A Real Dark Age: suggested PODs or general changes?

The idea that the Dark Ages were properly dark is of course suspect, after all we still have most of the works of Aristotle and many of Plato's, and a great deal of technology did survive until the renaissance. In other words, the Dark Age was a wimpy Dark Age. I want a proper Dark Ages, I don't want them to know the difference between Cicero and Plato, I don't want them to remember how to make steel.

Is it doable? How would you pull it off?

In terms of PODs I imagine it would help to not have Catholicism (perhaps earlier Church schisms?) and no Byzantines, but that's rather specific (I'd like something more widely applicable) and that probably won't get me all the way there anyways.

I posted in this forum rather than after-1900 because I don't want to hear nukes or technological answers, I've already read Canticle for Leibowitz I know how that works. It seems more challenging to send a civilization back to the Bronze Age that hasn't got so much natural apocalyptic potential.
 
I'd say some good recommendations to do that are:

1. Eliminate Christianity as a unifying force in Europe.
2. Prevent Islam from making its intercontinental Caliphates. That would help a lot with trade reduction and cultural linkage.
3. Extend the scale of collapse to other parts of the world (ie have the Chinese, Indians, and Persians also have their own "dark ages")
4. Prevent agricultural advances like the 3-field system from expanding too far.
5.Have a widespread plague kill a large part of the population, so much so that there is no way to have a large intellectual class (aristocrats or middle class) focused on advancements. That would leave the administration time to the priests, reducing their time to copy and read over older ideas.

That'll most likely lead to a good old fashioned degeneration.
 
I think the best way to do this is to have feudalism not develop. Which can be fairly easily done if Charles Martel is defeated at some point in his life. Then Europe will be pretty much all tribes, which were much more focused on fighting each other and surviving than on advancing themselves too much (so Charlemagne the warrior can happen, but he'd be much more like a nomadic conqueror than IOTL. 'Charlemagne the guy that brought guys in from Britain to learn stuff' can't happen in a tribal state).

Then, knock out Muhammed and have the Vikings do a better job of destroying England, and I think the world is much more backwards. Oh yeah, have the Byzantines and Persians overrun in the 5th century as well.

Like every dark age in history, it will eventually be followed by a golden age, but this will probably happen much later, probably towards the end of the Second Millennium AD.

- BNC
 
ASBs carpet nuke Eurasia?:coldsweat:
Well... You could have what essentially amounts to a humanity-wank for a few hundred to a few thousand years, allowing incredibly rapid development of technology and society, only to result in nuclear war around 1900. This, of course, would require just about everything to go perfectly right, in the ideal circumstances, in such a manner so that things don't go wrong further down the line.
 
Have the plague of Justinian do as much of a number on Europe as smallpox did in America?
That would do it alright, especially as the few survivors would be in the most isolated rural areas. If the Arabs then decided that the empty Europe and North Africa had been cursed by God and were now forever unclean and forbidden then the libraries would just rot away and every thing would be lost.
 
You underestimate how dark the dark age actually was. Sure, a lot of people overestimate it as well but there is a lot we don't know about what happened in that era, nor do we have the vaguest grasp in a lot of areas, either. You know why we remember the works of Aristotle etc? Thanks, ERE.
 
No it wasn't. Slavery persisted in every single form of the Roman Empire, from the Kingdom to the Byzantines.

*checks up*

Ok, maybe I worded my earlier post wrong, but the beginnings of serfdom did arise in the late Roman Empire. It's still going to be hard to get rid of feudalism. Perhaps it develops differently ITTL?

At any rate, the "we have all the answers, no one else needs to learn anything new, because there isn't anything new" mentality has to stick around for a loooooong time.
 
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