Crimean War
Britain and France allied with Turkey and invaded Russia. After the war was over the countries fighting the war did not achieved anything of importance.
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info – Ireland – Western Europe
Some books were beautifully decorated, Benedictional of the Dark Ages. Through such books, the Church strove to preserve Christian civilization, while Barbarians ravaged Europe.
Dark Ages
Scholars of the 1400's gave this name “Dark Ages” to the period in Europe after the downfall of the Roman Empire in the A.D. 400's. It was “dark” compared to the “brightness” of ancient Greece and Rome.
During this period Europe was ravaged by barbarians like the Goths, the Vandals and the Huns, who swept down from the east and north. They destroyed many of the better things that had existed under the Romans. When they finally settled down, little was left of the civilization which they had plundered. The second reason for calling this age dark is that few records (which might have helped us discover what happened) were written; and the raids destroyed many of those that were.
Charlemagne, Alfred of England, and Otto I of Germany all tried to recover and rebuild the lost civilization of Rome. These were false starts. Arabs and other Islamic peoples kept attacking from the south; Saxons and Magyars harried Eastern Europe; and the Vikings from the Scandinavian countries came again and again in their long ships, raiding all the western coasts. They even reached Sicily and Italy.
The Church invented the monastery as a refuge to preserve something of the Christian life and culture that there had been under the later Roman Empire. Reading and writing continued in the monasteries: in them some of the old authors' books were saved, studied and copied. When the churches and monasteries were destroyed in one area, enough survived elsewhere for missionaries to return to a fresh start after the worst was past. In the simple cells of the Irish monks, Greek was still taught after it had been lost over much of Europe.
At this time the unconquered Eastern Roman Empire had a far higher standard of civilization than the West. But both were outshone by the greater civilizations of Asia, in India and China. About the A.D. 1200's, a lasting recovery of culture began. To what the Church had saved were added borrowings from the Arabs. Much of the lost knowledge of the Ancient Greeks was found again. On these foundations the richer life of the Middle Ages was built.
