The period between 600 and 1450 CE is often called
the Middle Ages in Europe because it came between the Roman Empire — assuming you forget the Byzantines — and the beginning of the Modern Age.
However, outside of Europe, the Dark Ages were truly an
Age of Enlightenment
Medieval Europe had less
trade, fewer cities, and less cultural output than the original Roman Empire.
London and Paris were fetid firetraps with none of the planning of
sewage management of places 5,000 years older like Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley Civilization, let alone Rome.
But with fewer powerful governments, wars were at least smaller, which is one reason why Europeans living in Medieval Times
lived slightly longer — life expectancy was 30 — than Europeans during the Roman Empire — when life expectancy was 28.
Instead of centralized governments, Europe in the middle ages had feudalism, a political system based on
reciprocal relationships between lords, who owned lots of land, and vassals, who protected the land and got to dress up as knights in exchange for pledging loyalty to the lords.
The lords were also vassals to more important lords, with the most important of all being the
king.
Below the knights were peasants who did the actual work on the land in exchange for
protection from bandits and other threats.
Feudalism was also an economic system, with the peasants working the land and keeping some of their production to feed themselves while
giving the rest to the landowner whose land they worked.
The small scale, local nature of the feudal system was perfect for a time and place where
the threats to peoples' safety were also small scale and local.
in fuedalism there's little freedom and absolutely no
social mobility. Peasants could never work their way up to lords, and they almost never left their villages.
things were certainly brighter in the
Islamic world, or Dar al Islam.
The Umayyad Dynasty then expanded the empire west to Spain and moved the capital to
Damascus, because it was closer to the action, empire-wise but still technically in Arabia.
Staying in Arabia was really important to the Umayyad's because they'd established this hierarchy in the empire with
Arabs like themselves at the top and in fact they tried to keep Arabs from fraternizing with non-Arab Muslims throughout the Empire.
This of course annoyed the non-Arab Muslims, because the Quran says that we're all supposed to be equal. And pretty quickly the majority of Muslims weren't Arabs, which made it pretty easy for them to
overthrow the Umayyad's, which they did in 750 CE.
After overthrowing the Umayyads, the
Abbasids took their place
the Abbasids were from the Abbasi family which hailed from the Eastern, and therefore more Persian, provinces of the Islamic Empire.
The Abbasids took over in 750 and no one could fully defeat them — until
1258, when they were conquered by the Mongols.
