buckle would have defined the Dark Ages as ending, and British “modern” history starting.
[00:08:14] Indeed, the numbering system of Kings of England started in 1066, with William I. It’s almost as if British history ignored the presence of any king that came before him.
[00:08:28] For example, the first King Edward, King Edward I of England, was crowned in 1272, but there were three Kings of England called Edward that came before him.
[00:08:40] They just ruled before 1066, in the so-called "Dark Ages”, and therefore don’t count.
[00:08:47] Getting back to our story, or our question, of whether it’s fair to say that we don’t know much about what happened during The Dark Ages, there are plenty of 20th and 21st-century historians who completely refute this idea, they say it's rubbish, it simply isn’t true.
[00:09:05] Instead, they say, there is a vast amount of information that we have from this period, western European societies weren’t just living in some kind of dark cloud where nobody wrote anything down or created anything of cultural value, and everyone spent their days not doing much more than working the fields and drinking.
[00:09:25] Compared to the ancient Romans and Greeks, yes there might have been less written history, less poetry, fewer great buildings, and less information left behind for historians to consult.
[00:09:39] There were, in fact, plenty of sizable literary achievements in this period, some of which we’ll discuss shortly, and most modern historians would argue that labelling this entire period as “dark” is a great simplification of reality.
[00:09:56] First of all, putting the entire 1,000-year period into the same category and saying it was all “dark” isn’t helpful at all.
[00:10:07] The period directly after the fall of the Roman empire was very different from the period in which Petrarch was living.
[00:10:15] When the Roman empire fell, much of the stability and order that had existed in Western Europe for centuries disappeared.
[00:10:22] The collapse of Rome created a power vacuum, and smaller tribes fought for regional power.
[00:10:30] And of course, when you are fighting for power, and fighting for your own survival, this leaves less time and mental bandwidth for cultural activities, writing poems, plays, creating art and building great buildings.
[00:10:45] To call this period directly after the fall of the Roman empire “dark” might be semi-justified, at least from the point of view of there not being as many great additions to cultural history.
[00:10:58] But fast-forward a few hundred years and it is hard to say the same thing about the world that Petrarch lived in, for example.
[00:11:08] Petrarch was born in 1304, just four years before Dante started writing his seminal work, The Divine Comedy, a poem that is to this very day the most important work of poetry in the Italian language. And later on that century, in northern Europe, Geoffrey Chaucer was writing one of the most important works in English literature, The Canterbury Tales.
[00:11:32] Hardly “dark” from a cultural point of view.
[00:11:36] What’s more, some of the first universities in Europe had been founded several centuries before Petrarch’s comments.
[00:11:43] The University of Bologna was founded in 1088, The Sorbonne in Paris was founded in 1150, and the University of Oxford was founded in 1167.
[00:11:56] It’s hard to argue that the founders of these world-famous universities were living in the “Dark Ages”.
[00:12:02] But by Petrarch’s definition, they were.
[00:12:05] So, what else was happening in “The Dark Ages”?
[00:12:09] Well, it’s a 1,000 or so year period, so we will have to be very selective here.
[00:12:15] Of course, there was plenty of uncivilised activity, fighting, and bloodshed, the sort of activities that are associated with classical definitions or stereotypes of “The Dark Ages”.
[00:12:28] The Vikings don’t exactly come top of many lists of the “world’s most cultured societies”, and the reality that European literacy rates were typically in the single digits meant that people simply weren’t able to write great works of literature.
[00:12:44] But, when you compare this to Petrarch’s example of a civilisation to admire, Ancient Rome, there are, of course, plenty of Ancient Roman examples of not-so-civilised behaviour.
[00:12:57] They might have built beautiful buildings that stand to this very day, but if the purpose of these buildings was to watch men fight each other to the death or be torn apart by lions, it wouldn’t meet many modern definitions of high civilisation.
[00:13:14] So, to go back to what actually happened in the so-called “Dark Ages”, there was a lot that was far more civilised than the so-called shining lights of Ancient Rome.
[00:13:25] There was the rise of the papacy, of the pope, and the great monastic orders.
[00:13:30] King Charles of the Franks became Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, uniting Western and Eastern Europe under one ruler.
[00:13:39] Trade networks continued to develop. Although transportation was long and arduous, there is evidence of European trade that goes against the narrative of people simply living in isolated villages, surviving off subsistence farming and trying to avoid being killed by neighbouring tribes.
[00:13:59] From a technological point of view, there were several significant agricultural inventions, mainly around improved ploughing. Sure, this might not sound so impressive nowadays, but figuring out how to generate food more efficiently is clearly a pretty useful technological development.
[00:14:20] It’s clear that there was not “nothing” going on, even in the Eurocentric worlds that Petrarch and Buckle were referring to.
[00:14:29] And, perhaps most importantly, outside Europe, this period was far from dark, it was very bright indeed.
[00:14:38] The Middle East experienced a blossoming of scientific, mathematical and economic development.
[00:14:44] Baghdad was founded in 762, and swiftly became a trade and cultural centre for the Arab world.
[00:14:52] Further East, there was no such “Dark” period in China, with some of the most impressive dynasties overseeing the country during these supposed “Dark Ages”.
[00:15:03] Clearly, outside Europe, in many other areas of the world civilisation was moving forward at a breakneck speed.
[00:15:12] But, as non-Europeans will be all too familiar with, Europeans are not always very good at looking outside Europe.
[00:15:22] In the time of Petrarch, in the 1300s, perhaps we can forgive them slightly, as knowledge of what lay outside Europe was more limited.
[00:15:32] But fast forward to the Victorian era, to Henry Thomas Buckle in 1857 and his coining of the term “The Dark Ages”, and it’s hard to be particularly forgiving.
[00:15:46] Indeed, most modern historians have pretty much cast the term aside, agreeing that describing this period of history, even if we limit it to European history, or even Western European history, describing it as “dark”, uncultured and lacking in development, simply isn’t true, and probably tells us more about the people describing it as “dark” than the people being described as living in The Dark Ages.
[00:16:15] Labelling a thousand-year period as “dark”, a period where men were credulous and ignorant, where progress stood still, life was harsh and culture non-existent is, in fact, about as ignorant a comment as someone could make, and reveals the sense of superiority that a man like Buckle, and perhaps to a lesser extent Petrarch, felt about the worlds they lived in.
[00:16:41] So, to answer the question we posed at the start of the episode, or even the title of this episode, “How Dark Were The Dark Ages?”, the much simplified answer is most probably “not very dark at all”.
[00:16:58] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Dark Ages, or rather, the Early Middle Ages as we should call them.
[00:17:08] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that if you previously thought that this period of history was characterised by a lack of progress,a stagnation of civilisation, well, I hope you’ll now know that this was not really the case.
[00:17:21] Perhaps it will even inspire you to find out about some of the marvellous things that did go on during this period, things we didn’t have the time to properly get into today.
[00:17:32] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:36] How is the history of The Dark Ages taught in your country? And is the period still called The Dark Ages?
[00:17:43] What do you think this term tells us more about…the people it refers to, or the people who coined it?
[00:17:50] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:54] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:02] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:07] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
