We come to the end of the Middle Ages.
Not in Asia and Africa, where there is no difference between the middle ages and the later preindustrial world that followed.
In western Europe. Where the local progression that we call the middle ages really happened.
And so, the end of the middle ages.
On one side, a radiant age of art, beauty, and the rediscovery of learning.
On the other, dark terrible wars and the burning of witches.
On one side, the Medieval age.
The age of soaring Gothic Cathedrals.
Brilliant decorated manuscripts.
The discovery of Greek and Arab learning in the High Middle Ages.
On the other side, the wars of the Reformation.
Which is where you find the burning of witches.
Not in the High Middle Ages.
In the wars of the Reformation in the 17th Century.
Now, that does not mean that the early modern period in Europe was all dark.
There was the Italian Renaissance, there was Newton and Galileo, there was Handel and Bach.
There was plenty of art and learning.
But the early modern period in western Europe was recovering from an unimaginable disaster.
The Black Plague.
And the collapse of France and Castille, western Europe's greatest kingdoms, and the wars that followed, that the Black Plague caused.
And this was an unimaginable disaster that happened nowhere else.
The Black Plague was far worse in western Europe.
With its winters, its rat problems from the lack of a love of cats, and its disdain for the careful sacred cleanliness of the older civilizations, western Europe was far more vulnerable to the Black Plague than the rest of the world.
We have lots of records from this period in the Islamic world.
But there are far fewer references to the Black Plague in the Islamic world, or anywhere else beyond Western Europe, than there are in western Europe, where the most famous artwork of the area, the most famous piece of Italian literature from the era, Bocaccio's Decameron, is literally about a group of people telling stories as they wait out the plague.
The Europe of the Reformation was reeling from an unimaginable disaster- far worse than anything that happened to anywhere else in the world since 1100 BC until European colonialism and the World Wars.
This was when we find 'medieval' darkness in western Europe.
In the wake of this unimaginable disaster that the brilliant Italian Renassance was trying to revive European civilization from.
This is the dark era.
And yet one that did, in the Italian Renaissance, recapture a lot of light and beauty and vibrant life to go along with the darkness!
God loves you!
We're being reborn from the early 20th Century too!
(In Asia and Africa from the 19th Century!)
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson