Medieval Period Did the Fall

Medieval Period

Did the fall of the Roman herald a true 'Dark Age'?

To some extent, to refer to the 'fall' of the Roman Empire is somewhat inaccurate. After all, the Roman Empire was a large, sprawling territory, and its dissolution occurred over a long period of time, and cannot be traced to a single event. However, if a single date may be given to the end of the empire as it had existed as a collective and unifying force over the entire known world it would be in September 476 CE. This was the year when the last Roman emperor of the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Germanic prince Odovacar. The German then secured his people's control over the remaining Roman army in Italy and sent the western imperial regalia to Constantinople, in a powerful symbolic gesture of the 'changing of the guard' (Heather, 2006, p.1). The center of the world power shifted, and was taken away from the authority of Rome and shifted eastward. However, despite the growing power of Constantinople, what really replaced Roman authority was not a singular force, but a disparate constellation of princes in various far-flung regions of the empire, from Anglo-Saxons in Britain, to Goths in southern Gaul and Spain, to Vandals in North Africa. The Roman Empire did not so much 'fall,' in other words, as it was divided and then fragmented into a series of parts. This fragmentation would eventually sow the seeds of feudalism, the system of governance that eventually replaced Roman Imperial rule

Conventional historical suggests that the fall of the Roman Empire created a 'Dark Age' for the world. This suggests an age of ignorance, but learning did flourish in some pockets of the former empire, particularly in monasteries. However, the early Christians, after years of persecution by Rome, had a strong level of hostility towards the learning of pagan antiquity, now that they had come to power in so many regions of the world. Many documents and buildings from classical Greek and Roman antiquity were destroyed or left to disintegrate. But as well as intolerance, this was also due to a lack of institutional support for the arts and architecture, also due to the fall of Roman central authority. Thus the subsequent age after the fall appears dark because the fragmented political structure allowed for little lasting cultural developments to flourish, and was marked by the dominant of societies that did not emphasize written language, or had no means to create monumental, lasting structures that still stand today.

A comparison to Greece and Roman apparent "education and literacy, sophisticated architecture, advanced economic interaction, and, not least, the rule of written law," life during the Dark or Early Medieval period seems far more "nasty, brutish and short" (Heather 2006, p.1). But this begs the question -- how does one define a good life, given that the empire was dependant upon the subjugation of other peoples, slavery, a decadent, undemocratic and corrupt Imperial system, and the "entrenched social hierarchies that were also part of the Roman world" (Heather 2006, p.1). Viewed as such, the Dark Ages may be seen as a "necessary evil" (Heather 2006, p.1). Rome had to fall to destroy large-scale slavery and make possible, eventually, a world which valued all human beings more equally. To establish control, over the new order, however, required a "slow and difficult" process and thus the early medieval world was in a state of constant turmoil in a way that did not support patronage of the arts and culture (Jansen 2006).

Eventually, there were substantial innovations that would affect the rest of human history towards the end of this age. The Renaissance and High Middle Ages did not arise from nothing, after all -- some of pagan antiquity was preserved, and Christianity and religious art came to the forefront of the images embodied in artistic expression in a way that would inspire great artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo. The Gothic aesthetic has its roots in this period, one of the founding artistic movements of the later centuries. New approaches were sought to create houses of worship as distinct from pagan antiquity, and greater pluralism of culture was allowed, now that the empire was no more -- it was the ideology of Christianity that proved a uniting force in the West, and Islam in the Middle East, rather than a Roman government.