[blam]

"Well, insofar as it's meaningful to argue about a historical term... Historians generally consider the Dark Ages to have begun in the fifth century, when a series of barbarian peoples invaded the Mediterranean world and destroyed urban civilization."

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The Dark Ages: Were They Darker Than We Imagined?

[SedVictaCatoni]

I'm familiar with this theory. However, 536 AD was a hundred and fifty-eight years after the Battle of Adrianople, a hundred and twenty-six years after Alaric's sack of Rome, ninety-seven years after the Vandal conquest of Carthage, and sixty years after the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor. The Dark Ages were well and truly established by then.