http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/11/the- ... more-14949
One part:
.The Dark Ages have a bad reputation.
But, in many ways, the feudal system, with one universal Church and many local kings and barons maintaining the folk law, tied to subjects and vassals by personal oaths of loyalty, with neither the slave markets of the ancient world, the theocratic sultanates, ancestor worship, or caste systems of the Near and Far East, nor with the plutocracies, state-syndicates, and socialisms of modern Europe, achieved something unheard-of in the ancient world and forgotten in the modern:
It achieved maturity. It achieved something never achieved before or since: a form of civilization fitted to the human condition, high and low, male and female, spiritual and temporal. It achieved the modern world without the more notorious evils and drawbacks of the modern world.
It took the wreckage of the Roman Empire, while being attacked from the Norse and the Paynims, and managed to throw the Mohammedans out of Spain. Meanwhile, in the East, the Byzantines has a centralized empire more similar to our modern bureaucracy-state, and collapsed before the approach of Islam.
Monarchy is not a perfect system, but it is better than the Imperial form of government where anyone, from the son of the previous emperor to a famous general to a camel driver can be elevated to the purple as the Praetorian Guard elects, and no one else gets a vote.
Meanwhile, from 500 AD to 1500 AD under precisely the type of government at which you sneer, the West abolished slavery, invented science, erected the Common Law (which is the single greatest juridical accomplishment of Man) created perspective in drawing, the Gothic arch and flying buttress in architecture, the horse collar and stirrup, the romance story in art, individualism in psychology, the Magna Charter, the dinner fork, the Julian calendar, the monastic order, parliamentary government, separation of secular and spiritual government, the University system, the code of chivalry, the notion of limited warfare, Christmas carols, the windmill, modern astronomy, the clock, eyeglasses, the bound book, the Copernican model, and the idea that marriages had to be voluntary for both partners. This was while civilization was wrecked and under remorseless attack by more powerful forces from north, south, and east.
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