The romantic Knight in shining armour

[LafayetteCCurtis]

Exactly, it has little written records because nobody back then knew how to read and write, not even the nobles.

This statement is horribly misleading. Being illiterate does not equate with being stupid or uncultured--many of the "barbarian" kings in the Dark Ages, like Theodoric the Great, were great patrons of learning who devoted vast amounts of resources to preserving and propagating Roman knowledge. The only problem with them is that they sometimes neglected to record their own history in their occupation with saving what they could from the ruins of the Western Roman Empire.

(Yes, just the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire remained standing well into the Middle Ages and represented a strong continuity between Roman and medieval times).

Only the monks knew how to read and write. I believe the Romans called them barbarians. After the Roman Empire fell, their was very little left in term of civilization.

This is also manifestly false, since--as I've said before--the "barbarian" kings were often also the most assiduous in preserving Roman knowledge. Even if we restrict ourselves to military history, the patterns of warfare in the Dark Ages were actually not very different from the ones we found in the late Roman Empire. The "barbarian" kings based their power upon their control of former Roman fortifications and walled cities, and were fully capable of taking and defending these cities with the most advanced siege techniques of the day barring the Chinese trebuchet (and they adopted these trebuchets very quickly once the technology had spread to Europe). Their battlefield tactics were sometimes strikingly similar to those of the late Romans, whose armies were mostly "barbarian" anyway; for instance, there are some indications that the Franks were not slow in transforming their infantry from impetuous warbands to fairly well-drilled formations along the late Roman model. Sometimes they got so far as to adapt Roman models to their own needs and circumstances, like the Carolingian Franks' organization of their cavalry (!) into "legions" capable of performing intricate tactical maneuvers and conducting prolonged strategic operations in hostile territory. Let's not forget that the most important military text during the Middle Ages was Vegetius's manual of late Roman warfar--so much that its author's name became almost synonymous with the science of war in the same way that the Chinese couldn't talk about military science without mentioning Sun Zi/Sun Tzu.

That's just on the military side. Many other things survived the fall of the western half of the Empire--like the Roman Catholic church, which itself was an important organ of the late Roman state. Then there were the late Roman estates that eventually formed the model for medieval manorialism. So, generally speaking, there was at least as much continuity as discontinuity between the Western Roman Empire and the so-called Dark Ages in Western Europe.

[Awesome King.]

The dark ages meant different things to different people. Here in Britain, before the onset of the Germanic Saxons we now look at it not as an absence of knowledge, but a revival of native culture (not the flowery neo paganism crap) tinged with Roman idealism.
For example, despite the churches statements to the contrary Christianity was a minor(ish) religion around the 5th-6th century in Britain, with Mithraism (worship of the Persian god of war and soldiery, sacrifice of bulls etc brought with the Romans) being the most common religion.
What does this tell us? That a little of Rome persisted here and there and that post Roman Britain held some sense of war prowess, amongst other things.

[Joel Norman]

I took a class last semester that covered the time period from Late Antiquity (Late Rome) to the Early Medieval Period (the so-called Dark Ages). The professor's take on it (and she is not alone, from what I read) is that calling the Early Medieval Period a Dark Age comes from Italian propaganda, and that we've pretty much bought into it because we use the term so easily. The Italians considered the breakdown of old Rome a bad thing, naturally, and when the Italian Renaissance began, they called the period of Germanic cultural domination a Dark Age, because to them the Germanic peoples were dark, barbaric, etc.
We also have bought into the propaganda again because we call the Italian Renaissance THE Renaissance. Many historians consider there to have been several renaissances within the so-called Dark Ages: the Carolingian Renaissance, the Northumbrian Renaissance, the Ottonian Renaissance, etc. Several 'barbarian' kings promoted education and learning and promoting what was left of Roman culture more than is commonly known, so the debate is that if so many people did become educated during the Dark Ages, were they really that dark at all? Like Stacy said, lack of surviving records often has more to do with messy events in history rather than not having produced written records at all.
Since this professor is also an Art History person as well as a medievalist (though she had not seen fechtbucher until I showed them to her), she also contends that one should not think that medieval art is inferior to or less sophisticated than Roman art or Italian Renaissance art, but simply different, reflecting different cultural values like abstraction over realism.
Anyway, I thought the class was fascinating, even if it was only one person's take on the so-called Dark Ages. She also had a lot to say about modern institutions and cultures owing at least as much to old Germanic cultures as to old Roman culture as transmitted to us through the Italians.

[RayMcCullough]

None of my professors at Auburn University of Montgomery had heard or seen fechtbucher, and one of them was a medievalist.

This is sad, but I didn't know they existed until about 3 years ago either.

[Keith Culbertson]

Indeed there have been numerous ebbs and tides of so called 'civilized' and so-called 'dark/barbaric' times---each dependent upon perspective of the oral legends and, later, writers in all places. Floods, famine, war---these all spelled doom for cultures thought a pinnacle, yet cycles of fortune and chance developments/meetings cause the turning points that divide these 'convenient' labels. So remember legends of Atlantis and Lemuria; the facts of Minoan, Egyptian, Roman and Byzantine collapses; the devastation of the Americas and other colonial conquests. Everyone has had times which certain persons would conceal from history if they could, or that were lost despite hopes of its continuity.

[Jonathan Coupe]

I would caution people when reading this though about over-generalizing von Hutten’s experience as representative of the noble or knightly life. The sentiment in the second paragraph of this document is indicative of the fact that it is a product of the Holy Roman Empire, which was particularly turbulent. While violence was certainly common in England and France..

It's a wonderful letter. In England, I think only the Border had that sort of experience of routine uncertainty and violence.

[Scott A. Richardson]

Let me point out that much of the way in which we refer to historical periods -- and, therefore, conceptualize those periods and the people in them -- come to use by other historical periods in between then and now. Very often, those intersecting time periods have attached labels to earlier time periods due to their own self-contered conceit, then passed the phrase onto us. However, without understanding the attached conceit, we assume these time periods are so named for very good reasons.

So in reference to this particular post: There are several theories as to why the very enlightened "Dark Ages" should be so named, but one idea is that it was a condescending term used by Renaissance intellectuals to show just how advanced they were compared to their forefathers. It has little to do with how "dark" the Dark Ages were or not, and much more to do with bigotry and arrogance.

Another example is the so-called Byzantine Empire. If you were to ask someone living in Constantinople to describe their nationality, they would most assuredly have called themselves Roman. This was, in fact, who they were and how they thought of themselves. They weren't labled "byzantine" until after 1453, when -- again -- bigoted Renaissance intellectuals wanted to distinguish the clever, manipulative ways of that army and royal families compared to the brave and honest ways of the western Europeans. As this is the dictonary definition of byzantine, the empire became so labled.

Just an interesting note to consider when we think about what we think we know about the past. By this point in time, history has been passed through so many seives -- many of them highly bigoted and unfair -- such that their impression of the past more often creates our image of it far more than reality does. This post, dealing with the reality of the Renaissance ritter, is a perfect example of that.

[Alan Abu Bakr]

but one idea is that it was a condescending term used by Renaissance intellectuals to show just how advanced they were compared to their forefathers.

Much like how medieval sword fighting is well known to be a clumsy fight of pure force, fought with very heavy blades, due to the writings of renaissance fencers.

[Rod-Thornton]

Which writings? Although not nearly as well-read as many others here, I can't think of any.

...Much like how medieval sword fighting is well known to be a clumsy fight of pure force, fought with very heavy blades, due to the writings of renaissance fencers.

[Alan Abu Bakr]

Which writings? Although not nearly as well-read as many others here, I can't think of any.

I'm not well read either, but that is what I've come to understand.
...well maybe fencers from later then the renaissance, I don't know.

[Stacy Clifford]

I'm not well read either, but that is what I've come to understand.
...well maybe fencers from later then the renaissance, I don't know.

My understanding is that most of that misperception comes from the writings of the later smallsword era and the Victorians and so forth, not the Renaissance writers who were still using weapons not that far removed from Medieval types. Not to mention pasty museum collectors with no athletic ability.

[Scott A. Richardson]

I'm not well read either, but that is what I've come to understand.
...well maybe fencers from later then the renaissance, I don't know.

My understanding is that most of that misperception comes from the writings of the later smallsword era and the Victorians and so forth, not the Renaissance writers who were still using weapons not that far removed from Medieval types. Not to mention pasty museum collectors with no athletic ability.

Yes, it was pretty much the 19th Century fencers, such as Alfred Hutton, who were the first to put down the Medieval warrior as being nothing but a brute and little more than a caveman with a sword. They tended to respect the Renaissance swordsman as being the forefather of their "perfected" sport fencing; however, that respect was born out of what sword technique morphed into, and not for the intrinsic skill and value of the Renaissance warrior himself.

[Nathan Dexter]

What I don't understand, is why people can have such a romantic view of the knights themselves, and then come around and believe that they were guys running around with 40 pound flat metal clubs.

[s_taillebois]

What I don't understand, is why people can have such a romantic view of the knights themselves, and then come around and believe that they were guys running around with 40 pound flat metal clubs.

Ivanho, Hereward the Wake (late versions), Lady of Shalott, and pre-Raphelite painters.

When these stories were written, the culture was still using swords for serious business. But, as noted, they did tend to view earlier styles as primative. Not an uncommon phenomenon, cultures tend to view their ways of killing people as more refined than those of their ancestors. It's a common tendency to want to appear more moral when killing each other.

And when these stories were popular romanticizing a pre-industrial past was a common desire. And to write into the stories how good period swords actually were, and that these were made by proto industrial techniques...didn't fit the romantic persona. Same phenomenon happens when some people today look at some aspects of NA technologies.