were the dark ages just a meme or did it actually happen?

It is true in the sense that there isn't as many written records as we would like, which is regrettable.

Though, it isn't the case that the corpus of human thought disappeared or shrunk.
That is also precluding intellectual movement outside of Europe.

>>2551429
Mostly a meme. In some parts of the world it is arguably true, e.g. England, northern Spain, the Balkans etc. In places like Gaul and Italy it wasn't that bad. People had to move onto hilltops and the like to discourage Arab raids but other than that most of these places were relatively untouched by societal upheavals in the 5th-9th centuries AD.

>>2551429
It's a western euro thing only.

>>2551429

They happened but they were not as long or as bad as they're portrayed as being, nor was it for the reasons often given.

>>2551480
load of codswollop

>>2551429
It's true in the Anglosphere, the only sphere that matters

The end of the roman empire up until about 1000 was a bit of a dark time in european history.

Dark ages is a term that means that the period had no historical record of the events basically "kept in the dark of that age"

nowadays we know much about the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne but back then we didn't.

The first usage of the term appeared in Ancient Greece describing the period between the Golden age of Greece and the Classical age that they were in.