Anno Domini & The Dark Ages

What is meant by the Dark Ages? It's not the same as the Medieval Era of Civilization, although people conflate them.

Let's explain.

First let's stipulate that in the past of human civilization there was a time identifiable as Antiquity. This is the civilization of Greece and Rome, which is continuous one from the other for over a thousand years.

How do we know Antiquity even happened? We know primarily from archaeological evidence, including written inscriptions in stone. These inscriptions are supported by manuscripts of writings which we can say originated in Antiquity, and which we can assume have been faithfully copied over the centuries. The most useful among these writings for historical purposes are actual histories, in which the author describes a chronology of events in his own lifetime, or in living memory of his elders.

Very few original documents survive from Antiquity. Most of what we have are copies made much later. The concept of recopying documents faithfully over centuries of time is a fundamental feature of civilization, usually arising out of a priesthood.

But besides archaeology and writings about Antiquity, we also claim to have a continuous western tradition that dates from Antiquity, such that there has been an unbroken recording of time and events in the West since Antiquity.

Simply put, this means we assume we are using the same calendar (of years) as Antiquity. It means that we can assert that when we say it is the year 2020, that means that we assert that is precisely two thousand and twenty years since the year we identify as 1 BC, which in Rome saw the Consulship of Lentulus and Piso. The calendar priests of Rome identified this as the. year 753 Ab Urbe Condita, (AUC), which means since the founding of the city of Rome. 

But what about Anno Domini? At what point was AD adopted? One might then that dating events from the Incarnation. of Christ was adopted by early Christians of the first century. But there is no evidence the early Christians used such a dating system

How did Anno Domini come about? It was invented later by a Romanized Scythian monk, named Dionysius Exiguus. He was interested in building a table of the dates of Easter, which is a moveable feast in the Christian calendar. Determining the date of Easter, which is based on an astronomical formula, is common motivation for anyone who worked with calendars back then. As part of his work, he wished to know the calendar date of the first Easter. To do that, he needed to know how many years had passed since then. So went into the Imperial consular records and determined that he was living 525 years after the birth of Christ (and therefore 525-33=492 years since the first Easter).

Dionysius Exiguus didn't intend this discover to becoming a calendar for dating of events year-by-year. He used it this way only a few times.

His discovery was propagated throughout the Empire, but outside a few instances, there is little evidence his dating of the Incarnation was widely used as a system of dating current events during what would would have been the 600s AD.

Probably the first significant author to use Anno Domini was a monk in England, St. Bede.  He wrote about current evens in the history of the Church in England, as well as events centuries before his lifetime, which he gathered from other chronicles. He identified himself as living in the 730s AD according to the Easter calendar of Dionysius Exiguus. He probably died in the yea 735 AD, as his chronology of current events ends at that point.

Yet even after Bede,  use of Anno Domini still does not become widespread. The main reason is that after Bede, the recording of history in the West stops for a while.

For the next several centuries after Bede, there are no reliable year-dates in western history, that we can be confident were recorded by people at the time.  For most of Eiurope, this period of no-history begins up to a century or more before Bede, even as early as the 500s AD. The next reliable western dates we have pop up in the 900s AD. 

This gap of reliable reliable recorded dates in western history, which stretches from the end of Antiquity (500-750 AD)  to just before 1000 AD is called the Dark Ages.

After the year 1000 AD, history picks up in a big way. We have many overlapping writings and stone dates from this time forward. The use of Anno Domini is almost universal in the West across Christendom from that time forward, in both documents as well as dates recorded in stone.  This is the start of Medieval Civilization.