the.com/dark ages

means A historical label for the early medieval period in Europe, used (often unfairly) to suggest a time of cultural stagnation, ignorance, and lost knowledge after Rome's fall.

from The phrase comes from the Latin saeculum obscurum, coined by a 16th-century Italian scholar lamenting the scarcity of surviving texts and records from the era — 'dark' meaning poorly documented, not literally benighted. Renaissance thinkers, proud of their own classical revival, happily cast the preceding centuries as a dim interlude between Rome's glory and their own. Modern historians have mostly retired the term, noting it reflects a shortage of surviving sources and a bias toward Mediterranean civilization — not an actual absence of learning, art, or progress, much of which quietly carried on in monasteries, courts, and workshops the label simply failed to illuminate.