Late Antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the time of transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, in both mainland Europe and the Mediterranean world. Precise boundaries for the period are a matter of debate, but historian of the period Peter Brown proposed a period between the 2nd and 8th centuries. Generally, it can be thought of as from the end of the Roman Empire's Crisis of the Third Century (c. 235 – 284) to the re-organization of the Eastern Roman Empire under Heraclius and the Muslim conquests in the mid-7th century.
The Roman Empire underwent considerable social, cultural and organizational change starting with the reign of Diocletian, who began the custom of splitting the Empire into Eastern and Western halves ruled by multiple emperors. Beginning with Constantine the Great the Empire was Christianized, and a new capital founded at Constantinople. Migrations of Germanic tribes disrupted Roman rule from the late 4th century onwards, culminating in the eventual collapse of the Empire in the West in 476, replaced by the so-called barbarian kingdoms. The resultant cultural fusion of Greco-Roman, Germanic and Christian traditions formed the cultural foundations of Europe.
The general decline of population, technological knowledge and standards of living in Europe during this period, became the archetypal example of societal collapse for writers from the Renaissance until recent times. As a result of this decline, and the relative paucity of historical records from Europe in particular, the period between the fall of the Empire and the Middle Ages became known as the Dark Ages, a term displaced in most current periodisations by the introduction of "Late Antiquity".
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)