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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

"Post roman empire collapsing europe" is the textbook definition of the Middle Ages (from 476 to 1492).

Which textbook is that? 1492 is Late Renaissance at the cusp of the Early Modern age.

It's not easy to find single events or dates that define a change of historical period, that don't happen overnight and uniformly globally. The arts were indeed more advanced.

But 1492 has a number of interesting events. It's the year that Spain got unified as the first modern state, with a centralized court. That's a crucial event to get over feudalism. Coincidentally it's the same year Columbus reached the Americas, so it's an event relevant to globalization.

Erasmus, also a central figure, was ordained that year.

Most of the textbooks use the definition of middle ages to be between the fall of the western Roman empire and the one of the eastern Roman empire

Shouldn't that be post Western empire collapsing - the Eastern Empire lasted almost another thousand years?

It's weird to think that the Eastern Roman Empire only fell 39 years before Columbus discovered America. (At least, it's weird for me. I expect that the Roman Empire - even the eastern version - was a long time earlier.)

And the Russian empire is arguably a continuation of Byzantium / third Roman Empire with a Czar (Caesar) until the Russian Revolution.

The first czar was crowned in 1547 (104 years after the end of the Eastern Empire), so I'm not sure that it's a "continuation" in any real way. It may be a continuation in peoples' minds, but it's not a continuation in the way the Eastern Empire was.

The Russians would have wanted you to think so, anyway. Likewise, Fat Carl in France.

The eastern wasn’t much of an empire the last few hundred years. Its influence barely extended beyond Constantinople.

In 400 CE, the empire controlled the entire Mediterranean coast, all of modern day France, Spain, Italy, England and the entire Balkans.

In 717 CE, the Eastern Empire controlled most of modern day Turkey and some scattered enclaves in Greece and Italy.

If that's not a collapse, I don't understand the meaning of the word.

The Early Medieval period, the immediate post-collapse centuries, are also referred to as the Dark Ages, distinct from the High Medieval Period and Renaissance Period.

There's a pretty big difference between 1300AD and 600AD

For example, by 1300 you have Kings of England with substantial documentary index.

In 600 you have ongoing Anglo-Saxon settlement, the written evidence is poor, but there seem to be tens or hundreds of independent political units.

There are reasons people refer to the early middle ages specifically as the "dark ages".

1000 years is a pretty big range

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