Cesare Baronio, known more commonly as Caesar Baronius CO, was an Italian Oratorian, cardinal and historian of the Catholic Church. His best-known works are his Annales Ecclesiastici, which appeared i
Portret van kardinaal Baronius, onbekend, schilderij, Museum Plantin Moretus MPM V IV 111
The Dark Ages is a term, now deprecated by most historians, for the Early Middle Ages, or occasionally the entire Middle Ages, in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which chara
Caesar Baronius
…and keeps theology in the background. Lord Acton called it "the greatest history of the Church ever written". In the Annales, Baronio coined the term "Dark Age" in the Latin form saeculum obscurum, to refer to the period between the end of the Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first inklings of the Gregorian…
Petrarch (1304–1374), who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. 1450
Triumph of Christianity by Tommaso Laureti (1530–1602), ceiling painting in the Sala di Constantino, Vatican Palace. Images like this one celebrate the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of Antiquity.
Medieval artistic illustration of the spherical Earth in a 14th-century copy of L'Image du monde (c. 1246)