When is an age “dark”? It was the great Renaissance scholar Petrarch who, in the 1330s, first used the term “Dark Age” to describe his own time, a epoch he saw in sharp contrast to the bright glories of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. Within a hundred years, historians such as Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo developed a three-tiered view of history: a long period of darkness bookended by the glories of classical antiquity and the hope of Renaissance.