The "Dark Ages" Debate

The debate

Take a look at the images below and put them in chronological order based on the technique, level of realism, and skill of the artist. Which one is the oldest?

I’m guessing many of you said that the Cantigas de Santa Maria is the oldest. However, the oldest one (by 12 centuries) is “Woman with wax tablets and stylus.” It’s a painting from the Roman town of Pompeii that dates to the first century CE. The Cantigas de Santa Maria, on the other hand, is from the thirteenth century CE. The top image is the “Last Supper,” a painting by Leonardo da Vinci from the late fifteenth century CE.

Do these three paintings tell us anything about the European Middle Ages?¹ Do they show us that the Middle Ages were “Dark Ages”? Obviously, these are only three paintings, and I might have chosen only these three to make you believe the Middle Ages were backwards. But historians do this all the time, choosing evidence that supports their claim or worldview. Over the last five hundred years, historians have debated whether Europe entered a dark age after the fall of Rome and how long it lasted. Let’s look at some examples of this debate from the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the modern period.

The Renaissance and Enlightenment view of the Middle Ages

You probably don’t enjoy everything your parents or teachers do. You might roll your eyes at their music or laugh at their outfits in old photos. Surely, they came from a strange, backwards time. This generational eye-rolling is pretty common, and scholars of new generations often try to separate themselves from those who came before. As European learning and art flourished during the Renaissance, scholars looked back at the funny pictures and bad music of the Middle Ages and thought, “I’m better than that.”

The Renaissance—which means “rebirth”—was a period of European history after the Middle Ages. During this period, scholars sought to revitalize science and the arts. Francesco Petrarca, usually known as “Petrarch”, was a fourteenth-century humanist.² He wrote about the accomplishments of ancient Greece and Rome. Petrarch believed that his society was moving backwards from the achievements of the Greeks and Romans. Petrarch was the first to describe Europe after the fall of Rome as “dark”.

Petrarch and other scholars argued that the Greeks and Romans of the classical era might have lacked the “light” of Christianity, but their intellectual achievements were still brilliant. However, he was less complimentary of the Middle Ages. In 1343 he wrote, “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” (Petrarch 453-7). Petrarch believed that the “darkness” of the Middle Ages was coming to an end—Europeans would soon progress into the future by learning from the past greatness of Greece and Rome.

Many later scholars shared Petrarch’s views. One of the most well-known Enlightenment³ historians was British author Edward Gibbon. Gibbon agreed with Petrarch, believing that Europe declined after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He wrote a multi-volume work titled The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1789. In it, Gibbon blamed the rise of Christianity for the fall of Rome. He claimed that “the triumph of barbarism [lack of culture] and religion” were to blame. Like Petrarch, Gibbon argued that it was not Germanic tribes who toppled the mighty Roman Empire. Rather, “the reproach [blame] may be transferred to the Catholics of Rome.” He believed that, in their efforts to erase the “pagan” history of Rome, they also lost the greatness of the Roman Empire.

Modern views of the Middle Ages

During the nineteenth century, historians still clung to this idea of the “Dark Ages”. But by the twentieth century, some historians began to argue that the Dark Ages weren’t really that dark for too long. By the mid-twentieth century, more and more historians, scholars, and journalists argued that there were no Dark Ages at all. Yet, the term has not disappeared. English Heritage is an organization the British government established in the 1980s to manage historic properties in the UK. In 2016 they published a history of Tintagel Castle, an English ruin from the Middle Ages. In their history, the authors repeatedly referenced the “Dark Ages of Britain.” They defined the time period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the year of the Norman Conquest (c. 400-1066 CE).

The use of “Dark Age” to describe Tintagel fanned the flames of the debate. Some writers and historians criticized the use of “Dark Ages” as outdated and wrong. But others came to the defense of English Heritage. The historian Alban Gautier wrote that “Dark Ages” can be a useful term. He argued that, despite the debate about the term, historians should continue to use it, but only under two conditions: “The first is to limit the use of ‘Dark Ages’ to those two centuries only [c. 410-610 CE]…The other condition is not to understand the phrase in a negative way. If we talk of ‘Dark Ages’, we must be clear that it is a purely descriptive label, by which we refer to a very poorly documented period. For historians who work primarily from texts, those centuries are indeed, and are most likely to remain, ‘lost centuries.’” In other words, the Dark Ages weren’t dark because they were bad, but because our knowledge of them is limited.

The debate continues

So why does this debate still rage? Scholars in every era have different motives. Renaissance scholars wanted to periodize history and shape how future generations would remember them. They hoped to be remembered as the people who brought forth a “rebirth” of the classical world. They wrote about Greco-Roman society as the bright light of art, literature, and culture. By combining the knowledge of the Greco-Roman world with Christianity, they believed they could create a brighter future. By contrast, Enlightenment scholars tended to be anti-Catholic. The Enlightenment celebrated reason and science, and many authors were skeptical of organized religion. Edward Gibbon blamed the fall of Rome on the Catholic church.

Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars like Petrarch and Gibbon were influential. Because of this, later nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars often accepted their arguments and continued to romanticize the Romans and Greeks. Many modern scholars continued to portray the Middle Ages as unrefined and violent, without any cultural achievements. Today, the debate continues, but more and more scholars are starting to argue that the past wasn’t so simple. They argue that, if there was a period that deserves the “Dark Ages” label, it was pretty short, and it was not truly “dark”—we just don’t have enough historical sources to light the way.

What do you think? Was there ever a “dark age” of medieval history? Or do you think that the older Roman networks and communities were simply changing into something new during the Middle Ages?

1 The Middle Ages was a period in Europe from the fall of Rome in the fifth century to the beginning of the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

2 Renaissance humanism was a movement that focused on studying classical authors to improve humanity. Some rejected the focus on Christianity and religion during the medieval period while others incorporated aspects of Christianity into their classical studies.

3 You’ll learn more about the Enlightenment later. For now, just know that it was an intellectual movement from the seventeenth to nineteenth century that emerged from the ideas of the Renaissance.