u/Critical-Cost9068

I know that there’s almost certainly no exact statistics on this, but do we have any rough information on how many people would have used opium during the Qing Dynasty throughout the 1800s, before the Opium Wars, during, after, etc.? How many people would have tried it once and how many people were addicts? (This part is especially difficult, I know, because they recognized the dangers of overuse and dependence but didn’t quite classify “addicts” the way we did.) How acceptable would it have been for Chinese people to have or use opium occasionally if they were functional? And since raw opium import/consumption levels divided by the whole population is probably the most reliable or available statistic we have, how would that compare to phenomena like the modern opioid epidemic in the West? (That probably requires some mind-boggling math comparing the strengths of different forms of opiates, but are there any already published studies?)

So I know the modern consensus is that the “Dark Ages” as such is an imprecise and misleading term. I’m trying to ascertain the truth of some specific facts that I read or learned a long time ago, though:

In the time of transition from the Western Roman Empire to the medieval European kingdoms, there was likely a population decline (at least specifically in Western Europe;) if not, there was definitely a decline in urbanization, with many people leaving cities for rural areas to engage in subsistence farming. Correspondingly, there was a decline in overall literacy rates, as well as degradation in those professions that required multigenerational education and transfer of skills. There were still many talented artists and thinkers, but some techniques and concepts that took hundreds of years to develop, and that you just had to be “taught,” were lost because the chain of transmission was lost. Public works and buildings, aqueducts, roads, became rarer and more dilapidated. Architecture became smaller in scope. The educated elite stopped corresponding with each other as much, resulting in Latin branching into different languages, and even governors/high noblemen/kings could actually be illiterate, whereas that wouldn’t have been conceivable in Classical Greece and Rome.

Basically: how much of what I just said is outdated historiography, and how much still holds true? I know that technological progress continued, and that certain sciences in the so-called “Dark Ages” were more advanced than in previous times, but there still was SOME sort of gradual loss and then a gradual recovery of collective civilizational knowledge and stability, right?

I’ve long had the vague perception that the Crusades were a relatively rare example of an “ideological war” where the aggressors’ motivations didn’t make that much economic or geopolitical sense. I know that some noblemen got land and prestige for a while, and institutions like the Templars flourished, but looking at Western Europe as a whole, it seems like they wasted a whole lot of money and men for no gain in the long run, and that even if they had ultimately succeeded, the “Holy Land” wouldn’t have been that profitable or useful (or even sustainable from a military perspective.) This is in contrast to, say, the conquest of the Americas, which involved an ideological pretext of “converting the heathens,” but DID enrich the conquerors and was an investment that paid amazing dividends. Obviously, there were multiple crusades over a long span of time and they took drastically different forms (the Fourth Crusade largely targeting other Christians in the end), but overall, how correct is my understanding that the Crusades weren’t “realpolitik?”