The entire medieval period, from 500 AD to 1500 AD was ‘christened’ by Atheists and many Protestants as a ‘Dark Age’.  This propaganda has been relentless since the poorly named ‘Enlightenment’ when self-obsessed and largely historically ignorant personalities decided to elevate themselves and their contemporary progress against the backdrop of a sinister, corrupt and brooding Church.  In real scholarship no one accepts the appellation of a ‘Dark Age’, certainly not from the 8^th to 16^th centuries.  This was a long age of survival, renewal, and energy, punctuated by revolutions in science, agriculture, war, the arts and governance. 

The agnostic historian Will Durant, along with many others defended the Church from these baseless accusations including the charge against the Church for the social retrogression of the 6^th and 7^th centuries, especially in the ‘West’.  Most people don’t understand that the Byzantine Christian empire of the ‘East’ was rich, powerful and expansionary during this period, culminating in the rather ruinous and expensive wars of Justinian in Italy and North Africa in the mid-6^th century.  These wars retarded and degraded the ‘West’ and caused extraordinary turmoil from war, disease and social destruction. 

These conflicts were not the only source of Western dislocation.  Germanic tribes post 476 AD and the takeover of the Roman empire by the Goths, continued to pour into Western Europe.  These pagan incursions transformed the entire scene and upended the social and political landscape within the former Western Roman empire.  This had nothing to do with the Church.  In fact and in reality, without the Church the ‘West’ never would have withstood this onslaught and never would have developed along the lines and structures it did.

“The basic cause of cultural retrogression”, Durant writes, “was not Christianity, but barbarism; not religion but war.  The human inundations ruined or impoverished cities, monasteries, libraries, schools and made impossible the life of the scholar or the scientist.  Perhaps the destruction would have been worse had not the Church maintained some measure of order in a crumbling civilisation.”

This is rather obviously true. 

The Germanic incursions emanated from various tribes who were rural and nomadic.  There was no written literature, no settled life, no political organisation and no technological development.  Rome for all its faults as a white-slave trading premised empire, did possess a legal system with a large corpus of laws and precedents, codified by Justinian I.  The Germans did not.  The Justinian codex, based on centuries of legal activity became the basis for Western Europe’s legal systems.  This legal heritage was built and saved by the Church.  No such history informs the Germanic tribes who were first and foremost nomadic warriors or at best semi-settled militarists.

Christoper Dawson, “The Church had to undertake the task of introducing the law of the Gospel and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount among people who regarded homicide as the most honourable occupation and vengeance as synonymous with justice.”

The most significant event in Western European medieval history is likely the conversion of Clovis King of the Franks in around 496 AD.  Compelled by his powerful wife who was a Christian to adopt the faith, the conversion by all accounts was a real and honest conversion by Clovis to Christ.  The entire Frankish tribe soon converted en masse, and Christendom had secured the support of the most powerful of the Germanic tribes who would forge the future state of France.  Of course, the ending of pagan naturalism and superstition would take many generations and entail hard work from Catholic missionaries and priests.  Eventually the light of Charlemagne would shine on France, Italy and parts of Germany, and Christianity would be further spread eastwards, through missionaries like Boniface and through interminable wars with the heathen and pagan Saxons.

Without the guidance of the Church all would have been lost in Western Europe during the 5^th and 6^th centuries.  Pope Gregory the Great was instrumental in salvaging civilisation in Italy during the early 6^th century.  The ongoing efforts of conversion and guidance in Gaul can be read in St Gregory of Tour’s ‘History of the Franks’ and that of the Anglo-Saxons in England, in the Venerable Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’.  Saint Boniface undertook these efforts in Germany and reformed the Frankish church in the 740s as well. 

People today are mostly ignorant about the benefices and fundamental importance of the Church during the long medieval era.  The reality is quite simple: no Catholic Church, no modern Europe.