The concept of “the Dark Ages” is central to several key elements in much anti-religious polemic.  One of the primary myths most beloved by many anti-theists is the one whereby Christianity violently suppressed ancient Greco-Roman learning, destroyed an ancient intellectual culture based on pure reason and retarded a nascent scientific and technological revolution, thus plunging Europe into a one thousand year “dark age” which was only relieved by the glorious dawn of “the Renaissance”. But when this “Dark Age” supposedly was, what made it “dark” and what all this had to do with religion are usually left unsaid and – on critical examination – are usually hard to pin down. Like its twin concept – “the Renaissance” – this “Dark Age” is something everyone seems to know about, but few can actually delineate. This is because both the concept and the term have very serious historiographical problems.

The idea that religion ruled Europe in the Middle Ages and they were “the Dark Ages” as a result is so well-understood and generally accepted that it is regularly presented online in memes like the one above and variants like it. There is no attempt to detail when exactly this was, how precisely religion “ruled” or how this caused these ages to be “dark”. Like a lot of anti-theist historiography, this kind of meme is heavy on assumed understandings and light on details. Certainly some of the variants appear rather confused about the whole thing. Take this one from Twitter, for example:

This is, presumably, supposed to illustrate these “Dark Ages”. But the picture is a painting by the Flemish masters, Dieric Bouts and Hugo van der Goes, dated to c. 1468 and it depicts the story of the matyrdom of Saint Hippolytus of Rome, said to have been torn apart or dragged to death by horses. Using a fine work of late medieval Flemish art depicting the legend of a second century Christian who lived circa 170-235 AD and was, allegedly, executed by pagan Romans seems an odd choice as demonstration of these Christian “Dark Ages”.

A third example seems similarly muddle-headed:

At least in this case the people doing the killing are actually Christians. But so are the people being killed. This is a sixteenth century engraving from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) depicting the execution of three Protestant women on Guernsey in the Channel Islands in 1556, during the Marian Persecutions. How this Early Modern example of Christians being horrible to each other illustrates these undefined “Dark Ages” is not clear, but this is apparently the sort of thing that went on in this period.

Confused and confusing memes aside, when queried about when exactly “the Dark Ages” were, most people who favour this term as a polemical tool use it as a synonym for the Middle Ages. Essentially, “the Dark Ages”, they claim, was the benighted and terrible period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and “the Renaissance”. So, roughly 500 to 1500 AD.

The Origin of the Term

The term “the Dark Ages” has its own history, and it begins with the fourteenth century poet Petrarch  Prior to his time, medieval scholars had something of an inferiority complex.  Western culture had been looking back on earlier “golden ages” for centuries and as early as the late sixth century BC Hesiod laid out the idea that he lived in a debased and corrupted period and spoke of a χρύσεον γένος – an “Age of Gold”- as an ancient, idyllic era when “men lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief”.  Christianity inherited this idea that things were in a long decline and coupled it with its own eschatology that talked of a period of debasement and chaos before the End Times and the Apocalypse.

With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, these ideas were supplemented by the very real fact that early medieval western European lived surrounded by reminders of a past that was grander and greater than the present.  Sometime in perhaps the eighth century an Anglo-Saxon monk wrote an elegy contemplating a Roman ruin:

“Eorðgrap hafað
waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene,
heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea
werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad
ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum,
ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas.”

(Earth-grip holds
the proud builders, departed, long lost,
and the hard grasp of the grave, until a hundred generations
of people have passed. Often this wall outlasted,
hoary with lichen, red-stained, withstanding the storm,
one reign after another; the high arch has now fallen.
The Ruin, ll. 6-11)

The same monk was probably also acutely aware of literary references to ancient works that he could never read: Greek and Roman works that were now lost in the collapse of the Empire.  Even when western learning began to revive and many of those lost works came back to western Europe via Arabic and Hebrew translations from Sicily and Spain, western scholars still saw themselves as inferior to the ancients.  In 1159 John of Salisbury wrote:

“Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.” (Metalogicon)

But by the early fourteenth century this inferior attitude began to change.  After several centuries of the revival of Greek and Roman texts on logic, philosophy and proto-science, a new breed of scholar was turning their attention to ancient literary works.  Petrarch was one of the earliest who not only devoted himself to Greek and Latin poetry and histories, but set out to imitate it in his own works and to reject the living Latin of his own day in an attempt at restoring the language to what he saw as its earlier purity.

For Petrarch and the Classical revivalist Humanists who followed him, he was not a dwarf compared to the ancient giants, he was their peer and equal.  It was the lesser scholars of the period since the fall of Rome who were the midgets and that period between the end of the Empire and his own time that was an unfortunate interregnum.  He saw himself as at the beginning of a new, better age that would parallel that of the ancients and dispel “the darkness”:

“[F]or 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 for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.”(Africa, IX, 451-7)

Later Humanists continued this idea and the “dark” period in the middle  – between the “radiance” of Greece and Rome and its new revival – came to be called first the media tempestas (” the middle times”) and later the medium aevum (“the middle ages”).  “Medieval” was the English term derived from the latter and while it did not appear until the nineteenth century, the concepts of this period as “the Middle Ages” and its connections with ideas of it as a period of “darkness” were well and truly entrenched by then.  

The terms “Middle Ages” and “Medieval” have cognates across Europe; the period is the Mittelalter to German speakers and the Moyen Âge to the French.  But while these terms have all had some historiographical associations with “darkness”, the term “the Dark Ages” is uniquely English in its usage, if not its origin.  The term was first used not as a way of denigrating the “middle times”, but actually in a work that went some way to defending them.  Between 1588 and 1607 Cardinal Caesar Baronius published his multi-volume Church history, the Annales Ecclesiastici; which was in part a response to the Protestant version of history found in the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-74) produced by a group of Lutheran scholars.

Baronius found that the period between the end of the Carolingian dynasty in 888 and the church reforms of Pope Gregory VII was difficult to research because of a lack of source material:

“The new age which was beginning, for its harshness and barrenness of good could well be called iron, for its baseness and abounding evil leaden, and moreover for its lack of writers, dark.” ( Annales Ecclesiastici, Vol. X. Roma, p. 647)

This concept of a period that lacked written sources as a saeculum obscurum – “a Dark Age” – struck other historians as useful and it began to be applied by them first to the specific 160 years identified by Baronius and then to other periods for which source material was scanty.  But it was in seventeenth century Protestant England that its English form began to be applied to the medieval period generally and to be given its pejorative overtones rather than its original technical meaning.

By the nineteenth century the terms “Dark Ages” and “Middle Ages” had become synonymous in English usage and the clearly Protestant, post-Enlightenment and decidedly Whiggish historiography of English language history writing in that period did not have a problem with its pejorative implications.  Edward Gibbon, writing for a Protestant audience in the tradition of Voltaire and the French philosophes, had no qualms about scorning the “rubbish of the Dark Ages” and most popular history writing in this period usually maintained that scorn in both Britain and the U.S.

But the true academic study of the Medieval Period really only began in the twentieth century and by then the moralising, value judgements and biased sectarian polemic of eighteenth and nineteenth century historiography had been replaced by the far more objective, neutral and careful traditions that began with Leopold von Ranke and were developed by Marc Bloch and his successors.  Value-laden terms like “the Dark Ages” began to fall from favour and modern historians now tend to avoid them, even though they linger in common parlance.

This was partly due to their obvious negative bias, but also due to the fact that, as twentieth century study of the Medieval Period proceeded, many of the assumptions about it were shown to be false.  Far from being a period of technical stagnation, even the very early medieval period saw agrarian and technological innovation that transformed western and northern Europe economically and culturally.  Rather than being a period of total Popish theocracy, the near constant tension and regular open conflict between Church and State meant the Church actually spent most of the period trying to extract itself from secular domination.  It also became increasingly clear that the rise of universities, of communal republics and parliaments and of complex systems of law and governance meant that many institutions that are central to the modern world have their origins in the Medieval world rather than the more remote and rather alien Classical period.

And one of the key nineteenth century myths that the new medieval history specialists debunked was the idea that the Church suppressed or restricted inquiry into the natural and physical cosmos, stifling proto-science until the “yoke of the church” was thrown off in the “Renaissance”.  Working on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) and Lynn Thorndike (1882-1965) both came to the conclusion that the idea of the Medieval Period as one of scientific stagnation until the “Renaissance” and the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century was nonsense and that the revival of natural philosophy not only began as far back as the eleventh century, but the later medieval proto-scientific tradition laid the essential foundations of the later true revolution.  This is now totally accepted by all modern historians of science.

So while all this is not well known to the average person today (and actively resisted as “revisionism” by biased ideologues), it’s all standard, accepted stuff for anyone with even the slightest undergraduate grasp of medieval history.  As a result, the term “the Dark Ages” as applied to the whole Medieval Period is simply not used by modern historians at all.  Where the term is applied at all, it is to a very specific period of British history: the 200 or so years from the withdrawal of Roman troops in the fifth century to the end of the north-west Germanic invasions and settlements in Britain in the late seventh century.  This is a “dark age” in the technical sense of Baronius, because it is not well served by written sources (even though it continues to be increasingly illuminated by archaeology).

Defending the “Dark Ages”

As noted, there are some who do not like the fact the term “the Dark Ages” is considered out of date and inaccurate and want to cling to it. This is usually because they rather like the old, moralistic divisions of western history into the “good” periods (the Classical world, the “Renaissance” and the Modern Era) and the “bad” one (the Medieval/”Dark Ages”). All this new-fangled nonsense about the Medieval Period not being so “dark” is dismissed as revisionist nonsense and, recently, as probably politically motivated and “woke”. This reactionary view is also often motivated by some very old and deeply seated sectarian and religious prejudices. The association of “the Dark Ages” with images of the repression and suppression of the medieval Catholic Church is an ingrained set of Protestant tropes that still pervades the Anglosphere. And this was inherited and intesified in the Englightenment’s conception of history that forms a foundation for modernity. So there is a strong cultural current that runs against any dismissal of the term. Many people, especially ones who have never actually studied the period, just somehow know it was a “dark age” and dismiss anyone who claims otherwise.

Those who defend the term often engage in a form of “motte-and-bailey argument”. They begin by insisting that the Medieval Period definitely was a “dark age”, only relieved by the dawning of “the Renaissance” and finally dispelled by the Enlightenment. This runs into all the problems of exactly when and what this “the Renaissance” was – see “The Great Myths 13: The Renaissance Myth” for the tangle of historiographical problems involved there. But it is also hard to sustain given that we now have a far more extensive, detailed and nuanced understanding of the Middle Ages and modern historians since the early twentieth century have found most of the assumptions of their eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors were simply wrong.

The revival of Classical learning previously attributed to “the Renaissance” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is now well known to have begun much earlier; in the Twelfth Century Renaissance, and so right in the middle of the Middle Ages, not at its end. Many modern institutions and foundational concepts and practices turn out to have distinctly medieval origins, such as universities, parliaments, international banking and finance and the Common Law. Everything from double entry book keeping to modern musical notation and even commonplace items like chimneys and buttons are all medieval in origin.

As already mentioned, far from being a period of scientific stagnation or even the suppression of natural philosophy, the medieval period saw a remarkable revival of rational inquiry into the natural world, stimulated by the rediscovery of Greek works lost in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and by the discovery of Arabic works that expanded these subjects. Not only does the medieval period see work in a range of fields from optics to physics by some remarkable scholars, but modern historians of science now argue that the later development of modern science in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries had essential medieval foundations. As Edward Grant details in his The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: 1996), the proto-scientific foundational work of medieval scholars was not just important but fundamental to the development of the full scientific method and its attendant institutions and norms. Modern science would not have developed in the west without the work of medieval natural philosophers like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa. In recent years this better understanding of the history of science has been made more accessible to the non-specialist through excellent popularisations like James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon: 2009) and Seb Falk’s The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Norton: 2020).

Similarly, the idea that the Medieval Period was technologically stagnant has also been completely revised. Even the nineteenth century polemticists grudgingly granted the Middle Ages the technical innovations of gothic architecture, which saw the spires of cathedrals stand as the tallest buildings in the world until, remarkably, the 1890s (if we do not count the Pyramids of Giza). But the Middle Ages also saw the invention or development of technologies such as blast furnaces, mechanical clocks, astronomical clocks, windmills, eye glasses, gantry cranes, rolling mills, stern rudders, horizontal looms, corned gunpowder, compound curved plate armour and magnets. Medieval technicians loved mechanical solutions to problems, applying them to everything from turning spits to roast meat to making clockwork automata to entertain dinner guests. Joseph and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (Harper, 1994) and Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Barnes and Noble: 1976) both detail how technically inventive the Middle Ages actually were.

Confronted with evidence like this and much more besides, those who want to defend the “Dark Ages” conception abandon the “bailey” part of their position and retreat to their “motte” – they concede that not all of the Middle Ages were “dark”, but note most of these examples come from the Later Middle Ages. So they redraw the boundaries of these “Dark Ages” as referring not to the Middle Ages as a whole, but to the Early Medieval Period. The centuries following the fall of Rome, they assure us, are the actual “Dark Ages” where everything was terrible, backward and in decline. Here they are on slightly firmer ground, but several major historiographical problems remain.

Decline and Fall and/or Transformation

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire has been the subject of centuries of debtate, not only as to its causes but also its nature. For a very long time it was seen in fairly simple terms: the Empire was rotten within and so overcome from without by waves of barbarian invaders. What followed was a catastrophic collapse of civilisation, with the whole of western Europe regressing to primitive barbarism among the fallen ruins of the glory that was Rome.

In the twentieth century this picture underwent substantial revision. Historians emphasised not just what was lost, but also what survived. Emphasis was placed not only on sharp breaks with the Roman past in the Early Medieval world, but on less obvious but still significant continuities. By the end of the century there was a strong emphasis on the end of the Western Empire not as a story of chaos and collapse but of transition and transformation. By 1995 Princeton’s Peter Brown published his The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (Wiley-Blackwell: 1995, 2013), which was considered a masterwork of historical analysis and synthesis spanning Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The date parameters of Brown’s study mean he did not abide by the older norms that saw a hard break at the end of the Western Empire. His book traces the continuities and transformations across a period that begins with the Roman Empire at its height and ends halfway through the Medieval Period. In many respects Brown’s book exemplifies the historiographical trend that is referred to as the Continuity Thesis.

But academic trends usually invite reaction, rejection and backlash. In 2005 archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkins produced a work that took aim at this image of continuity and argued for a re-examination of the older chaos and catastrophe model. In The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: 2005). Ward-Perkins makes a strong argument against the Continuity Thesis, which he sees more informed by post-War European politics than solid evidence. Drawing on both archaeological data and textual sources, he argues that the material decline and collapse of things like long distance trade and major public infrastructure meant the end of Rome genuinely was a catastrophic fall. He states that if we compare a second century Roman Briton living in villa with hypocaust heating under its mosaic floor and drinking wine imported from the Rhine in amphorae made in Spain, he is a world away from his sixth century descendant who lives in a smoky thatched hall and drinks ale from a primitive locally made cup. Ward-Perkins and, to an extent, Germanicist Peter Heather (see The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, Pan: 2006) led a counter argument for a Catastrophist Thesis.

Unsurprisingly, those who want to preserve the idea of “the Dark Ages” – at least for the earlier part of the Middle Ages – hold up the Catastrophists as wholly correct. In the decades since Ward-Perkins’ book was published, however, historians have (as they often do) come to a more nuanced consensus. Whether the Fall of Rome was mainly a catastrophe or mostly a continuity, most would argue today, depends on when, where and what you are talking about.

As some of Ward-Perkins’ critics noted at the time, many of his examples come from the fringes of the Empire, where Roman civilisation was an imported business mostly propped up by the infrastructure and economics of the military and the taxation systems. As Western Roman politics consumed itself with civil wars and usurpers in the fifth century, people on the edges of the system were forced to (and, seemingly, also chose to) become more self-reliant and local in their thinking and action. So while there are good examples of chaos from, say, Roman Britian or western Spain, there are localised continuities and transformations there too. Closer to the centre we find more transformation and continuity, punctuated by periods of chaos and collapse. So, it depends.

It also depends on what we choose to focus on and value. The original, traditional Catastrophist Thesis of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was framed by men who saw strong monarchical rule, centralised authority, an empire that traded the Pax Romana for riches and tribute, a centralised taxation system, a large and expensive standing army, large public works of great extravagance, and an economy with a few very rich people at the top and masses of poor or unfree people at the base as normal, proper and good. Therefore, for them, the break down and collapse of all these things was, therefore, automatically bad. These were the things, they believed, that made civilisation civilised. Their fall was, therefore, automatically a terrrible tragedy.

Many people today would question most if not all of these assumptions, at least to some extent. If we do value those things and concentrate on them, the Catastrophists and the “Dark Ages” defenders who rely on them may seem to have a point. But what if we focus on other things? A comparison between a third century Gallo-Roman peasant and his seventh century Merogingian descendant that concentrates on things other than mosaics, roofing materials and whether or not there was an amphitheate in the nearest city but, rather, notes other differences may arrive at a different view. The third century Gaul was paying substantial taxes – up to a third of his yearly income – and this was often brutally enforced by officials who often needed to be placated with gifts and bribes. And while these taxes substantially went to paying the Roman Army, that army was in this period often at war with itself, while foreigners were taking advantage by raiding over the frontiers deep into Roman territory. Our Gallo-Roman was not getting much of a return on his tax. His Merovingian descendant, on the other hand, paid no taxes to anyone. It would be some time before the bureaucracy or infrastructure for that kind of thing would develop again in what was becoming France. Frankish nobles and their neighbours occasionally fought small scale wars, but it would be rare for our peasant to be affected by those. His home may have been thatched rather than tiled, but he appears by many measures to be better off than his ancestor. There is even some evidence that average height increased in the Early Medieval Period, before declining in later centuries (see Richard H. Steckel, “New Light on the “Dark Ages”: The Remarkably Tall Stature of Northern European Men during the Medieval Era”, Social Science History, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2004, pp. 211-229).

So this was a “Dark Age” for who, exactly? Or what are we choosing to highlight when we make this assessment? What we decide regarding what was “dark” or “light” depends on what we choose to assign value or where we choose to focus.

And this is the problem with this whole terminology. It is value-laden and based on selective focus and judgement. Someone who values prot-science over theology will regard ths period as a barren wasteland. But those who regard highly abstract and intricately-patterned art will see it as a period of remarkable examples of beauty and innovation, It all depends on where you look and how you focus.

This is why value-judgement based terms like “the Dark Ages” are not useful. Even if we leave aside the heavy historiographical baggage and associations that weight down the term, it is hardly neutral terminology. This is why neutral terms like “the Early Middle Ages” are better and are generally accepted by current historians. This is not them being revisionist, apologetic or “woke”. It is simply them doing their job with objectivity.

Those who defend the concept of the “Dark Ages” are usually not very interested in objectivity. In fact, many of them have definite agendas; mostly very modern and often highly political. Certainly those who like “the Dark Ages” because it gives them a stick with which to beat religion in general and Christianity in particular do so because of deeply unobjective and highly emotional motivations. Even if these people retreat to the “motte” and argue for a highly Catastrophist view of the Early Middle Ages, they are stuck with another problem. If this regression was somehow due to Christianity, they need to explain why the period in which the Church was relatively weak was the one which saw all this decline and disintegration. Whereas the period where the power, wealth and influence of the Church was at its height – the High Middle Ages – was the one that saw an economic boom, European expansion, technical innovation and the foundations of modern science. The anti-Christian polemicists are stuck with a situation that is the precise opposite of what their prejudices predict.

No historiography occurs in a vacuum and these topics and the assumtions and terminology around them will always be influenced by and reflect the wider culture. But rational people are careful to try to analyse history with objectivity, not bend it to use as an ideological tool or weapon. The “Dark Ages” has long been used as both. Which is an excellent reason to abandon the concept.

Further Reading

Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (Wiley-Blackwell: 1995, 2013) – Note the detailed “Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Revised Edition” (2013), particuarly Brown’s response to Ward-Perkins (pp. xxx-xxxii)

Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Norton: 2020

Joseph and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (Harper, 1994)

Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Barnes and Noble: 1976)

Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: 1996)

James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon: 2009)

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, (Pan: 2006)

Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: 2005)