Who Started the Lie That the Middle Ages Were "Dark"?

We learned it in school: the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages.
The Church stopped people from thinking, and everyone lived in ignorance.

Where the lie began: Petrarch

The first person to use the idea of "dark ages" was the 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch.
He didn't use it because the Church was corrupt or because people were starving.
The one thing that upset him was that the beautiful writings of Roman times had been lost.
"Our age is dark because it doesn't have the old books I love."
But that one remark became a weapon.
Renaissance scholars painted the age right before them darker to make their own era look like a "rebirth."
Then 18th-century intellectuals, looking to attack the Church, completed the story: "Religion stopped people from thinking for a thousand years."

So what were the Middle Ages really like?

Around the year 1000, Europe's population doubled within about 300 years.
An agricultural revolution centered on the monasteries meant there was enough to eat.
Heavy plows spread, water-powered mills were developed, and fields were managed more efficiently.

The first universities were born in the Middle Ages

Bologna: 1088. Paris: around 1150. Oxford: around 1167.
Alongside theology, they organized and advanced law, medicine, mathematics and astronomy.

The astonishing productivity of the Middle Ages

The money and technology needed to build a single Gothic cathedral were comparable, in today's terms, to launching a spacecraft.
That means Europe had productivity to spare.
Cities and merchants gathered around cathedrals, and merchant associations called guilds appeared.
The seeds of the middle class and of capitalism were sown in this period.
And those grand cathedrals have become eternal tourist attractions, feeding their countries like a pension.

The birth of sheet music: pop music's ancestor was a medieval monk

In the 11th century, a monk named Guido of Arezzo created a system to help choir singers learn songs easily. It became the standard of Western music to this day.

The beginning of welfare: the birth of the hospital

People picture the medieval Church as a place that hunted witches, but it was medieval churches and monasteries that first created the modern hospital and welfare system.

Calling this the "Dark Ages" isn't history

Renaissance scholars painted the Middle Ages dark to make their own time shine.
18th-century intellectuals completed the story to bring down the Church. And we learned it in school. Today, historians no longer use the term "Dark Ages."
"Golden age" would be closer to the truth.