Editing Dark Age (section)

==Meanwhile elsewhere==
"The Dark Ages" were a western European thing. Byzantium, [[China]], [[India]], Persia, and eventually the Islamic Caliphates were, on the whole, doing quite well at this time. After all, this was the era that played host to the meteoric rise of Islam as both a world religion and temporal superpower. 

In Europe, the Byzantine Empire did quite well for some time, especially under Emperor Justinian as he strove to restore the old Empire, financing and patronising religious, cultural and scientific advancement of the state. It was under his rule that famous Hagia Sophia was constructed. However, his most influential and lasting legacy was the unified and complex Codex of Laws, known as ''Corpus Iuris Civilis'', that combined both older Roman laws and Justinian's own innovations. While it would be lost and abandoned by the West after the Great Schism, it was revisited by Napoleon, who used it as the basis for the Napoleonic Code upon which many modern nations built their legal systems. Justinian was doing great until up to half of the entire population died in the plague outbreak named after him and Theodora's death by cancer pretty much broke the last great classical autocrat. After Byzantium and Persia broke each other, the Islamic empire came and sent them to their inevitable declines. 

The Caliphate would go through a Golden Age that lasted until the Mongols, excepting the Sunni-Shia schism and the Abbasids overthrowing the Umayyads. There is also an often-overlooked period called the Carolingian Renaissance which occurred from the 8th-9th century and saw a flourishing of Frankish intellectual elites in such areas as law, writing, literature, liturgical reform, and the arts. 

China would emerge from a period of political instability (and China had a lot of that) to be reunified by the Sui Dynasty and thrive under the Tang Dynasty, notably developing its famed imperial bureaucracy based on competitive examination. Meanwhile, Japan was coming into its own as a well-developed civilization with the Nara and Heian Periods following China's model.