How homogenous was Europe in middle ages ?

[sarevok2]

You have well known tumblr blogs like medievalpoc which claim Europe always had a substantial non white population. Recently there has been some controversy about videgames such as Kingdom Come or Witcher because they don't feature non white characters.

On other hand the genetic information seem to show very little subsaharan influence in Europe. Less than
3℅ generally in areas where it peaks like Spain and southern Italy.

Historically in middle ages how common would it be to see a non white person in Europe ? If you had a TV show or videogame set in those periods would a white only cast be justified ?

[LaCroix]

Main problem: "Middle ages" are about 600 years, give or take, which aren't uniform, either.

Quick answer:
Since most people never ventured further than the next town, before hurrying back to their own town, it is pretty much zero for 'most' people.

In a city, there would be a few jews, maybe. If you consider them "non-white". They would live secluded, though.

A black, 'truly' middle-eastern(arab/persian) or asian? If you are living in the king's city, and he was important enough to have international diplomatic contact? You might be able to see a diplomat on his way into the castle, occasionally.

If you live in southern Spain or south-eastern Europe during certain eras of the middle ages? Then look no further than your current ruler, his nobles and army, or the currently invading turk army...

[Lord Revan]

First of it depends on where in Europe were talking about as Europe is a rather big place and in no ways culturally unified. In the Merchant cities of Italy or spain it would be probable that you would encounter "non-white" people, but places like Åbo (capital of the swedish province that consisted a large portion of modern day Finland) you could live your life without ever seeing a "non-white" person.

so the question "is a non-white cast justified" depends on the question of "when and where".

[Titan Uranus]

Ethnicity was also much more blurred if you include the western steppe, back before the Russians took over, you would get people with asiatic features and red hair/green eyes clear across the entire steppe, and any other combination of east Asian/northern Mideast/central Asian/European features you can dream of.

But there is no time/place in Europe in the middle ages where actual blacks were common, if that is what you are asking.
Mediterranean folks would be common, of course, you might find Arab diplomats, or traders in important trading cities, especially the farther south you get.

Conquered areas would of course be more likely to have Arabs and other attendant middle eastern ethnicities.

Also, how the hell did it get to be ok for left wingers to tar everyone who's not white with the same brush, especially with a phrase which just means colored people, just annoys me is all.

[Lord Revan]

Also, how the hell did it get to be ok for left wingers to tar everyone who's not white with the same brush, especially with a phrase which just means colored people, just annoys me is all.

I have no bloody idea what this sentence is suppose to mean. Are you implying that we think all non-white races are the same? Since that's not true, hell I would argue that even "white" is way too broad and all too often is considered same as "anglo-saxon".

[Titan Uranus]

No, I meant the term "Person of Color" and the blog mentioned in the OP. It's not an indictment of you or anyone else in this thread, just the blog in the OP.

[sarevok2]

Yep. PoC is actually a racist term, when you take into consideration it is derived from "coloreds". PoC implies white is the natural state of humans and everyone else is defective or lesser.

[Zixinus]

A minor point: differences between various peoples would be intensified and people at the time would call one region more ethnically more diverse than we'd do today.
To us cosmopolitan Internet-users it would look like that there would be barely any substantial difference (ie, most are what we would call "white") but there would be tons of tribe and clan rivalries going on. Atop of that, ethnicity in the medieval ages were both more diverse and sharper. You can have a white population that spoke different languages (and within that even more different variates and accents), wore different clothes, organized themselves differently, have on average different economic roles and would not have freely associated themselves with another. They could even recognize marked physical differences between them, such as hair color (was a bigger deal), facial features, height, etc. They'd also recognize them by things like mannerisms.

Until nationalization all steamrolled them into one nationality, you could have large to small differences in ethnicity in a given region that today we'd say are all from the same race and under the same kingdom. This is where "race is a social construct" thing rolls in.

There are situations where someone of non-white ethnicity would appear in an medieval European setting but that would be rare. Being from a far-away land was much more of a big deal back then. You might see such non-whites (especially someone we'd call black or Asian) as traders, diplomats maybe occasionally mercenaries or sailors in places they'd have business. Essentially people that had the means and reasons to travel to what they considered the edge of the world.
This does not account regional variations. It is possible that one ethnicity settled on the other end of Europe, sometimes by assistance (sometimes the only way you could get new skills and expertise back then was to take the whole ethnicity with it). During war ethnicities also tend to come around. You are likely to see variation in Europe from Scandinavian blonds to Mediterranean dark-skinned and hair.

[Elheru Aran]

Quick example: A place with a large trade-based economy could be reasonably expected to have several "non-white" merchants, slaves/indentured labourers, and so forth passing through. For example, Venice. A little village in the arse-end of Yorkshire, on the other hand, this would be about as common as a three-headed sheep and regarded about the same.

Race in the Middle Ages and really pretty much up to the 16 or 1700's is largely a matter of regional identity, not actual genetics or appearance. St. Maurice was a popular saint in the Middle Ages, being in particular a patron saint of soldiers and knights, and he was commonly portrayed as dark-skinned or Negroid due to being of supposed African descent, but nobody cared about *that* other than bothering to make the distinction.

That said, obviously you're not going to have a whole lot of what we consider "non-white" people until fairly recent times, corresponding more or less with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the age of exploration. But again, it depends on where you are.

[madd0ct0r]

there's also odd events spreading people around - like the shipwrecked remains of the Spanish Armada on the north Irish coast giving rise to the 'black irish'

[Titan Uranus]

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that the "Black Irish" are actually a myth.

I cannot see a statistically significant population resulting from the Spanish Armada given the losses from the battles with the English, the privations of the voyage, and I suspect that the English would have done their level best to kill every Spaniard that they found in Ireland.

I suspect you would find many more foreigners among the upper nobility, especially later in the era, due to marital alliances, though all of the examples I can think of involve kingdoms, empires, and archduchies.

If you involve a crusade, especially the southern ones, you would find a lot more darker-skinned nationalities, particularly the Italians, and of course the middle easterners/Mediterranean folks the crusade was targeting.

But the game that started this whole controversy was a game set in Bohemia during the Hussite wars, or perhaps slightly before them. While it is possible that Prague would have more than a few Mediterranean merchants, and I suspect that there would be Roma scattered about, it would be extremely unlikely for any sub-saharan Africans, Asians, or anyone else we would today recognize as non-white.

There might be some steppe nomads, as I know that they traded with settled societies, but with Poland, Lithuania, and the free Russian states in the way, I see no reason why they would go as far as Bohemia.

[Thanas]

Moved to History.

[Thanas]

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that the "Black Irish" are actually a myth.

I cannot see a statistically significant population resulting from the Spanish Armada given the losses from the battles with the English, the privations of the voyage, and I suspect that the English would have done their level best to kill every Spaniard that they found in Ireland.

Yeah, any Irish with darker hair/skintone are more likely to result from the ancient Roman/Ibero/Carthaginean influence that existed due to the vast trade routes with Ireland back then.

[Broomstick]

Yep. PoC is actually a racist term, when you take into consideration it is derived from "coloreds". PoC implies white is the natural state of humans and everyone else is defective or lesser.

The irony behind that is that in the US it was the PoC who made the term popular in this country.

As to the OP - at least in the larger urban centers there would have been some awareness of very different looking people being in the world - Othello, after all, was regarded as a popular play and to get the point of the plot you had to be aware that some people looked very different from the usual European. But, as pointed out, that would be major trading hubs, not villages in the ass-end of nowhere. City dwellers might not have seen such a foreigner but knew they existed. People in the middle of nowhere might not be aware that there were people in the world who looked significantly different from themselves, although by the end of the period that was probably getting rarer.

[Elheru Aran]

Consider also boundary regions. Othello takes place in Venice-- but he is a Moor, from Spain, which borders Northern Africa. People in Eastern Europe frequently clashed with Turks (and sometimes Tatars), and the Ottomans made periodic forays into Europe as far as Malta (near Italy) and Vienna (Austria). Hell, if you want to go further back into history, the Mongols invaded as far as Hungary in the 1200's and settled nearby as the Golden Horde, dominating much of central Asia and parts of eastern Europe for a pretty good while.

[madd0ct0r]

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that the "Black Irish" are actually a myth.

I cannot see a statistically significant population resulting from the Spanish Armada given the losses from the battles with the English, the privations of the voyage, and I suspect that the English would have done their level best to kill every Spaniard that they found in Ireland.

Yeah, any Irish with darker hair/skintone are more likely to result from the ancient Roman/Ibero/Carthaginean influence that existed due to the vast trade routes with Ireland back then.

Probably. We've been traced back a thousand years or so to italy, although one family theory is we're jewish somewhere.

[Broomstick]

Man, if I had a shekel for everyone I've heard claim a Jewish branch in the family tree....

[madd0ct0r]

yeah, I know. Some obscure religious group from north italy, possibly. going back another migration is the challenge for my retirement.

[sarevok2]

Consider also boundary regions. Othello takes place in Venice-- but he is a Moor, from Spain, which borders Northern Africa. People in Eastern Europe frequently clashed with Turks (and sometimes Tatars), and the Ottomans made periodic forays into Europe as far as Malta (near Italy) and Vienna (Austria). Hell, if you want to go further back into history, the Mongols invaded as far as Hungary in the 1200's and settled nearby as the Golden Horde, dominating much of central Asia and parts of eastern Europe for a pretty good while.

Do we know what Othello really looked like ? Most Moroccans I seen look like Spaniards. IIRC Moors were a mixed group of muslims of many ethnic origins. So would being a Moor necessarily imply being non white ?

[Elfdart]

Consider also boundary regions. Othello takes place in Venice-- but he is a Moor, from Spain, which borders Northern Africa. People in Eastern Europe frequently clashed with Turks (and sometimes Tatars), and the Ottomans made periodic forays into Europe as far as Malta (near Italy) and Vienna (Austria). Hell, if you want to go further back into history, the Mongols invaded as far as Hungary in the 1200's and settled nearby as the Golden Horde, dominating much of central Asia and parts of eastern Europe for a pretty good while.

Michael Wood had an interesting documentary about Othello and pointed out that in Shakespeare's time there was a substantial black population in London. I know that's a century after the late Middle Ages but I would assume black people had moved to London some time before.

[Broomstick]

I'm not sure "moved" is the proper term in that context. More likely, for at least some of them it was "kidnapped, clapped in chains, and sold to the highest bidder".

[Elheru Aran]

I'm not sure "moved" is the proper term in that context. More likely, for at least some of them it was "kidnapped, clapped in chains, and sold to the highest bidder".

That was the majority of blacks. Some of them were seamen picked up overseas; others were immigrants. London has had Indian restaurants since the early 1800's. It's a bit surprising how many non-whites immigrated there, actually...

[Sea Skimmer]

Michael Wood had an interesting documentary about Othello and pointed out that in Shakespeare's time there was a substantial black population in London. I know that's a century after the late Middle Ages but I would assume black people had moved to London some time before.

I think that was the later part of Shakespare's life. The British East India Company was founded in 1600 and rapidly brought a large number of slaves and freed blacks as crews back to London. It utterly boomed and helped make the British rich enough to win the Anglo Dutch Wars, fought over access to southern-eastern trade outright, and eventually turning into full British control of the Africa slave trade, aside from Portugal whom became a British proxy. Before the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 the English had pretty limited trade with Africa and the Far East, they got much more aggressive afterwards. The Spanish and Dutch might have had major black populations earlier, no idea on that one but not much if any trade was going past Morocco before ~1480.

People complaining about the Witcher games is pretty ironic though, since the actual books made the idea of racism a major part of the world, including the bloody main character getting involved in race riot at the end to he saga, and a fair part of that made it into the second game dialog. I have no idea on the others. But 15th century Poland just didn't anyone but white people of any real note, and that's what the universe is based on. The Eastern European states had rampant slavery, but they just didn't have the commercial links required to diversify the population.

[Thanas]

Michael Wood had an interesting documentary about Othello and pointed out that in Shakespeare's time there was a substantial black population in London. I know that's a century after the late Middle Ages but I would assume black people had moved to London some time before.

I think that was the later part of Shakespare's life. The British East India Company was founded in 1600 and rapidly brought a large number of slaves and freed blacks as crews back to London. It utterly boomed and helped make the British rich enough to win the Anglo Dutch Wars, fought over access to southern-eastern trade outright, and eventually turning into full British control of the Africa slave trade, aside from Portugal whom became a British proxy. Before the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 the English had pretty limited trade with Africa and the Far East, they got much more aggressive afterwards. The Spanish and Dutch might have had major black populations earlier, no idea on that one but not much if any trade was going past Morocco before ~1480.

Spain has always been a melting pot since the days when Carthage conquered it. The Moors brought black people with them when they conquered it and the trans-saharan slave trade was happening since Carthage. So there were always black people trickling in long before the reconquista and this was just hastened by the Spanish conquests in Northern Africa - though Marocco did block this trade to some extent.

So you got a long history of relatively low-volume trading already until it explodes with the rise of the New World.

[chitoryu12]

Michael Wood had an interesting documentary about Othello and pointed out that in Shakespeare's time there was a substantial black population in London. I know that's a century after the late Middle Ages but I would assume black people had moved to London some time before.

I think that was the later part of Shakespare's life. The British East India Company was founded in 1600 and rapidly brought a large number of slaves and freed blacks as crews back to London. It utterly boomed and helped make the British rich enough to win the Anglo Dutch Wars, fought over access to southern-eastern trade outright, and eventually turning into full British control of the Africa slave trade, aside from Portugal whom became a British proxy. Before the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 the English had pretty limited trade with Africa and the Far East, they got much more aggressive afterwards. The Spanish and Dutch might have had major black populations earlier, no idea on that one but not much if any trade was going past Morocco before ~1480.

People complaining about the Witcher games is pretty ironic though, since the actual books made the idea of racism a major part of the world, including the bloody main character getting involved in race riot at the end to he saga, and a fair part of that made it into the second game dialog. I have no idea on the others. But 15th century Poland just didn't anyone but white people of any real note, and that's what the universe is based on. The Eastern European states had rampant slavery, but they just didn't have the commercial links required to diversify the population.

It seems like a good deal of the complaints of modern racial makeup in media comes from a very American-centric view of racism. Race relations in the United States have been "White people oppressing non-white people" for much of the country's history and into the modern day, so naturally Americans who are aware of that start to demand greater non-white representation in media. The result is that they fail to understand that much of the world and history isn't modern America, but attempt to apply its racial demographics to understanding it. Hence demanding that historical properties taking place in an area that should have been bone white incorporate a multi-ethnic cast.

Speaking of which, has there ever been a consensus on just how "black" Ancient Egyptians were? I see claims that they were similar to modern Egyptians and claims that they were very dark-skinned and displaced by immigration/conquest.

And Hollywood movies that keep casting white people from the UK.