"Thousand years of darkness" represents a view of the Middle Age that was widespread among historians of the past, most famous Edward Gibbon and his: "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (1776-1789), but is seen in a
much more differentiated way today. For a recent introduction into the debate of the "fall" of Rome (in the West) see Bret Devereaux's three part series "Rome: Decline and Fall?"[1] In his conclusions at the end of the series Devereaux states:
"The ‘nitwit’ of our duel – the notion that the Middle Ages was some general collapse of ‘progress’ which delayed the course of human development – doesn’t accord with the evidence. The popular perception is that many Roman technologies were lost, but in fact these were fairly few, the most notable being Roman concrete. As noted, what is remarkable about Greek and Roman literature and learning is not how much of it was lost, but how much of it survives to the present. Moreover, the Roman economy was not the durable foundation for a lost early industrial revolution; instead it was a delicate clockwork mechanism which could, for a time, haul itself modestly – and only modestly – above pre-modern agrarian norms. When the gears broke, the clockwork stopped and it fell back down.
At the same time, ‘falling back down’ is not the only story of the Middle Ages. I cannot stress this enough, the European Middle Ages were not a stagnant time in Europe or anywhere else. Older scholars, like Rostovtzeff and Gibbon supposed that Europe only reached a Roman level of prosperity in the early modern period, perhaps in the 1500s or 1600s, reasoning from the grandeur of Roman buildings and literature. But a fair look at the economic and demographic history suggests, I think, quite clearly that the ‘crossover’ point is much earlier, well into the Middle Ages. My own rough estimate would be generally around 1100 in most places; state capacity remains lower for longer because the states of Europe were small and fragmented, but one can argue that was a good thing for their long-term development. Moreover, not everything between 476 and 1100 was just ‘recovery’ – some things were new! Speaking of my own expertise, medieval steel-making, especially at its upper end, tends to be quite a bit better than Roman steel-making. Water-mills (which the Romans had) and windmills (which they didn’t) were, by 1100 apparently far more common in Europe than they had been under the Romans.
The collapse of Roman political authority doesn’t represent any sort of clear break in anything we might call ‘Roman civilization’ [...] Latin persisted; Christianity persisted; Roman literature persisted; Roman law persisted; the Roman Empire itself persisted in the East. The claims of Frankish and Gothic kings to be heirs to the legacy of Rome was not an empty one from a cultural standpoint – if Gallo-Romans or Greek-speaking Eastern Romans could be heirs of Rome, why not Latin-speaking Franko-Romans?
At the same time, what we might call the ‘strong’ form of the ‘change and continuity’ position – that essentially nothing of value was lost as the Roman Empire crumbled in the west – doesn’t seem sustainable in light of the evidence either. [...] it is quite clear that, on the one hand, the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West represented a substantial decline in state capacity [...]
At the same time, it seems fairly clear from the evidence that the collapse of Roman connectedness took a slow economic decline and turned it into a collapse. [...] my focus is drawn to the living conditions of the people in a society. From that perspective, the fall of Rome was an unmitigated disaster, a clear (but not total) break with the economic patterns of antiquity which had enabled a measure of prosperity in the Mediterranean world."
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/28/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...