Late Medieval Revival

The standard story of medieval Europe runs roughly like this: Rome falls, everything goes dark, then the Renaissance rescues civilization. It is a story beloved by Renaissance humanists who invented it, and it is mostly wrong.

Between roughly 1000 and 1350, western Europe underwent one of the most significant economic and intellectual expansions in its history. Population nearly doubled. Forests were cleared, marshes drained, and millions of new acres brought under cultivation. Trade routes that had contracted after Rome's collapse reopened and extended further. Towns that had dwindled to villages grew back into genuine cities. New institutions appeared — guilds, universities, municipal governments — that had no Roman precedent and would outlast the medieval world entirely.

The Black Death interrupted this expansion brutally and almost terminally. But the structures built in the three centuries before the plague proved durable. The universities kept teaching after 1350. The cathedrals kept rising. The towns kept trading. What historians used to call the "Dark Ages" had, well before any Renaissance arrived, already produced a functioning and in many ways dynamic civilization.