so, what was it like to live in the year 1020?

in western europe, you had a dominant christian church that hoarded knowledge for itself and outlawed reading by the death penalty (unless you were in a few specific classes of people, like monks), which was opposed by periodic uprisings of indigenous pagan groups that saw christianity as a kind of absurd death cult. this history was largely suppressed, and hard to put together. most people lived in feudal relationships, and lived miserable lives. life wasn't too bad, or too backwards, for the rich, though - who had access to most of the same classical texts that existed in the greek world, and sometimes perhaps later than they did there, as they were destroyed there.

in eastern europe, you had byzantine hegemony, and the dying remnants of the last classical culture of european antiquity. they were so much more advanced than their neighbours on all sides, and than pretty much everybody except the chinese, that it's hard to contemplate. imagine the british building a city like canberra in australia; it was that disproportionate. so, they tried very hard to protect their scientific superiority by keeping it a secret. they would even encrypt their writings, that's how paranoid they were. the byzantines held on to something like a classical society, which is a primitive version of our own, but it was fraying and there was both slavery and feudalism. had the byzantines fallen sooner, it's an open question as to whether there would have been a renaissance at all.

and, in the former roman & persian regions of africa and asia you had this muslim empire that was hell bent on destroying any literature that contradicted their religion, while aggressively pushing their language as the status quo. they saw their religion and their culture as inherently superior, and thought they had manifest destiny to take over the world. in the end, we would all speak arabic, and all be muslims. while the society was in many ways still fundamentally classical, they also invented the african slave trade, and it was african slaves that performed that vast majority of the labour in the empire. this allowed for what we would today call a "middle class". we give them credit for saving certain texts, but don't understand the context, and so don't criticize them for all the books they destroyed.

which is better? i don't see a total ordering.

but, i'd rather live in 2020 than 1020.