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The context is that after the collapse of Roman authority under the onslaught of barbarian invaders, wave after wave of new invaders, mostly Germanic, swept across Europe preventing the formation of stable governments; no sooner would one tribe begin to consolidate power in an area, than another more desperate, & thus more aggressive, tribe would overthrow them, generally pushing them further west & south.
How does this situation, several centuries of constant warfare & chaos, compare with the peaceful & orderly handover of power by European colonial powers to their former subjects? All the machinery of government remained in place: gov't administration, police & military forces, an educational system, etc. The "natives," many of whom had already been working in these agencies, had merely to "take over the wheel"; but we see what they did with it--drove their countries into the ditch.Comment
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That's easy. They handed government to one faction of the locals, who were willing to keep in place the economic status quo, which was wealth extraction for the advantage of the former colonial power.
The "machinery" of rule is the least of it. Those colonial powers exited because their rule was discredited in the eyes of the governed, and much of the world.Comment
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I recommend reading Stay Away Joe -- a story about an Indian - French Canadian family and their struggle with the modern world. The wife (the French Canadian) got a government grant of a small herd of purebred cattle, which was to be their ticket out of poverty. Joe, the son, came home, there was a celebration, with all the relatives. They had a feast -- and ate the bull!Comment
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The "official" date for the fall of the Western Roman Empire is 476 AD. Charlemagne had established the most powerful state in Europe since the fall of Rome before 780, so where's the "1,000 years"? And what scholar would call the spread of culture & learning under his long rule, esp. the production & circulation of books, the Dark Ages?Comment
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valid points but not what I was referring to ,
at the time togor mentions, Rome and it's empire were at or just past their heyday,
the heathens that overran Rome and the Empire came from what would (compared to the Empire) a shaithole country,
context would be were they Shiat hole countries occupied by the Empire? or did they take a big fall after the Roman's left?
truth would be some regions did well, others not so much, and maybe none better than what Rome is or was?
as far as the East Euro comment, the Poles and a few others may have some other ideasComment
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Okay gonna need some examples of culture and learning from that 1,000 years that really stands out in comparison to before, after, or elsewhere. You have 1,000 years to work with so I'm sure you'll find something, but you understand the big picture. You just don't like it!
Another European sh*thole country example, more recent: Ireland in the time of the famine. Potato blight was a result of an introduced pest, and the cultivation methods forced by the English landowners. Traditional Irish farming methods, like those in S. America, created a microclimate that resisted the fungus. And at the height of the famine the English colonizers continued to extract wealth, exporting food! Irish refugees washed up on far shores, escaping the calamity, where they were greeted with hostility and prejudice by the locals.
Modern Ireland, no longer a sh*thole country, does not exist to export its wealth to Britain.Comment
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"The most important Catholic reply to the Magdeburg Centuries was the Annales Ecclesiastici by Cardinal Caesar Baronius. Baronius was a trained historian who produced a work that the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1911 described as "far surpassing anything before" and that Acton regarded as "the greatest history of the Church ever written". The Annales covered the first twelve centuries of Christianity to 1198, and was published in twelve volumes between 1588 and 1607. It was in Volume X that Baronius coined the term "dark age" for the period between the end of the Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first stirrings of Gregorian Reform under Pope Clement II in 1046"
So the "Dark Ages" -- according to the man who coined the term -- is not the period following the fall of the Roman Empire, but following the fall of the Carolingian Empire a little more than 400 years later, and it lasted a little over 150 years.Comment
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I think he must have been speaking theologically, referring to HIS ideals of Christian doctrine & practice. Otto the Great, Holy Roman Emperor, established a kingdom almost as large as Charlemagne's in 968, & at least equally splendid. Many great cathedrals were already built or begun before 1046. If the term has any legitimate meaning, regardless of who first coined it, it would have to refer to that time of constant war, invasion, & general chaos, in the two centuries or so of the power vacuum left after Roman power was overthrown.Comment
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Yes for once you are correct. But the term more has more broadly come to refer to a 1,000 year period in which European civilization waxed and wanted with little improvement in science or technology.
Certainly true that the life of an ordinary peasant in those times was brutish and short.Comment
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