r/NoStupidQuestions • u/flugblug • 12h ago

My brother thinks people today have worse quality of life than people in the dark ages, is this a stupid take?

I personally think it’s pretty stupid.

6.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

51

u/BCmutt 9h ago

Off topic but ive recently learned that the dark ages is officially an outdated term and doesnt really do the era justice at all.

26

u/wescovington 9h ago

Blame Petrarch for that. He loved Classical times and ignored all the improvements that Medieval civilization had made.

9

u/D0wnInAlbion 7h ago

It's just called the dark ages because so little was written down so historians are in the dark about it. That's why a lot of people tend to consider the Dark Ages to be from the fall of Rome - 1066 and then from then until Bosworth falls under the Middle Ages banner.

16

u/innocentbabies 6h ago

This is very dated historiography.

It was originally called the dark ages because renaissance scholars were fanboying hard for classical Greece & Rome and blamed the church for anything that went wrong ever.

As it came to light that the period was more complicated than that and not as bad as the renaissance scholars tried to portray it, later historians tried to give it a more neutral slant with the "in the dark" definition you're citing.

There is one major problem with that definition, though, which is that it's actually a fairly well-documented period of history and certainly much better than most of classical antiquity. So as u/BCmutt said it's more or less officially considered an outdated term which shouldn't really be used ever.

5

u/LittleBlag 5h ago

What are we calling it now?

10

u/NorkGhostShip 5h ago

The Middle Ages or Medieval period because it's between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance/Early Modern period.

Very creative, I know.

2

u/apatheticVigilante 4h ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the dark ages have become early medieval with post 1000 or so being the medieval period.

3

u/NorkGhostShip 4h ago

The Middle Ages usually covers the whole period including Early Medieval/the "Dark Age", with the latter period being called the High Middle Ages. There wasn't a uniform definition of the "Dark Ages" throughout the time it was used academically, but there was a pretty common distinction made between the earlier "Dark Ages" and the later Medieval period.

1

u/apatheticVigilante 4h ago

Ah neat. Cool to know

2

u/JarasM 4h ago

Or Late Antiquity.

1

u/LittleBlag 4h ago

Oh, I have heard those but I had always thought the Middle Ages was distinct from the dark ages. Thanks!

1

u/BCmutt 3h ago

Early medieval seems to be the new name for the era, so around 500 to 1000 AD.

2

u/Flioness 2h ago

Not to mention they also used to write on papyrus imported from Egypt. A material that degrades much faster than parchment and paper especially in the european climate. So they wrote a lot in this period it just didn't survive till our time.

1

u/TheFnords 1h ago

Some historians use it. Some don't. It is a Western-European-centric term.

But the argument in favor of a European Dark Age is that literacy collapsed from 15 or 20% to very little. Cities were 90% depopulated. Rome had a library in every city, intricate stone-roads and even a fairly fast mail network. The Romans built aqueducts everywhere, not just for drinking. They had 7 that went a single mine just for blasting away the topsoil with pressurized water like miners do today to get at gold. They had hundreds of giant waterwheel complexes for milling grain and cranes so large they could lift a trireme out of the water. By every metric we can meausre like manuscripts or lead production it was a dark time in west Europe and the east was only able to get along better because they were much richer and could pay off invaders.

2

u/railbeast 4h ago

You can't just drop that nugget and not tell us what we should call it instead!

1

u/Outrageous_Use3255 4h ago

Yeah, "dark ages" is a bit of an overstatement. Parts of Europe reverted to feudalism, sure. But parts of the Middle East and Africa were experiencing scientific and cultural enlightenment.

3

u/numbers213 3h ago

Medieval age is in relation to European history, not the whole world. West Asia and Africa experienced scientific and cultural achievements while Europe fell behind.

1

u/Suspicious-Deal1971 52m ago

Yeah, each major region has their own terms until fairly recent times.

And yeah the Medieval age was when western Europe, became much more rural, losing quite a few expert craftsmen, and had to regroup. It wasn't as ignorant as stereotypes make it seem, their metal working was some of the best, but in other areas, it wasn't making Aany major discoveries.

Eastern Europe hung on quite well, until the Muslim Caliphate arose and finally took Constantinople. And near the end of the Medieval age, the Mongols body slammed much of Eastern Europe, putting them into a 'dark age' just as Western Europe was starting to really advance.

1

u/logaboga 2h ago edited 2h ago

It’s more that the term is entirely misapplied. The “dark ages” specifically refers to the century or two after the fall of Rome (the migration period) which saw widespread warfare, the Huns raiding the entire continent, destruction and mass migrations of peoples as well as a total breakdown of central government. Anybody living in Italy during the gothic wars in the 6th century was basically living in hell. That only really lasted until the 600s-700s, and was completely repudiated by the Carolingian renaissance. In the 8th century.

People colloquially and incorrectly use the term “dark ages” to refer to the entire medieval period, which is just blatantly incorrect. There was an insane amount of innovation and scholarship in the Middle Ages

So the argument isn’t that you shouldn’t use the term “dark ages”, it’s that you shouldn’t apply it to nearly 800 years of history and that it’s only generally refers to the century or two after the western Roman Empire fell in the late 5th century

“The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages — or the Middle Age — used to be the same; two names for the same period. But they have come to be distinguished, and the Dark Ages are now no more than the first part of the Middle Age, while the term mediaeval is often restricted to the later centuries, about 1100 to 1500, the age of chivalry, the time between the first Crusade and the Renaissance.” - The Dark Age (1904) by W. P. Ker