RomanArmyTalk

I realise that historians today normally don't consider the Early Middle Ages as being "dark," or a time of ignorance and superstition. But I am interested in when this idea was popular, and which historians were strong proponents of it. Through JSTOR I found Mommsen's essay "Petrarch's Conception of the Dark Ages," but does anyone else have any other suggestions? Do you know who considered these times to be the "Dark Ages" and when this thinking was popular?

I think it is still a useful phrase, as long as it is understood to refer to different time periods in different areas.

Pretty much anything written before about 1980 used the 'Dark Ages' as a term that was generally understood. 'Late Antiquity' became increasingly popular from the 1960s onwards. Pesonally I think the reasoning behind dropping the Dark Ages as a useful bit of shorthand are rather specious.

The fall of civil administration and the halting of trade would a disaster today. I still think the term dark age is appropriate. There is a new book on the fall of the Bronze Age, called "1177 BC; the Year Civilization Collapsed" that uses the phrase 'dark age' to describe the disaster.

I think there is definitely some misundrestanding in the term. The Dark Ages still experienced Technological advancement, and the Successor states upheld the Roman Civil and Military system through things like the Lex Gundobada and the Lex Vesigotorum. The Merovingians, Ostrogoths, Vesigoths, etc. all used Roman military and civil systems, the problem was that the Romans came back up through North Africa and Italy, destryoying the infrastructure.

The "Dark Ages" is a very useful heuristic device when dealing with the areas of the Western former empire. I think what happened was there were a revisions and a few people went overboard with it as they are wont to do. Now what tends to happen is whenever one throws the term around outside academia one meets this smug idiotic "oh we don't think of it like that anymore..." I don't know who "we" is meant to be in this situation but it is most certainly still used. It's like the whole BUT WHO IS A CELT term the archaeologists have started. Well, linguistics nicked that whole field in the bud when...a century ago? more?

Keep reading Mommsen. I know his work is very old and updated but in terms of simply citing documentary evidence he remains useful and neat. Its also very important for the sake of intellectual history to read old books now and then and not just the more up to date one. Toynbee may tell us little of anything about Greece nowadays but its useful for telling us what people in those days thought they knew and felt about Greece, if that makes sense.

For more up to date work just grab anything by Chris Wickham. He's a medievalist rather than a Classicist by training and has an admirably broad sweep, rather rooted in material culture. He's famous for his work on Italy but he wrote a wonderful popular book "The Inheritance of Rome" which even manages to discuss things like the Querolus. Heavily recommended and I think he goes on even to cite changes in interpretations over the years.

Quote:I think there is definitely some misundrestanding in the term. The Dark Ages still experienced Technological advancement, and the Successor states upheld the Roman Civil and Military system through things like the Lex Gundobada and the Lex Vesigotorum. The Merovingians, Ostrogoths, Vesigoths, etc. all used Roman military and civil systems, the problem was that the Romans came back up through North Africa and Italy, destryoying the infrastructure.

Military not for sure.

I don't know from what novel you created this Fantasy tale but the Merovingian Military System, the Langobard Military System, the Anglo-Saxon military System, the Burgundian, Visigoth, Bavarian and Turingian Miliatry systems were absolutely another world compared to the Roman Military system, different social hierarchy, different system of economic and social classes, different moral and cultural values, different political structure, different warfare organization, different army composition in social terms and in military terms, it was another world my dear boy ....

No it really wasn't. It slowly devolved back into a militia system (more or less), but if you read the Lex Gundobada, or Lex Euriacum (or is it Euriacensis?) their laws regarding Civil and Military organization are almost the same. The differences lie in some traditions carried over in each system, as well as terms established by a feodus (e.g. 1/3 sortes allotment in Roman law and 2/3 sortes allotment in Burgundian).

The decline and fall of the Dark Ages (as a term of historical reference) is quite a fascinating phenomenon, although perhaps not as complete as some people believe. Articles like this one might lay into a variety of straw men, deriding 'pseudo-history' in a pretty pseudo-historical way, but a scan through Google Books reveals quite a few recent titles of varying degrees of academic worth that still use the term, albeit often in 'scare quotes'...

I believe earlier writers - Gibbon in the 18th century, Burkhardt in the 19th - tended to use the term to describe the entire period between the fall of Rome in the west and the renaissance. By the mid 19th century, it had settled into its more familiar meaning, describing the immediate post-Roman centuries in western Europe specifically.

As such, it's still quite useful. Even leaving aside the negative associations of 'darkness', and considering the more nuanced appraisal of the era provided by recent archaeology, this is still a pretty obscure period in european history, at least from our perspective. The entire literary output of the British Isles between AD400 and 700 appears to have amounted to less than that of a single year at the height of the Roman empire. Perhaps less than that of a single day during the late republic.

Literature isn't everything (although it leaves us a bit clueless about what might have been going on), but material culture also sees a decline. The principia of the legion fort of York, for example, still had paved floors and functioning heating c.AD400, but within a hundred years had apparently been turned into a pigpen, a slaughterhouse and an indoor cemetery. It would take a considerably lateral approach to value judgements not to see this as a decline in local living standards.

I was looking through Ward-Perkins's The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation recently. He gives some interesting pros and cons to the use of 'dark ages', 'early medieval' and 'late antiquity' as descriptors. While it's true, he says, that both 'dark age' and 'medieval' have unfortunate connotations today (nobody in a popular movie has yet threatened to 'get late antique' on anybody's '@ss'), the positive emphasis of 'late antiquity' tends to focus too strongly on religious and spiritual developments, and neglect the social and cultural.

This in turn, W-P suggests, is part of a wider desire to rid history of notions of crisis, violence, and decline. Admirable as such a desire may be in relation to the present day, it threatens to diminish our ability to understand the violence of the past, and to see it in context. By extension, it replaces one set of mistaken images (hairy barbarians trashing the glory of Rome) with another (evil Roman proto-nazi oppressors overcome by the freedom-loving ancestors of the modern world)...

(It might be worth mentioning, of course, that plenty of Romans believed themselves to be living in a 'dark age' - either comparing their times with the great days of their distant ancestors, or, like Cassius Dio, claiming that our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.... ;-) )

In the last few days, I noticed this topic of Roman military system surviving the fall of Empire and continuing on, little changed, surfacing a few times. I am interested in a good discussion about it, but I see neither side putting up any real evidence. I don't know much about this topic, but cultures that contributed to the fall of Empire and settled on its former territory were highly militarized cultures with a warrior ethos and a warrior class. Rome had soldiers, legiones, auxiliaries, new kingdoms had a warrior class of "nobles". Of course some of them soon went to warrior class plus levy/militia system because its better for cultures not in a great migration anymore. But do we have any evidence that similarities were any more than just logical similarities of two cultures facing similar situations and problems? Do we have evidence for a true copy/paste of something?

Quote:No it really wasn't. It slowly devolved back into a militia system (more or less), but if you read the Lex Gundobada, or Lex Euriacum (or is it Euriacensis?) their laws regarding Civil and Military organization are almost the same. The differences lie in some traditions carried over in each system, as well as terms established by a feodus (e.g. 1/3 sortes allotment in Roman law and 2/3 sortes allotment in Burgundian).

It was, at the point that you could live under Merovingian rule and preserving your Roman law.

The Germanic Law was based on other principles and other values, in the Langobardic Kingdom of Italy if you was a Langobard, that is, if you could enumerate your last ten ancestors on father line, you was an Arimannus, that is, a free man, if not, you was a Roman but you was not a free man, you had your law but you couldn't carry weapons and serve in the army, even if this situation changed after 100 years, it's a clear sign of the totally new conditions and of the totally new cultural atmosphere of the new Kingdoms, because exactly the same can be said for the Merovingian Kingdom and the other Germanic Kingdoms.

What happened in Britain it was the total deletion of any trace of the Roman state.

If you think that the Roman State survived into the Germanic Kingdoms of the VI and VII centuries you are dreaming! If you think that any trace of Roman Military organization survived in the Early Middle Age your dream may be called a hallucination, exchanging the birth of the Feudal Europe with the prosecution of the Roman Military professional Army it is really Science Fiction, and again I cannot follow you on this way, it's too much for me..

Well, at this point, good sleep my dear! :wink:

Thanks – these are excellent replies.

It is interesting how there seems to be ebbs and flows in the use of such historical concepts as the Dark Ages. I remember in college in the early 1990s a professor suggested to us students not to use the phrase at all because all of the connotations it brings.

Jass – yes, I’m a fan of Chris Wickham. I wrote a review for The Inheritance of Rome here on RAT a couple of years ago. I should look for some more by him.

Nathan – Ward-Perkins looks right up my alley. I need to get his book and see what he has to say. I should try Burkhardt, too, because I’m interested in how older historians viewed the era.

I understand how changes in religion, society, literature or material culture can be used to illustrate the Dark Ages. But how does the retention (or abandonment) of the Roman military system by the successor states fit into this?

There are of course more 'dark ages' than just the one in western Europe after the Roman period. We also know a 'Greek dark age' after the Mycenean period (c.700-1100), or the 'Byzantine dark age' (8th-9th century).

Wikipedia also mentions:
Dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450–1863)
Dark ages of Laos (c. 1707–1893)

How about this one?
Digital dark age, a future time when it might not be possible to read historical digital documents

The digital dark age can be circumvented, once we start storing things on graphene chips and begin making the transition to quantum tunneling computers. Our modern understanding of science and the access of information by more or less anyone in the 1st world will help prevent that.

Even then, I'm pretty sure some nerd will have an old Windows 95 PC or something that will be able to access said Data, which we could manually copy and transfer.

Last week my father (an accountant) handed me some 5.25" discs and wanted me to recover the files for him. Even if I found a computer with that type of floppy drive I still needed a MS-DOS operating system and a program that could convert Wordstar docs and Multiplan spreadsheets. These kinds of problems are only going to get worse over the next few decades.

Luckily I copied all of his 5.25" files onto a hard disk twenty years ago and kept transferring that folder onto each new computer he bought, so all I really needed was a program to convert the old files into MS-Word and MS-Excel.

Yes the good thing about digitization is that you can copy digitized data without much effort and store it in multiples across the globe.
During the middle ages you needed a monastery with a lot of scribes a lot of time and space to achieve what good university digital librarys and google books can do with little effort today.