One more point that's really interesting from a world history perspective. This devolution from empire to localism has happened in lots of places at lots of different times. And in times of extreme political stress, like after the fall of the Han Dynasty in China, power tends to flow into the hands of local lords who can protect the peasants better than the state can. We hear a lot about this in Chinese history and also in contemporary Afghanistan, but instead of being called feudal lords, these landlords are called warlords. Eurocentrism striking again. The other reason the Dark Ages are called dark is because Europe was dominated by superstition and by boring religious debates about, like, how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. And while there's something to that, the Middle Ages also saw theologians like Thomas Aquinas, who was quite an important philosopher, and women like Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote all this important liturgical music and also basically invented the genre of the morality play.