Dark Ages
Description
From the Wikipedia:
"The Early Middle Ages or Middle Ages in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, characterizing it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.
The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity. The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records). The phrase "Dark Age" itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 when he referred to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness in Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. This became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.
As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the "Dark Ages" appellation to the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century), and now scholars also reject its usage in this period. The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use, typically in popular culture which often mischaracterises the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography))
Status
Modern scholarly use, from the Wikipedia:
"The term was widely used by 19th-century historians. In 1860, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt delineated the contrast between the medieval 'dark ages' and the more enlightened Renaissance, which had revived the cultural and intellectual achievements of antiquity.[36] The earliest entry for a capitalized "Dark Ages" in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a reference in Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England in 1857, who wrote: "During these, which are rightly called the Dark Ages, the clergy were supreme." The OED in 1894 defined an uncapitalised "dark ages" as "a term sometimes applied to the period of the Middle Ages to mark the intellectual darkness characteristic of the time".
However, the early 20th century saw a radical re-evaluation of the Middle Ages, which called into question the terminology of darkness, or at least its more pejorative use. In 1977, the historian Denys Hay spoke ironically of "the lively centuries which we call dark". More forcefully, a book about the history of German literature published in 2007 describes "the dark ages" as "a popular if uninformed manner of speaking".
Most modern historians do not use the term "dark ages" and prefer terms such as Early Middle Ages. However, when used by some historians today, the term "Dark Ages" is meant to describe the economic, political and cultural problems of the era.[40][41] For others, the term Dark Ages is intended to be neutral, expressing the idea that the events of the period seem 'dark' to us because of the paucity of the historical record.[10] For example, Robert Sallares, commenting on the lack of sources to establish whether the plague pandemic of 541 to 750 reached Northern Europe, opines that "the epithet Dark Ages is surely still an appropriate description of this period". The term is also used in this sense (often in the singular) to reference the Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent Greek Dark Ages, the brief Parthian Dark Age (1st century BC), the dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450–1863 AD), and also a hypothetical Digital Dark Age which would ensue if the electronic documents produced in the current period were to become unreadable at some point in the future. Some Byzantinists have used the term Byzantine Dark Ages to refer to the period from the earliest Muslim conquests to about 800, because there are no extant historical texts in Greek from the period, and thus the history of the Byzantine Empire and its territories that were conquered by the Muslims is poorly understood and must be reconstructed from other contemporaneous sources, such as religious texts. The term "dark age" is not restricted to the discipline of history. Since the archaeological evidence for some periods is abundant and for others scanty, there are also archaeological dark ages.
Since the Late Middle Ages significantly overlap with the Renaissance, the term 'Dark Ages' became restricted to distinct times and places in medieval Europe. Thus the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain, at the height of the Saxon invasions, have been called "the darkest of the Dark Ages",[49] in view of the societal collapse of the period and the consequent lack of historical records. Further south and east, the same was true in the former Roman province of Dacia, where history after the Roman withdrawal went unrecorded for centuries as Slavs, Avars, Bulgars, and others struggled for supremacy in the Danube basin, and events there are still disputed. However, at this time the Abbasid Caliphate is often considered to have experienced its Golden Age rather than Dark Age; consequently, usage of the term must also specify a geography. While Petrarch's concept of a Dark Age corresponded to a mostly Christian period following pre-Christian Rome, today the term mainly applies to the cultures and periods in Europe that were least Christianized, and thus most sparsely covered by chronicles and other contemporary sources, at the time mostly written by Catholic clergy.
However, from the later 20th century onward, other historians became critical even of this nonjudgmental use of the term for two main reasons. Firstly, it is questionable whether it is ever possible to use the term in a neutral way: scholars may intend it, but ordinary readers may not understand it so. Secondly, 20th-century scholarship had increased understanding of the history and culture of the period,[50] to such an extent that it is no longer really 'dark' to us.[10] To avoid the value judgment implied by the expression, many historians now avoid it altogether.[51][52] It was occasionally used up to the 1990s by historians of early medieval Britain, for example in the title of the 1991 book by Ann Williams, Alfred Smyth and D. P. Kirby, A Biographical Dictionary of Dark Age Britain, England, Scotland and Wales, c.500–c.1050, and in the comment by Richard Abels in 1998 that the greatness of Alfred the Great "was the greatness of a Dark Age king".[54] In 2020, John Blair, Stephen Rippon and Christopher Smart observed that: "The days when archaeologists and historians referred to the fifth to the tenth centuries as the 'Dark Ages' are long gone, and the material culture produced during that period demonstrates a high degree of sophistication."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography))
Characteristics
The Nature of Dark Ages
Sing Chew:
"We need to abstract the several processes that depict a Dark Age in order to have a clearer understanding of the various factors that precipitate system crisis and transformation. Such an abstraction starts by delineating the connections between the natural system and the social system. Barriers to the reproduction of the world system are formed when human actions change the ecology. The degradative aspects of human activity are conditioned by social organizational factors (urbanization, accumulation, wars, technological innovations, and population). Natural disturbances such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions also condition the reproduction and evolution of the world system.
Dark Ages are rare. Between 3000 BC and AD 1000 there have been indications of only two such phases: 2200 to 1700 BC and 1200 to 700 BC (considered as one phase in terms of the crisis of the Bronze Age), and AD 300/400 to 800/900. Several scholars have discussed conditions during Dark Ages, highlighting economic, political and social disorder. Historical records and archaeological evidence indicate population losses, a flattening of the social hierarchy, declines in living standards and devolution of sociopolitical organization. Dark Ages show developmental reversals, the decline or loss of certain material skills, deurbanization and migration, decay in the cultural aspects of life, and trading contractions.
Crisis conditions extend to peripheral parts of the world system as a consequence of political and economic relations with the core countries. However, the impacts of Dark Ages do not extend necessarily and evenly across geo-spatial boundaries. They depend on regional interactions and the level of intensity of social and natural system connections. The state of crisis and/or transition appears to have its greatest impact on core regions of the world system. This is related to the fact that it is in the core where the social and natural system relations are at their highest levels. The connections the core has with the periphery via economic and political processes assure that at least some (if not all) crisis conditions are felt there. Besides these devastating ecological outcomes, climate changes are also associated with Dark Ages.
Climate changes and natural calamities generate challenges to social system reproduction. Higher than normal temperatures can generate salinization problems for agricultural cultivation, especially in areas where irrigation is extensively used, and hence lower harvest yields. The aridity that commonly occurs with higher temperatures has often generated problems for pastoral herds and lead to nomadic migrations, thus causing further pressures on core centers. Dark Ages also provide opportunities for the resolution of contradictions that inhibit the reproduction of the world system, leading to processes of system reorganization and transition. Ecological limits become also the limits of the socioeconomic processes of the world system, and the interplay between ecological limits and the dynamics of the social system define the historical tendencies of the human enterprise. To this extent, Dark Ages or system crises also offer opportunities for two parties: the natural system and the periphery. For the natural system, Dark Ages should be appreciated as periods for the restoration of the ecological balance that has been disrupted by human exploitation. The downscaling of socioeconomic processes provides the opportunity for Nature to recover. For the periphery, Dark Ages enable some areas to re-articulate themselves within the hierarchical matrix of the zonal production processes of the world system. This opportunity is only open during system crisis periods, and has been exploited by some through the course of world history."
(https://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/E6-94-12.pdf)
Duration of Dark Ages
Sing Chew:
"Dark Ages depict very specific moments in world history when system reproduction is in a state of crisis and/or transition. Their resolutions require an extended period of time, historically at least 500 to 900 years. Such an expanse allows the ecological balance to be restored and productive capacities to continue. Especially with resource depletion, the need arises for innovations in social organization and technology. If it is not possible for the ecological environment/balance and trade networks to be restored, new source areas have to be located and/or substitutes must be adopted. Technological innovations might also occur. These interactions underscore the different time duration needed for our understanding of the interaction of the natural environment (measured along ecological time) with political and economic activities (that are gauged along social time). In certain circumstances, resolution of a system crisis might not necessarily lead to a system transition. Crises may be resolved because the ecological balance has been restored and past patterns may resume. If, however, these conditions are not in place, a new set of organizing principles will be engendered. In such a context, qualitative changes ensue and a system transition occurs. In this regard, perhaps what have been identified as long economic cycles or conjonctures might not reveal the long-term processes that drive the world system. Instead, we suspect that these long ecological phases might prove to be the system transition moments. What this means is that world history is not a flattened history accounting for networks of trading links and economic cycles of expansion and contraction with little or no distinguishing differences between periods, but one with ruptures through time leading to system reorganization and social evolutionary changes. Hence, Dark Ages are important moments in world history for they provide opportunities for the ecological balance to be restored, political and economic opportunities for some peripheral groups to advance up the zonal power matrix, and for reconfiguration of the hierarchical division of political economic. The rarity of such occurrences in the last five thousand years suggests the resiliency of the ecological landscape to human assault, and underscores the different time duration for our understanding of the interaction between Culture and the natural environment."
(https://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/E6-94-12.pdf)
Discussion
Sing C. Chew:
"There have been at least two occurrences of phases of socioeconomic and political crises known as Dark Ages. It is commonly understood that Dark Ages are times when human evolutionary transformations have been stymied, and indicators of growth reflect reversals. Dark Ages are also periods of environmental stress, and given reduced human activities, phases of ecological restoration as well. Because Dark Ages are recurring (though not necessarily cyclical) phenomenon, they can reveal the dynamics of system reproduction. These are periods of opportunity for ecological restoration, societal learning, and political power shifts.
We need to abstract the several processes that depict a Dark Age in order to have a clearer understanding of the various factors that precipitate system crisis and transformation. Such an abstraction starts by delineating the connections between the natural system and the social system.
Barriers to the reproduction of the world system are formed when human actions change the ecology. The degradative aspects of human activity are conditioned by social organizational factors (urbanization, accumulation, wars, technological innovations, and population). Natural disturbances such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions also condition the reproduction and evolution of the world system.
Dark Ages are rare. Between 3000 BC and AD 1000 there have been indications of only two such phases: 2200 to 1700 BC and 1200 to 700 BC (considered as one phase in terms of the crisis of the Bronze Age), and AD 300/400 to 800/900. Several scholars have discussed conditions during Dark Ages, highlighting economic, political and social disorder. Historical records and archaeological evidence indicate population losses, a flattening of the social hierarchy, declines in living standards and devolution of sociopolitical organization. Dark Ages show developmental reversals, the decline or loss of certain material skills, deurbanization and migration, decay in the cultural aspects of life, and trading contractions.
Crisis conditions extend to peripheral parts of the world system as a consequence of political and economic relations with the core countries.
However, the impacts of Dark Ages do not extend necessarily and evenly across geo-spatial boundaries. They depend on regional interactions and the level of intensity of social and natural system connections. The state of crisis and/or transition appears to have its greatest impact on core regions of the world system. This is related to the fact that it is in the core where the social and natural system relations are at their highest levels. The connections the core has with the periphery via economic and political processes assure that at least some (if not all) crisis conditions are felt there.
Besides these devastating ecological outcomes, climate changes are also associated with Dark Ages. Climate changes and natural calamities generate challenges to social system reproduction. Higher than normal temperatures can generate salinization problems for agricultural cultivation, especially in areas where irrigation is extensively used, and hence lower harvest yields. The aridity that commonly occurs with higher temperatures has often generated problems for pastoral herds and lead to nomadic migrations, thus causing further pressures on core centers. Dark Ages also provide opportunities for the resolution of contradictions that inhibit the reproduction of the world system, leading to processes of system reorganization and transition. Ecological limits become also the limits of the socioeconomic processes of the world system, and the interplay between ecological limits and the dynamics of the social system define the historical tendencies of the human enterprise. To this extent, Dark Ages or system crises also offer opportunities for two parties: the natural system and the periphery.
For the natural system, Dark Ages should be appreciated as periods for the restoration of the ecological balance that has been disrupted by human exploitation. The downscaling of socioeconomic processes provides the opportunity for Nature to recover. For the periphery, Dark Ages enable some areas to re-articulate themselves within the hierarchical matrix of the zonal production processes of the world system. This opportunity is only open during system crisis periods, and has been exploited by some through the course of world history."
(https://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/E6-94-12.pdf)
Duration of Dark Ages
Sing C. Chew:
"Dark Ages depict very specific moments in world history when system reproduction is in a state of crisis and/or transition. Their resolutions require an extended period of time, historically at least 500 to 900 years. Such an expanse allows the ecological balance to be restored and productive capacities to continue. Especially with resource depletion, the need arises for innovations in social organization and technology. If it is not possible for the ecological environment/balance and trade networks to be restored, new source areas have to be located and/or substitutes must be adopted. Technological innovations might also occur. These interactions underscore the different time duration needed for our understanding of the interaction of the natural environment (measured along ecological time) with political and economic activities (that are gauged along social time).
In certain circumstances, resolution of a system crisis might not necessarily lead to a system transition. Crises may be resolved because the ecological balance has been restored and past patterns may resume. If, however, these conditions are not in place, a new set of organizing principles will be engendered. In such a context, qualitative changes ensue and a system transition occurs. In this regard, perhaps what have been identified as long economic cycles or conjunctures might not reveal the long-term processes that drive the world system. Instead, we suspect that these long ecological phases might prove to be the system transition moments. What this means is that world history is not a flattened history accounting for networks of trading links and economic cycles of expansion and contraction with little or no distinguishing differences between periods, but one with ruptures through time leading to system reorganization and social evolutionary changes.
Hence, Dark Ages are important moments in world history for they provide opportunities for the ecological balance to be restored, political and economic opportunities for some peripheral groups to advance up the zonal power matrix, and for reconfiguration of the hierarchical division of political economic. The rarity of such occurrences in the last five thousand years suggests the resiliency of the ecological landscape to human assault, and underscores the different time duration for our understanding of the interaction between Culture and the natural environment."
(https://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/E6-94-12.pdf)
Examples
2200 BC
Sing C. Chew:
"A systemic crisis or Dark Age began around 2200 BC, impacting initially northwestern India, the Gulf, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and West Asia. Following this, new power centers emerged in the Near East, northern Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. This systemic crisis continued till 700 BC, depending on the region, and impacted the main areas of West Asia, Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean and central Europe (from 800 BC onwards). These periods of crisis not only were characterized by socioeconomic distress, regime transitions, and center/hinterland conflicts but were also riddled with population losses, deurbanization, resource depletion, environmental degradation and climatological changes. Negative ecological trends (such as deforestation) were observed from 2200 BC onwards. Temperature increases and aridity pulsated from 2205 BC with warm periods and dryness alternating with cool conditions and moistness. Such ecological and climatological circumstances impacted on some parts of the system, and reverberated throughout the system as the Bronze Age proceeded. Recovery returned around 700BC with social systems expanding and growing in complexity. Expansion came first in the form of colonization by the Greeks. Between 775 and 675 BC such expansion was for agricultural purposes, where the lands of Greece, which were degraded after centuries of intensive cultivation, could no longer meet the needs of the population. Poor peasants became tenant farmers (hectemores), and then swelled the cities. With the degraded environment in Greece, expansion of the system came with migration to other arenas such as Italy, Sicily, southern France, and West Asia. Growth in this case came from a colonization process that was extensive in nature, as a consequence of the ecological crisis of the Dark Age that has just ended. Following the success of the agricultural colonization strategies, a second round of outward expansion from 675 to 600 BC focused on commercial activities. With this phase, trade routes were fixed and strengthened. Other growth poles of the system were Egypt, Persia and Phoenicia. No single polity ever gained control of the Mediterranean.
The rise of Rome and the demise of Greece did not interrupt the degradation of the environment. Forests were removed in northern Africa and almost everywhere Roman rule was established. Mines were dug in Spain, with cities, roads, and production facilities established throughout the Empire. Crisis emerged again 700 years later, around AD 300/400 with patterns reminiscent of the Bronze Age decline. It was another systemic crisis, the first for the Iron Age. From what we have delineated above there are structural trends and tendencies that are ecological, socioeconomic and political that distinguish Dark Age periods from other phases. We find indicators of climate changes and ecological crises such as deforestation, soil erosion, and endangered species, correlating with distressed socioeconomic and political conditions such as declining population, trade and economic disruptions, de-urbanization, and changes of political regimes. Let us examine these changes."
(https://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/E6-94-12.pdf)
More information
- NOT related: Digital Dark Ages
Bibliography
Comments from Sing C. Chew:
Bell, Barbara. (1971). The Dark Ages in Ancient History I: The First Dark Age in Egypt. American Journal of Archaeology. Vol. 75:1-20. [Article highlights the Dark Ages in the third millennium B.C.]
Braudel, Fernand (2001). Memory and the Mediterranean. New York: Alfred Knopf. [Historical study on the Dark Ages and their impacts on the Mediterranean development.]
Carpenter, Rhys (1968). Discontinuity in Greek Civilization Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Detailed analysis of Dark Ages in Greece.]
Chew, Sing C. (2001). World Ecological Degradation : Accumulation, Urbanization, and Deforestation. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press/Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. [Global Study of Ecological Degradation with reference to Dark Ages.]
Chew, Sing C. (2006). The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press/Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. [Detailed study of Dark Ages in World History.]
Kristiansen, Kristian (1998) Europe before History Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Archaeological study of the development of Europe in relation to social and environmental conditions.]
Randsborg, Klav (1991). The First Millennium AD in Europe and the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Historical essay on the development of Europe in relation to social and environmental conditions in the first millennium.] .
Snodgrass, A. M. (1971). The Dark Age of Greece. Edinburgh: University Press. [Detailed study of Dark Ages in Greece during the second millennium.]
Weiss, H. (2000). “Beyond the Younger Drayas” Pp. 75-98 in G. Bawden and R. Reycraft (eds.) Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. [Article identifies societal collapses as a consequence of environmental changes.]