How the Middle Ages Became (Unfairly) Seen as the "Dark Ages"

How the concept of "Middle Ages" was created in the Renaissance and how they became unfairly seen as "Dark Ages". Were the Middle Ages really that bad compared to other periods of European history?

When presenting medieval history to a large audience, one must inevitably refute a ton of stereotypes and myths that exist about the Middle Ages. The medieval time period, defined as stretching from around year 500 to around 1500, is associated with religious fanaticism, ignorance, repression and brutality. Over centuries that followed, a very dark image of this era has been created and the term medieval itself is often used as a pejorative. Even though there has been a lot of great historical research done on the period by reputed modern historians and a more favorable view is now mainstream in academia, the “dark age” image of Middle Ages is still rooted in popular perception of the era, and this is not going away any time soon.

To understand why, we need to look deeper into Western history and how Western civilization began to understands itself since the early modern period.

This is why I’m going to approach this from a bit different angle. I’m not going to start refuting the most absurd (yet unfortunately still very widespread) myths about the Middle Ages. There’s already a lot of well written articles online pointing out how educated medievals didn’t actually think that the Earth was flat and didn’t argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. There will be time for such things later.

The main problem I see is that no matter how much you refute all kinds of stereotypes and negative myths about the Middle Ages, people will still see it as a dark period simply because of the fact that medieval values were different than modern values, and were ultimately still unacceptable for our age. They will think something along the lines of, “Alright, so maybe the Middle Ages were not as ignorant and repressive as we thought, but it was still a very brutal era compared to ours.” Which, to be fair, is basically true. The medievals ultimately held different values and a different approach to life than our modern society does, and this has to be always pointed out as well. Obviously we can put this into context and try to understand the spirit of the time and the circumstances that made them how they were, but I’m not going to deal with this in this article either.

Because something else needs to be addressed first and this is how the Middle Ages are unfairly singled out compared to other eras of European history before modernity which were just as “bad” judging them by the same criteria. Once we explore the origin of such attitude, the bias against Middle Ages becomes much more apparent and easier to understand.

Therefore in this article, I will go back to how the concept of “Middle Ages” was created by the Italian humanists, how it was meant to denigrate the period and glorify classical antiquity, and how this interpretation of history caught on in the early modern era and has been with us ever since.

Once you start comparing the Middle Ages to other time periods of European history, you can quickly notice that in comparison, the periods that came before and after, Antiquity and Renaissance, get a much more favorable treatment. Antiquity is seen as the glorious origin of the Western Civilization while the Renaissance is framed as the beginning of the modern era, signalling a supposed sudden big leap from the darkness of the Middle Ages.

This always seemed absurd to me because pretty much everything bad you can find in the Middle Ages, and for which the medievals get criticized for relentlessly, also existed in either Antiquity or Renaissance, or in both. So even if you want to judge the Middle Ages as a dark period of repression, ignorance, irrational fanaticism and brutality from the standards of our age, you have to give a similar judgement to other pre-modern periods of European history if you want to be fair. In fact, many of the phenomenons which give the Middle Ages a bad reputation have a much more common presence in the other two historical eras.

This is especially true when we compare the Middle Ages to Renaissance, which was pretty much just a slow and steady continuation of the Middle Ages instead of this big transformation that people seem to believe it was. Inquisition and persecution of witchcraft reached their peak after the Middle Ages. Despite this, people would still describe these phenomenons as proverbially “medieval” in their nature, even though they scarcely happened in the medieval period (as defined in the 500-1500 timeframe), with exception of certain parts of Europe for a certain period of time, and in very specific circumstances. For example there was the Episcopal Inquisition, and since the 1230s the Papal Inquisition as a response to heretical movements of Catharism and Waldensians. It did not reach the level of the Spanish Inquisition, which was only established much later in 1478, and became a strong institution in the early modern era.

In general, whenever there are instances of religious fanaticism in the modern age, people would say that it is like “going back to the Middle Ages” instead of saying something like “this is just like Renaissance” even though violent religious fanaticism was more common in Renaissance era Europe than in the Middle Ages by any objective measure. The early modern period was largely defined by religious wars which shaped the political discourse and identity of the emerging powers. Even if many of these religious wars had a very cynical political aspect to them, they were definitely also fueled by popular religious hatred and fanaticism. The Renaissance Catholic Church also became more strict and more dogmatic following the Council of Trent (which took place from 1545 to 1563). The kind of rigid Catholic Church people associate with the Middle Ages would be closer to the Renaissance Church than the medieval Church.

Also worth noting is that there were many powerful women in the Middle Ages and women had more rights compared to Antiquity, yet people would denounce certain sexist attitudes in modern time as “medieval” instead of comparing them to classical Greece or pagan Rome which were more patriarchal societies than Middle Ages.

Another example is the plague, associated with the Middle Ages but more common in Renaissance. While the “Black Death” pandemic did indeed happen in the Middle Ages, it happened relatively late in the medieval era (1346-1353) and would persist long after the Middle Ages ended. The bubonic plague would continue to be a big problem through the entire Renaissance period with outbreaks of this disease occurring quite often, especially in large cities like London, Florence and Venice. Plague was a feature of Renaissance. The life expectancy of the Renaissance period was also lower than in the Middle Ages in many places as a result of regular plagues and wars which also became more brutal and costly than before.

Wars and brutality were another thing where Renaissance exceeds the Middle Ages, including torture methods and devices. The wars became more intense and the battles and campaigns more lethal. The development of gunpowder weapons ensured high casualties in open field battles, while the increasing might of emerging European superpowers meant larger and more frequently raised mercenary armies which often ended up pillaging and devastating the countryside. While the latter also happened in the Middle Ages, the early modern conflicts like the Italian Wars (1494-1559), the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648) and most notoriously the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) were unlike anything the Middle Ages had seen in terms of scale of brutality and devastation over a prolonged period of time.

These examples show that the Middle Ages are simply seen as fundamentally bad while the civilizations of Antiquity and Renaissance carry an inherent prestige in popular Western imagination, despite all of them having similar “sins”.

But what about the good things that people praise Antiquity and Renaissance for? Weren’t these two time periods simply more advanced than the Middle Ages?

This is a very tricky question that actually gets us to the root of the problem. Ultimately, it’s a very unfair comparison and I’ll explain why.

If we compare Middle Ages to Renaissance, I have to point out what I mentioned earlier; the Renaissance was just a slow and steady continuation of the Middle Ages instead of this big leap forward that people seem to think it was. Just like with the bad things, pretty much everything good that existed in the Renaissance already existed in the Middle Ages, just on a smaller scale. There is a clear line of progress from the period we call “High Middle Ages” (1000-1300) to Renaissance. The growth of cities and trade, the establishment of universities, technological advances, impressive architectural achievements, scientific innovations, improvement of military and naval technology etc. Everything was already taking place long before the 16th century and had been for improving for quite some time. The medieval period laid the foundations for everything that unfolded in centuries afterwards, good or bad. Last but not least, the most powerful rulers of Renaissance came from Capetian Valois and Habsburg houses, two old medieval dynasties. If we would split time periods of European history between dynasties like we do with some other civilizations, this would be the same period based on that alone. It was ultimately the same civilization. The Middle Ages and Renaissance were connected to an extent that we could actually consider them the same period in European history. And this also shows us how the periodization of Middle Ages that ends around year 1500 is problematic to begin with. There can easily be a case to extend the civilization we call “medieval” much further in Western historic timeframe, all the way to around 1800. The combined effect of the Industrial Revolution and political revolutions of 1789-1848 presents a much bigger break in European history than anything that happened around 1500 that was supposed to bring about “the new age”. Because ultimately, “early modern” society from around year 1600 would have had much more in common with medieval society from year 1300 than with the actual modern society from year 1900. And this terrible periodization is one of the reasons why Middle Ages are seen in bad light. We “cut off” the “medieval” civilization just at the time when all the hard work that the medievals put in started to show results, and present this as an entirely new period, then judge the medievals for not being as good as what they themselves built the crucial foundations for. In a weird way, they’re denied credit for the progress that they themselves started.

When comparing the Middle Ages to the ancient Romans we encounter a similar problem of periodization. The Middle Ages supposedly begin around year 500, usually with a specific year that marks one of the events in the demise of Western Roman Empire like 476, the year when the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed. 476 was actually chosen by Leonardo Bruni, one of the 15th century Italian humanists who were instrumental in creating the concept of “Middle Ages”, and I’ll get to him soon. In this periodization, the Middle Ages are naturally seen as a big step down compared to the glory of ancient Rome. But does it really make sense to put the start of the Middle Ages around year 500? I would argue that it doesn’t. I think that a specific distinct “medieval” culture only started to take shape around year 1000. The centuries from 500 to 1000 were still in the shadow of ancient Rome in one way or another, and could be considered as part of the long decline of Roman Empire in the West, rather than a period of its own. Because the Roman Empire didn’t really fall over night. First of all, it remained in the East in the form of Byzantine Empire. But also in the West, Roman culture was still a civilizational standard, and nothing new really emerged that would replace it, yet. The Roman imperial memory was still completely alive and had not been abandoned. This is why the Catholic Church ultimately tried to revive the Western Roman Empire by crowning Charlemagne as Roman Emperor in 800, rather than trying to legitimize his existing Frankish Empire as a Catholic Empire on its own, without invoking the Roman connection. The Catholic Church itself was a Roman institution and Christianity was essentially a Roman religion, born in the Roman Empire and spread by its infrastructure. The Catholic Church preserved continuity with Roman culture through Latin language and preservation of Roman texts and knowledge, and it had a direct unbroken link with the Empire itself. The Catholic monasteries in particular were crucial for preservation of Roman culture and present another important link between Romans and medievals. What really happened is that the political structure of Roman Empire slowly collapsed in the West, but in terms of civilization and culture, this was still a world in the shadow of Rome, and not a new civilization with a clear sense of its own identity and mission. So why not count it as part of Roman history as well? As I will show later, the 500-1500 timeline became popular for purely political reasons during the Renaissance, and tells us more about the Renaissance than the “medieval” period in question.

The actual medieval civilization as distinct from the Roman one only began to really form in the 11th century. In this century, crucial developments took place in the form of Crusades, Gregorian reforms and Investiture Controversy (the conflict between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor). This is a long topic and I will address in future why these events were so important, but in short, all of this led to the birth of a new civilization in the West that had a strong sense of distinct self-identity, and that began developing very differently than the previous Roman one. The people who belonged to this civilization were called Latins or Franks, as they were commonly named by the Byzantines and the Muslims during their encounters in the Crusades. The Byzantines and the Muslims both realized they’re dealing with a culture very different from their own, even though they all shared cultural knowledge of Antiquity and ruled the territories that once belonged to the ancient Roman Empire. What came to being in the 11th century Latin (Catholic) West was a very unique civilization split into many distinct entities but united by common religion and common cultural norm. Often described as a Res publica Christiana or Christendom, a commonwealth of Christians headed by warrior aristocracy and Catholic clergy as imagined in the political system of three orders. This system emerged in 11th century and lasted until the age of nationalism in 19th century. This was the real birth of the civilization we call Western Civilization now. It would make more sense to mark this era as a distinct time period in Western history than the established medieval one of 500-1500, which doesn’t really make sense and was created for purely political and cultural reasons during the Renaissance, as I will explain later.

So if we use the periodization that I used and mark the medieval period as lasting from 1000 to 1800, it suddenly doesn’t look that bad compared to the Roman Empire, if we use the same criteria under which the Roman Empire has been glorified in the West for so long. The Roman Empire became a dominant military force and boasted of many technological, scientific and cultural advances? Well so did the “medieval” civilization that kicked off in 11th century and also includes the early modern era for the reasons I mentioned earlier, lasting until 19th century. And unlike the Romans, there was no decline in the end, it transformed into an even more advanced civilization with industrial revolution. As you can see, an argument can easily be made for why the medieval Western civilization was actually “better” than the Roman Antiquity, using the same criteria for which the ancient Romans are praised for in Western imagination.

But my point is not to compare these historic periods and civilizations but just to show you how quickly a perspective can change. Just by moving the starting and ending dates a bit, a time period in history suddenly goes from looking like a dark age to looking like a golden age. Placing the “middle” age between ancient and modern age between the years 500 and 1500 makes the entire period look bad, but moving the years to 1000 and 1800 makes it look good. It also shows us just how arbitrary these dates are, and could be changed to fit a narrative.

And this takes us back to what I hinted at earlier. It’s all about perception. It all gets even more clear when we begin to understand how the whole concept of “Middle Ages” was actually created with the intention to make the entire period look bad and to make the periods that preceded and succeeded it better. This began with Italian humanism. The famed poet Petrarch (1304-1374) was the first to develop the concept of “Dark Ages” in relation to the period that would be later named the “Middle Ages”. He glorified ancient Rome and classical Antiquity, while describing the period that followed the “barbarian” conquest of Rome as a period of darkness. His own time was included in these “Dark Ages”. He did not yet formulate the tripartite concept of history that would also include a modern age to follow the “middle” dark age, but laid the foundations for such thinking. Petrarch remained rather pessimistic and did not see himself living in a modern age that would overcome the “Dark Ages” he described. However he did hint at a possible better age coming in the future. In his poem Africa, dedicated to Roman general Scipio Africanus and written after Petrarch’s visit to Rome in 1337, Petrarch wrote, “My fate is to live amid varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age.” It has to be pointed out that at the time of Petrarch’s visit, the city of Rome was in decay following the papacy moving to Avignon in 1309 and not returning to Rome until 1376, two years after Petrarch’s death. This must have fueled Petrarch’s pessimism about his time as he saw the once glorious city of Rome in such sad state, and increase his admiration of the period of ancient Rome.

Petrarch was even more clear in his forecast of a possible new glorious age in one of his Epistolae familiares where he complains about being “in such sad times”, and wishes that he had been born either earlier or much later, “There was a more fortunate age and probably there will be one again; in the middle, in our time, you see the confluence of wretches and ignominy.”

Other Italian humanists continued with this glorification of classical antiquity and Roman Empire. They echoed the spirit Petrarch described in his quote, “What else, then, is all history, if not the praise of Rome?”

But what is important to note here is that humanists like Petrarch did not actually “rediscover” Rome as it’s sometimes attributed to them. Medievals were familiar with the Roman Empire and incorporated it in their view of history. It’s just that their view of Roman place in history was different. The medievals viewed history as progressing in linear way as according to God’s plan. They divided history into either “Six Ages” (as formulated by Augustine of Hippo) or the “Four Empires” (as recorded in the Book of Daniel). The medieval chroniclers presented history from the creation of the world to their present according to this pattern. They believed in universality and continuity of history and in their presentation of history, each age flowed into another. There was the concept of translatio imperii (transfer of rule) through which the rule and power of one empire transferred to another in linear succession. For example in this manner, the medieval people believed that the imperium of Romans simply transferred to Franks and to other “barbarian” tribes and it was all part of wider God’s plan. This was seen as a Biblical prophesy from the Book of Daniel (second chapter, verses 39-40) where it says, “And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.” Using these Biblical passages for interpretation of history, declines of historic empires were seen as normal and part of God’s plan, and not something to lament about in the way that the humanists like Plutarch lamented the demise of Rome.

The medievals viewed the Roman Empire simply as one of the transitionary empires in their linear progressive history. It was seen as part of their history but not an age that should be glorified above their own. Various medieval kingdoms legitimized themselves by drawing the translatio imperii from the Romans to themselves, seeing themselves as legitimate successors of Roman imperium. It should be noted that this view of history didn’t completely disappear with Renaissance either, as late as in the 17th century we find histories of the world organized in accordance with the interpretation of Daniel’s prophecy.

However Petrarch’s views opened a way for a completely new approach to history. Suddenly there was a specific “glorious age” which was followed by a “dark age”. While the medievals also sometimes associated a certain time period of history with darkness, this was specifically reserved for the period before the birth of Christ, seen as the period of “error and darkness” followed by the period of “purification and truth”. But Petrarch turned this upside down. For him, the Romans were the period of light while the Middle Ages were the period of darkness despite Christianity. Furthermore, Petrarch didn’t recognize any continuity between Rome and subsequent medieval kingdoms and went against the idea of translatio imperii. In his view, the ancient Roman Empire was finished for good and without a successor, for it “had been impaired, debilitated, and almost consumed at the bands of the barbarian.” For him, and even more so the future humanists that followed him, the only way to bring back the glorious age would be to use Antiquity as an inspiration to transcend into a new age and overcome the “dark” period in the middle. And this kind of thinking would become the main inspiration behind the concept of “Renaissance”.

The first Italian humanist who used this periodization of history and actually saw himself as living in the new age was Leonardo Bruni. In 1442 he wrote the History of the Florentine People. In his book, he divided history in three periods. He saw the period following the fall of Roman Empire (which he placed in 476 when the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed) as a “middle age”. However unlike Petrarch, he considered that his age was already the prophesied “new age”. Bruni argued that Italy had entered a new age in recent centuries. He placed the beginning of this supposed revival in late 11th and 12th centuries, coinciding with the rise of his own state, the Republic of Florence, which he saw as carrying the torch for the coming golden age, claiming it to be the heir of the Roman Republic, which he saw as the peak of ancient Rome. Here you can see that such view of history was also useful politically, which is why it became so popular. Placing a specific state or family as the initiator of the “golden age” was a way to gain prestige and legitimacy. This soon became very popular in Renaissance Italy which was in constant political turmoil that saw governments and powerful families come and go frequently. Rulers tried to use art and culture as political propaganda and patronized artists. They praised themselves as being responsible for ushering in a new era, using the same concept of history as Bruni as a framework.

Due to his own political reasons, Bruni’s “new age” started much earlier than it would in later historiography. But his concept of tripartite history remained to this day. As did the date he chose for the end of Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages, year 476. This was the date when the barbarian commander Odoacer staged a coup which deposed Western Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus. But the contemporary 5th century Romans did not see anything particularly special in this event as nine different Western Roman Emperors were changed from 455, many of them overthrown by barbarian commanders in similar fashion. The Romans would definitely not see the year 476 as the “fall of Rome”. This is why I said that placing the beginning of the Middle Ages in 476 or around 500 is very arbitrary, initiated by a humanist historian who wanted to scapegoat “barbarians” for the decline of Rome. It ignores the long and complex decline of Rome and the continuity of Roman culture into the period deemed as the Middle Ages. It makes the ancient Romans look “better” because it blames the medievals for their own decline, associating the medievals solely with barbarians despite the fact that Western medieval culture was a mixture of Roman and barbarian origins. Yet for Bruni, it was convenient politically. He needed a clear-cut ending to the glorious Rome so that he could declare Republic of Florence as its sole true heir, and trash the barbarians in between.

Bruni also rather unintentionally began the process of secularization of history in the West. Following Bruni’s model, history was no longer interpreted through Biblical eras. He set the foundations to replace the Christian linear progressive view of history, where everything was moving ahead according to God’s plan, with a cyclical view of history where history moves in cycles of golden and dark ages. Such view of history would also remain in the West to this day.

The next influential Italian humanist historian was Flavio Biondo who wrote De Roma triumphante in 1459, a book that portrayed ancient Rome as the model for contemporary government and military. Biondo used the same tripartite model of history as Bruni, seeing the period between Rome and his age as a dark age, and also claimed that Italy was on the verge of a new great age. He saw the papacy as the continuation of the Roman Empire in his time, which also served a political purpose to bolster its legitimacy and prestige.

It also has to be pointed out that despite praising the pagan Rome so much, humanist historians like Bruni and Biondo were not anti-Christian or anti-Catholic. They blamed the “barbarians” for the destruction of the Roman Empire and not adoption of Christianity. However they set the foundations for future anti-Catholic and anti-Christian interpretations. In the future, the Catholic Church in particular would often get blamed for, and associated with, the “Dark Ages”.

This is because this pro-antiquity attitude did not only affect politics but also everything else from language to religion. This spirit was described with the phrase ad fontes, meaning "to the origins". Ancient Rome was seen as the glorious origin of culture and had to be imitated everywhere. In this spirit they created a new form of Latin in the 16th century, the “New Latin”, which was trying to copy the Classical Latin, the kind that Cicero wrote in, and removed the medieval forms used in the “Medieval Latin”, the form of Latin that developed organically through the middle ages in the Church and among the educated classes. The humanists saw the Classical Latin as pure, and their goal was to “purify” the language, bringing it back to the glorious origins as the phrase ad fontes suggested.

This ad fontes mentality also spilled over to religion. In similar fashion, the Protestants declared they were going back “to the origins” with their emphasis on the Bible and glorified the early Christianity over what they saw as corrupted medieval Christianity. The subsequent Protestant interpretation of history thus also used the concept of “Dark Ages” for religious and political reasons, just in a slightly different way. It was now the Catholic Church that was “blamed” for the Middle Ages instead of the “barbarians”. And the Protestant Reformation was presented as a way to lead to a new glorious age.

This new way of interpreting history could easily be used in favor of different political and religious interests. This is why it became so popular and widespread and reached way beyond Italy. It became particularly relevant because the early modern era was engulfed in wars and the invention of printing press made propaganda even more effective and necessary as various states, dynasties and religions struggled for supremacy. Rulers who wanted to gain more legitimacy and rally their support in wars needed to show their splendor through art and culture. The Italian Wars put Italy into further turmoil and saw many governments change. The First Italian War started in 1494 during the height of Italian renaissance and the subsequent Italian Wars ended up involving almost all the major powers of Europe which kept invading Italy and fighting each other. I already explained in one of my articles how contemporary Habsburg ruler Emperor Maximilian invested a lot of money into art that glorified his accomplishments, creating a powerful mythology around himself and his dynasty. Other Renaissance rulers did similar. They would compare themselves to Caesar and invoke comparisons with the splendor of Imperial Rome, placing themselves at the forefront of this supposed revival of ancient glory, investing into art and architecture. This was also the time of Machiavelli who further popularized ancient Rome and the need to imitate it, writing about Roman history extensively in his Discourses on Livy (1517).

All of this increased the prestige of Renaissance as a historic age. Because so much clever political propaganda was used through art from all sides, it seems that the Renaissance as a whole managed to self-propagate itself into being the standard for what is considered a “golden age” in Western history, as it’s still seen as such today. The Renaissance thinkers basically denigrated the Middle Ages as “Dark Ages” to make their own age look better. But in reality there was not that much difference between them. Just by claiming you’re living in a totally different age doesn’t make it a reality. The old mentality still remained, the Renaissance people lived in the same political and social system as the medievals, in many cases ruled by the same medieval dynasties. There were more things that would unite people from Middle Ages and Renaissance than divide them.

The Renaissance did have many spectacular accomplishments and one can easily understand its allure. But beneath all the splendor and propaganda, it was also an era which kicked off many brutal wars, slaughters and persecutions on a level not seen before. For an ordinary person, life was likely worse in the Renaissance than in the Middle Ages.

But it was the Middle Ages that became ingrained in Western consciousness as a “dark age” precisely because of how effective the spread of Renaissance ideas was. Every golden age needs a dark age to compare itself to and the Middle Ages took this place in people’s imagination, already maligned by Italian humanists since Petrarch. Associating contemporary enemies with a foregone dark age also became a powerful propaganda tool and was used ever since. The Dutch Protestants used such propaganda to a great effect during the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648) against the Spanish Empire, giving birth to the “Black Legend”, a very negative portrayal of Spain which was painted as the symbol of backwardness. Dutch propaganda depicted the Catholic Spanish Empire as an archaic empire of repression, greatly exaggerating the brutality of Inquisition and Spanish rule over other lands, often using completely made up depictions of torture and executions. The “Black Legend” stuck ever since and this type of negative image of Catholic Spanish Empire is still largely present in modern people’s minds, as opposed to their Protestant rivals Dutch and English who are usually seen in better light (or at least they were until 20th century anti-colonialism). Furthermore, the Black Legend imagery has become associated with the Middle Ages, even though it was happening entirely during the Renaissance. This is why so many people still associate the Spanish Inquisition with the Middle Ages. It’s an example how people love to stick historic events they don’t like into the designated dark age even when they don’t fit there. Or sometimes attribute completely imaginary absurd myths to these historic periods.

Pretty much all the subsequent ideologies used a similar framework in the following ages. They all tried to present themselves as the forthbringers of a new glorious age, associating their enemies with some specific dark age of the past. For example the 18th century enlightenment thinkers considered the Middle Ages as the “Age of Faith” while they saw themselves as bringing forth the “Age of Reason”. They started to associate the already hated Middle Ages with things they didn’t like, and which they claimed to be the opposite of. At the same time, they also largely praised Antiquity and ancient Rome for their republican political traditions, attributing their views to the glorified Roman Empire. People sometimes falsely attribute the origin of vilification of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, but in reality the Enlightenment thinkers just used the same model that was already in existence since Italian humanism, and used similar anti-Catholic interpretations as Protestants.

The nationalist ideologies of the 19th century also used the “golden age versus dark age” rhetoric a lot as they claimed to represent a national “revival” or “awakening”, usually placing the origins of their nations into Antiquity or early Middle Ages, and vilified various “internationalist” multi-ethnic monarchies that emerged in the later medieval era as repressing their “national identity”. Neoclassicism was built on the same ad fontes mindset of imitation, presenting a glorification of ancient Greece and Rome and trying to imply a deep connection with these two cultures. All of this created a sense in the modern West that something was lost in the Middle Ages and recovering what was lost was seen as a civilizational mission.

Of course, there was also glorification of Middle Ages in the 19th century romanticism. But this was not a proper historic rehabilitation of the Middle Ages but rather just a similarly flawed reinterpretation in which the Middle Ages suddenly became a “golden age”. That’s because we, as Westerners, simply became captives of this type of interpretation of history. Instead of seeing our history as a complex and slow progress over time, we’re more used to see it as a mix of glorious, less-glorious and dark ages, and then project what we like to glorious periods and what we dislike to dark periods.

We can see how this in modern political discourse as well, where both sides of the political spectrum would use such references. The liberals would for example claim that by banning abortion, the conservatives want to bring us “back to the Middle Ages.” By invoking association with the consensual “dark age” of our history, it becomes a powerful rhetorical tool. Little does it matter that for the majority of the Middle Ages, abortion was actually not criminalized, and there would be plenty medieval people that would agree with “pro-choice” opinions, as abortions were more common in the Middle Ages than people think, and very rarely persecuted. And on the other hand, conservatives and reactionaries would turn this around by saying that we’re actually the ones living in decadent “dark ages” right now and would like a return to a “glorious age” that in their view existed in either pre-1960s West, in the Ancien Régime before the French Revolution, or in some even earlier period.

The rhetoric about glorious and dark ages simply has too much political and cultural appeal for people to give up on it, and it has become ingrained in our mindset. Associating yourself with a glorious golden age while painting your enemies as the forces representing a dark age is just as powerful today as it was in the Renaissance where powerful rulers and dynasties used it as a way to gain prestige and legitimacy. There is also a lot of cultural appeal. The idea that there was a “dark age” is exciting to people, and that’s why the Middle Ages continue to fill this role in popular culture. People like to imagine there was an age where all the values were supposedly a total opposite of what they believe in, where almost everyone was barbaric or a religious fanatic. It’s exotic and makes for good entertainment. It’s not even just a vilification of a period, in a weird way many people seem to like this skewed perception of the Middle Ages, in the same way people like intriguing villains and bad guys.

But the actual truth is probably a lot less exciting to people. European history was simply too complex to break it down into long periods of light and darkness. Once you abandon the modern emotionally charged perspective of the Middle Ages and develop a more neutral one, you see that things were progressing slowly but steadily since around 11th century. There was progress in the Middle Ages, and for the most time, the time period was actually quite peaceful compared to what followed. It was not an age of chaos and total violence. But it was not some romantic age either. While there were many exciting stories that unfolded in that era, most of society revolved around boring banalities with glimpses of joy and terrible tragedies here and there, and in the background a minority of people was putting in a lot of hard work to make improvements, just like in any other period of history. This is why I neither glorify nor vilify the middle ages. For me it’s just a background to specific exciting stories I’m interested in. Like I said many times, for me history is about special moments. However the background is also important to understand which is why I spent enough time to study the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to see their complexity. I do think that both of these periods provided a lot of special moments due to specific way the wars and politics were conducted at the time, and both of them also provided a lot of both beauty and ugliness.