Things that ACTUALLY EXISTED FOR REAL IN EUROPEAN HISTORY: Non-white people, mostly those of North African and Middle Eastern heritage who were immigrants, merchants, missionaries, mercenaries advisors, and scholars; female leaders, including the famed Warrior Queen Boudicca; and queer folk, seriously, Shakespeare wrote sonnets for dudes.
Things that did NOT actually exist for real in European History: Magic, faeries, dragons, wizards.
Q.E.D. The “well, there’s no black people/brown people/women leaders/gay people in this European inspired fantasy because that would be inaccurate” rhetoric is bullshit.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST YESTHIS PLEASE AND THANKS
So much fantasy is set in quasi “dark ages” feudal Europe. Can we just take a sec and realize that Europe is that asshole who gets to be a continent even though he’s not really a continent. He’s the jerk who, when he has a bad day, everyone starts calling it The Dark Ages.
FYI, “The Dark Ages” were a golden age for almost everyone else. Islam was booming, spreading and gathering up classical knowledge that would have been completely lost otherwise. China was going through a golden age of its own unter the Tang empire and Song empires, during which China grew and traded so much and so widely that they ran out of metal for coins and had to invent paper money (they also invented gunpowder). And let’s not forget that, while we have relatively few written records from this region, the evidence suggests that Africa (ALL of Africa, both around the Mediterranean and in Sub-Saharan Africa) was booming as well, creating empires of their own, trading with Islamic travelers and building gorgeous goddamn cities.
During this massively diverse time period, there were gay emperors and female emperors in China, the most traveled man in the world was an Islamic scholar and one of the wealthiest men in the world was an African Muslim king.
AS a historian, I can say that this is INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT AND OFTEN OVERLOOKED information.
Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Dark Ages, Schmark Ages. The De-Textbook cuts through that and so much more fake-fact bullshit.
cloudy with a chance of witch burning
your periodic reminder that a good chunk of Europe basically shat the bed for a few centuries while everyone else kinda did their thing.
I am sorry I’m going to be that person.
This map is extremely inaccurate.
1) China was not going through business as usual China was going through the TANG DYNASTY i.e. the Golden Age of Chinese culture, which would lay down legal and social and poetic norms for the rest of Chinese history. The Tang is so influential that a lot of languages call Chinese people 唐人 (People from Tang.) (We call Chinese people “people from Qin” so.)
2) Japan is _first becoming literate_ during this time period (due to the influence of the Tang they adopt Chinese script), which is a BFD for poetry, religion, politics, society. Japanese court culture develops, which near the end of this period (11th century, around the time Europe enters “high middle ages”) will produce The Tale of Genji (by a totally awesome woman named Murasaki),widely regarded as the world’s first novel because of it’s deft use of irony and social commentary.
3) The southern part of Korea is experiencing the emergence of Unified Silla, a state that will last the entire period and will see the importation of Chinese and Indian buddhism, the construction of the first Confucian college in Korea, and so on.
4) In Mesoamerica, the Mayans are inventing astronomy, writing (the third and final independent invention of writing in human history), and a whole crapload of other stuff. This is the triumph of their culture.
5) The Umayyads in Spain are a massive center of technology, learning, and (comparative) religious toleration.
6) The Eastern Roman Empire, which spans both the green and yellow portions of your map, isn’t doing too badly either, bouncing back after losing territory to the Caliphate.
7) The Polynesians are colonizing the ENTIRE PACIFIC using amazing advanced navigation technology not rivaled until the INVENTION OF GPS.
8) I am not equipped to talk about Sub-Saharan Africa in detail (cue rant about how we never learn about subsaharan africa in the western educational system) but you can bet there are some major, amazing developments going on there too. I’d be shocked if there weren’t.
9) HOLY SHIT INDIA.
10) OMG SOUTH EAST ASIA. SOUTH. EAST. ASIA.
11) THEY WEREN’T BURNING WITCHES IN EUROPE DURING THE MIGRATION PERIOD (dark ages). Witch burning took off in the EARLY MODERN PERIOD, nearly 1000 years after this. Europe was going through some tough shit, which would leave them backwards compared to the rest of the world for 1000 years, but also there were some amazing things happening there, at least have the decency to be like “angry dudes with swords stabbing people” not WITCH BURNINGS FFS.
12) And ABSOLUTELY Islamic Caliphate was a totally amazing flowering of intellectual, artistic, and spiritual culture, a mixing pot between a thousand cultures and languages, and totally amazing. Don’t in any way want to diminish that in any way.
PLEASE ALWAYS BE THAT PERSON
Basically people call it the dark ages because some guy who had a massive hardon for the Roman Empire was sad that there was no Roman empire.
^Pretty much.