dark ages

If the dark ages did not cone around , would this have changed our developmens in our world today. I dont know much about the dark ages so if someone could explain, that would be great!:confused:
 
Depends what you mean.

If the "Dark Ages" - which were only dark for a few particular corners of Western Europe - don't happen when they did, most likely they do happen some other time, and things average out. But obviously a lot of details would be different. Frex, if the Saxon invasion of Britannia is butterfled away, then "England" won't exist and whatever replaces it will speak either a Latin or Celtic tongue.
 

scholar

Banned
If the dark ages did not cone around , would this have changed our developmens in our world today. I dont know much about the dark ages so if someone could explain, that would be great!:confused:
The dark ages refer from the time after Western Rome fell to the age of enlightenment. The phrase was coined by self-important individuals who viewed upon all that came before them with inferiority and the people and philosophers are ignorant due to the hold the Catholic Church had over the people of Europe. It cannot be avoided unless the enlightenment is avoided. :p
 
Um...

First off, you ask a very, very, very simple question for an extremely complex answer.

First off, how would you have prevented the Dark Ages from not coming? The survival of the Roman Empire?

Next off... let's call it the Middle Ages. The Dark Ages is an aging term, as the Middle Ages weren't actually all that dark.

For example, many modern historians now suggest that the progression of technology did not go backwards or completely stop, but simply progressed at a slower rate.

At the same time, the stretch of international trade increased significantly. Feudualism allowed for population growth, new complex systems of government, and new found wealth.

Really, I'm probably not doing a great job of explaining it, but calling the Middle ages dark is not really a historical thing any more.
 
Instead of warriors lording it over peasants from forts, you'd have gentleman scholars loading it over serfs from manors. Not a huge difference, though probably less violent.
 
Instead of warriors lording it over peasants from forts, you'd have gentleman scholars loading it over serfs from manors. Not a huge difference, though probably less violent.

The violence of roman land owners was less warrior-like, it's true. The fiscal oppression, the permanance of slavery and semi-slavery as the constitutions of private militias was just as violent if not more.
 
The violence of roman land owners was less warrior-like, it's true. The fiscal oppression, the permanance of slavery and semi-slavery as the constitutions of private militias was just as violent if not more.
Tell me more of this Roman private militia.
 
Tell me more of this Roman private militia.

Since the crisis of III century, as the roman army was still on the borders and the germans raiding the countryside, the land-owners had little choice but recruiting people to protect their lands.

It was coming both from germans or other peoples such as brittons, from poor provincials, etc. At the end, it formed some armies, such as the one ruled by Syagrius that have both regular armies (as "master of militias") and provincial private troops.

Of course, it was really helping to force peasants into submission. That was nevertheless a secondary role, like the military force of feudal lords wasn't used against peasant except during revolts.

Even during the high Empire and the late republican period, the great land-owners had already private troops, thanks to the clientele system that said. This is hardly typical from MA and still exist today.
 
The traditional dates for the Dark Ages are 476 (end of the Roman Empire in the West) -1066 (the last Viking attack).

You could argue for other dates. The world was never the same after the Battle of Adrianople in 378, when the Roman frontier was breached and the Romans weren't able to get the invaders out.

In Britain, there's a clear break in 411 -- we know what was going on there before that date; we don't know much detail for a long time afterwards and we are forced to rely on later sources for most of what we do know. It's clear that literacy declined, maintenance of infrastructure ceased and coinage was discontinued.
 
The problem with the Dark Age concept is that it's basically Renaissance-era propaganda on the part of writers in Italian city-states who were disgruntled with the pattern where Italian city-states were successively absorbed by the Valois and the Habsburgs. The concept has been perpetuated by the fanboys and whitewashers of the Classical Age who obsess with a selective view of the era in question's virtues and an almost total and complete blindness to that era's faults. The degree to which it was a break has been grossly exaggerated, only in Britannia did the fall of Christian Roman civilization produce a collapse of literacy and the rise of an oral pagan culture, elsewhere it was Christian Romans being conquered by Christian Germans. And this is without the tricky question of why Roman fanboys insist that East-Rome is not-Rome when the line of Emperors was perfectly unbroken to 1204, but that raises a different can of worms.
 

gaijin

Banned
Meaning that the average person at 35 was just as dead as this thread was until you necrod it.
 
I've never understood that sort of thing, the whole don't revive ancient threads rule that seems to be prevalent across the internet.

I mean, who's it hurting? If I see some interesting shit, I'd very much like to continue the conversation regardless of the age.
 
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