The Dark Ages are not a period upon which the scholar can look with superior scorn. He no longer denounces their ignorance and superstition, their political disintegration, their economic and cultural poverty; he marvels, rather, that Europe ever recovered from the successive blows of Goths, Huns, Vandals, Moslems, Magyars, and Norse, and preserved through the turmoil and tragedy so much of ancient letters and techniques.
