The view of the medieval period as the "Dark Ages" is a stereotype, or oversimplified image; so, too, is the other extreme, which one might describe as the "knights in shining armor" viewpoint. This is the idea created by fairy tales and sustained by movies, an impression of the Middle Ages as a time of beauty, romance, and mystery. This view centers around images of chivalry—for instance, the knight rescuing the fair maiden from a dragon or an enemy, and carrying her on his horse to a castle gleaming in the distance.
In fact, if a modern person actually got a chance to meet a real medieval knight and his fair maiden, they would probably be more than a little disappointed—maybe even revolted. Whereas people in ancient Greece and Rome had been reasonably clean according to modern standards, by the time of the Middle Ages most of Western Europe had come to believe that baths were only good as a cure for sickness. If one were not sick, then there was no need for a bath. Therefore the knight and his maiden would be fairly smelly; furthermore, no one had any concept of brushing their teeth, let alone the idea of preventing tooth decay. Teeth simply fell out, and therefore the smile of the fair maiden would indeed be a sight to behold.
At some point, either the knight or his maiden were likely to come into contact with a terrible illness for which there was no cure. Certainly if one got sick, it was a bad idea to visit a so-called "doctor." Doctors in medieval Europe were actually just moonlighting barbers, and they proposed all sorts of hideous "cures" such as bleeding the patient to release impurities from the body. Not surprisingly, life expectancy during much of the Early Middle Ages was only about twenty-five or thirty years. Not only were lives short; people were short. Due to a number of factors, most notably poor diet and medical care, the averagesized man was between five and five-and-a-half feet tall, as opposed to six feet tall today. There were also far more people with physical problems of one kind or another: hunchbacks, persons with the dreaded disease leprosy, and others.
Experienced no dark age, and indeed became home to a splendid reminder of ancient Greek and Roman glory in the form of the Byzantine Empire.
Nor did the Arabs of the Middle East view the period as a "dark age": beginning in the 600s, Arabia experienced a cultural flowering on a scale seldom equaled in human history. While the ancestors of the English and French were still mostly illiterate peasants living in drafty huts, the Arabs enjoyed a degree of civilization that easily put them on a level with ancient Rome. It is not surprising that when they first encountered Western Europeans during the Crusades beginning in 1095, the Arabs viewed them as ignorant, foul-smelling brutes. Even in modern times, Arab historians do not typically view the millennium that began in a. d. 500 as a "middle age," especially since the Muslim world does not use the same calendar as Europe: instead of dating their years from the birth of Jesus Christ, Muslims begin with the prophet Muhammad's escape from the city of Mecca in a. d. 622.
Much farther east, the Chinese not only had their own calendar, but their own long and distinguished histo-ry—a history that had nothing to do with Europe. In fact, prior to about a. d. 100, the Chinese did not know that Greece or Rome existed, nor did they much care when they did learn of the fact. In their view, China was the center of the world, and all other peoples were barbarians to varying degrees. Just how barbarian the Chinese thought others were, of course, had a great deal to do with how much or how little their culture was influenced by that of China.
Moving farther east—so far east, in fact, that it is considered west—one finds the Mayan civilization in what is now Mexico and Guatemala. The Maya had never heard of Western Europe, Arabia, or China, placing them even farther from the Western European world of knights and castles. Nonetheless, the peoples of America, as well as Africa and other regions covered in this series, had their own unique experience of the period that in the West is known as the Middle Ages.
World History
