I’ll leave the exact meaning of that phrase up to your personal interpretation, but I’d like to hear why you chose your answer.
I’ll leave the exact meaning of that phrase up to your personal interpretation, but I’d like to hear why you chose your answer.
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1349/1350: the Black Death kills somewhere around 40% of the population in Denmark.
In general 1347-1353 is probably a good candidate for most of Europe…
Anytime before 1879, when the lightbulb was invented. Some parts of the country were really dark before that, especially in the winter when the sun sets around 15.00
There are many contenders sadly.
The 1950’s communist regime.
World War 2, particularly between 1943-45.
The 150 years of Ottoman occupation and devastation between 1541 and 1686
The Mongol genocide of 1241-1242.
The obvious answer is the third Reich from 1933 to 1945 and that’s certainly true all things considered.
For the average German civilian, the thirty years war (1618 to 1648) was probably worse.
The period between 1936 and 1982 was the darkest, since murders were a daily occurrence and people had to hide their true identities in order to survive.
Many families were broken, their assets stolen and their children killed or kidnapped. A deep division in the society arose that is still going on on many subjects.
A poorly planned economical policy also left the country behind of its peers in Europe, a situation that still prevails in the highly inefficient job market.
Another vote for the Black Death in the 1300s. People at the time would have had good reason to think it was the end of the world because so many people died.
Irish famine. But it’s wasn’t a famine..we had food but it was all exported to England while the Irish were left to starve to death on the of the roads. It was a genocide not a famine.
The Great Wrath of 1713-1721.
Russia occupied most of Finland and Russians stole everything that four men and a horse could carry.
They raped everyone they could, burnt entire villages and stole huge amounts of people to slavery in Russia. They brought the Black Plague with them and that led to even more death and despair. Every city and church was burned, all the tools of building and agriculture were stolen. Torturing people for fun and profit was widespread. Torturing children in front of their parents and vice versa. Murdering entire villages just because they could, even the small babies, wherever their soldiers went.
In just a few years one quarter of the population died in worst regions. Of the whole country, one quarter of households were empty after they finally left.
That’s one of the many, many, times Finland has been ravaged by Russia for a millennium, and one of the plethora of reasons we do what we can to help Ukraine. We know what Russians do to those who cannot defend themselves.
Ironically, it would be the age that is often described as our golden age – Stormaktstiden, the Age of Great Power, during the 17th century.
This is the period we sing nostalgically about in our national anthem, the period when Sweden reached its territorial height and practically controlled the Baltic Sea. All that wealth from the Baltic trade (as well as all the plundered wealth) enriched the state, and in many aspects, Sweden became a modern state during this period. But it was a pretty miserable time for everyone except the elite in Stockholm.
There were regular wars where droves of young men were conscripted and never returned, and Sweden was an aggressor in most of these conflicts. Two of the most infamous ones were the Thirty Years War and the Second Northern War, where the German and Polish peoples suffered some of the most devastating periods in all of their histories.
The Little Ice Age was at its peak, which was good for warfare (we conquered eastern Denmark after a surprise march across an icy strait) but not so good for all the people who relied on their harvests. The people in the newly conquered Danish provinces suffered immensely as well, being forced to feed Swedish soldiers who were stationed in their homes. Many of the forest peasants organized in militias called snapphanar, and those who were caught were usually impaled, crucified on church doors, or broken at the wheel.
This was also a time when religious persecution was worse than ever, with our state church enforcing strict Lutheran laws and generally acting as a mouthpiece for the government. And of course, this was the 17th century, so witch hunts were rampant as well.
All things considered, not a great time to be alive.
Given my flair, I’ll give you one guess 🙂
Yeah, it was WW2, when a Quisling regime was in power.
Alternatively, I’d say the time of “Reliquiae Reliquiarum”, when much of the Kingdom of Croatia was occupied by the Ottomans.
In the Netherlands we have had quite a few dark hours.
Historians generally see 1672 as the “disaster year” for the young Dutch Republic being under attack by the Brits, the French and some German States from the East. Our country wasn’t that old by the time, was (for its size) extremely wealthy and powerful back then, and almost seized to exist that year.
More recently I think our army fighting the Indonesian independence movement, the German occupation, and our role in slavery would qualify as dark. What our history books and collective memory sometimes forget is that the Netherlands was a country that collaborated quite enthusiastically with the Germans. Collaborators outnumbered the estimated amount of people in the resistance. As a result, from all Western European countries, the Netherlands has the highest % of Jews killed during WWII. Having said that, the Netherlands is also an easy country to occupy, geographically then. No real nature, hardly any forest, no mountains, nowhere to hide.
I never understood why our history books focus on the resistance so much, ignoring the not so pretty role a lot of my countrymen played. As there is also wisdom in emphasizing how easy people can be convinced to collaborate in evil or (and that were even more people) do nothing against evil.
Netherlands: probably WWII, with the Holocaust and the Hunger Winter. But I also say that from the position of not properly knowing what life was like for the average peasant centuries earlier. For example the 2nd century AD was for the swamp dwellers in the north east a time of big hunger, looming war with the Romans and general uncertainty proven by bog bodies that were sacrificed to the gods. But because those early Germanic peoples didn’t write anything down, we simply do not know.
There are quite a few options.
– For an average Czech, the plagues from the mid-14th century to the first half of the 15th century, they devastated a huge portion of population. Add to it famines, later the hussite wars, not a good time to be alive. But it was not a good time anywhere in Europe, those plagues were particularly horrific.
– The thirty year war. (1618-1648) The war had a lot of causalities, the famine was absolutely devastating, at least a quarter of Czech population died, probably much more. A lot of Czech elites had to flee abroad, there was forced germanisation. Czech lands had been the first country ruled by protestants, in 1458 Czechs elected a protestant king, before protestantism even became a big thing in the rest of Europe. But the Czech defeat and Habsburg victory lead to forced recatholisation and it laid the foundation for today’s Czech atheism and dislike of organised religions. The period starting with 1620 is often called the dark age and although views of some periods of the following two centuries have been reevaluated, the thirty year war was a horrific time for Czech lands. It also lead to the loss of both Lusatias, which were lands of the Bohemian crown and eventually became part of Saxony. And Sweden sacked and plundered Prague and other places, stole a priceless collection, hundreds of books and paintings and sculptures. They’re proudly displaying the treasures stolen from Prague to this day.
– Post-Munich and WWII era – the sense of betrayal has shaped a lot of Czech attitudes. After Munich, Czechs from Sudetenland fled to the unoccupied regions, which ended up occupied as well in March 1939. Czechs suffered losses before WWII started, for example the painter Alfons Mucha died in summer of 1939 after several days of an interrogation by the Nazi. After the assassination of Heydrich by the resistance in 1942, Czechs had to listen every evening to the endless lists of names of executed Czechs, including famous people that were important for Czech culture. Lidice massacre etc. Czech Jewish and Romani populations were devastated during the war.
The Black Plague, Fascism, the years of lead, the mafia of the 90s attacks, Mani Pulite, etc
There are multiple periods for different reasons…
Obviously, the Black Plague is the same for all of Europe.
Fascism, there is no need to explain, is it?
Years of Lead, as wikipedia says: The Years of Lead (Italian: Anni di piombo) were a period of political violence and social upheaval in Italy that lasted from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, marked by a wave of both far-left and far-right incidents of political terrorism and violent clashes.
Mafia bombings, up to and including the deaths of magistrates Falcone and Borsellino.
Mani pulite, it was a wide corruption judicial case that destroyed our politicians and it was from those ashes that Berlusconi was able to get into politics.
And there are others.
Easily the Second World War. Brutal invasion by two genocidal totalitarian regimes with both having goal of destroying Poland as a nation and subjugating into mindless, obedient work force. Concentration camps, death camps, gulags, countless deportations by both Germans (‘purification’ of areas where mixed population lived) and Soviets. Planned destruction of the elite of the country like Sonderaktion Krakau or Katyń.
Years of hunger, poverty, alcoholism and complete devastation of moral backbone of the people. Ruthless pacification of resistance movement where whole villages were burnt to the ground along with it’s inhabitants while people in the cities were randomly rounded up and publicly executed as a reprisal. Thousands of people forced to work in Germany, often randomly caught in the streets.
Pillage and rape conducted by Red Army on their way to Berlin. Genocide of Poles by Ukrainian Nationalists in the Volhynia. Complete destruction of the capital, Warsaw, during failed uprising, along with extermination of significant part of its population. Post-war Soviet terror where thousands of people went through torture chambers of NKVD torture chambers. Ethnic conflict with Ukrainian Nationalists with resulted in mass deportations of Ukrainian an Lemkos, along with mass deportatons of Poles from territories occupied by Sovuet Union. Post-war poverty and general lawlessness. The list could go on and on.
Estimation put the death toll for Poland at around 6 milion, more than 20% of total population. There are villages that weren’t rebuilt to this day and are overgrown with the forest. Many small cities in which pre war population was 30-50% higher than today. Whole regions where Jews constituted significant part of city population which after war became and after their extermination became irrelevant, backwater countryside.
The only could be considered close is Swedish Deuge 1655–1660 which brought tremendous devastation and plunder of the country that crippled it’s development for dozens of years and led to its eventual downfall.
For Sweden it’s probably the imperial era 1611-1721. Sweden was in perpetual wars in which swathes of young men died, the worst being in 1700-1721 when Swedens empire fell and hundreds of thousands died both abroad and at home. Something like 44 000 Swedes invaded r Russia and marched all the way to Ukraine, very few made it home, that was the worst campaign.
The period between the Lisbon great earthquake (1755), Napoleonic invasions (1807-1811) and the civil war (1832-1834).
Mid 18th to mid 19th century was pretty much a horrible period. The terrible earthquake and tsunami killed thousands, destroyed the empire’s capital (and a lot of smaller towns to the south of the country), shaking the kingdoms morale, creating huge treasury issues and even creating profound religious and philosophical debates, then the Napoleonic invasions forced the royal family to flee to Brazil and leave the country occupied (by the French and the Brits), up in arms and plundered. All this lead to economic decline, loss of colonial control and the empire’s decline due to Brazil’s independence, and then to top things off, a very brutal civil war between absolutists and liberals.
For literally everybody else in the empire its around 1600- 1956, for the UK itself its probably either 1940, with the possibility of Operation Sealion and the Battle of Britain or like the Black Death or the Plague or something.
I would say it’s the period we like to call our “golden age”, specifically our involvement in the slave trade.
The Black Death (14th century), for the catastrophic population decline and collapse of society.
And also the English Civil War, where hundreds of thousands died, towns were ransacked and crops destroyed, and the country was also left with severe political divisions that broke communities.
Early 18th century, when Russians killed and enslaved 10% of Finland’s population (great wrath).
We were part of Sweden then, btw. Which makes the Swedes babbling about being great warrior vikings pretty damn cringy.
The religious wars, which were basically a gigantic civil war with a weakened royal state and aristocracy behaving like Three Kingdoms warlords. People were killing neighbours in their house for being either Protestants or Catholics, nobles waged wars between themselves taking or razing cities and the kingdom was on the edge of completely falling apart with religious strongholds trying to be autonomous
The Great Northern War (1700-1721). War between Russia and Sweden, we were part of the Swedish empire and after the war, Russian empire. The war together with plague and starvation killed more than 80% of Estonians in some counties and in total more than half of all Estonians died. There were stories that seeing a human footprint was so rare that if you did stumble on it, you would get on the ground and kiss it.
The XX century was pretty shitty for Spain in general until the 80s: an awful monarchy, including a military dictatorship, a Republic only democratic in name with a leftist coup in 1934 and political motivated assassinations every week that culminated in a civil war, and then another military dictatorship.
Apart from that, maybe the XIV century, with the Black Death, the Castilian Civil War, several conflicts between Castile, Aragon and Navarre, with the involvement of France, Portugal and England in the greater context of the Hundred Years War, more wars with the North African Marinid and their allies in Granada, etc.
German occupation during WW II with the Soviet driven communist totalitarianism during the 50s as a close second.
For Hungary, it’s the 1241-1242 mongol invasions and the 1526-1718 part of the Ottoman wars that rampaged on Hungarian territory.
Oh man. I am Polish and we were fed for much of history.
The first very bad time for Poland was the division between nobility when there was no central government and much fighting for power between Poles then Mongols came and after some time we were able to unite.
Next time was the 3 divisions, Constitution of May 3rd, Kościuszko insurrection. First our 3 powerful neighbors used liberum veto (one member of nobility can oppose something and it doesn’t become law) to weaken the country, then they attacked. We tried to resist after the first division (1772) but our king capitulated during the Polish-russo war in the defence of the Constitution of May 3rd. After that there was one final attempt (while Poland existed) to save Poland-Kościuszko insurrection. General Tadeusz Kościuszko started the insurrection but after a brutal fight we lost. Then for 123 years we were wiped from the map.
The next very bad time period was the time of occupation by the three former neighbors. There were two main uprisings against them. Both failed. We were russificated, germanigicated, there was Kulturkampf. Despite that we became a state back in 1918 after the defeat of II Reich.
The 21 years between WW1 and WW2 were kinda okay for us but we fought many countries for territory.
After that came 50 years of occupation and enslavement. First the nazis came and murdered 1/5 of our country (everyone knows that). Then the soviets came and enslaved us murdering our heroes (unbreakable soldiers, former members of resistance and army and other enemies of the red revolution). We were enslaved until NSZZ Solidarność didn’t start fighting for our independence. We used peaceful methods (general strikes, civil disobedience) and eventually won during the first democratic elections that took place on 4 of June 1989. After that we elected Wałęsa.
The 50 years of enslavement first by naizs then by communists was definitely the worst time of Polish history.
From a Scanian perspective definitely from the mid 17th to the early 18th century, right after we were conquered by Sweden from Denmark. When our old East Danish language, literature, culture, traditions and religion were banned by the Swedes in their effort to forcibly make us Swedish through a “Swedification” process – essentially cultural genocide. The Swedes also stole and pillaged and ravaged and murdered as they went. And anyone who rebelled against the Swedsh rule was of course tortured and killed by the Swedes along with all their relatives, and entire villages were burnt to the ground by the Swedish army and authorities. There were also a lot of wars during this time which devastated the land even more, as Denmark tried to free us from the Swedish rule, often with the help of local Scanian rebel groups – but ultimately without success.
The 17th century always came across to me as an especially grim time to live in. Lots of religious conflict between Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Catholics, including upheaval with the Bishop’s wars, large scale mercenary involvement in the 30 year’s war, War of the Three Kingdoms, Cromwellian Commonwealth, the Glorious Revolution, the ‘ill years’ of the 1690s with large scale famine and emigration, and the fallout of the Darien scheme.
Much of this could be said for the wider UK or much of Europe of course as well. Still a very important time in the development of traditional ‘big history’; such as in the development of the modern state, religion and politics.
The spring and summer of 1918: for a small nation of 3,5 million people we managed to brutally slaughter 40 000 of our own in a bloody civil war. In the years 1939-45 we lost 90 000 lives, and this happened by our own hand and in well under a year.
In Italy the fascist period (1922,1943). Fascism is the equivalent of cancer for societies , and unfortunately we have not yet a cure for it (see today). Fuck fascism now and forever
The 400 years of the Ottoman occupation.
WW 2 and the civil war that followed.
The 1967-1974 dictatorship
2008- now. The economic crisis not only ruined the Greek economy, but it also ravaged the country as a whole, possibly for good. Greece’s collapse is only comparable to Venezuela’s and Argentina’s.
The triple Axis occupation of Greece and the Civil War after 1944. You can understand why. The second event, partly, led to the coup d’etat of 1967, 58 years ago this day. If you want, include the immediate aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 and the National Disunity of 1917-1920.
In the Faroes 🇫🇴 it is generally considered to be the “Gabel Period” 1655-1709.
The (then Danish) King had given the islands to the Gabel family of Nobles as their property. The first thing they did was raise the prices in the Store. The King had placed a Monopoly on all trade in the islands in 1271 (abolished in 1856) and the Gabels used that for gross profits. Raising the prices of goods sold and lowering the price for goods bought to the extreme, this caused a country wide famine.
As the islanders were banned from owning ships this caused isolation and no means to ask the King for help. It took 12 years for 2 men to be able to barter passage on a Ship to Europe. When they finally made it to the Kings Court for an Audience the King was reluctant to believe them – Gabel was a personal friend of his after all.
After the King died and his son took over the situation on the islands could not be hidden from him any longer and in 1709 the Gabel family lost the islands and they were made a Danish County instead (not much more than a Colony basically) and placed under the oversight of Danish Governors. This form of governing continued until 1948.
The darkest time is the Habsburg-Ottoman wars. Truly apocaliptic stuff, Hungary became a battlefield for 150 years, most of the territory of modern-day Hungary became Ottoman territory, modern-day Slovakia and Western Hungary became Habsburg land and Transylvania, probably the luckiest of them all was still just a semi-independent Ottoman vassal. Whole regions were wiped out and had to be repopulated after the fights ended.
The most shameful is WW2, especially after the German occupation of 1944. Hungary yet again entered a war where it had very little to gain, hundreds of thousands of people died, Hungarian authorities took an active part in the deportation of Hungarian Jews and in the end Hungary not just failed to recover any territory it lost under WW1 but also ended up under foreign occupation for 45 years.
Honourable mentions are the complete collapse of the Hungarian state in 1918-19 (don’t get me wrong, the partition of the old Kingdom was inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing, the tragedy was that Hungary had no say in the final borders) and Rákosi’s hard-line Stalinist regime between 1948 and 1956.
The reflexive answer is WWII, but I would argue the Time of Troubles was worse, especially when viewed together with the final decades of Ivan the Terrible’s rule, “poruha”.
Ivan’s policies ruined Russia so much that half of the farmland lay fallow. Then the famine of 1601-1603 killed one third of whatever population was left. Then fifteen years of dynastic instability and wars with the PLC and Sweden followed. By 1618 the worst-hit regions had lost 75% of their population.
The Famine/An Gorta Mór (“The Great Hunger”), 1845-52. We still haven’t reached our pre Famine population.
As with the majority of countries in the world – our history of slavery. The fact it still exists in parts of the world attests to how ignorant humankind is. We are just animals.
Difficult to choose one.
The first decades of the 20th century in Spain were brutal. Since the First Republic, the Basque and Catalan nationalisms and secessionisms that had not yet assimilated their mistake that led years before to the Carlist wars (well, they have not yet assimilated and recognized it apparently 😅), along with left-wing political movements and anarchism inspired by the Soviet and Bolshevik revolution… all already assiduously opted for violence and terrorism, to which they also responded from right-wing forces. “Summary” murders and robberies every now and then, against politicians, workers perhaps not even conflictive but as long as they asked or expected minimal logical improvements, agitation groups trying to blame their opponents… there were decades and years of the so-called “gunmen”. Until everything exploded in the civil war in the ’30s… and after the same in ’39, the post-war, in which there was nothing, nothing but hunger and lack of everything, until in the ’50s more or less many activities and capacities were half recovered and stabilized.
That’s the closest thing, but many of us didn’t even know it even in passing, perhaps some of Generation X do remember something. I was very little as a child, certain fragments were still observed in the ʼ80s (I remember having seen what is today the CNP or National Police, when even in the ʼ80s they were the Armed Police, whose uniform and vehicles were brown, which is why they were known as “the cops”) and little else. The most we know is from grandparents, parents and what we learned from documentaries and historical documentation (and much of it with bias).
Let’s say it is what most people will name, and they are right… although as you will see, most of them expressly refer to 1936 and the dictatorship, when the previous years and decades were tremendous in turmoil.
But what about the well-known years of lead that marked much of the new democratic period with Basque nationalist terrorism? Little is mentioned, suspicious, and many of us have experienced that, until well into this century. Despite having taken more than 880 souls with bomb attacks or point-blank shooting.
Some still try to forgive them and buy their speech and rhetoric (what I said before, they continue without self-criticism and assume what they still carry from Carlism, which were and are the most rancid, conservative… and authoritarian).
But if I look at older times, just at the periods in which the bubonic plague hit hard, my hair stands on end.
🇬🇱1945-2000.
When America occupied Greenland during ww2, a lot of women where raped by American sailors and soldiers.
Denmark did a lot of stuff like forcing minor girls to take contraceptives(population control), in most cases they where not told what the doctors did to them and many found out only in adulthood that they had Intrauterine Device’s inside them since they where 13-15 years old. They also kidnapped random Greenlandic children and sent them to Denmark to make them “Danish”, just placed them with random families, then sent them back to Greenland just before reaching adulthood, many of them could no longer remember the Greenlandic language, my grandmother was one of those children. Alcoholism was out off control, massive problems with people committing suicide, no real opportunities for people to get out off poverty, hunters where giving hunting quotas which severely limited how much food they could hunt. That made quality of life much worse for the average Greenlander. Entire tribes like the Thule were forcefully moved to new places to live, partly because of the US military.
In 2009 Greenland finally got the right to have self governance.
We still have a lot of social problems on Greenland and Denmark has apologized for most of what they did. They have since made a lot of educational initiatives and tried to right a lot of the wrongs of the past century. So while we still have a lot of issues, it is nowhere close to how bad it was 1945-2000.
Edit: It is important to remember that Greenlanders before 1945 still lived mostly as hunter gatherers and in one generation when from migrating around the island for seasonal hunting, to being forced into poorly build apartments, alcohol and other substances where introduced. You can guess how that went.
Probably the Rampjaar, as it was the end of the Dutch Golden Age. But in all honesty: I don’t think there’s any really ‘dark’ periods in the history of the Netherlands.
Everything has been decently smooth sailing, and with the exception of some negative periods (like the Hongerwinter in ww2, a famine. Or alternatively the Watersnoodramp, a major flood), I don’t think there’s anything that has actively damaged our Dutch society, culture or economy to the same degree as you could state other nations.
World War 2, because we killed a lot of people just because they were of a different religion and nationality.
Hunger Winter (Dutch famine). People were eating tulip bulbs to survive! Rations were given out of about 500 calories a day in some areas
A toss up between the Vichy Regime, the Algerian War, the Jacobin Revolutioanry era or the Religion wars. Between the treachery and corruption of national values from Vichy, the hypocrisy and sheer brutality of the french army and state in the Algerian war or the sheer fratricide caused by the Jacobins and the Religion Wars, hard to pick.
Depends. Probably the Gothic war is a good choice. A long war on our land, famine, the plague. The fragmentation of our peninsula started with this war. Had it not happened, we probably would have been in a much better position throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. Obviously our culture would be very different as well.
The crushing of the United Irishmen’s’ Rebellion of 1798. The atrocities that were committed were so widespread and egregious they still haunt the genetic memory and led to two centuries of sectarian violence.
1920 to present day. Vesszen Trianon.
Hungarians were on enemy territory in all frontlines when Germans (our allies) surrendered.
The US president asked the president of Hungary to make ceasefire and disarm the army to prepare for peace negotiations. The Hungarian president accepted and followed through by sending the soldiers home. At this point, 5 or 6 different countries started a full-scale invasion on Hungary from all directions, even breaching their individual ceasefire/peace agreements.
Someone assassinated the president and there was a coup, then another coup. Volunteers resisted the invasion and state forces managed to conquer back some territory. After 2 years of constant war like this, the 4 main representatives of the enemy alliance forced Hungary to give up 70 percent of its territory, all its coastline and navy, all its goldmines, much of its railways, and they maximized the army size in 35 thousand and forbidden the use of modern weapons.
After this, irredentism became the main factor in Hungarian politics basically ever since, and millions died in the following decades because of this backstabbing and evil agreement. On the top of this, when Hungarians entered EU for free trading, and entered NATO, many Western leaders see it as a free pass for occupation, and they refuse to respect that Hungarians don’t trust them with their lives and sovereignity. They proved for 1000 years of history, but especially since 1920, that sustaining self-defence abilities is crucial when making trade deals and market transactions with Westerners. Because they simply don’t keep agreements.
The 1800’s, just huge wealth inequality. Absolutely no health and safety, we conquered 1/4 of the earth. Child labour etc.
There are many fucked up periods in history of Czechia where people suffered and died. But hey, let’s say 15th century events have very little influence on present. So WW2 and then 40 years of communism as a direct consequence of the war.