The "Dark Ages" Debate

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor
Images in popular culture often refer to Europe during the Middle Ages as a “dark” time period. Many scholars from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries would have agreed. But is the term “Dark Ages” one that most historians today would reject?

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An eerie, paneled painting. In the center, a human skeleton rides on a horse skeleton, and below them, several lay dead. In the corners, people crowd around a fountain and look over the dead.

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?

 

A painting of a woman, holding a tablet that looks similar to a notebook or book. She holds a pen-like stylus to her lips.

“Woman with wax tablets and stylus (Sappho)”. By Naples National Archaeological Museum, public domain.

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 backward. But historians do this all the time, choosing evidence that supports their claim or worldview. Over the last 500 years, historians have debated whether Europe entered a dark age after the fall of Rome in the 400s CE. They also discuss how long it lasted. Let’s look at this debate from the perspectives of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the modern period.

The Renaissance and Enlightenment view of the Middle Ages

Portrait of a young-looking person standing amongst tall branches with golden leaves hanging off of them.

Portrait of Petrarch shown with laurel leaves symbolizing ancient Rome, c. 1480 CE. By Bartolomeo Sanvito, public domain.

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, backward 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. Many probably thought, “I’m better than that.”

The Renaissance—which means “rebirth” in French— was a period of European history after the Middle Ages. Renaissance scholars sought to revitalize science and the arts. Francesco Petrarca, better 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 backward from those achievements. He was the first scholar 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. At the same time, 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 forever. 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, he felt, 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, and wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This multi-volume work was published between 1776 and 1789. In it, Gibbon blamed the rise of Christianity for the fall of Rome. He believed that, in their efforts to erase the “pagan” history of Rome, “the Catholics” 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 (circa 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 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 likely to remain, ‘lost centuries.’” In other words, the Dark Ages weren’t dark because they were bad; they were dark 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 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, while expressing skepticism of organized religion.

Later nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars often accepted the arguments of Petrarch and Gibbon. They continued to romanticize the Romans and Greeks and portrayed the Middle Ages as unrefined and violent. They ignore the cultural achievements of the period. Today, the debate continues, however, more and more scholars are arguing that the past wasn’t so simple.

Photo of remains of a stone castle on a green hillside. A long, winding staircase leads up to the castle.

Ruins of Tintagel Castle, Cornwall, England. By Robert Linsdell, CC BY 2.0.

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.

Sources

Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Joseph Ogle Robinson, 1830.

Ker, W. P. The Dark Ages. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911.

Petrarch. Africa (Volume IX), 1343.

“Tintagel Castle.” English Heritage, 2016. Accessed 5 February 2019. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/tintagel- castle/things-to-do/

Wiles, Kate. “Back to the Dark Ages.” History Today, 2016. Accessed 5 February 2019. https://www.historytoday.com/kate-wiles/back-dark-ages

Bridgette Byrd O’Connor

Bridgette Byrd O’Connor holds a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford and has taught Big History, World History, and AP U.S. Government and Politics for the past ten years at the high school level. She has also been a freelance writer and editor for the Big History Project and the Crash Course World History and U.S. History curriculums.

Image credits

Creative Commons This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0 except for the following:

Cover: Fresco by an anonymous painter depicting ‘The Triumph of Death’, Death as a skeleton rides a skeletal horse and picks off his victims. Italy. 1445. Sicily. © Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper”. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_da_Vinci_-_The_Last_Supper_high_res.jpg#/media/File:Leonardo_da_Vinci_-_The_Last_Supper_high_res.jpg

“Woman with wax tablets and stylus (Sappho)”. By Naples National Archaeological Museum, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herkulaneischer_Meister_002.jpg#/media/File:Herkulaneischer_Meister_002.jpg

Illustration from the Cantigas de Santa Maria. By G.Rosa, CC BY 3.0. https://gl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficheiro:Symphonia_Cantigas_Sta_Mar%C3%ADa_160.jpg

Portrait of Petrarch shown with laurel leaves symbolizing ancient Rome, c. 1480 CE. By Bartolomeo Sanvito, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bartolomeo_Sanvito_-_Portrait_of_Petrarch_in_the_Incipit_Letter_%E2%80%9CN%E2%80%9D_-_Google_Art_Project_CUT.jpg#/media/File:Bartolomeo_Sanvito_-_Portrait_of_Petrarch_in_the_Incipit_Letter_%E2%80%9CN%E2%80%9D_-_Google_Art_Project_CUT.jpg

Ruins of Tintagel Castle, Cornwall, England. Photo courtesy of Robert Linsdell, Wikimedia Commons. By Robert Linsdell, CC BY 2.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tintagel_Castle,_Cornwall_(461273)_(9456439117).jpg#/media/File:Tintagel_Castle,_Cornwall_(461273)_(9456439117).jpg


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