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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Herberto, post: 2947178, member: 74222&quot;]Nice coins and nice written, but this little part is not quite correct.</p><p><br /></p><p>Plagues always came sporadically even in Antiquity and Renaissance, and that plague during Justinian’s time hardly was the reason for the supposed thousand years of decline.</p><p><br /></p><p>After the (Western) Roman Empire collapsed a lot was lost. True, Pagan Barbarians from Germania don’t read Plato’s philosophical works, Aristotle’s physics, Ptolemy’s astronomical works, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey, Hippocrates’ and Galen’s medical works, and they cannot build outstanding/spectacular buildings. All these things were done by Romans(now “Byzantines”). A little exception was perhaps Italy, as it was (one of?) the richest part of the western part of Roman Empire, but with Justinian’s two-times Gothic-wars and with Lombards’ invasion Italy was finished for good.</p><p><br /></p><p>But Europe was not left “in the darkness” and “would not recover for nearly a thousand years”. Actually, numerous inventions and progress were made in terms of philosophy, science, agriculture, architecture, medicine. True, in the part of (Pagan) Europe initially it was somehow primitive to start with unlike the Byzantines and Muslims who had advanced culture/learning in Middle Ages. But that Barbarians’ culture that ruined/replaced classical culture, was “only” at the beginning: eventually when Charlemagne, a great European monarch around 800 CE, secured his empire he initiated the “Carolingian Renaissance”, and onwards the classical learning expanded eastward in Europe. At the same time under the Macedonian Dynasty in Byzantium the Macedonian Renaissance was initiated which resulted into the “civilizing” of the Russians/Slavs.</p><p><br /></p><p>So while the Pagan Europe was indeed &quot;primitive&quot; just after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the things changed immediately in 800’s (Charlemagne’s reign) and progress were made, and in 1000’s I would say that continental Europe was more advanced than it was during Plato’s time.</p><p><br /></p><p>The notion of a supposed dark ages that lasted for a supposed 1000 years is one of the widespread myth that has been refuted and diminished the last few decades in the academia.</p><p><br /></p><p>If interested, you might find these links beneath informative:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/how-the-middle-ages-reall_b_5767240.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/how-the-middle-ages-reall_b_5767240.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/how-the-middle-ages-reall_b_5767240.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=dynamic_middle_ages" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=dynamic_middle_ages" rel="nofollow">http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=dynamic_middle_ages</a></p><p><br /></p><p>And this doesn’t particularly deal with Middle Ages, but perhaps you might find it interesting since it explains where the myth originates from:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/CIS/Numbers/Numbers_Lecture.pdf" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/CIS/Numbers/Numbers_Lecture.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/CIS/Numbers/Numbers_Lecture.pdf</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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