HFM 057 –
Dark Ages in History, Part 3:
Europe’s Collapse in 476 AD – And its Rise
That Happened Much Sooner than the 1500s
Michael Rank: This is the History in Five Minutes Podcast, the #1 podcast for learning
about anything in history in no time at all! I’m your host, Michael Rank.
Today’s topic is Dark Ages in History, Part 3: Europe’s Collapse in 476 AD – And its Rise that
Happened Much Sooner Than the 1500’s.
Today, we’re wrapping up on our three-part series on different Dark Ages in history. Two
weeks ago, we talked about the Bronze Age Collapse and last week when the Dark Ages
happened in England.
Today, we’ll talk about one that most people think of when they hear the term Dark Ages
which is Europe’s collapse after the fall of Rome in the West. We’ll talk about how it
happened, what society was like during this time, and how and when it ended. The period
known as the Dark Ages is generally used these days to refer to the early Middle Ages
period from around 500 to 1000 AD when Western Europe underwent a long period of
political fragmentation, external invasion, internal conflict, and a decline in trade, education,
and infrastructure. This is what scholars use if I talk about the Dark Ages. A lot of people
still use this term to refer to basically up to the Renaissance in the 1400’s but historians
have mostly rejected this concept.
So how did the Dark Ages happen? Well, of course, Rome collapsed but the traditional view
that was spread in the 19th century and the 18th century was to blame religion for the
collapse of the empire. This view has its basis in the anti-Catholic bias of the Protestant
tradition and Edward Gibbon says as much in the 1700’s in his Magnum Opus, The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire. He looked back at the glories of the Roman Empire and
despite of the violence, brutality, and lack of intellectual activity during the Middle Ages
which he thinks characterized the post-collapse period. The reason he calls it dark was for
its lack of light of civilization and intellectualism which he writes had been replaced by
feudalism and religious dominance and superstitions and witch burnings and all those
things.
The problem with this theory is that the eastern half of the Roman Empire was strong and
stable when the western half collapsed. It actually re-conquered large parts of the Western
Roman Empire in the 600’s and 700’s and wasn’t even conquered until the 1500’s. Of
course, this eastern part became known as the Byzantine Empire. The reason for the
collapse of Rome and the beginning of the Dark Ages has to do more with barbarian
migrations and invasions in Rome and the collapse of its bureaucracy and military due to
stagnation and corruption. From the 400’s to the 800’s, there were waves of invasions by
various Germanic peoples, Avars, Morus, Magyars, which are today’s Hungarians and
Vikings. So for Western Europeans, survival is more important at this time than preserving
its schools or books or road systems which is why trade and education collapsed.
Scientific knowledge in the Western Roman Empire during the Dark Ages also collapsed, but
the roots of this are quite deep and are actually traced back to the Roman Empire. The
Greek Heritage in Rome and classical learning began after 200 BC when there was a lot of
contact between Greek scholars and the bilingual Roman upper class, but bilingualism of
HFM 057 –
Dark Ages in History, Part 3:
Europe’s Collapse in 476 AD – And its Rise
That Happened Much Sooner than the 1500s
Greek and Latin and productive scholarship actually started declining after 180 AD when the
Roman Empire entered the 3rd century crisis when there were lots of emperors who were
rising and falling and a lot of internal political turmoil. This cause of disruption to
educational infrastructure and the division of the empire into two caused knowledge of
Greek to decline in the west. As a result a lot of classical texts on philosophy, science, and
logic and mathematics couldn’t be read by people who only knew Latin.
With the barbarian onslaught in the 400 to 500’s, the Western Empire was overrun by
illiterate Germanic and Northern barbarians which completely destroyed the empyreal
infrastructure. So the classical scientific tradition fell into the hands of Muslims as they
expanded out of Arabia and across North Africa up into Spain by the 700’s, Muslim scholars
translated these classical Greek works into Arabic and some scholars further developed
them. When Western Europe recovered sufficiently, many of its intellectuals traveled to AlAndalus which was Muslim-controlled Spain in order to retrieve many of these texts and
translate them back into Latin.
So what was society like during the Dark Ages? Well, it’s not completely characterized as
being the cesspool of disease and mud-stream peasants who lived in thatched roof cottages
and had missing teeth. After all, there were plenty of those during the Roman period. Of
course, education was less good than the Roman Era but monks and scholars were still very
interested in Greek philosophy, science, and medicine which they had preserved through a
laborious process of hand-copying. These texts of course were ones that had been
translated from Greek into Latin before the Roman collapsed. These works included things
by Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Simplicius, and many more but it was not a
simple process.
Since these monks did not know Greek and had lost many of their original documents in the
first place, some have compared the long road back from the intellectual collapse of the
Western Roman Empire on learning compare it to people that after a nuclear holocaust are
trying to revive modern science when all they have is a few copies of the Encyclopedia
Britannica and a copy of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. As Tim O’Neil
describes who was a quest on our podcast many episodes ago and also talked about
misconceptions about the medieval period, scholars in the 8th or 9th century had just enough
fragments of information to know that they had barely anything at all but not enough to
begin reconstructing what had been lost. Works of Aristotle on logic were particularly
revered and it wasn’t really until this co-mingling with documents that Muslims had
preserved and translating them from Arabic back into Latin that they could really begin this
recovery process.
But society emerged from the Dark Ages much sooner than we usually think. As Daniel
Mallia has written for the History News Network, contesting the traditional interpretation of
the Renaissance, many scholars contend that the Renaissance began earlier than the 1400’s.
Some advocate the Renaissance of the 12th century when raids by Vikings and Avars ended,
Europe stabilized, literacy increased, and learning expanded. This puts a Renaissance right
in the middle of the Crusades, not really a time when most people would think there was a
vast growth of the scientific enterprise, but if we look at what scholars were doing, many
HFM 057 –
Dark Ages in History, Part 3:
Europe’s Collapse in 476 AD – And its Rise
That Happened Much Sooner than the 1500s
historians argue that they were really laying the foundation for the scientific enterprise of
Western Civilization in the centuries to come.
More recent scholarship has examined the Ottonian Renaissance of the Holy Roman Empire
in the 900’s and have even looked further back into the Carolingian Renaissance under the
first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, and this is in the late 8 th and early 9th centuries.
So in summation, the Dark Ages may not have been quite as dark as we thought. When
Europe finally emerged from the Medieval centuries of chaos and invasion, it was the
churchmen who sought out books by Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, and Ptolemy and kickstarted a revival of learning and inquiry that helped lead to the scientific method and the
rise of the west. There were interesting hiccups along the way with different scientific fields
of inquiry like alchemy which we talked about a few episodes ago, but really it’s this period
that we have to thank for the level of science that does exist now in the 21st century. So we
have an interesting debt to pay to the Dark Ages for where we are today.
For more history like this that is offbeat, obscure, but most of all not boring, come check out
my website at www.michaelrank.net. There, you can find podcasts and blog posts like this.
I’ll even throw in a free history Ebook that you can grab right now at
www.michaelrank.net\freebook. Have a good day!