Early Middle Ages

Are the Dark Ages a Real Historical Period?

The origins of the term 'Dark Ages,' why modern historians have largely abandoned it, and what it is sometimes still used to mean.

Question & answer

No, “the Dark Ages” is not a term used by modern professional historians to describe a real historical period. It survives in popular usage, in some museum exhibits, and in a few specialized contexts, but it has been abandoned by most scholars as misleading, value-laden, and chronologically vague. The early Middle Ages - the centuries roughly between 500 and 1000 - was not a period of cultural darkness or universal decline. It was a complex, dynamic, and creative era in which the political, religious, and cultural foundations of medieval Europe were laid. Modern scholarship has replaced the “Dark Ages” framing with a much more nuanced understanding of the period.

The history of the term

The phrase “Dark Ages” was first used by the Italian humanist Petrarch in the fourteenth century. Petrarch, who was engaged in reviving the literature and values of classical antiquity, looked on the centuries after the fall of Rome as a period of cultural night - a “dark” age in which the literary and philosophical glories of Greece and Rome had been lost. The image was reinforced by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, all of which tended to identify progress with the recovery of classical learning. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) gave the idea its canonical English-language statement, tracing a long process of Roman decline that culminated in the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

The “Dark Ages” framing was developed in a context of explicit cultural polemic. Its users were not neutrally describing a period of the past; they were advancing a particular view of European history, in which the values of classical antiquity and the modern West were joined in opposition to a “barbarian” and “superstitious” middle period. The Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by contrast, tended to celebrate the early Middle Ages as a heroic age of faith, nation, and folk spirit, and the image of the period has fluctuated between the poles of “darkness” and “heroism” ever since.

The scholarly critique

The scholarly critique of the “Dark Ages” developed gradually over the twentieth century. The first major break came from archaeologists, who began to demonstrate the technical sophistication and economic complexity of post-Roman Europe. The discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939, the excavation of Viking towns like Birka and Hedeby in the mid-twentieth century, and the systematic survey of post-Roman landscapes in France and England revealed a world that was in many ways innovative and dynamic.

The second major break came from the historians of late antiquity, especially Peter Brown and his students. Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971) argued that the period from the third to the eighth centuries is best understood as a long, creative transition in which classical Mediterranean civilization was transformed by the rise of Christianity and the formation of new political forms. The “Dark Ages” framing, in this view, is a misleading imposition of nineteenth-century values on a much more complex past.

The third major break came from the revisionist economic history of the early Middle Ages. The work of Chris Wickham, Jean-Pierre Devroey, and others has shown that the early medieval economy, while different from that of the Roman Empire, was not a static and unchanging subsistence system. Trade, exchange, and economic growth continued throughout the period, often in new and innovative forms.

What was not so “dark”

The early Middle Ages witnessed an extraordinary range of cultural, political, and religious creativity. To take only a few examples:

  • The Christianization of Western and Central Europe, including the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, the Saxons, the Lombards, the Visigoths, the Bulgars, the Serbs, the Poles, the Bohemians, the Hungarians, the Norse, and the Kievan Rus, was an event without parallel in world history, and it produced an institutional, intellectual, and artistic tradition that would dominate Europe for centuries.
  • The Carolingian Renaissance of the late eighth and ninth centuries was a conscious and successful effort to revive classical Latin culture, to standardize biblical and patristic texts, and to develop a new form of writing (the Carolingian minuscule) that became the basis of virtually every Western typeface.
  • The Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels are among the most brilliant achievements of medieval art, and they were produced in the seventh and eighth centuries, the heart of the supposed “dark age.”
  • The rise of Islam, which produced the Caliphate, the House of Wisdom, the libraries of Córdoba and Cairo, and a brilliant tradition of philosophy, science, and medicine, took place in the seventh through tenth centuries.
  • The Viking expansion of the eighth through tenth centuries produced a network of trade and settlement from Newfoundland to Constantinople, and the Norse legal and political traditions of the Icelandic Commonwealth were an important contribution to the development of European constitutional thought.
  • The Slavic literary and liturgical tradition, founded by the Cyril and Methodius and developed in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Rus, gave a written culture to a large part of Eastern Europe and continues in use to this day.

None of these developments could be described as “dark” in any meaningful sense. They were creative, sophisticated, and consequential.

What was “dark”

This is not to say that the early Middle Ages had no shadow side. The period did experience real disruptions and losses. The urban infrastructure of the Roman Empire was significantly diminished in much of Western Europe, and many great cities shrank or disappeared. The Roman system of aqueducts, public baths, and paved roads was gradually lost in the West. The classical literary tradition survived in fragments, in summaries, and in the libraries of monasteries and churches, but most of the literature of classical antiquity was not directly available to early medieval readers. The Roman tax state withered in the West, and the coin economy contracted. The early Middle Ages was, in many regions, a period of demographic decline, economic simplification, and political fragmentation.

But these losses must be set in their proper context. The early Middle Ages was not a “fall” from a previous high point. It was a transformation, and many of the things that were lost were replaced by other things. The Roman villa was replaced by the monastic estate and the seigneurial manor. The Roman road system was supplemented by river and sea routes. The Roman tax state was replaced by a system of royal and seigneurial income. The Latin literary tradition was supplemented, and in some cases transformed, by vernacular literatures in Old English, Old Irish, Old High German, Old Norse, and Old Church Slavonic.

When the term is still used

The term “Dark Ages” is still used in a few specific contexts. Some historians use it to refer narrowly to the early early Middle Ages - the sixth through eighth centuries - before the Carolingian Renaissance, when the documentary record is at its thinnest and the long-distance trade economy of the Roman world was most seriously disrupted. Archaeologists sometimes use it to describe the material culture of post-Roman Europe, in which the elaborate material culture of late antiquity was replaced by simpler forms, before the revival of more complex material cultures in the eighth and ninth centuries.

These uses are not necessarily wrong, but they are not the same as the original “Dark Ages” of Petrarch and Gibbon. They are descriptive terms, applied to specific phenomena in specific regions, and they do not imply a global judgment about the period as a whole.

The modern alternative

The standard modern term is “the Early Middle Ages” or, less commonly, “the early medieval period.” These terms are descriptive rather than evaluative, and they leave open the question of how to characterize the period. They are used by professional historians, in academic journals, and in university curricula. They are also, increasingly, used in popular and museum contexts, as part of a general movement away from the “Dark Ages” framing.

The fuller treatment is in the Defining the Early Middle Ages and The Early Middle Ages: A Complete Overview. For the major events of the period, see the Timeline and Key Dates.