In 476 a soldier named Odoacer sent the last western emperor, a teenager, into retirement and did not bother to name a replacement. Life in the provinces went on. Bishops still held their sees, farmers still paid taxes, and many people still called themselves Romans. This course picks up the story after the western empire came apart and follows Latin Christian Europe for roughly a thousand years, to around 1500.

Kingdoms on Roman ground

In place of one empire came several kingdoms ruled by Germanic warrior elites who were few in number compared with the Roman population beneath them. Visigoths ruled Spain, Franks ruled most of Gaul, Anglo-Saxon kings carved up lowland Britain, and the Ostrogoths ruled Italy under their king Theodoric from 493 to 526. In 568 the Lombards arrived in Italy and took much of it. These rulers did not want to destroy Rome. They wanted to enjoy it. They issued law codes in Latin, used Roman officials and minted coins with imperial images.

Religion divided them. Many Goths were Arian Christians, who held that Christ the Son was subordinate to God the Father, a view the bishops of the old Roman population rejected as heresy. Clovis, king of the Franks, made a different choice. Clovis was baptized as a Catholic Christian, which won him the backing of the Catholic bishops of Gaul. The date is uncertain, somewhere between about 496 and 508, but the result lasted: the Franks became the most successful of the successor kingdoms.

Who invented the Dark Ages?

Nobody living in the year 700 thought of themselves as stuck in the middle of anything. The idea of a gloomy middle period came later. The Italian poet Petrarch, writing in the 1300s, described the centuries after Rome as an age of darkness, by which he meant the loss of the classical Latin he loved. Humanist scholars after him spoke of a middle age between the glories of antiquity and their own revival, and the German scholar Christoph Cellarius helped fix the division of history into ancient, medieval and modern in textbooks of the late 1600s. Protestant reformers added contempt for a church they thought corrupt, and Enlightenment writers added contempt for religion itself. The label stuck.

What was really lost

Medievalists today mostly avoid the phrase "Dark Ages", but they disagree about how sharp the break was. The archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins argued in 2005 that the end of the western empire brought a real collapse in living standards. Ward-Perkins pointed to material evidence such as smaller cattle, cruder pottery and fewer roof tiles. In Britain coins stopped circulating for generations and building in stone almost ceased. Other historians stress continuity in law, religion and language, and warn against judging a society only by its pots.

Learning shrank but did not vanish. Monks in Ireland, Northumbria and Italy copied old texts and wrote new ones. The Northumbrian monk Bede finished his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731, and Bede helped spread the habit of dating events from the birth of Christ, the AD system still in use.

The Pirenne thesis

The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne offered a bolder answer to the question of when antiquity really ended. Pirenne argued that the decisive break came with the Arab conquests of the 600s, which he believed cut Mediterranean trade. Cut off from the eastern sea, he reasoned, western Europe turned inward and northward, and the Frankish empire of Charlemagne was the result. Later research complicated this. Documents and archaeology show that Mediterranean trade shrank but never stopped, and Michael McCormick's study of travelers, letters and the slave trade found busy contacts between Europe and the Islamic world in the 700s and 800s. Few accept Pirenne whole, but his question, how Europe's story ties into that of its neighbors, still shapes the field.

An age of invention

It also helps to remember what medieval Europeans built. They spread water mills and later windmills across the countryside, developed mechanical clocks, and eyeglasses for reading appeared in Italy in the late 1200s. They founded universities and raised cathedrals that still stand. Calling a thousand years "dark" tells us more about the people who named it than about the people who lived it.

Worked example: the ship at Sutton Hoo

In 1939 excavators at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England, opened a large burial mound and found the ghost of a ship about 27 meters long, its timbers rotted away but its iron rivets still lying in rows in the sand. In the middle lay a chamber full of treasure: a gold belt buckle, a crested iron helmet, silver bowls made in the Byzantine empire, and gold coins from Frankish Gaul. The burial dates to around 625 and is often linked, though not proven, to Raedwald, king of East Anglia.

Apply the debate. On one side, Sutton Hoo shows that a king in supposedly dark Britain had craftsmen of great skill and contacts reaching to Constantinople. On the other, this was a world where wealth was concentrated in a few warrior households and passed around as gifts, not sold in markets, which fits the view that ordinary material life had grown poorer. Both readings fit the same evidence. The lesson is to ask which people, which region and which measure before calling any age bright or dark.