Were the "Dark Ages" really dark?

Not in the way the name suggests. "Dark Ages" is a label for the early Middle Ages, roughly the late 5th to the 10th century, and most modern scholars avoid it because they find it misleading. The centuries after Rome's western empire fell really were hard in many places: the population of the formerly Roman area fell by about a third between 150 and 600, trade-based industries vanished, and epidemics wiped out large rural populations. But "dark" suggests ignorance and standstill, and that is the part historians reject.

The label has a surprisingly personal history. In the 1330s the scholar Petrarch, who spent years rediscovering classic Latin and Greek texts, saw the centuries after Rome, his own included, as dark next to the light of antiquity. Centuries later a cardinal named Baronius used "dark" in a narrower sense: he meant that one period left few writers and few written records. So at first the word described a shortage of evidence, not a shortage of intelligence. Even today some historians use it that way, because a thin record makes the period look dark to us.

Meanwhile, plenty was changing. Farmers learned to rotate crops in three fields instead of two, so more land could be cultivated, and a heavy wheeled plough suited the heavy soils of northern Europe. From 787 decrees recommended restoring old schools and founding new ones across Charlemagne's empire.

So the early Middle Ages were a time of loss and of invention at once. The "Dark Ages" label survives mostly in popular culture, where it stands for violence and backwardness, which is why many historians would rather say the early Middle Ages.