Episode #88- Are the Dark Ages a Myth?

You need something from Lowe's, but your day is already jammed packed. Since my Lowe's rewards and my Lowe's pro-rewards members get free same-day delivery, we'll make the run for you. Seriously, just lock in your order and we'll do the rest. See you soon. Members get more at Lowe's, $25 minimum and loyalty membership required. Order eligible items by 2 p.m. Subject to weight and size restrictions and availability in terms of Lowe's comm/shipping terms. Fall never arrives all at once. Verse the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf, because you don't simply step into the season. You create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross. Support for this podcast comes from Progressive. America's #1 Bowtonsure. We've all made mistakes on the water, but there's one mistake you shouldn't make. Being uninsured. With Progressive Bowtonsurance, you can choose coverage for most mistakes you or other boaters can make, helping you float carefree all season long. Quote today. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. #1 Rating based on 2024 filings with State Departments of Insurance. Hey everyone, Sebastian here. Before we start the show today, I just want to let everyone know that I am going to be appearing live in Callingwood, Ontario, at the Callingwood Museum on June 22nd, 2019. I'm going to be giving a talk on a bunch of my favorite topics, including podcasting, public history, and weird historical myths. So if you are going to be near Callingwood, Ontario, on June 22nd, 2019, please come check out the show. If you want tickets, you can head to my Facebook page. That's facebook.com/ourfakehistory and click on the link that I have pinned to the top of the page. Or check out my page on Twitter @ourfakehistory and click on the tweet that has been pinned to the top of the page there. Okay, I hope I see a bunch of you out on June 22nd. Now on with the show. In 2011, when my wife and I were still dating, we went to see a movie. Being that we both enjoyed high concept sci-fi fare, we decided we would take in a movie called The Adjustment Bureau. You might remember it. It was a fun little thriller adapted from a Philip K Dick short story starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. It was one of those movies with an interesting premise that kind of fell flat in the delivery. The plot was based around the idea that some mysterious higher power had a plan for the course of human events. When something in this overarching plan got off course, the supernatural, fedora-wearing bureaucrats from the adjustment bureau would step in to correct whatever went wrong. Being that this was based on a Philip K Dick story and remember, he's the guy who's writing inspired the movie Blade Runner. The story dealt with philosophical ideas about the nature of God and free will. After talking, both my girlfriend and I agreed that the movie was okay, but not great. Now it wasn't a disaster by any means. It just didn't really stick the landing on its lofty premise. And the history nerd in me couldn't help but get caught up in one particular monologue. You see, at one point in the movie, a member of the mysterious adjustment bureau uses history to explain to Matt Damon why humanity has been denied free will. Here's what he says. Whatever happened to free will? We actually tried free will before. After taking you from hunting and gathering to the height of the Roman Empire, we stepped back to see how you're doing your own. It gave us the dark ages for five centuries. And to finally we decided we should come back in. The chairman thought that maybe we just needed to do a better job with teaching you how to ride a bike before taking the training modes off again. So we gave you the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution. For 600 years, we taught you to control your impulses with reason. Then in 1910, we stepped back. Within 50 years, you'd brought us World War I, the Depression, Fascism, the Holocaust, and cut it off by bringing the entire planet to the brink of destruction in the Cuba missile crisis. At that point, a decision was taken to step back in again before you did something that even we couldn't fix. You don't have free will, David. You have the appearance of free will. Now, why did that little speech ping so many alarm bells in my brain? Well, I was fresh off a master's degree in public history. And as such, I had become very critical of what is often referred to as the grand narrative of history. The grand narrative is more or less the version of human history that was spelt out by the character in the movie. This is the belief that humanity progressed steadily from being simple hunters and gatherers until we reached a peak of civilization during the height of the Roman Empire. Then when Rome fell, there came the notorious dark ages, where learning and reason all but vanished from the earth. We are told that the adjustment bureau stepped back in that time. Then finally, in the late 15th century, humanity came to its senses, re-engaged in education, art, and science, and the Renaissance was born. What followed was the steady progress of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, eventually culminating in our modern society. In the world of the adjustment bureau, all the good bits were due to divine intervention, and all the bad bits were caused by disastrous human free will. So this so-called grand narrative of history has been around for a very long time, gaining particular prominence with European historians in the 19th century. Historian Herbert Butterfield famously criticized this narrative as "wig history" back in the 1930s. That's Wig spelt WHIG in reference to the old British political party who believed that since the so-called dark ages, society had been steadily progressing to greater states of human liberty, political freedom, and economic prosperity. But as Butterfield pointed out in the 1930s, and countless others have echoed in the decade since, this grand narrative doesn't really stand up to close scrutiny. Many have argued that this version of history is simplistic, inaccurate, and overly fixated on Western Europe and its colonial offspring. But despite decades of thoughtful critique, this version of the past keeps popping up in popular discourse. I graduated high school in 2003, and even then the history textbooks and the history curriculum in general were definitely informed by this grand narrative view of history. Perhaps the most tenacious of all the ideas associated with the grand narrative is the idea that after the civilizational high watermark of the Roman Empire, their followed centuries of decline, known as the dark ages. The pop history take on the dark ages was that they were dark for a number of reasons. First, they were an era from which few reliable historical sources survive, so events are hard to decipher, and nothing can be said for certain. But perhaps more pejoratively, the dark ages are often characterized as a time of ignorance, superstition, and scientific artistic and cultural stagnation. In the grand narrative, this darkness then gets contrasted by the light of the Renaissance. But over the last few decades, scholars who study this period of history have worked hard to challenge and ultimately reject the dark ages label. Many historians of the early medieval period have rightly called out the term dark ages as reductive and misleading. Now in the age of the internet, it seems like their work has finally changed. started to penetrate the historical consciousness. Just Google the term dark ages and you will find countless articles with some variation of the title. How dark were the dark ages? We are finally openly and publicly questioning the idea that a dark age occurred after the dissolution of the Roman Empire in Western Europe. But have we over corrected? Has our newfound skepticism of the dark ages perhaps led us to diminish what may have been a legitimate decline in both levels of education and quality of life? Should we completely abandon the idea of the dark ages or does that term still tell us something about a very particular time and place? Well, let's find out today on our fake history. Episode number 88 are the dark ages of myth? Hello and welcome to our fake history. My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast that explores historical myths and tries to determine what's fact, what's fiction and what is such a good story that it simply must be told. This week we are going to zoom out and take a wider view of history than we often do on this show where we usually do a deep dive into a particular time and place in an attempt to clarify historical misconceptions. Today we need to stand back from the historical timeline and ask some questions about why and how it's been chopped up by historians. This is sometimes called periodization that is the division of history into distinct and manageable periods of study. Traditionally the timeline has been roughly divided into the ancient medieval early modern and modern periods. However, there are countless other ways to chop up history. Those divisions don't really work for certain eras or for certain parts of the world. In the past we've used other terms like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment to refer to distinct historical eras. I've also heard cool terms like the Axial Age to refer to a few centuries in the very ancient past where Confucius, the Buddha, the Jewish Old Testament writers and the Greek philosophers were all active. Defining and naming historical periods is certainly more of an art than a science. Very rarely do historical periods neatly begin and end. Human life just doesn't work like that. No one woke up one morning walked outside and said, "Honey, we're in the Renaissance." Putting the brackets around historical eras is always messy and inevitably imprecise. As such over the years, different periodizations have come in and out of vogue with historians. But perhaps one of the most controversial of the historical periods is the era that has sometimes been called the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages has been such a heavily contested name because it seems so loaded with judgment. Calling an era ancient doesn't necessarily carry a positive or negative connotation. Calling an era dark certainly does. When we call a time a dark age, we are suggesting to our audience how they should feel about that time. However, we often judge the past, or at least podcasters like me do. It's very common for both historians and average people to condemn all sorts of historical phenomena. We often come out against things like the Atlantic slave trade or genocide. However, it gets tricky when you start condemning an entire historical epoch. We need to ask, is it reasonable to label a huge swath of history as "a dark age"? Now, I know some of you are already saying, Sebastian isn't this debate already over. I mean, no one's really pushing the idea of a dark age anymore, are they? Well, to that, I would say look at pop culture. Less than 10 years ago, the adjustment bureau was able to toss out the idea that the dark age were very much a thing, trusting that the audience would just accept that as a historical truth. I would also point to a book from 1992 that has made an appearance on this podcast before. This is a world lit only by fire, by William Manchester. You might remember it from our episode on the Pied Piper. In that episode, I pointed out that Manchester had made some highly dubious, unsourced claims about the historical Pied Piper being a violent child murderer. Well, that little story had come from the book, a world lit only by fire. A work of popular history that has since been widely discredited by serious scholars as being poorly researched, badly sourced and linked together by chains of supposition. In this book, William Manchester basically makes the case for the old grand narrative of history. He claims that the dark ages were very real and were very dark. This darkness was only broken by the light of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. Now, even though his book was savaged by academic critics, it was widely read by a popular audience curious about history. This helped reinforce ideas about the dark ages in the popular imagination that still persist to this day. So what were these ideas? Well, let's let him explain. Here's how William Manchester's book begins. "The densest of the medieval centuries, the 600 years between roughly AD 400 and AD 1000, are still widely known as the dark ages. Modern historians have abandoned that phrase, one of them writes, quote, "because of the unacceptable value judgment it implies." Yet there are no survivors to be offended, nor is the term necessarily pejorative. Very little is clear about that dim era. Intellectual life had vanished from Europe. Even Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman emperor and the greatest of all medieval rulers, was illiterate. Indeed, throughout the middle ages, which lasted some seven centuries after Charlemagne, literacy was scorned. Nevertheless, if value judgments are made, it is undeniable that most of what is known about the period is unlovely. After the extant fragments have been fitted together, the portrait which emerges is a melange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness." Okay, so there are like a million things about that little paragraph that are just straight up incorrect. Manchester claims that scholars have abandoned the use of the term dark ages for fear of offending early medieval people. I mean, that's obviously ridiculous. He then casually asserts that intellectual life completely vanished from Europe during the so-called dark ages. Now that is reductive at best, and through the course of this program I hope to prove to you that it's actually pretty untrue. He also inaccurately claims that Charlemagne was illiterate. This is only partially true. While Charlemagne famously could not write, he could read in several different languages, including Latin. So right off the top here, we can see that Manchester is playing fast, and loose with his history. But in that last sentence, Manchester sums up a widely held conception about the historical period ranging from the 5th to 10th centuries, namely that it was "a melange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness." I think you can tell by the tone in my voice that I don't put too much stock in the writing of William Manchester. But I think it's important for us to understand his perspective because he is giving voice to a number of commonly held prejudices about the medieval era. The question we need to ask is whether or not this conception of history is based in anything beyond those old prejudices. Is there some good research that supports the idea of a dark age? Or is everything Manchester thinks he knows about the dark ages wrong? Well, let's take a closer look. America's number one Bowtonshire. Being uninsured. Quote today. Number one rating based on 2024 filings with State Departments of Insurance. First, we should look at where this idea of a dark age comes from. You see, the period between the 5th and 10th centuries wasn't always characterized as the dark ages. You can certainly find examples of contemporary writers bemoaning the warfare and turmoil that accompanied the end of the Roman Empire in the West. But after that initial period of collapse, people seem to settle into their new normal. In other words, while many were distressed by Rome's abandonment of the Western provinces, in a century no one seems to be saying that they're living in a new age of darkness. The first example we have of someone referring to the medieval period as a quote unquote "dark age" comes from the famous Italian poet Petrarch. Petrarch lived in the mid 1300s and is often cited as the first ever humanist. In the 1300s, being a humanist really just meant that he was a lover of classical antiquity and the achievements of pre-Christian Mediterranean cultures. He was at the heart of a movement built around the rediscovery and revitalization of long forgotten Greek and Latin texts. Petrarch famously found the famous Roman Senator Cicero's letters, which contributed to a renewed interest in the literature, philosophy, and artistic traditions of the ancient Greek and Roman world. Now, before Petrarch and the humanist movement, the pre-Christian world had been viewed by Christian thinkers as the real time of darkness. To them, that period seemed dark because the pagan people did not have the salvation of Jesus. In Dante's Ferno, all people born before Jesus are in hell. But we should note that Dante assumed that the most admirable of the pagans would be hanging out at the topmost and therefore most comfortable ring of the Inferno. Anyway, the point is that Petrarch thought about this entirely differently. He saw much to be admired in the literature and culture of Italy's pagan past. To him, the Roman era had been a time of light and his own time, and the centuries directly preceding it, had been a time of darkness. He wrote this about his own era, the 1300s, quote, "My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms, but for you, perhaps, if, as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age, when the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance." So, in that quote, you see Petrarch using a metaphor of darkness and light to describe history. In the past, there was a former radiance, as he calls it. In his time, there is darkness. And in the future, perhaps we will come into the light again. It should be noted that in his time, Petrarch's ideas were far from mainstream. It was only with the growth of humanism over the next few centuries that this idea would gain popularity. But it would only really get enshrined in the popular consciousness as a historical truth in the mid-1800s. In 1855, the French historian, Jul Michelet, first coined the term "the Renaissance," which literally means "rebirth" to refer to what he saw as a revival in scientific thought in the late 15th century. Michelet famously thought that the medieval era was "bizarre and monstrous," and the Renaissance represented a clear break from that dark age. Five years later, the Swiss historian Jacob Berkhardt published his super-influential history entitled "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy." In this book, he took Michelet's idea of "a Renaissance" and pushed it even further. Berkhardt pointed to people like Petrarch, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Nicolò Macavalli, and a slew of others to make the argument that this period, starting in the late 14th century, had been something new and distinct from the medieval era. According to Berkhardt, it was a time of massive artistic and cultural revival, which would eventually lead to massive scientific and political change. With this book, Berkhardt basically invented the Renaissance as a distinct period in our historical imagination. Berkhardt also picked up on Petrarch's light and dark metaphor. The metaphoric light of his Renaissance was contrasted by the dark of the early Middle Ages. Now, it would be very easy for us to go down the rabbit hole of "Was there really a Renaissance?" So let's just set that aside for another day. I just want to point out that this idea that the centuries following the end of the Roman Empire in the West were dark is a relatively new idea, historically speaking. It's only really been around since the mid-1800s, Petrarch notwithstanding. The idea of the dark ages was reinforced by the highly respected British historian Charles O'Man around the end of the 19th century. In 1893, he published his tour de force work on the early medieval period, entitled simply "Dark Ages," 476 to 918. In that book, he very neatly carved out the specific years when this era began and ended. This is one of those exhaustive turn-of-the-century histories that very carefully details every act of every king over the course of the centuries covered. After O'Man, the historical reality of the dark ages was basically unquestioned until after World War I, when people started challenging the idea of human progress in general. But even though Charles O'Man's book is now terribly dated, he actually makes the best case that I've read for the existence of a dark age. So let's just put that in our back pockets for now and return to that later. So to sum this up, the dark ages were not always accepted blindly as a historical fact. It was an idea that was developed by a handful of historians in the mid-to-late 19th century. The dark ages were used deliberately as a foil to highlight new research into an era that was becoming known as the Renaissance. The people living in the dark ages didn't think they were living in the dark ages. And for a long time, Christian thinkers actually saw the pagan Romans as "dark and deluded." So darkness really is in me eye of the beholder. Charles Oman defined the dark ages as extending from 476 to 918 AD. One of the reasons why that period is often called "dark" is because it's seen as a low watermark for learning, literacy, artistic development, and philosophical thinking. As William Manchester bluntly put it, "intellectual life had vanished from Europe." But is that true? Did the failure of the Roman Empire and the Western provinces mean that intellectual life also vanished? Well, the short answer is no. The long answer is yes in some ways, but not completely as is often claimed. It is true that levels of literacy seem to have dropped off sharply in Western Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries. This can partially be explained by the fact that many Roman provinces were being invaded and conquered by cultures that were not literate. That is to say that they had no system of reading and writing of their own. A prime example of this is the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain that was so central to our recent series on King Arthur. When the Anglo-Saxons first came to Britain, they were illiterate. There was no written version of their language. When a new illiterate ruling class installs itself in a former Roman province, literacy and traditional forms of education are obviously going to take a hit. However, this dynamic changes noticeably when groups like the Anglo-Saxons in England and the Franks in France convert to Christianity. This is a process that takes place in the 5th and 6th centuries not long after the initial invasions. After this conversion point, the church takes on a new role as the keeper of knowledge, education and philosophy. While some have argued that the church was restrictive and sensorious, this does not seem to have been the case in the early medieval period. The church actually becomes far more into censorship during the so-called Renaissance. So contrary to popular belief, in the centuries after the Roman retreat from the Western provinces, learning persisted. Literature was created and science was encouraged, but now it was being done by monks in monasteries. Philosophy also did not disappear. St. Augustine was creating hugely influential works of philosophy in the early 5th century, a time often cited as one of the darkest parts of the dark ages. These religious scholars were actually far more worldly and cosmopolitan than you might imagine. To use England as an example again, the early church there was essentially built by priests who had traveled widely and had trained in the most sophisticated urban environments of the era. The Archbishop Theodore, who founded a great school in Canterbury in the late 7th century, was originally from Anatolia and had trained in the city of Constantinople. This was not a world that was cloistered and ignorant. It was filled with travelers, thinkers, and people who actively sought to improve the education of the masses. A close look at the years comprising the so-called dark ages, and you see a number of times and places when art, literature, and architecture actually flourished. These are like little mini renaissance, smattered throughout the period. For instance, during the reign of Charlemagne, which ran from 768 to 814, dab smack in the middle of the so-called dark ages, you get something called the Carolingian Renaissance. This was a flourishing in art literature and architecture under the patronage of Charlemagne himself. This is a time of impressive cathedral building, perhaps best exemplified by the cathedral at Charlemagne's court in Aachen. Charlemagne also pushed for the creation of new church and monastic schools that would encourage literacy and the learning of Latin. Remember, Charlemagne's empire was massive. It included most of what is today France, Germany, and Northern Italy. The Carolingian Renaissance really was a western European Renaissance. Many scholars have pointed out that while the so-called Carolingian Renaissance represents a certain boom in artistic and scholastic achievement in Western Europe, it didn't come out of nowhere. Charlemagne merely put resources into the type of learning and artistic development that had been quietly developing in the monasteries for centuries. Now, with all that said, I think it's important to point out that the Carolingian Renaissance was something that was mostly only experienced by a small group of educated elite. So perhaps we need to be careful not to overstate its importance. Nevertheless, I think the historian John Contrini puts it very soberly when he writes this. The Carolingian Renaissance quote had a spectacular effect on education and culture in Francia, a debatable effect on artistic endeavors, and an unmeasurable effect on what mattered the most to the Carolingians, the moral regeneration of society. Now, roughly a generation later, you see something very similar play out in the English Kingdom of Wessex, under the king Alfred the Great. Alfred was also known for his patronage of public education and his encouragement of literacy. In fact, many have credited Alfred's educational reforms for helping codify the early English language. This boom in education, art and learning in England in the late 9th century is sometimes called the Alfredian Renaissance. By the time you get to the high middle ages in the 11th and 12th centuries, you're seeing robust literary traditions, including the medieval romances we explored in our last series. Architecture reaches new levels of sophistication, especially in the area of castle building. We also see works of philosophy from the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas and ambitious works of poetry from people like Dante and his divine comedy. Now, I will concede. There may be some reasons why this era could still be seen as dark, but it's simply not correct to say that intellectual life vanished. Intellectual life persisted in the monasteries and every so often flourished when it was encouraged by a sympathetic ruler, like Charlemagne or Alfred the Great. This was not simply a quote bizarre and monstrous time as Michelin put it, or a time of impenetrable mindlessness as Manchester charmingly stated. Things were happening, people were thinking, writing, and making art that needs to be considered before a time is condemned solely as a dark age. But so far we have been engaging with this question on its own terms. That is, we are evaluating whether or not Western Europe legitimately experienced a dark age after it was abandoned by Rome. But what often happens, as exemplified by that monologue from the adjustment bureau, is the history of Western Europe gets conflated with the history of the entire world. The dark ages are sometimes lazily presumed have been a global phenomenon. But was this really the case? Perhaps the most important criticism of the idea of the dark ages is that it's Eurocentric. If you don't know that particular 10 dollar word, Eurocentrism is a way of looking at the world, including its history and geography in a way that over-privileges Europe and specifically Western Europe. As we've already seen, the so-called dark ages in Western Europe were not as dark as is often claimed, especially by lazy writers like William Manchester. However, I think you can reasonably make the case that there was some decline in Western Europe after the retreat of Rome. Literacy rates did fall. Some knowledge was lost. Perhaps most obviously, some sophisticated artistic techniques and construction methods faded from memory. In the early Middle Ages, people in Western Europe did not produce sculpture with the same lifelike level of detail, like they did at the height of the Roman Empire. The secret of Roman concrete was forgotten, which meant that as the centuries progressed, people no longer knew how to repair Roman era buildings, which inevitably fell into ruin. This also meant that it would be centuries before works of architecture, equaling the size and stature of those created by the Romans, would again be created in Western Europe. Perhaps most tellingly, the roads that had been built in the Roman era remained the best roads in Western Europe deep into the medieval period. Finally, there is the case made by Charles O'Mon, which I hinted at earlier. Now I'm going to lay on you. He argues that one of the reasons why this era could be considered a dark age is because the forms of government that immediately followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West were far more arbitrary and violent than those that had come before. Early in his history, O'Mon spends time explaining how the vandal kingdom in North Africa functioned. Instead of the reliable bureaucratic forms of taxation leveled by the previous Roman authorities, the vandals collected tax in the form of violent and arbitrary raids. A vandal lord would be awarded the right by the king to raid a particular area as much as he wanted to enrich himself. From Charles O'Mon's perspective, this form of government was obviously more brutal and nasty than the Roman system. In other words, things got dark. So this isn't to say that the Romans weren't violent. I mean, they ran a huge slave state. But I will concede that there is at least some factual basis to claim that there was a dark age in the former Western Roman Empire. However, this only really affected that particular corner of the planet. The dark ages were not a global phenomenon. This was something that happened in Western Europe and pretty much only Western Europe. So we should probably speak about it that way. First, we need to squash the common misconception that Rome fell in the fifth century. The date that often gets tossed around for the fall of Rome is 476. The year Charles O'Mon tells us the dark ages began. But as many of you listening already know, when the last Roman emperor was deposed in the west in 476, the empire kept ticking away just fine in the east. Remember, at this time the capital had long since been relocated to Constantinople and what is today Turkey. The continued existence of the Romans in the east can sometimes be obscured by the fact that this phase of the Roman Empire is sometimes called the Byzantine Empire by historians. But make no mistake, the people in the east self-identified as Romans and would continue to do so until the city of Constantinople was finally conquered by the Turks in 1453. So here's the question. After the Western provinces were lost, did the east go through a similar decline? The answer seems to be a hard no, or at least if a decline did come in the Byzantine Empire, it would not materialize for centuries after the start of the Western dark age. Take for example the reign of the emperor Justinian from the years 527 to 565. Over the course of his reign, he successfully managed to reconquer huge portions of the previously lost Roman West. He also brought in notable legal reforms and embarked on some of the most ambitious building projects the empire had ever seen. During his reign, massive domed churches were built around the empire. Most notably the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which still stands to this very day, the Hagia Sophia would end up being the largest building in the world at the time with the largest domed roof ever constructed up to that point in history. In the sixth century at least, the Eastern Roman Empire was not experiencing a decline. On the contrary, they were hitting new cultural heights. As soon as we turn our gaze beyond the Roman world, the idea of a dark age becomes even more ridiculous. For the followers of Islam, these centuries were far from a dark age. In fact, many would consider it a golden age. The Islamic Prophet Muhammad was born in the year 570 AD. His famous flight from Mecca to Medina that signifies year one in the Islamic calendar is commonly dated to 622 AD in the Gregorian calendar. In the centuries after the death of the prophet, Islamic armies experienced unprecedented success. Their conquests spread the Islamic religion and culture throughout much of what had been the former Roman and Persian empires. Many of the cities and these new Islamic kingdoms, or caliphates as they were known, became known as centers for learning art and culture. Many of the Greek classics like Plato's dialogues were preserved by Islamic scholars in this period. While Western Europe may have been experiencing something like a dark age, the Islamic world was developing advanced mathematics, navigation techniques, and advancing astronomy. The Islamic Kingdom of Al-Andalus in what is today Spain is a particularly strong example of the achievements of Islamic culture during Western Europe's so-called dark age. During the supposed dark ages, people in Al-Andalus lived a quality of life unheard of in the rest of Western Europe. This was a highly urban society with relatively high levels of literacy. Beginning in the 8th century, gorgeous works of architecture would be created in this region, like the Cordoba mosque or the Al-Hambra in Grenada. Ironically, because Spain technically is in Western Europe, even if you accept that there was a Western European dark age, you have to include a pretty big asterisk excluding Muslim Spain. Once you factor in the history of China, it becomes impossible to think of the dark ages being more than just a small regional phenomenon. The years 618-907 AD are commonly given for a period in Chinese history known as the Tang Dynasty. The Tang Dynasty is considered by some historians to be one of China's true golden ages. Under the Tang Emperor's China was united and controlled more territory than at any other point in its history, save for the equally impressive Han Dynasty. Art and science flourished in the Tang centuries. New musical forms were invented that are still performed in China today. Quality paper that could be used to print books was developed in these centuries. That paper was then used for the first ever printed book. In the year 868, the Buddhist text known as the Diamond Sutra became the first ever book to be printed. This was printing centuries before similar technology would turn up in Europe. Levels of education also reached record highs under the Tang Dynasty. The Tang were the first to allow commoners, that is people who did not hold an aristocratic rank, to join the civil service. So long as candidates passed a rigorous examination process, they could get a good, highly respected job working for the government. Now there still were some forms of exclusion going on here because to get the education that you needed to pass these exams, you needed to have quite a lot of money. But still the desire to become a government official was strong enough that a sizable portion of the population was motivated to get educated. The Tang Dynasty may have even been the era when fireworks were invented, but to be fair this is contested. Basically no one would ever describe the Tang Dynasty as a dark age. China was thriving, learning, art, architecture, and science were all going through a period of growth. So as soon as you look beyond the borders of Western Europe, then yes, the dark ages were totally a myth. But I can hear some of you saying, "Hey Sebastian, aren't you being a little pedantic about this?" When we say dark ages, everyone knows we mean Western European dark ages, do we really have to make use of the qualifier Western European dark ages every time we use the term? We don't have to do that with other types of historical shorthand. For instance, in China there was something called the Warring States Period. We don't call it the ancient Chinese Warring States Period. It's just the Warring States Period. When we use that term, we don't get some know-it-all podcasters saying, "Well, if you look at other parts of the world, you'll discover that other states were not at war, so we shouldn't use the Warring States Period." No, everyone gets that the term is specific to a region. Okay, I hear you. Most of the time people get that terms like this are region-specific. When we talk about the troubles, most people understand that this is an Irish thing, and it was not a global phenomenon. The whole world did not have troubles at the same time as Ireland. However, I think the dark ages are a different case, because they are often popularly understood as a global phenomenon. The grand narrative about human progress tells us that we progressed to the height of the Roman Empire, then we paused for the dark ages only to begin again in the Renaissance. If we complicate this narrative with facts about the cultural achievements of the Eastern Roman Empire, Islamic society, or Chinese civilization, the narrative very quickly breaks down. The grand narrative only makes sense if you look at it from a purely Eurocentric perspective. And if you don't think that this conception of history is still out there, look no further than the Adjustment Bureau. You'll note that all the historical milestones that the character in that movie mentions, the Roman Empire, the dark ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, these are all European milestones. However, he talks about them like they are the history of the entire world. Now, I'm not saying that this little movie is to blame for the spread of this idea, quite the contrary. I'm saying that this idea is so pervasive that it can lazily pop up in a just-okay Mad Damon movie. So that's why it's important to remind people that the dark ages, if they ever happened, were a purely regional thing. The history of the West has time and time again been presented as the only history that matters, and that just isn't true. Okay, so let's bring this all together. Should we write off the dark ages as a historical myth? Well, I'm going to argue both yes and no. Typical Sebastian, I know, but here's what I think. I think it's important to recognize that the dark ages were often called dark for a reason. I think Charles O'Mon's point is well taken. That the systems of government that replaced the Romans in the Western Empire, after the so-called barbarian invasions, were often more violent and less predictable than their predecessors had been. Now, the Romans were plenty violent, but once you were a province, you could rest assured that the powers that be wouldn't indiscriminately raid your land, usually. It's clear that literacy became less common in Western Europe in the years commonly associated with the dark ages. It's clear that knowledge was lost in the West. It's clear that Western Europeans would not get better at building roads for centuries. This all suggests some form of decline. Also, historical sources from the early medieval period in Western Europe are scarce, which makes the period less clear to us, or dare I say it, dark. But, and this is a big but. The dark ages were not the intellectual wasteland they are sometimes presented as. Education and learning were preserved by the churches and monasteries. There were even moments like during the reigns of Charlemagne, or Alfred the Great, when art, literature, and architecture experienced a revival. The medieval period was not pure mindlessness and superstition. This is a prejudice that is simply not supported by the facts. Finally, if you want to use the term "dark ages", you really should say Western European dark ages. As soon as you look beyond the borders of Europe, you see that the rest of the world was not experiencing a decline. These centuries were the most important to the development of Islamic religion, politics, and culture. The Chinese were experiencing a golden age of cultural and scientific achievement. So yes, we should accept that things got worse in Western Europe after the Roman retreat. At least for a time. However, we should reject the idea that this was an age of pure ignorance. This just isn't correct. Perhaps historian Lin White said it best when he wrote this about the so-called "dark ages". If it was dark, it was the darkness of the womb. Okay, that's all for this week. Thanks again for joining us. Join us again in two weeks' time when we will look at another historical myth. Before we go this week, I just want to remind everyone that I'm going to be appearing live in Collingwood, Ontario, on June 22nd, 2019 at the Collingwood Museum. There, I'll be giving a talk on public history, historical myths. I'm going to be talking a little bit about the area itself, Georgian Bay, Collingwood. So if you're from that part of the world or if you're going to be near that part of the world. Think about coming out on June 22nd. If you want to get tickets to that event, go to my Facebook page. That's facebook.com/ourfakehistory and click on the link that is pinned to the top of the page. Or you can go to my Twitter page. So that's me @ourfakehistory on Twitter and go to the pinned tweet there. Before we go this week, I also want to give a shout out to the following awesome people. So I'd like to give a very big thank you to Shauna Scott, Randall Kemper, Shawshank, Karen Montyth, Joshua Mechal Houghton, Steve, Matthew Whitman, Matthew Kragon, Richard Klaus, Kurt Gordon, bridge city sessions, and Rachel Rocket. I like that Rachel. Rachel Rocket. I hope I have pronounced everyone's name correctly there. Again, there was a couple tricky ones in that batch. But as always, these are the people who have decided to pledge $5 or more every month to this podcast. So you guys know what that means. You're beautiful human beings. Thank you again to everyone that has pledged at all the different levels on Patreon. There's some exciting things I'm cooking up right now for the Patreon subscribers. So in the next few months, I'm hoping to get some new extras out to you there. If you think you'd like to support on Patreon, just go to patreon.com/ourfakehistory. Look at all the different levels of support. Look at all the cool extras that you get when you support the show and think about doing it. If you don't have the extra money to support, I get it. Time's tough all over. Think about writing a nice review of the podcast somewhere or just recommending it to a friend that you think might like it. Honestly, word of mouth goes a lot further than you might think. As always, if you want to get in touch with me, you can send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com. You can go to the Facebook group I was mentioning earlier, facebook.com/ourfakehistory, or hit me up on Twitter at our fake history. You can hear my thoughts on everything from historical controversies to Game of Thrones, all that good stuff. Check me out there. The theme music for the show comes to us from DirtyChurch. You can check out DirtyChurch at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com and all the other music that you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me. My name is Sebastian Major and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real. [Music]