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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

> Europe was entering the Dark Ages

The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. There was a genuine decline at the fringes, which includes Britain which maybe why it was so ingrained in Anglophone culture, but also history written by imperialists like Gibbon who thought the decline of Empires an intrinsically bad and regressive thing.

The Eastern Roman Empire went on, the western broke up into successor states. Some things got worse, some things got better, there was progress made (especially for women and people at the bottom like slaves), and the early medieval period laid the foundations for progress later on.

> Muhammad was having his visions

Is that a bad thing? I know less about the history of that region than some others, but I think you need to look at prior conditions in places such as the Arabian peninsula to assess that.

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The European Dark Ages was also a narrative largely invented by the Renaissance, which was trying to distinguish itself from what came before. Material wellbeing did improve overall, but that was because a huge portion of the population was killed off from the plague, freeing up tons of resources.

The Dark Ages were a period after the Romans left Europe where there are little to zero records of what went on then.

Depends on who you ask, it's sometimes used to refer to as late as the 1400's.

It wasn't a straight jump from Columbus or the Iberian unification, the Enlightenment and the late Middle Ages overlap a lot. I'd say from 1200's things began to 'instituonalize', from first proto-parliaments, to Iberian Fueros, to different merchants and thinkerers eroding the Ancient Regime a little by supporting capable people with the money of rich people (Maecenas? in Latin).

There was a collapse though. The plague, climate change and warfare lead to significant population declines. Especially in Italy.

You are referring to the Black Death and that didn’t occur until around 350 years after the end of what are colloquially known as the Dark Ages.

There was also The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century which may have been more devastating than the Black Death.

So you both can read other people's minds yet are also entirely ignorant about major well known historical events? Fascinating.

They probably meant that Muhammad was on his way to become a prophet and a future leader who would lay the foundation of the Islamic empires that would span around most of the world (while at the same time, Europe's decline had begin).

From the peak-civilization of Ancient Greeks a steady slow decline started and continued until the calamity of 5th cent AD. Pick your start of middle ages sometime there.

For a very long time a dark cloud was hiding the sun of wisdom until the scientific and other conquests came over. Pick your end there.

All that in the Western part of the world...

>"Is that a bad thing?"

I think they were just setting the Age of Man here. Time framing it in history so others would know when we are talking about. It's fine.

> The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture.

They definitely did. Books stopped being published, even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution, and basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments that make current postmodern academic culture look reasonable.

We don't know what normal people were doing, technology advanced at a snail's pace, we don't even know where many cities and towns were located. We know far more about the Romans and the Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe. We're very lucky that some sense of religious nostalgia for the Classical age (from the fact that the Christian religion was an outgrowth of the late Roman state) kept them from losing or destroying all of the knowledge and documents of antiquity.

The Western world was saved from 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants. It wasn't that they were geniuses, but that they thought that there was some value to the individual other than service to the imbred descendants of Roman generals. This reinvented the concepts of philosophical disagreement and intellectual productivity in Europe.

The "there was no Dark Ages" revision is from people who would love to take us back to the Dark Ages. Nostalgic for the rule of elites, unfettered by the opinions of a population kept uneducated and on the edge of starvation. People associate the slaver culture of the US South with hillbillies, but they associated themselves, with their elaborate gowns and ballrooms, with a renewal of European culture, with the slaves playing the part of the serfs.

Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. Somehow, with their weakness, Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.

We've gone from a history described entirely in terms of nobles arguing with and sleeping with each other to a present entirely described in terms of oligarchs arguing with and sleeping with each other. The last few hundred years will one day probably be described as the "Popular Period." Historians will describe it as the short span of history in which it is trivially easy to find the price of a loaf of bread, or the rules of card games. "At least 20% of the commercial writings from that period have survived."

The Dark Ages were named in hindsight, with soft start and end dates, purposefully chosen. This period encompassed the Little Ice Age that put Europe in a long period of unusually cold and wet years included volcanic darkening events culminating in 536. That was the canonical "worst year" for humans to live. 4 years later, the Plague of Justinian wiped out tens of millions of people. It was a dark time, to say the least.

> even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution

Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD.

> basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments

Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to

> Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe

Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap.

> 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants

The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)?

> Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago.

lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.

> The same people who brought back witching burning

Seems like it was more complex than that :

> Authors have debated whether witch trials were more intense in Catholic or Protestant regions; however, the intensity had not so much to do with Catholicism or Protestantism, as both regions experienced a varied intensity of witchcraft persecutions.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_mode...

Then :

> The Witch Trials of Trier took place in the independent Catholic diocese of Trier in the Holy Roman Empire in present day Germany ... Between 1587 and 1593, 368 people were burned alive for sorcery in twenty-two villages, and in 1588, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant in each

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trier_witch_trials

However:

> The son of a Puritan minister, Hopkins began his career as a witch-finder in March 1644 and lasted until his retirement in 1647. Hopkins and his colleague John Stearne sent more accused people to be hanged for witchcraft than all the other witch-hunters in England of the previous 160 years From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Hopkins

Note that in Scotland and England, witches were hanged, not burned.

Generally it seems it was mostly in areas where Catholicism and Protestantism were in close contact and had compete for believers or in protestant dominated areas.

The Spanish inquisition for the most pairt maintained the medieval view that witchcraft could not exist from a theological perspective and continued prosecuting belief in it as a heresy.

I'm not defending the church, though. They declared witchcraft to be an irrational superstition to delegitimize pagan beliefs a few centuries earlier yet had no qualms about embracing the same beliefs to gain a competitive edge when competing against protestants.

The Dark Ages were actually something of a golden age for the Gaels with some of their best cultural artefacts being produced kn that period.

That happened in the Englightenment era too. The censhorship, tortures and whatnot, I mean.

>Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.

Yeah, unlike the champions on killing 'witches', you know, the Germanic protestants.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Inquisition was depicted as brutal, but, trust me, you would prefer to be trialed by them that some bastard ruthless lord or worse, the villagers being more brutal than the Church itself.

Read about Alphonse X and the Book of Games. A book from the 13th century, Middle Ages, and yet more knowledgeable than the 90% of the self-called "Enlightened" Anglo-Saxon/Germanic protestants reinventing the wheel after the School of Salamanca from similar origins.

Humanism? Trades and agreements between nations? Modern Economics on value and production? It's all there from that School in Castille.

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