Dark Age

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Brick and Concrete have given way to Wattle and Daub

The Western Roman Empire is generally said to have fallen in 476 CE, but this really only the culmination of a long, gradual decline caused by a wide variety of internal and external reasons which are beyond the scope of this article and indeed are still extensively debated by historians. Long story short, as Rome's central government broke down, German tribes such as the Saxons, the Vandals, and the Goths invaded and took over large swathes of territory, and many urban centers that had thrived under Roman rule withered on the vine as their people fled to the countryside. As a result, a fair bit of higher learning was lost in Western Europe. For the sake of curation, this marked the end of the Classical Period and inaugurated a period of history which lasted until about 1000 AD/CE or so called The Dark Ages.

During this time warlords across Europe carved out new kingdoms for themselves, handing some of the choicest of their conquered lands to their favored warriors as a reward for their service. In turn, these warriors taxed the peasants who lived on their new land and used the money to buy mail, helmets and horses, gradually morphing into the first knights. They also made alliances with the Catholic Church, which arose from the ashes of Rome offering its services in placating the peasants, rebuilding society and doing things that required book learning in exchange for their aid in spreading the faith, a say in the way things were run, and various other privileges.

Invasions

The Germanic 'barbarian' invasions continued from the end of the Roman Empire well into the Dark Ages. Even though Rome "officially" fell to Odoacer in 475, it was still relatively livable until further nomadic invasions razed the city almost completely. Roman holdouts in Britain had to contend with continuous and savage attacks from the Jutes and Saxons, which formed the backdrop of the earliest Arthurian legends. The Byzantine Empire, another Roman holdout, faced attacks from the Bulgarians, Hungarians, Persians, and the new Muslim armies from Arabia. The rest of the former Roman Empire was in constant flux, whether they be petty warlords duking it out or nomadic opportunists looking to raid the still-disorganized European mainland. It's believed that one of the driving forces for all this raiding and invasion was the Winter of 536, where volcanic dust clouds covered the planet and caused a brutally long winter, resulting in widespread famine followed by a mass outbreak of plague. These dire circumstances resulted in nomadic tribes attacking anyone they could to survive, which was everyone due to how weakened society had become.

Starting around the early 700s, the relatively new Umayyad Caliphate had begun conquering Europe, seizing nearly all of Iberia. While the other Mediterranean European countries were under the protection of the Byzantine Empire, the south of France was vulnerable and became the site of significant clashes between the local Frankish tribes and the invading Muslims. During this time period, Frankish statesman Charles Martel was able to rally the Franks at the battle of Tours and beat back the invasion; his grandson Charlemagne would succeed in uniting the remainder of Western Europe under the Carolingian Empire, the closest the West had been to a unified state since Rome. While the Carolingian Empire didn't last, it laid the groundwork for the two future states of France and the Holy Roman Empire.

Around 793 the Vikings began to show up and would remain an active element for centuries to come. While most of these attacks were short yet violent raids for the sake of pillaging and taking slaves, eventually the Vikings conquered a sizable chunk of England and established the "Danelaw," ensuring a long-term presence that would last even after the petty English kingdoms got their shit together and ousted the Norse warlords. France fared somewhat better, as the French monarch was able to convince the invading vikings to settle down in the province of Normandy in exchange for their fealty. This would have long-term consequences, as said Normans ended up claiming the English crown for themselves, leading William the Conqueror to invade England in 1066; this typically marks the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the High Middle Ages, as the various European powers were finally starting to stabilize and more formal governance was being established. It's also the point where the iconic heavy cavalry in full armor became a thing, as the invention of stirrups made cavalry considerably more practical, while mail armor began to encompass more of the body than the mere "chain shirt" that had existed since Roman times.

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.

Notes

• Long story short, the term "Dark Age" has become rather contentious in recent decades among historians and at the very least it has been judged that people from the Renaissance onward overestimated how big an effect the collapse of Rome actually had. Many prefer the far less loaded Early Medieval Period to describe this period of history.
• The real reason we call this period the “Dark Age” is due to the relative lack of European writing we have in comparison to the ages coming before and after; the term "Obscure Age" might be more accurate. Between the high levels of political instability and drop in literacy, the only people making books at this time were monks. That’s not to say Europe was a total intellectual vacuum; the university was invented in this time period, and a network of schools were established at this time that would really come into prominence once the Renaissance hit.
• There are other periods of time labeled "Dark Ages", such as the Greek Dark Ages between the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Classical Period, or basically whenever an advanced civilization noticeably regresses due to general decline or some catastrophe. And like the previous point, we know almost nothing about what happened during these periods, especially so for the Bronze Age.

The appeal of the Dark Age

How do you like your medieval fantasy? Do you like it to be harsher, grittier and on the cruder side? Then the Dark Ages are a good place to mine for ideas. People are living in tiny, isolated settlements with mud-walled buildings while a king theoretically reigns over them, but actual power lies in the hands of local nobles and knights. Viking raiders are cruising the seas on longships searching for gold and thralls and doing battle with scruffy knights in dirty scale and mail who are at best marginally more civilized than the pagan "barbarians" with whom they're fighting, and both are more likely to preserve their deeds in song than with words written down in books. Monasteries full of monks are copying down a few ancient texts that they cannot read for future generations. You can even work in a bit of a Post Apocalyptic vibe with a Dark Age setting, where people build crude wooden fortresses and barn-like halls exist alongside the remains of more impressive structures from a now fallen empire. Civilization once stood here and it might do so again, but now all is an age of turmoil and the sword.

Not to say that these guys did not have a creative side. Some of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in the world were produced during the Dark Ages, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, and this period is also home to the elaborate spiral patterns and tapestries of Celtic art. In general the aesthetics of the time are more abstract than the Classical era before it or the High Middle Ages and Renaissance ahead of it.

Dark inspired Games, Factions and Settings

This is one of the most used settings in all fantasy. While usually taking a fair degree of artistic liberties, most fantasy authors use the aesthetics of feudalism in one way or another: dirt-grubbing peasants, luxurious (for the time) and corrupt royal courts stabbing each other in the back, dirty and decrepit cities, barbarians pillaging the remnants of the old empires, a nebulous fight in the frontiers (usually based on the Muslim or Mongol invasions during the Middle Ages)...

• The Kingdom of Bretonnia in Warhammer FB is clearly inspired by a late version of the Middle Ages' Kingdom of France and/or England, whereas the Empire is closer to the Early Modern Age's Holy Roman Empire.
• The human kingdoms in The Lord of the Rings also follow a similar aesthetic, although much less grounded in reality and more in fantasy.
• Dark Sun
• Frostgrave has a strong Dark Ages feel, with wizards, barbarians, and knights fighting over treasure in the frozen ruins of an ancient city.
• Horizon Zero Dawn is set a thousand years after Earth was effectively destroyed because some idiot invented unhackable self-replicating biomass-fueled war-bots and forgot to put in a kill switch. Now clans of techno-barbarian humans live among the ruins of the old world, collecting and venerating the relics left behind by the "Old Ones", unearthing what knowledge they can, and building bows, spears, and armor from pieces of advanced technology.

Historical Time Periods
Deep Time:	Prehistory
Premodern:	Stone Age - Bronze Age - Classical Period - Dark Age - High Middle Ages - Renaissance
Modern:	Age of Enlightenment - Industrial Revolution - The World Wars - The Cold War - Post-Cold War