The ‘Dark Ages’ Weren’t as Dark as We Thought

This is an over‐elaborate way of saying that in as much as the era after the Roman Empire is “dark” it is because it has been overlaid by many centuries of further things happening—and I have talked only about human agency rather than the terrors of mold, mice, lightning and damp. These issues become vivid in the town of Tournai—for centuries a French‐ruled enclave squeezed between the County of Flanders and the County of Hainaut and now part of Belgium, a classic crossroads through which every army has marched, from the legionaries of the Roman Empire to Allied troops in 1944. This accidental find catapulted everything back some 250 years before Charlemagne, to the century after the Western Roman Empire had collapsed, a world which must have still been densely Roman in its appearance, probably with much smaller populations in towns and more limited trade.

Source: lithub.com