The Middle Ages are a dark age, they say. And its initial centuries are even more so, those that run roughly from the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD) to the formation of the new empire of Charlemagne (800 AD). This is not a simple stereotype, as one would easily tend to think. The medieval obscurity derives rather from a heavy conditioning of the sources on which the reconstructions of historians must be based: the archives of Europe retain written documentation only starting from the eighth and ninth centuries.
With very few exceptions, the previous period is in shadow. It was easy, almost immediate, for scholars to interpret that lack of sources as the direct result of a serious crisis caused by the collapse of the Roman Empire. If that solid state system failed, the cultural attitudes and widespread literacy it had guaranteed would also disappear, leaving room for the elitist and solitary culture of clerics and monks. The interpretation is certainly legitimate, but it is not the only possible one. At least one more can be formulated based on the very few exceptions mentioned above.
The European archives in fact preserve tiny handfuls of documents prior to the eighth century, which differ in nothing from the later ones except for their material support: they are written on Egyptian papyrus paper. All the others are written on parchment, that is, on the skins of animals such as goats and sheep. It may seem a purely technical aspect, this of the writing materials, yet if you insert it into the historical discourse, the dark centuries of the early Middle Ages appear different from how we imagined them.
According to recent estimates, papyrus paper has an average shelf life of three hundred years, while parchment, on the other hand, exceeds a thousand years without difficulty. Therefore the first material tends to dissolve over time, the second does not. It is not difficult to believe, given that the papyrus documents themselves preserved in the archives are particularly fragmentary and require special care, while the scrolls are handled more comfortably than a weekly.
So is there a material problem underlying the Dark Ages? Research on the uses of papyrus and parchment in medieval Europe has suggested a positive answer. The fragments received and some indirect sources have in fact revealed that until the late seventh century all the cities of the continent imported papyrus paper from Egypt. Then when the ancient pharaonic land was conquered by the Arabs (641 AD), there was a slow but progressive contraction of trade flows which induced European notaries to make more conspicuous and rational use of their animal resources.
It was mainly the British Isles and the Franco-Germanic area, which in fact were the first to change material. But necessity soon turned into virtue: realizing that parchment defeated time, the old age as was said at the time, little by little, between the eighth and ninth centuries, even the most seafarers decided to switch to the new technology. Paradoxically, the last to be convinced were the popes of Rome around 1050 AD. Wanting to appear as the best heirs of the ancient Roman emperors, the highest representatives of Christianity continued to source their supplies from Egyptian factories, with no concern for the Islamic religion of those who now controlled them. Ironically, an economic crisis has provided solidity to the historical narrative.