There were Greek reports of the Carthaginian navigator Hanno who is supposed to have ventured into these waters in the sixth or fifth century BC and lived to tell the tale, but that story was semi-legendary and no other such ancient voyages of that kind are known. Maritime technology was still too rudimentary for this kind of oceanic voyage and medieval sailors tended to avoid it for the same reason Greek and Roman sailors did – because they did not want to be wrecked on a coast far from home. Early medieval mariners did not venture down West Africa for entirely practical reasons. No medieval geographer or encyclopedist describes the oceans south of the straits of Gibraltar in this way, and there are no claims of “sheets of flame” or the danger of Satan reaching up from the depths. First, despite it being presented on the authority of an esteemed historian and Fellow of Oxford, it is total nonsense. Two things are striking about this lurid passage. And even if he should be able to survive all these ghastly perils and sail on through, he would then arrive in the Sea of Obscurity and be lost forever in the vapors and slime at the edge of the world.” “ … and as for trying to sail down the West African coast everyone knew that as soon as you passed the Canary Islands you would be in the sea of darkness in a medieval imagination this was a region of uttermost dread where the heavens fling down liquid sheets of flame and the waters boil or serpent rocks and ogre islands lie in wait for the mariner, where the giant hand of Satan reaches up from the fathomless depths to seize him where he will turn back in face and body as a mark of God’s vengeance for the insolence of his prying into this forbidden mystery. On this point historian Brian Ward-Perkins, a Fellow at Oxford University, puts it this way in his ‘The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation’ on the ‘scared of the world mentality’ (quote): Hicks presents the conception of the Middle Ages as a “Dark Age” as “the mainstream view” and illustrates it thus: I have gone into the origins of the term “the Dark Ages” and why modern historians now largely reject it in detail before – see “‘The Dark Ages’ – Popery, Periodisation and Pejoratives”. None of this has anything to do with “conservatism” or any ideological stances at all, just good modern historiography correcting the distorting Whiggish positivism of nineteenth century conceptions of the past. Even the earlier part of the period, for which many of the elements that make up the popular conception of the “Dark Ages” are at least somewhat applicable, is most usually referred to as the “Early Middle Ages” as a more neutral term without the ideologically-driven value judgements of the term “the Dark Ages”. Historians of the Middle Ages have largely abandoned the term “Dark Ages” because of its pejorative historiographical baggage and the way it has traditionally been applied to the whole Medieval period. It would certainly be news to historians of the Middle Ages that this is the case in “mostly conservative ”. Hicks opens by declaring that it is “a faux pas in some intellectual circles, mostly conservative ones, to say there was a ‘Dark Ages’ in European history”.
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