Lindisfarne and Iona: Preserving Western Civilization in the Dark Ages
Overview
When the Roman Empire fell to the barbarians in A.D. 476, much of western civilization's accumulated knowledge began to disappear. Scrolls and manuscripts were lost when the monasteries and libraries that contained them were abandoned. Documents that remained were less and less valuable to people ignorant of their value. As Europe fell into the Dark Ages, only a very few people, most of them Christian monks, had any knowledge of Latin, the language of knowledge and learning. With this decline, the accumulated culture of Rome began to wane; the translated works of Greek antiquity nearly disappeared.
Despite the eclipse of knowledge from Greece and Rome, there was some significant contribution to western scholarship in the Dark Ages. The Roman Church managed not only to survive the fall of the empire, but to thrive in its absence, sending missionaries to the geographical extremes of Europe. Some of these men traveled as far as the British Isles, seeking to Christianize the barbarian tribes (people who were not former citizens of Rome). When they arrived in northern Europe, they established monasteries, educated future generations of priests, and transcribed religious and some secular texts.
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