Were There Dark Ages?
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The point I try to make when I teach this stuff is not that there was no period of decline in Christian Western Europe after the fall of the Western empire. That's a given. But the culture of the Greeks and Romans also had a home in places like Morocco, Afghanistan and Egypt. Those places were doing great during the "Dark Ages" and were just as much the inheritors of the Classical world as, say, Germany and Ireland.
In other words: fixating on a Dark Age that only befell something like 1/4 of the zone of Greco-Roman influence gives a misleading impression because it imposes much more modern geographic boundaries. Many of those "lost" classical texts rediscovered in the Renaissance were still readily available in places like Isfahan and Shiraz. Likewise with population: I would wager that, taking a century-level view, the regions encompassed by Alexander's empire increased steadily in urbanization and GDP from his time to that of the Mongols.
"Every other historical age name is instantly understood by everyone to refer to both a time and a place. [..] let’s just agree to call it the Western European Dark Ages, as long as we can also agree it existed and was bad."
Importance is I guess in the eye of the beholder, but it's pretty hard to argue that Christian Western Europe isn't a particularly large part of the Greco-Roman world.
The argument was that it wasn't particularly large or important.
It's pretty easy to make this argument: In terms of the known world during Greco-Roman times, most of the known world was to the South and East. Persia and Carthage were major empires, and writings from those parts and beyond were known in Rome. Compare that to Western Europe: The Romans barely knew that Britain existed before Julius, and it was so unimportant that they abandoned it. Gaul was geographically a large part of the empire, true, but wasn't particularly important. Note that land grants to legionaries were given in Romania, because Rome wanted to control that area rather than in Gaul.
Counter-factual histories are endless of course, but it can be worthwhile thinking about them occasionally. We live in a world where the Mongols stopped before Vienna (at least partly because they didn't see anything rich enough in Europe to bother with). If they hadn't stopped, or if they hadn't destroyed the Islamic world and inland trading empires like they did it is entirely possible that Western Europe would still be considered a backwater.
> Note that land grants to legionaries were given in Romania, because Rome wanted to control that area rather than in Gaul.
This isn't really true at all. By the time Trajan conquered Dacia (and distributed land to his veterans there) Gaul was a settled, integrated part of the empire.
As a layperson, I've always had the impression you counter, i.e. that there was great progress in classical times, and it didn't accelerate again until the Renaissance.
OTOH I know of one fundamental development made elsewhere during the W.E. Dark Ages: algebra.
A fun list and it would be interesting to see what else it might include. Technological innovation might be an interesting counterpoint to arguments based on population or GDP. I might write a blog post about it...
Unfortumately, there's no objective metric to quantify the importance of each development, which is a problem for charting it, but this kind of thing has been attempted for the development of life on earth, and of technology, based on complexity.
e.g. Kurzweil's singularity stuff. I think his charts are quite well argued for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PPTCountdowntoSingularity...
It's also been back-extrapolated to estimate the genesis of life (which pre-dates earth, they find): https://phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html
Moore's Law has a similar chart, but it's easy to quantify in FLOPS or other computation units, so doesn't really help here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moore%27s_Law_over_120_Ye...
See for example: http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/all-curves-wit...
I'd caution that these graphs are completely useless for talking about a technological singularity though, and - even worse - they make it seem like "something must happen" because that line is so obviously "almost vertical". This simply isn't the case, and - importantly - is almost the opposite to the argument for a singularity.
I agree that GDP and other outcomes are another approach - and perhaps more accurate and more easily measured. GP suggested tech innovation might be an "interesting counterpoint" to conventional population/GDP approaches.
Innovation from China too... though I have the impression the government managed to lock-down dangerous (to the government) innovations, like gunpowder and flight, so I think progress would have slowed there, too.
I'm not aware of any particular efforts to suppress or restrict it beyond the usual Chinese restrictions on weapons. Wikipedia says a (non-central-government) militia official demonstrated a particularly effective form, and that there was later a restriction on trade of sulfur and saltpeter, but that appears more to build up their own stocks.
flight
Err.. they had manned kites if that was what you mean? Marco Polo say to foretell whether a ship should sail, a man would be strapped to a kite having a rectangular grid framework and the subsequent flight pattern used to divine the outlook[1]. That does seem to have been particularly restricted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Man-carr...
Unclear how one would measure this, but assuming one could...
One would definitely expect some kind of accelerating rate of change: it would be very rare for innovations to be lost completely, and fairly common for one old piece of innovation to be waiting on a new innovation to unlock a subsequent change.
Assuming a constant rate of "raw innovation" would give an accelerating rate just by combining new innovations with existing technology.
There is evidence of a medeival decline, even in those areas, although obviously not as bad.
In "Why The West Rules, For Now", Ian Morris defines "The West" very broadly, and definately includes everything you are talking about. He then comes up with various metrics which are not averages, but which focus the most successful part of the region (e.g. population of the biggest city).
Not surprisingly, the most successful parts of the west by his reckoning, were in the Islamic world during the middle ages. But even then his overall metric shows a medeival dip for the west, which his "east" (aka China) did does not see.
How is that the New York art scene? It’s equivalent to “privatize profits, socialize losses”. You’re saying when The West succeeds it’s because of its Westiness, and when The East succeeds it’s because it was having a Westy period.
This data would surprise me too, but the author is fairly well credentialed and has done reasonable work at estimating this kind of thing before. He is one of the authors of https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/cambridge-economi...
His work on city size seems to be in this PDF, pages 109-117: http://www.ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf
I'm far from an expert on this. The only thing I noted was that his estimate of 125K in 1000CE Baghdad is lower than I expected. He argues it may actually have been lower given the documented size, and he notes the 500K-700K estimates for Baghdad imply a much higher density to anywhere else at that time.
I'd note that I don't see the OP's point (that population declined in the Muslim cities during this period) reflected in the numbers I'm seeing in this document. That is mostly because it isn't clear about the whole area population as opposed to the largest cities.
More specifically answering the historical question, the Church was just as strong in the Eastern Roman Empire as in the fallen West, so its presence does not really distinguish the one (lasted until 1453) from the other (Dark Age).
Or, even if nominally the same Church, were their attitudes about science the same?
But it's not just about outright opposition, I think. During that period, didn't Islamic civilization generally support science more than Christian civilization did?
This book explains quite well how Western European civilization during Dark Ages was sucking all kinds of inventions and improving them slowly in order to adapt itself in hostile conditions of Northern Europe.
https://www.amazon.com/Cathedral-Forge-Waterwheel-Technology...
Also, it's about religion, not politics.
In this explanation, the Church was merely one player, and it wasn't the religious nature in itself which led to the lack of progress. Instead, it was the inward-looking nature of all of Western Europe which meant all players were more interested in gaining influence within that closed sphere rather than growth (Perhaps the reign of Charlemagne is an exception here).
There are numerous examples of this kind of behavior: the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 is probably outside the period of time usually classed as the "dark ages" but is still a good example of this behavior.
I'm pretty much in the Hawking/Dawkins camp regarding religion, I must admit.
Edit: Quoting Hawking, from the Wikipedia article on the conflict thesis: "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works." That was obvious to me when I was 12.
Except if you look at actual history of science and religion, it's way far from being that simple. Religions change, sometimes drastically, and are completely capable of overthrowing and even completely abolishing (see move from Catholicism to Protestantism) the authority structure. And science has plenty of authority issues, to the point where researches note that in some areas significant progress is made only when "old school" dies out and is replaced by "new school" - not because of reason, but because of physical limits of human existence. And some areas of science are very much influenced by political and other issues that have little to do with observation and reason.
So in practice both work in ways much more complicated than that.
define:politicize
cause (an activity or event) to become political in character.
But good luck with that theory anyway!
But anyway, de gustibus non disputandum est :)
The loss of most of the Eastern Roman Empire and the defeat of the Persian Empire by a religious-based empire at around the same time indicates this "exception" may not be quite as universal as you seem to believe.
I'm greatly amused, by the way, that modern fundamentalist Christians and Muslims agree that Jesus will return for Armageddon. And just disagree about whose side he'll be on.
For an individual of low birth serfdom seems preferable to slavery, however it must be more difficult to organise a 'big' economy on top of that
The western Roman empire needed grain from North Africa and the Middle East - it needed ships to transport all that and would pay with silver from Spanish mines - you need a slave regime to maintain all that. A system with more independent actors that achieves the same level of trade / cultural exchange is inherently more complex (needs more complex system of laws, finances, everything) , but is in turn more scalable.
I think Europe 'won' because it was a distributed system. A country/ruler can go bad, but as a whole connected by trade and cultural ties it kept going further (each ruler had to keep up if not to be swallowed by the neighbours) . However big unified realms like China or Russia all rise and fall as one entity - and it takes longer to recover from a big crisis.
Standards of living declined dramatically, war and violence were more widespread. Most people would call that darker.
Ctrl-F "Consta..."
No offense, but this dude should stop posting anything history-related. Historical memes aren't history.
"Every other historical age name is instantly understood by everyone to refer to both a time and a place. [..] let’s just agree to call it the Western European Dark Ages, as long as we can also agree it existed and was bad."
Talking about the Dark Ages and failing to mention the Eastern Roman Empire is like talking about the Cold War and failing to mention the USA.
It means that the article is a kaleidoscope of mismatched, unconnected memes instead of something holistic and grounded in reality.
Some reality-based facts:
a) The western part of the Roman Empire collapsed a few centuries prior to the fifth century.
b) The southern shore of the Mediterranean and the Middle East collapsed during the Muslim invasions. (And never recovered, even to this day.)
c) The eastern part of the Roman Empire only started collapsing during the 13th century, give or take.
d) The flow of civilization from the eastern part to the western parts of the Roman Empire was blocked by Muslim piracy. (There is no overland route between Italy and Greece.)
e) The German-speaking parts of Europe were never any part of any Roman Empire, and saw no collapse. (Only improvement.)
f) Spain has its own history and its own historical cycles.
So yes, if you're goal is an exclusively Christian Western Europe focused view of history, the term is fine. If that isn't your stated goal, why use it over Early Middle Age?
People don't know a ton about the Dark Ages either, but "Rome collapsed leading to the Dark Ages," and "The Discovery of America/the Renisance/The Scientific Revolution led us out of the Dark Ages" are often things you will have heard. And given the context you can hear them, it's not clearly referring to Western Christian Europe.
Calling them the Early Middle Ages gets rid of the false narrative of later events ending the Dark Ages, and it doesn't accidentally imply nothing happened anywhere. It's not going to end ignorance, just remove confusion. What reason is there to keep calling it the Dark Ages?
As for the isolated demand for rigor, I would not expect most people to know anything about the examples given. If I were talking about them, I would immediately add a qualifier explaining what they are. The Dark Ages are a more common term, being widely used outside of history.
Yes, some folks in US and Europe think "history" and "Western European history" is the same thing, at least until America was "discovered". But renaming Dark Ages is not going to change this, only better education is going to change it.
An apt mathematical comparison is infinity. Most people have heard of it, but their idea of what it is and why it's important is lacking. Some people still think about it and talk about it though. Being wrong about infinity doesn't run into the same problems as the Dark Ages though, just stoner philosophy and crackpot theories of perpetual motion.
Many, if not most, of the names we use to describe things are based entirely on limited views of history. Some examples are given in the linked story.