2 - Late Antiquity and the Early “Middle Ages”: Were the “Dark Ages” Really Dark?

Summary

The Inheritance

It is now generally agreed by historians that there was much continuity between the western Roman empire and its successors following the disintegration of the centralised state during the fifth century. In the east, the continuity was unbroken as the Byzantine empire survived for another thousand years. The Germanic tribal confederations, many of whom had been living in or alongside Roman society for decades, set up kingdoms of whom the Franks in northern Gaul and beyond, the Visigoths in southern Gaul then (after expelling the Vandals, who took over Roman Africa) Iberia, and the Ostrogoths who established a kingdom in Italy were the most significant. The new rulers (numerically a small minority of the population) wanted and needed to use what they found, not destroy it. Only in a few places had specific circumstances led to a collapse of the Roman infrastructure. The political and military history of the age can be traced easily through written evidence – key features were the reconquest of Africa and destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy by east Roman (Byzantine) emperor Justinian (r. 527–65), and the expansion of the Frankish kingdom under the Merovingian dynasty following Clovis (r. 482–511) – but evidence for society and the economy is harder to find, and here archaeology makes a big contribution. Warfare and archaeology can be combined to permit a study of levels of engineering and to propose what happened to its military version. It will be proposed that although there are few references to named engineers across these centuries, they continued to operate; and that the changes to society and the economy that took place as late antiquity gave way to a recognisably different early medieval world in the seventh century appear to have had limited consequences in this field.

The seventh century also saw the sudden creation of an Islamic state as Muhammad’s followers achieved extraordinary victories pushing back the frontiers of eastern Rome and destroying totally the Persian empire (by 651) before extending their power across Egypt and North Africa (whence from 711 they quickly took over Visigothic Iberia) and eastwards across central Asia to the borders of China and India.