The Dark Ages - Part 2 - The Waning Empire

At its height in the second century A.D., the Roman Empire was the beacon of learning, power, and prosperity in the western world. But the once-powerful Rome - rotten to the core by the fifth century - lay open to barbarian warriors who came in wave after wave of invasion, slaughtering, stealing, and ultimately, settling. As chaos replaced culture, Europe was beset by famine, plague, persecutions, and a state of war that was so persistent it was only rarely interrupted by peace. THE DARK AGES profiles those who battled to shape the future, from the warlords whose armies threatened to cause the demise of European society, such as Alaric, Charles the Hammer, and Clovis; to the men and women who valiantly tended the flames of justice, knowledge, and innovation including Charlemagne, St. Benedict, Empress Theodora, and other brave souls who fought for peace and enlightenment. It was in the shadows of this turbulent millennium that the seeds of modern civilization were sown.

Narrator: Throughout the fifth century, wave after wave of invading tribes, Goths, Vandals, Franks, Britons, and Saxons

flooded in and fought to stake their claim on the waning empire.

Rome's once invincible domain shattered into a thousand pieces, each one held by a military strongman who wanted to collect them all.

The glory of Rome was gone forever, and the Dark Ages had begun.

Kulikowski: The Empire wasn't there, there was not longer an emperor, and as a result, the world was a smaller place.

Narrator: The next seven centuries, spanning from the fall of Rome to the First Crusade, would be an age of widespread violence, illiteracy, disease and superstition,

a time when urban populations throughout the continent declined, and city life withered.

Kilikowski: The amenities and the technology of life, and indeed the scale of life, just got smaller and worse.

The sewage systems stopped working, so that people can't get rid of their garbage the way they used to before.

Aqueducts break down, and you have wells instead of running water, and as a consequence, the houses get less and less impressive,

and people start living in, I'd suppose what we'd call, shacks.

Narrator: Even the great monuments of Rome, engineering miracles that had defined an unprecedented age of innovation were quarried for quick building materials.

DeVries: The people who came in afterwards settled next to the Roman ruins, not on top of the Roman ruins, but next to the Roman ruins.

They could not sustain the structures that had been there at one time. They took all the stones to make their houses and their own buildings from the Roman ruins.

Narrator: Over time, even the Coliseum, once Rome's grandest showcase of power and prestige, succumbed to the decay of civilization.

It became, at various intervals, a landfill, a shelter for the destitute, and a haven for packs of animals.

All the while, its facade was gradually being picked apart by pilfering settlers, who unwittingly left behind a hallow symbol of society's downward spiral.

Jim Masschaele: In the early Middle Ages, people would have been confronted with the fact that

there was this once glorious civilization that had preceded them, and that they could in fact still see around them.

They could see in the road system that the Romans had built, they could see in the aqueducts that were still standing,

they could see in the bridges that were still standing in many parts of Europe, and when they looked at those things,

and they looked at the level of engineering that it took build them, it must have led them to believe that they had regressed,

that life had been better in the past than it was in the present.

Narrator: The flames that had illuminated life in Ancient Rome, cutting edge technology, open trade, great access to education, employment and medicine

were extinguished amidst the chaos of the succeeding centuries.

But despite the undeniable downshift in society's progress, debate still rages about whether it's fair to call this era, the Dark Ages.

Martin: The term, the Dark Ages, has been used by lots of people.

The famous Italian scholar, Petrarch, since invented it because he was comparing this period to the earlier Classical Period,

which he saw as literally brilliant, full of light, and he said, hey, by comparison, the people of this period,

they were in darkness, in gloom. You got up in the morning in this period, and if you were poor and if you were hungry,

then it probably did look pretty dark, but that wasn't the case across the board, so there is a lot more to this period

than just the notion that people were living in gloom and were gloomy.

Narrator: In fact, in spite of its widespread chaos, anarchy, and upheaval,

or perhaps because of it,

this remote period of history would dramatically alter the course of Europe's future.

For while the continent was fragmented politically, a new form of unity was gradually emerging that couldn't be measured on a map.

It was not the work of warriors and weapons, but of monks and missionaries.

To the people of Dark Ages Europe, the new emperor was Jesus Christ.