Medieval society was extremely dynamic, politically decentralized and originated many of the best elements of Western civilization ('Christendom' would have been the politically incorrect designation). Despite a collapse of Mediterranean trade, primarily due to Islamic conquest and piracy as well as their deliberate policy of isolating the Roman Empire from the Latin world, medieval European society developed technology, trade and institutions of law superior to all past and contemporary cultures, and in some ways to today, where bureaucratic despotism on the Mandarin model has re-emerged coupled with a progressive theocracy far more totalitarian than any possible under the caliphates.
...soon after the fall of Rome, it encouraged an era of extraordinary invention and innovation. To appreciate this remarkable achievement it is necessary to confront an incredible lie that long disfigured our knowledge of history.
For the past two or three centuries, every educated person has known that from the fall of Rome until about the fifteenth century Europe was submerged in the “Dark Ages”—centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery—from which it was suddenly, almost miraculously rescued, first by the Renaissance and then by the Enlightenment. But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, during the so-called Dark Ages, European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world! The idea that Europe fell into the Dark Ages is a hoax originated by antireligious, and bitterly anti-Catholic, eighteenth-century intellectuals who were determined to assert the cultural superiority of their own time and who boosted their claim by denigrating previous centuries as—in the words of Voltaire—a time when “barbarism, superstition, [and] ignorance covered the face of the world.” Views such as these were repeated so often and so unanimously that, until very recently, even dictionaries and encyclopedias accepted the Dark Ages as an historical fact. Some writers even seemed to suggest that people living in, say, the ninth century described their own time as one of backwardness and superstition.
Fortunately, in the past few years these views have been so completely discredited that even some dictionaries and encyclopedias have begun to refer to the notion of Dark Ages as mythical.
...when the breakup of the Roman empire “released the tax-paying millions . . . from a paralysing oppression,” many new technologies began to appear, and were rapidly and widely adopted, with the result that ordinary people were able to live far better, and after centuries of decline under Rome, the population began to grow again. No longer were the productive classes bled to sustain the astonishing excesses of the Roman elite, or to erect massive monuments to imperial egos, or to support vast armies to hold Rome’s many colonies in thrall. Instead, human effort and ingenuity turned to better ways to farm, to sail, to transport goods, to build churches, to make war, to educate, and even to play music.
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