Why is 'Dark Ages' considered innacurate?

[Lone Wolf]

BTW, is it true that in the late Western Roman Empire the agriculture was largely run on slave work, while in the Eastern Empire the land was worked by personally free people? Or is it an oversimplification?

 

[Ajidica]

And how old was the Empire?
Going by Wikipedia (not the most scholarly source but still, the Roman Empire lasted from 27 BCE to 476CE. With 42% of the time the Empire was in relative peace has to be a pretty decent track record.


That's patently false. Diocletian, for instance, oversaw a period of massive reforms which completely changed the social and political strata of the Empire in response to the Crisis of the Third Century.
Diocletian became Emperor in 284. 80 years after my cutoff date. Thats why I ended the relative stability with the soldier emperors.


So it had 200 and perhaps an additional 50 years of relative peace in a state which lasted some five hundred years, at least, in the West. That's not exactly sterling, good, but not markedly better than other comparable Empires.



The Empire had comparatively few public servants and the ethnic admixture wasn't really all that important -- without nationalism and all that.
I agree that ethnic mixture mattered less before the advent of nationalism. You still however have different cultural groups with their own values and customs. That must have creates some friction.


Contrast what? The rules of the game seem to have had fundamentally changed. Some measure of decentralization seems to have been prevalent in the latter Roman Empire and the trends which propelled that alone don't seem to have markedly changed into the Carolingian Empire. But what does any of that have to do with intellectual achievements?
Intellectual achievments do not an empire make. The Carlolingian Empire was broken up into 3 separate states in 843 with the treaty of Verdun. After that the empire started to disintigrate further. Not exactly a stellar track record.

My answers are bolded.

I would also like to make clear that I acknowledge the impact the Carolingian Renniassance had, but it created very little. Most of the arguments I have seen supporting the Carolinigian Reniassance focus around their preservation of Roman documents. I don't know if it is me, but preserving documents does not mean it is a Renniassance.

Also, does anyone have any actual information on whether life for the average person was better or worse in the Roman Empire Golden Age or the Carolingian Renniassance? Until we can get that the entire argument is going in circles.

EDIT: LightSpectra, you said that a Renniassance inherently makes life better, but with the Italian Renniasance compared to the middle ages it still sucked to be a Peasant. The 'suckiness' culminated with the 30 YEars War and only started getting marginaly better around the 1840's. What statements do you have to validate that?

 

[Masada]

Going by Wikipedia (not the most scholarly source but still, the Roman Empire lasted from 27 BCE to 476CE. With 42% of the time the Empire was in relative peace has to be a pretty decent track record.

Define relative peace. You can't make a comparison that is in any way valid unless we set the bounds.

Diocletian became Emperor in 284. 80 years after my cutoff date. Thats why I ended the relative stability with the soldier emperors.

Again, I'm not sold on the idea that in order to prove a point you have to consciously ignore all the negative aspects -- especially a century of constant conflict -- to prove a point. The key problem is that if you do indeed select, which is fine, and then endeavor to compare you must then again pick a period in the other period using, in this case, totally different criteria not just in terms of time but in terms of qualitative and unprovable factors: Ref# "Golden Age" and so on.

I agree that ethnic mixture mattered less before the advent of nationalism. You still however have different cultural groups with their own values and customs. That must have creates some friction.

It doesn't seem to have institutionally hamstrung most comparable empires, and the Carolingian Empire wasn't ethnically homogeneous either for that matter.

Intellectual achievments do not an empire make. The Carlolingian Empire was broken up into 3 separate states in 843 with the treaty of Verdun. After that the empire started to disintigrate further. Not exactly a stellar track record.

So? The Roman Empire split into two, three and so forth a number of times. It even had swathes of pretenders and almost a hundred years of interregnum where legitimate Imperial authority all but collapsed. But you see the problem of selecting bounds now don't you.

I would also like to make clear that I acknowledge the impact the Carolingian Renniassance had, but it created very little. Most of the arguments I have seen supporting the Carolinigian Reniassance focus around their preservation of Roman documents. I don't know if it is me, but preserving documents does not mean it is a Renniassance.

Renaissances are almost always only recognized in retrospect. The products of the time only seem impressive if everything relative to it declines in percieved quality. One could be looking back in envy at a past which generated vast cultural works, which in retrospect, are far superior to anything that can be done in the present day: most of the Byzantine 'Renaissances' seem to have come about in this way. Or alternatively one could look back at the works of the past and notice a decisive break with what had gone on before it. I guess the Renaissance fall under that categorization since, it seems to me, that there haven't been any particular breaks with that continual stream of percieved progress. You seem to biased towards the later explanation which is fine but it only works if we accept that improvement is constant and not an intermediate period of substantial development followed by periods of stagnation or slower relative progress.

LightSpectra, you said that a Renniassance inherently makes life better, but with the Italian Renniasance compared to the middle ages it still sucked to be a Peasant. The 'suckiness' culminated with the 30 YEars War and only started getting marginaly better around the 1840's. What statements do you have to validate that?

For the record GDP per capita only just doubled between 0AD and 1000AD; and again during 1000AD and 1500AD. Those increases in per capita do not necessarily represent living standards as we understand them. Simply improvements in productivity which did not at that stage necessarily at that stage feed into improved living standards. In a purely objective sense: per capita economic growth was so close to zero from 0AD to 1500AD that economic historians usually assume that the system was zero-sum unless they're dealing with very long timeframes. Life sucked the world over. I don't see why comparing incrementally better levels of suckiness with little to no data is going to make it possible to deduce, what are really, minor differences.

 

[Plotinus]

... with the Italian Renniasance compared to the middle ages it still sucked to be a Peasant...

Not necessarily. If by "peasant" you mean someone who wasn't a gentleman or a merchant, but who worked on a manor of some kind for a lord, there were plenty of such people who had quite comfortable lifestyles, including keeping their own servants. Of course a labouring villein of the lowest rank had a pretty miserable lifestyle, but that was true in the Roman empire too and remained the case right into modern times, even after they stopped being villeins.