Map of Empire Zones

I created this map because there is far too much talk about the European dark ages without specifying which parts of Europe had dark ages. I had a longer post on this here. Cyan is the Northwestern Roman Empire region (I got the term from Scheidel’s Escape from Rome), yellow is the Northeastern Roman Empire region, dark green is the Southern Roman Empire region (united by the Arabic language and Islam), magenta is greater Iran, dark blue is European barbaricum (very sparsely populated prior to the dark ages), light green is East Asia and dark cyan is South Asia. The black polygon is roughly “the most compact polygon (in terms of land area) that encloses 80 percent of the places where the significant figures [in Europe from 1400 to 1950 AD] grew up” from Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment.

Both the northeastern and northwestern Roman Empire regions had dark ages (the first starting in the fifth, the second in the seventh century); the southwestern Roman Empire region (not shown separately) also had a dark age in the sixth to seventh centuries, but had a very strong recovery under Islamic rule. The southeastern Roman Empire region had no dark ages, at least, prior to the second plague pandemic.

Interestingly enough, China had a dark age during the fourth to fifth centuries, while India also had one with the fall of the Gupta Empire. I am not sufficiently well informed about Iran to know if it had a dark age at any point between 400 and 1000 AD.

And remember…