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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 5680326" data-attributes="member: 463">There was a fashion for denying the dark ages, as a way for historians to make their reputation by refuting the previous generations.  Now that 'Late Antiquity' is pretty old hat, the new generation are making their reps showing that the Dark Ages were indeed pretty damn dark.  I recently read the (IMO) excellent <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_fall_of_Rome_and_the_end_of_civiliza.html?id=2vSUh9KbfKAC" target="_blank">The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization</a> which demonstrates through primary sources the massive impact of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire - in Britain civilisation literally disappeared completely, and while the effects were more nuanced in other areas, they were ultimately devastating throughout the West.  For instance north Africa more or less survived the Vandal conquest, but was eventually done in by the Islamic conquest a few centuries later. In the West you go from a civilization where urbanites scrawl literary grafitti on brothel walls, and city streets, confident that passers by can read their words, to one where literacy is entirely the preserve of a small class of monks.The situation in the Eastern Empire was more nuanced - and Late Antiquity advocates have typically relied on Eastern literary sources for their 'Late Antiquity' claims, because there was nothing coming out of the West for several centuries.  But even there we see a massive long-term decline as the ERE contracted under barbarian Ostrogoth, Arab and later Turkish attack.</blockquote>

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