Answer: All these terms refer to the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance (year 476 to 1400)
Step-by-step explanation:
The term Dark Ages was originally intended to refer to the entire period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; Middle Ages has a similar motivation, which implies an intermediate period between classical Antiquity and the Modern Age. With the fall of Rome and the advent of the barbarians there was a darkness and decay in culture and it was until the the Renaissance when art, music and sciences flourished again.
The modern academic study of the Middle Ages emerged in the nineteenth century and it often is called a Dark age because it expresses the idea that the events of the time often seem "dark" to us only because of scarcity of artistic and cultural production, including historical records, compared to earlier and later times.