The Dark Ages
The European interregnum between Classical Civilization and Western Civilization, c. 500–950 CE
Also known as: Dark Age, early medieval period, European Dark Ages
In Quigley's framework the Dark Ages are not a vacuum but a structural interregnum: the centuries between the Decay of Classical Civilization and the Gestation of Western Civilization. They begin with the collapse of Roman authority in the West and end around the tenth century with the emergence of feudalism as a stable instrument of expansion. Quigley uses the same term in a parallel sense for the centuries around 1000 BCE in the Aegean — the Iron Age 'Dark Age that lasted for several centuries' separating Cretan civilization from Classical civilization (EoC 191).
Definition and boundaries
Quigley uses 'Dark Ages' in a strictly analytical sense: the centuries of institutional weakness and demographic regression between the collapse of one civilizational organization and the gestation of its successor. In the Western case he dates this from the deposition of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476 CE through roughly 950 CE — a period in which 'there was no state or government in the West' (T&H 94). For Quigley this absence is the period's defining feature, not its accidents: it is precisely because political authority disappeared and economic life localized to the self-sufficient manor that personal allegiance and feudal contract had to become the load-bearing institutions of social order. The Dark Ages are therefore structurally identical, in his account, to the Aegean 'Dark Age' centering on 1000 BCE that separated Cretan from Classical civilization (EoC 191) — a 'period of invasion' performing the 'double role' of ending one civilization and gestating another.
Within the seven-stage cycle
Within Quigley's seven-stage model the Dark Ages are the Mixture and Gestation phases of Western Civilization: the period in which the elements of the new civilization — Germanic warrior bands, Christian Latin clerical culture, and the surviving Roman administrative substrate — fuse into a new whole and a workable instrument of expansion (feudalism) gestates. 'The Christian Middle Ages' (EoC 44) and the 'manorial-agrarian' economy of the early Middle Ages (T&H 52) are continuous with this Dark-Age substrate; Quigley does not draw a hard line between the two but reads the centuries 500–1270 as a single sequence of Mixture, Gestation, and first Expansion. The early Middle Ages, he writes, were a time 'when there had been no state and no public authority,' so 'political organization had been the feudal system which was held together by obligations of personal fealty' (T&H 50–51) — an organization that the new civilization would eventually outgrow but on which it would build for a thousand years.
Civilizational role: invasion and gestation
Quigley reads invasions not as catastrophes but as structurally productive events. In The Evolution of Civilizations he argues that the Iron Age invasions of the Aegean, the Germanic invasions of the Western Empire, and the steppe invasions of late antiquity all perform the same double role: they end the parent civilization's institutional inertia and they 'mix' the populations and ideas from which the daughter civilization will be gestated. 'In the Aegean and Balkans these Iron Age invaders ended Cretan civilization forever and established a Dark Age that lasted for several centuries. This Dark Age, centering on the period 1000 B.C., marks the transition between Cretan civilization and its descendant Classical Mediterranean civilization, performing a double role as the period of invasion' for the one and of mixture for the other (EoC 191). The Western Dark Ages perform the same function for the transition from Classical to Western Civilization, with the Christian Church supplying the unifying ideological substrate that, in the Aegean case, would not appear until the Pre-Socratics.
Christianity and the cognitive substrate
Although the Dark Ages produced no state, they produced — through the Church — what Quigley calls the cognitive outlook of Western Civilization. 'Although the Church continued to exist for centuries thereafter in a society whose philosophic outlook was ill adapted to the Christian religion, and obtained a compatible philosophy only in the medieval period, the basic outlook of Christianity reinforced the experience of the Dark Ages to create the outlook of Western Civilization' (T&H 98). The chief elements were 'the importance of the individual' — because individual salvation was personal — together with a sharp dualism of spirit and matter and a moderate optimism about the possibility of changing the world. This outlook, Quigley argues, distinguished the West from its sister civilization to the east: 'Russian traditions were derived from Byzantium directly; Western traditions were derived from the more moderate Classical Civilization indirectly, having passed through the Dark Ages when there was no state or government in the West' (T&H 94). The Dark Ages are therefore the period in which the West acquires the specific cognitive and institutional DNA that will distinguish it from Byzantine and Islamic civilizations alike.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 94 Quigley
Russian traditions were derived from Byzantium directly; Western traditions were derived from the more moderate Classical Civilization indirectly, having passed through the Dark Ages when there was no state or government in the West.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 98 Quigley
The basic outlook of Christianity reinforced the experience of the Dark Ages to create the outlook of Western Civilization.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 191 Quigley
In the Aegean and Balkans these Iron Age invaders ended Cretan civilization forever and established a Dark Age that lasted for several centuries.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 50 Quigley
In the early Middle Ages when there had been no state and no public authority, political organization had been the feudal system which was held together by obligations of personal fealty.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 52 Quigley
At the beginning, in the early Middle Ages, Western Civilization had an economic system which was almost entirely agricultural, organized in self-sufficient manors, with almost no commerce or industry.