The Dark and Light Ages

Abstract

The term ‘dark ages’ is familiar enough in connection with the period 500 to 1000. However, as applied to world history, it suffers from Europocentrism, even West-Europocentrism. For in China, Islam and Eastern Europe, these, far from being dark ages, were ages of maximum light. In China, Emperor Hsüan-tsung, 712-756, under whom T’ang institutions and culture reached their height and the Chinese empire its greatest extent, was actually known as ming-huang, the emperor of light. In Islam, the reign of Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, 789-809, is generally regarded as the apogee of early Islamdom. In Eastern Europe, Emperor Basil II Bulgaroctonus, 963-1023, recovered not only Bulgaria but also Antioch and Armenia, besides strengthening control in southern Italy and effecting the conversion of Rus in 988. Against these achievements, it is the darkness of Western Europe, the successive failures of the Goths, the Merovingians and the Carolingians, which seems anomalous. Yet there was one common feature of the history of Eurasia between 500 and 1000. If antiquity had been the age of classics, what followed it was the age of scripture and exegesis. To the languages of the classics and the words of the philosophers was now added the Word of revelation: Bible and Tradition, Koran and hadith, sutra and sastra, t’ung and fu, Gita and Vedanta.