[Unknown_Enemy]

Nice topic. Here are my 2 cents.
(dark Age timeset : 300 - 1500 for this post)



At the beginning of the Dark Age, the WHOLE of Europe was invaded by barbarians. Some of these, the Francs, conquered the roman province of Gaulle and settled down. Most of the barbarian rulers were completely illiterates. Do you remember Charles Martel (Charlemagne) ? Well he was not able to write his name, but he was the very first powerful King to adopt Christianism.

It would be a dream to think knowledge was transmitted in the population. Serfs were not much more than slaves, they did not have the leisure to learn read/write. Knowledge was only transmitted between priests and monks who all learned latin. Until Charlemagne, almost all the ruling nobles were illiterate.

So, until Charlemagne, there is no question that knowledge salvaged from the roman Empire had been saved by the Churche.
Sometime, you even had improvement, but it was very slow. For example, until 1095, everybody in Europe (spain excepted, but it was Arab...)used to count with roman numbers (I, II, III, IV etc..). Only a handful of monks in europe were able to do a complexe multiplication or division. And if you do not believe it, just try to compute 52384.124 * 9145687.1235 using roman numbers.
Good luck.
Then went the first crusade. Then went a bunch of monks who came back from the holy land bringing knowledge of arabs numbers. In less than a century, every single idiot in europe became able to work out the basic operations using arab numbers.

That was for the church.
Speaking of it, which church are we speaking of ? High level church ? Or lowly monks in their covent ?
High ranking in the christian church were often coming from noble families. I would suggest everyone to try reading historical report on reign of Hugue Capet (a few years before 1000), and you'll see noble warriors continuously betraying each other, with the help of some of their family members in the ranks of the church. At that time, it was not unknown to have an eveque or such murdered by an enemy noble.

Most of the high church was about politics and power. But for this topics, what is interesting is the low level monks and priest, who has been the true gardians of both the faith and knowledge.

So Fyron, I have to disagree with you, the Church was tremendous in gaining and keeping track of human knowledge during the dark age. Simply put it, the time was not right for big advances despite the Church.