I'd love to see the data that went into THAT graphic. It's the kind of meaningless nonsense that's produced by people who think they've heard something about history, but don't actually have access to any facts.
Okay, so the dark ages had zero negative impact on the advancement of science and technology and human history?
I would go so far as to say that I am highly confident that I know the time period even better than you do. The fact remains, we have learned so much about the period from about the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire up to the Renaissance, that in virtually every sense, the term "Dark Ages" is essentially inappropriate and virtually meaningless.
So if I call it the dark ages, then you know what I'm referring to? If that's a yes, then it really doesn't matter. I'm well aware that many historians don't use the term. I used the term because that's what it was called almost my whole entire life. Excuse the fuck out of me. I also know you don't use the term chinaman or oriental when referring to Asians. You don't have to be so pedantic and I'm not trying get into a pissing contest over who knows more about the middle ages. I'll save you the effort, I don't know much about that time period, I study antebellum history the most.
if so, then do you accept that christianity was spread via conquest and terror more than willing hearts?
A friend of mine stirred up some shit on his Facebook over the weekend when he posted a meme similar to this (can't find his at the moment).
I for one don't. I have no idea, for instance, whether you are talking about a time period that begins ca 200 CE, 400 CE, 600 CE, or even 800 CE, and I am not at all sure that you know yourself. Same for geography -- do you assume the thing you are talking about applied to all mankind? To Europe? Did it include Little Asia? Iberia? Italy? Scandinavia?
There's nothing "pedantic" about it. You asked, "Okay, so the dark ages had zero negative impact on the advancement of science and technology and human history?" Let's connect the dots: Historians don't use the term "Dark Ages" anymore because.... 1. Virtually every assumption that is made by the term "Dark Ages" is wrong. *** OR*** 2. They just feel like being picky. To wrap it all up:
Jesus fucking Christ. Begging with the fall of the Roman Empire, generally accepted to be the period from 450 CE- the renaissance around 1400CE. No, it did not apply to all of mankind, but mostly Europe. Are you that stupid that you don't know what the time period commonly called the dark ages or middle ages is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages
IIRC, the term "dark age" was largely coined by scholars who had a real hard on but the Roman Empire and its legacy. So they termed everything after the fall of the Western Roman Empire as the "dark age" with the inference that it was a civilizational collapse that was huge step backward for all of humanity. Ignoring the fact that the Western Roman Empire wasn't even the most important part of the "Empire" at that point and the Eastern Roman Empire (centuries later called the Byzantine Empire) maintained a pretty high level of European civilization just a thousand miles or so to the East for another millennia. Probably the greatest setback for western European civilization during this long period was various plagues with the Black Plague (bubonic & pneumonic) being the largest. And aside from Christians blaming the Jews for poisoning the wells now and then I don't think they had much to do with the plagues.
You know, for most people, what you just posted would just be dumb. For a person who has supposedly earned a degree in history it is just unbearably stupid.
Keeping people uneducated, forcing religion on them, ruling over them through "divine right", not allowing people basic freedoms, burning people for being "witches", torturing people for not following your religion, killing or torturing scientists for daring to reveal the true nature of the universe, burning libraries and destroying cultural artifacts and identities, etc, etc, you don't think that had any negative impact on the course of humanity?
I always figured it to be up until the mid 800s, when the medieval era begins. granted, that was first year art history (20 years ago)...
Virtually every single one of those things is much more myth than fact, ESPECIALLY the one I highlighted. So, no. Read some modern historians.
While Christianity certainly played a role in opposing various scientists and advances, they also played a role in preserving knowledge as well. So on the whole its impact was probably a wash.
All of that happened before, during, and after the "Dark Ages." There was nothing unique about any of that happening during that particular period of time compared to other periods of time. Granted, humans were probably more efficient at accomplishing those things compared to people in the past due to knowledge and technology advancements during that time. But that is even truer today than it was 1,000 years ago.
I agree. There are many causes for what historians used to call the "Dark Ages" in Europe. I would highly recommend people listen to Thor's Angels by Dan Carlin. I'm not denying that the Church didn't have a role in the Dark Ages. But, it was a mixed bag. Some was good, some was bad. The fall of Rome in the west left a power vacuum and in many places, the church stepped in because only the church had the infrastructure to build schools, handle money, etc. Due to the Church being made up of humans, there were always problems. But, when the Church had the role of government pushed on it, all the problems of government entered into the church. Graft, corruption, waste, etc. This, obviously, culminated in the Reformation. But, to say that the church, single-handedly, caused the Dark Ages in Europe isn't fair at all.
The evidence is detailed in a number of books on the subject by actual objective scholars. Nixey herself refers to one of them: W.H.C. Frend , Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford, 1965). Though, as I said, she bungles/distorts what Frend says about the total death toll of the third century persecutions and largely ignores what he says about the centuries of earlier, local and sporadic persecution. But she doesn't ignore those earlier examples of persecution completely - she just makes excuses for them and strives hard to reconcile them with her weird depiction of the Romans as "tolerant". This is a little hard for her to sustain while the same time trying to justify people being executed in rather horrible ways simply because of their religious beliefs. So however you cut it your "fun fact" is nonsense. Christians were persecuted for several centuries and the numbers of victims are hard to determine, but even the most sceptical historians put it in the thousands, not the "less than 300" you claimed. Not even Nixey gets things wrong that badly. I'm afraid that isn't a very useful analogy. All Roman persecution was "state sanctioned". For most of the period until the reign of Decius this "state sanctioned" persecution was prosecuted at the discretion of local provincial governors, since the central Imperial government delegated most such activities to the provinces until the later third century. This changed from Decius onward and particularly after the administrative reforms of Diocletian for several reasons. Firstly, because the later third century saw great centralisation of power and control to reduce the likelihood of the kinds of usurpations by local authorities and commanders that had wracked the Empire earlier in the century. Secondly, because of a far greater intolerance of any form of dissent or non-comformity in this period, again because of the chaos that had gone before. And thirdly because Christianity, while still a small minority, had become large enough to attract centralised Imperial disapproval in this context of less tolerance and greater centralised power. To pretend that because the centralised, Empire-wide persecutions of the later third and early fourth centuries were more vehement, more extensive and more deadly than the earlier local and sporadic ones therefore the earlier ones don't count or didn't even happen is patently ridiculous. And as someone who reads plenty of popularisations of history that manage to shine a light on obscure subjects that people like me know very well, I'm used to such writers making some mistakes and oversimplifying things and am very tolerant of that. Nixey doesn't do this. She distorts, skips almost all counter-arguments, ignores whole swathes of evidence the don't fit her agenda and goes out of her way to leave her readers ignorant of things that work against her thesis. If you think all she does is "gets things wrong, or oversimplifies things" I can only conclude you don't know enough about this period to see through her smoke and mirrors. There is a reason that no historian who specialises in this period regards Nixey's book as anything other than sensationalist junk. I gave you a link to a detailed and carefully referenced 10,000 word article I wrote addressing this question, among others. It seems you didn't read it. I have a whole section in it on the various ancient claims about the size of the Library and why they can't be relied on. It is most likely to have been closer to 40k, however, and nothing like 400k. Which makes your original claim of an "estimated 500,000 to 700,000 books" even more fanciful. Peronally, I'd call any ancient work that we don't have a great loss. What is weird, though, is the strange fetish some people have for this particular ancient library and not, say the Library of Celsus, the Great Library of Pergamon or the Trajanic Libraries, any one of which would have held copies of Aristotle's lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics and much more beside. They seem to think the Alexandrine Library was somehow unique and a sole repository of this stuff, which is pretty silly. As someone who has studied this stuff for several decades, I'd be the last person to be surprised that a popular movie bungles history. The point here though is that this one was being recommended in a discussion about the history of relations between pagans and Christians, with the claim "Christians were the ISIS of their day". Except the thing that movie in question bungles most badly is the relations between pagans and Christians and the Christian attitude toward learning. So this is not a movie to recommend on that subject - it's basically a pseudo historical fairy tale. And he was wrong about the Great Library. Pretty much everything he says about it, in fact, is wrong. As a historian he made a good astronomer. So it's very strange you are asking why I note his mistakes when, again, someone was holding him up as an authority on history - which he was not. He was pretty terrible at history, in fact. That's nice but totally irrelevant to anything I've said. Or anything Sagan said for that matter, since he wasn't presenting any science he was making claims about history. And getting them mostly wrong. Poeple need to stop getting their grasp of the history of science from scientists like Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson and pay attention to actual historians. They are the actual experts.
This is a cute popular idea, but not one that stands up to much scrutiny. Leaving aside the fact there was no single "burning of the Library of Alexandria", this idea is based on a number of the premises listed below, all of which are substantially false: (i) The Great Library was somehow unique (it wasn't) (ii) It was a centre of great scientific study (its main focus was poetry and linguistics) (iii) Greek proto-science was more or less like modern science (it was not) (iv) The Greeks and Romans linked science to technology (they almost never did) (v) The Greeks and Romans were on the verge of a scientific/industrial revolution (they weren't even close) (vi) Christians hated secular Greco-Roman knowledge (some did, most didn't and the latter won the debate and preserved it) (vii) Christians burned down the Great Library (that's a myth) (viii) The so-called "dark ages" were caused by Christianity (historians reject that term and no they were not) (ix) The decline in technology and "science" caused by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire lasted until the Renaissance (it didn't) (x) The medieval world was more technologically backward than the Romans before the Renaissance (medievals overtook Rome centuries before then and were far in advance of Roman technology in almost all areas) (xi) The medieval church burned scientists and suppressed science (it burned zero scientists and actually fostered proto-science) (xii) The medieval church held back technology (it had little interest in technology and actually helped develop and spread some key elements of it) Cute popular ideas are fun. Actual history much more so.
There is little to no sign of any great quickening of technology in the period before the collapse of the Western Empire that sent western Europe backward economically and technically for a few centuries. In the Eastern Empire things ticked along much as they had been doing for centuries. If anything, the collapse of the Western Empire stimulated technological advancement. Population levels declined sharply, markets localised and communities were forced by the collapse of long distance trade to become almost self sufficient. So with fewer people having to do more for themselves with less, people turned to technology. The old Roman reliance on a massive labour surplus (mainly slaves) no longer applied. People needed to use machines and other labour-saving devices and so things like mouldboard ploughs, scythes, water mills for a wide range of uses, windmills, tidal mills, water powered forges, trip hammers and other technologies either became vastly more widespread, were developed to higher levels of sophistication or were invented outright in the early medieval period. This amounted to nothing less than an agrarian revolution that led to a series of long economic booms and the subsequent rises in populations and economic strength that in turn gave rise to more technology (eye glasses, effective gunpowder weapons, complex mechanical clocks and the printing press). So actually it seems the fall of the Western Empire broke the relative technological stagnation Europe had seen in the Roman Era and stimulated new uses for mechanical power and new technical innovations. The Church impeded none of this and was actually, through monastic orders like the Cistercians, responsible for developing and propagating a lot of this technology.
Most of those inventions were during the medieval period, not the Dark Ages. The most notable inventions in what was formerly the Western Roman Empire 500-1000 were horse shoes, the swivel axle, and the horse/ox collar. The next 300 and previous 1000 saw much, much more. It's true it's not fair to lump the medieval period in with the Dark Ages, but it's not right either to pretend the Dark Ages didn't exist.
