When people refer to the Middle Ages as the "Dark Ages"

>when people refer to the Middle Ages as the "Dark Ages"

>art = technological advancement
Are you retarded?

>when people fail to distinguish between the early middle ages and the high middle ages

Renaissance and Enlightenment era "intellectuals" who fapped to Latin & Greek history books

They were like nostalgiafags are now

>this recent age sucked
>we've completely degenerated

Referring to the early Middle Ages as the "Dark Ages" is still very inaccurate, look at the Byzantines for instance.
>technological advancement is the measuring stick of a civilization
>all of civilization prior to the 2nd half of the 19th Century was barbaric
Are you?

>"you're into history? have you ever heard about *ANCIENT ALIENS BULLSHIT*?"

Because those cathedrals were produced in the really end of the Dark ages, which had been going on since the late vth century bc, there are hundreds of years of stall before the romanesque and gothic cathedrals were spread.

What are you even trying to say?

>damn kids these days, with their fancy clothes, card games and dank kush

>those cathedrals were produced in the really end of the Dark ages, which had been going on since the late vth century bc

>The Byzantine

Which covered up only an extremely small part of Europe

The fuck is your problem, you retard?

ah bc, sorry I meant AD, you get the meaning.

Using cathedrals as a way to measure a civilization is retarded.

Lets remember thant the churche at that time was taxing 10% of all the wealth generated in europe every year, and that those cathedrals were built with even additional "donations" from the nobles or the merchants. If one third of your tax money was used to fund nice builds today you'd be insanely mad.

The 'Dark Ages' refers to Western Europe between the 5th and 8th centuries. It doesn't refer to Byzantium, unless you're talking about the 'Byzantine Dark Ages' between about 600 and 870 AD.

Which is why "Dark Ages" is a term that only refers to Western Europe after the Roman empire fell.

>implying cathedrals were just big, nice buildings

Cathedrals were a construction for all the people, they were the most democratized building ever created. At a time where there was no school, no hospital, no social services, it was the cathedral who accomplished all of those goals.

>At a time where there was no school, no hospital, no social services, it was the cathedral who accomplished all of those goals.
You got it wrong. Sure, the church provided some of those services - badly, and way less than what the states are doing nowadays, but the cathedrals were purely vanity buildings. The cathedrals weren't the places were the ill were cured or the poor fed.

>Sure, the church provided some of those services - badly, and way less than what the states are doing nowadays

The key being that there were few to no states in Europe at that time.

>but the cathedrals were purely vanity buildings
110% this.

The ONLY reasons churchs/cathedreils were built was to increase gods majesty on Earth as it was every Christians duty to do so.

They didn't make these archetectual nightmares for the sake of the technology, they did it so they could get into heaven.

>geeky cousin comes visit my beautiful region for the first time in years

>"HEY I CAME HERE FOR THE MEDIEVAL CASTLES"
>"aww yeah I know why you're my favorite cousin, there's so many castles we can visit-"
"I WANNA GO TO X CASTLE, HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO X CASTLE"
>"nah I never heard of it, why?"
>"WTF IT WAS THE SEAT OF THE PRIORY OF ZION, IT WAS IN THE DAVINCI CODE AND EVERYTHING! I THOUGHT YOU WERE INTO THIS HISTORY STUFF"

And the marvelous thing about cathedrals is that EVERY social group took part in it. In Chartres, for exemple, one of the stained glasses of the cathedral was bought by the whores of the town.

>implying bishops weren't the medieval European equivalent of the UN

Albeit more effective because the UN doesn't excommunicate people or launch crusades.

>dad was in the Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem because the family is from Europe, he was a medic in the military, and we have vague ties to Scandinavian nobility
>people get disappointed when they find out it's just the Shriners for Catholic doctors and isn't all Dan Brown and shit

IMO:
The Dark Ages are vastly overstated by left wing academics and students seeking to exaggerate the achievements of Islam (going so far as to suggest sub saharan africans as being Moors) and non euro nations in order to refute "eurocentric" views upon history or by euphoric Gibbon 2.0 memesters who hate anything remotely Abrahamic.

On the other hand, to claim outright that it never happened is very reactionary to say, considering that we do know that the level of literacy, trade, communication,produciton, and education plummeted in the final years and aftermath of the Western Roman Empire. Not to mention the wars of Justinian absolutely crippled Italy for the next few hundred years. Archaeology indicates lower quality productions of goods, St Gregory himself lamented that he was barely able to find a latin grammatician in Italy to teach him, no works of art of considerable grace were produced, and the populations of Western Europe were ridiculously low compared to the ERE (Rome eventually having a high of 20,000 people following the wars of Justinian, a city that beckoned perhaps a million people during the reign of the Nerva-Antonine Dynasty).


I think that it'd be more accurate to say that there was a sort of dark ages, wherein Western Europe had to get its shit together following the collapse of Roman infastructure, while the Byzantines managed to retain a very high level of culture and education for several centuries. It wasn't shit flinging mud riddled peasants, but a transformative event that was to reconcile the lack of a strong unifying culture and bureaucracy to a more unique identiy post Rome. I'd personally classify the end of the Dark ages as being around the reign of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance.

The thread is about people calling the Middle Ages the Dark Ages; most people recognize that the intermediate period between the fall of WRE and Charlemagne weren't fantastic.

Dark ages refers literally to the eras lack of writing.

This is literally what academics say.

In fact, most of them don't even use the word "Dark Ages."

They use "late antiquity"

>The Dark Ages are vastly overstated by left wing academics and students seeking to exaggerate the achievements of Islam

If by left wing academics and students you mean amateur non-historians and Islamists, sure. But the study of the height of Islamic civilization was what helped start the push back against the Dark Ages meme in the first place. The exaggerated dichotomy of Latin Europe and Islam in this period came about because of the time gap between popularization of the Islamic Golden Age and the modern medievalists who started criticizing the Neoclassical and Romantic views of past historians.

tl;dr popular history memes are shit, and have always been shit.

400-800 are easily Dark Ages

It's the dark age because blacks ruled Europe and kept it from chaos, after the power vacuum from the fall of Western Empire. Whiteys didn't like it and after they plotted and overthrew the 'dark'(-skinned) power, they erased all traces of records mentioning it, only leaving it as the 'dark age'.

Bretty close,but it was the church that destroyed books to enforce its "year 0" concept of christianity

As the son of a Freemason Eminent Commander, I feel you bro.

Wow, that's a timeless pic right there.

>gothic cathedral
>not a sign of technological advancement

this

>Romans
>Concrete

>When people thinks that Dark Ages is really used at all