Historians putting down the dark ages is (IMO) a game of Hegelian tennis. Someone has to hit the ball, so that you can refute it. If the previous historians had not framed the dark ages this way, modern historians would be. The process of erecting and dismantling such frames itself is just a way of doing history.
Here's my dismantling... The Carolingian Renaissance was not a renaissance. Frankia had never really been a part of the ancient civilization of Greece, Rome and "eastern lands." It was a roman outpost, for a time, but they never had urban civilization, widespread literacy, political unity or such. Same for the "Scottish Renaissance" or whatnot. The term makes sense for Italy, but that's about it. Before this period, it's all darkness... apart from an occasional roman flashlight.
In any case, the term "dark ages," at core, just means the absence of historical records.
Yeah, Western and Northern Europe were, as Taleb so aptly put it, backwaters for most of human history. The Dark Ages merely described their loss connection to urbane, cosmopolitan civilization, which never ceased in the east, and had been ongoing since the Bronze Age. Those yokels had to go east and plunder from the Romans of Constantinople and the Muslims of the Levant to get resources and knowledge or get them from the Moors in Spain.
Muslims in the East were still busy reading and interpreting Aristotle, practicing the most advanced medicine, mathematics, and religious tolerance while petty lords were raping and pillaging from peasants on and off their fiefdoms so much the Clergy had to make sermons and talks about cutting that out.
> Muslims in the East were still busy reading and interpreting Aristotle, practicing the most advanced medicine, mathematics, and religious tolerance while petty lords were raping and pillaging from peasants on and off their fiefdoms so much the Clergy had to make sermons and talks about cutting that out.
In parent's defense he was (a) quoting someone and (b) intentionally simplifying and distilling into a narrative label, which is the whole point of this thread.
It's also true that the Muslim Golden Age and european dark ages overlap, to the extent that you want to think in such terms.
OTOH, I would point out that civilized or barbarous, Muslim or Christian, lords abused their subjects.
I mean those sermons and talks are literally where the code of chivalry evolved from, are we saying the Romans in the East and the Caliphates didn't have access to more resources and knowledge?
Well, primarily, the eastern lands had access to paper. That in itself would explain a lot of the observed differences - it is so much more difficult to maintain an advanced culture when your only writing material is many dozens of times more expensive than what some other cultures had at the time. But to claim that "Muslims were busy reading Aristotle" and that they were "religiously tolerant" seems like almost a child-like simplification. Aristotle was being read not only by Muslims, and certainly not all Muslims were busy reading Aristotle. Not just that, but even in the Middle East, Aristotle was not even accepted unless he didn't contradict faith, as the existence of The Incoherence of the Philosophers seems to suggest (although early on the social climate might have been different). And more generally, the boundaries of "religious tolerance" were massively stricter than what a modern HN reader might expect that term to mean.
Here's my dismantling... The Carolingian Renaissance was not a renaissance. Frankia had never really been a part of the ancient civilization of Greece, Rome and "eastern lands." It was a roman outpost, for a time, but they never had urban civilization, widespread literacy, political unity or such. Same for the "Scottish Renaissance" or whatnot. The term makes sense for Italy, but that's about it. Before this period, it's all darkness... apart from an occasional roman flashlight.
In any case, the term "dark ages," at core, just means the absence of historical records.