The term employs traditional light - versus - darkness imagery to contrast the era 's "darkness '' (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light '' (abundance of records). The concept of a "Dark Age '' originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark '' compared to the light of classical antiquity. The phrase "Dark Age '' itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; this became especially popular during the 18th - century Age of Enlightenment.
when was the term dark ages first used
1602