Avoid the Myth of the Dark Ages

One civilization's dark age is another civilization's golden age.

The "Viking Age" was a time of expansion for the Scandinavians. They founded new cities from Ireland to Russia, opened up new trade routes and almost established themselves on a new continent.

The collapse of the Roman Empire in the west was a boon for the Franks, Vandals, Visigoths and Ostrogoths. The recovery of the eastern Roman Empire in the 500's was the downfall for most of them.

If the Sassanids and the Rhomaioi hadn't have battered each other senseless in their last conflict with one another, the Quraysh confederation, centred in Mecca, and their new Islam ideology wouldn't have had the golden age they enjoyed.

Just because the Roman Empire lost half its territory and struggled on for centuries, doesn't mean that everyone has to assume their failure as if it was their own.
 
Getting back to the original point, I think one way to do it would be to have more Ancient literature survive in circulation. The common belief that the Middle ages did not care for their ancient heritage was only ever partly true, but it received an enormous boost when humanists discovered manuscripts of texts nobody had had a clue existed. This sense of wide-eyed wonder at discovering an entirely new world would be considerably mitigated had Tacitus, Xenophon, and their ilk simply been part of the known canon. After all, medieval scholars deeply cared about their Roman heritage and readily worked with what canon they had. With more stuff, there would have been less of a sense of new beginning.

Incidentally, I am fairly sure that even without a full-blown Renaissance, we would see a lot of antiquarian sentiment. Italian art was always strongly influenced by Roman and Byzantine models, sometimes to the point of outright imitiation, but often producing very interesting and novel things not seen in the rest of Europe. So there'll very likely still be crowded reliefs, plenty of unnecessary columns, round arches and random nudity.

The idea of taking out Roman law is also very promising. The legal profession worked with medieval precedent very happily even in Roman law countries, and lawyers never felt the same sense of detachment from the era that artists and antiquarians often professed.

Another idea would be to remove the Irish monastic influence. It would make for a much duller Carolingian era (we'd lose a lot of good art and a fair number of converts), but the Irish monks were also instrumental in creating the idea of Latin as a separate literary language. This was one thing they puished very strongly in the Carolingian Renaissance when "Latin got better". They had always learned it as a completely foreign language, mostly from the models that the Romans had considered "classics", and were horrified at the kind of "debased" Latin that actual Latin speakers used. This is one reason, possibly the reason, why Latin, unlike Greek and Arabic, did not continue in a two-track mode, with vulgar varieties and the classical form coexisting, but split itself off entirely, considering the vulgar forms no longer part of the real thing. This is how we get Romance languages, and also how so much of Europe could feel that Rome was so far removed from them. If they had continued to think of themselves as Latin speakers (as indeed was common usage for quite a while), Italians, Southern French, Spaniards and Sicilians would most likely not have felt the urgent need to resurrect an ancient model as a contrast to current reality.
 
I'm in full agreement with Emperor Noton I, "Investigate Terry Jones' stuff on the Middle Ages. ".

The middleages was a tremendous time of Western European advancement.

Also read Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, and Cathedral Forge and Waterwheel Frances and Joseph Gies. :D
 
I'm in full agreement with Emperor Noton I, "Investigate Terry Jones' stuff on the Middle Ages. ".

The middleages was a tremendous time of Western European advancement.

Also read Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, and Cathedral Forge and Waterwheel Frances and Joseph Gies. :D

Actually, the person most to blame for the current view on the contrast between antiquity and the middle ages is probably Moses Finley. Though the steady refusal of too many university curricula to mentally include places like Qalbid Sicily, Beneventum, Spain, Moesia, Greece, or even Lombardy as "core Europe" for purposes of medieval studies also needs to bear its share of the burden.
 
There is a problematic conception with the idea that humans became stupider and more ignorant in Europe after the fall of Rome, and it only returned to previously lost intelligence with the Renaissance. And that the Romans were perfect and everyone else was a group of barbarians digging in the mud and living just a step above cave men. That's the Middle Ages in the conception of it as a middle age; a dip where people tried to climb out of a hole and get back to being in the Roman days. In truth, the Barbarians whom the Medieval kingdoms evolved from were reasonably advanced (and many on Rome's level; it may even be most) and Europe kept developing throughout the Middle Ages, and developed into the Renaissance rather than someone snapping their fingers and all of a sudden them leaping out of mud huts. The Middle Ages were, to the people who lived in them, the most Modern Ages. And they were doing things that hadn't been done before.

Investigate Terry Jones' stuff on the Middle Ages. He's my guru.

Oh, believe me, I'm well aware, I'm an amateur medievalist myself. And you're right, Terry Jones is great stuff, as is Robert Bartlett. My point wasn't that Byzantium would make the period less retarded, but rather change the perceptions of how retarded (or not) it was. It'd be a lot harder for people to go on about how Rome fell and all sense of classical life was lost with the Byzantines around to politely cough and interject.
 
If we saw continuation in Roman bureaucratic methods (taxation) etc. then I could agree that there was no such thing as a Dark Ages.

But I also don't think that the Dark Ages were a complete sinkhole- the fundamental difference between the barbarians and the Romans was that Roman ethnocentrism refused to allow for other civilizations to be acknowledged. (The closest they came to respecting anyone was the Sassanids, and that's just because ya know, they kept massacring those Imperial Armies and being a successful, stable-ish empire.

If you butterflied away Roman arrogance and superiority, and somehow kept the other things which made them want to become an empire, than the Renaissance would not be filled with pseudo-Romans who wanted to keep long gone definitions of "Barbarian" and "Roman,"
 
If we saw continuation in Roman bureaucratic methods (taxation) etc. then I could agree that there was no such thing as a Dark Ages.

But I also don't think that the Dark Ages were a complete sinkhole- the fundamental difference between the barbarians and the Romans was that Roman ethnocentrism refused to allow for other civilizations to be acknowledged. (The closest they came to respecting anyone was the Sassanids, and that's just because ya know, they kept massacring those Imperial Armies and being a successful, stable-ish empire.

If you butterflied away Roman arrogance and superiority, and somehow kept the other things which made them want to become an empire, than the Renaissance would not be filled with pseudo-Romans who wanted to keep long gone definitions of "Barbarian" and "Roman,"

The problem is that even if you somehow did that (how, I dunno), there was a difference between the Dark Ages (up to somewhere between Charlemagne and 1000 AD) and the previous height of civilization's perks. Deurbanization was not a step forward for Western Europe.

But that's exactly what happened in the failing of the western half of Rome until long afterward. I wouldn't say technology necessarily lapsed, but I'd rather live in 2nd century AD Rome than 9th century AD Rome, for instance.

The idea that the Middle Ages were all crude and backward is overstated, but there was a period where "civilization"'s higher aspects withered - the only way to avoid that being considered Dark is to change the period itself, or have people idealize the days of kings strenciling their name on documents and "town" meaning something in the three digits.
 
If we saw continuation in Roman bureaucratic methods (taxation) etc. then I could agree that there was no such thing as a Dark Ages.

Taxation did continue, by and large. The indictions were counted almost uninterrupted all the way to the Persian and Slavic invasions. It was just the less civilised parts of the Empire, and, through a quirk of fate, Northern and Central Italy, that saw the massive dislocation we associate with the "Dark Ages".
 
If we saw continuation in Roman bureaucratic methods (taxation) etc. then I could agree that there was no such thing as a Dark Ages.
Certainly not.

Not only germanic kings maintained a large part of an then obsolete taxation method, mainly by the prestige of roman administration and because the [randomo]-roman aristocraty maintained its power here.

It wasn't before the Carolingian renaissance, and the post-carolingian agricultural revolution that the taxation system chaged definitly (even if it knew many great changes during the VI/VIII) to give not only the medieval system, but ours.

But I also don't think that the Dark Ages were a complete sinkhole- the fundamental difference between the barbarians and the Romans was that Roman ethnocentrism refused to allow for other civilizations to be acknowledged
Depends, we have tons of "good barbarians" stuff, where germans are praised for their solidarity, their proximity with nature and good, where they're sawn as liberators by even some romans scholars.

Besides, the romanocentrism was critically pushed by...barbarians kings who were in the shadow of Rome's past. If Charlemagne revived the Roman Empire, it wasn't because it's sounded good.
But the main part of the concept of Rome as only center of culture, far from oriental hubris and nordic savagery is more due to Renaissance than Roman Times, even if you can find many texts or sources of this era about how the barbarians are retared but they weren't that influential.

In fact, ignoring the fact that barbarians were deeply integrated into roman chain-of-command and administrations, Renaissance scholars more or less "selectioned" the texts that were in the same point-of-view than them.
 
A deeper and longer-lived Carolingian Renaissance would help quite a bit. Broader literacy, better record-keeping, stronger cultural and commercial ties to ERE, and a stronger sense of European countries being WRE successor states rather than new kingdoms emerging out of barbarism.

Three things that'd probably help the Carolingian Renaissance:

  • A single clear heir, rather than dividing Charlemagne's empire among his three sons.
  • C had most of the castles and forts in his empire demolished so his vassals would be less able to resist the power of the central government, but it also left his successor states less able to resist Viking raids. Leave forts intact, at least along the coast, and you get much fewer Viking incursions.
  • Give C more diplomatic success with the ERE. The marriage proposal to Empress Irene has been discussed in other threads and is generally considered unrealistic for it to succeed as C had intended, but perhaps a more realistic alliance and trade agreement, with ERE recognizing C as Caesar of the West in exchange for Frankish promise to send troops if ERE is attacked by Persia?
 
Instead of calling it a "dark age," Petrarch calls it an "age of questions."
The new popular misconception was that it was the first time since the fall of hellenic culture that people in Europe asked questions about the world around them.
 
A deeper and longer-lived Carolingian Renaissance would help quite a bit. Broader literacy, better record-keeping, stronger cultural and commercial ties to ERE, and a stronger sense of European countries being WRE successor states rather than new kingdoms emerging out of barbarism.
What do you mean? All the continental european countries claimed to be sucessor of WRE even before Charlemagne. He didn't take the title for giggles and sunshine.
BUT, the differences were mainly on the perception of this sucession, in Frankish Kingdom between "Franks" (North) and "Romans" (South). Many historiographies claimed that new kingdom have freed people from roman oppression (and, honestly, it's far from false).

Anyway, how are you having a longer Carolingian Renaissance?
At the beggining of Louis's reign, there weren't no longer easy people to plunder, just too poor or troo strong ones. It's because the nobility began to busy about how make their domains (until then more a fiscal income than anything else) productive and active trade center that Carolingian Renaissance managed to long a bit until 860's.
But the "golden age" of Charlemagne can't be enlarged without a big, sucessful raid to basicly finance it. Where? Al-Andalus? Done three times, failed. Byzantium? Let's assume we didn't think about it and that we'll never do. England? With which boats?

Three things that'd probably help the Carolingian Renaissance:

  • A single clear heir, rather than dividing Charlemagne's empire among his three sons.
It's essentielly what was supposed to be the Ordinatio Imperii. The other kingdoms (Aquitaine and Bavaria) were supposed to be, as during Charlemagne's reign, only "subordoned" kingdoms made to satisfy the independent sentiment of their population.

Furthermore, when Charlemagne never intended to transmit his imperial title, Louis wanted so.

  • C had most of the castles and forts in his empire demolished so his vassals would be less able to resist the power of the central government, but it also left his successor states less able to resist Viking raids. Leave forts intact, at least along the coast, and you get much fewer Viking incursions.
Which castles? The only fortifications worth of mention at this time are castrum, generally or at the hands of local aristocraty or even bishops that are mainly "loyalists".
The castles are coming from carolingian collapse.
  • Give C more diplomatic success with the ERE. The marriage proposal to Empress Irene has been discussed in other threads and is generally considered unrealistic for it to succeed as C had intended, but perhaps a more realistic alliance and trade agreement, with ERE recognizing C as Caesar of the West in exchange for Frankish promise to send troops if ERE is attacked by Persia?

1)The fact that Franks regularly byzantine protected peoples if not byzantine territories is not really helping.
2) ERE recognized OTL Charlemagne as emperor in exchange of withdraw of some territories (very tiny coasts in Italy + Venice). I'm not sure a badass as C is likely to give more.
 
Alternatively, maybe we could keep Otto III alive and keep the Ottonian renaissance going? He was half Greek, and had big ideas about the renovatio of the Roman Empire, even making Rome his administrative capital.
 
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