There were people of color in medieval Europe!

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Often, when a fantasy story or a story set in Medieval Europe has an all-white cast and the writers are called out for this, they will come back saying that including people of color would be "historically inaccurate". Well, the author of this Tumblr has collected many artworks from Europe, including those from the Middle Ages, depicting people of color:

http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/

Here's an article about it:

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/24/this-b ... -euro.html

Here are peasants in the Netherlands depicted in a 1658 painting:



So having all-white casts in such stories would actually be historically inaccurate.

Of course there were. Because of the fact that many black people in Europe during that time came from Islamic regions, it was assumed outright that they were also very learned people who had been schooled in places like Baghdad or Timbuktu, which during medieval times were centers of learning in the Islamica areas every bit as prestigious as Boston, Oxford, or Cambridge.

You didn't incorporate them, into the story, for historical effect.

I have some Asian and African things, so am presumably not a xenophobe. When I want to read about their history, or a fictional account based on that, I do. The sky doesn't fall.

I don't demand representation.

Might I suggest Hyun Jin Kim's The Huns, Rome, and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013)? It's about the contributions the Huns, an Inner Asian multiethnic people which included and was ruled by people from around what is today Mongolia who conquered much of central and eastern Europe in the Late Antiquity, made to the development of medieval European society, culture, and politics.

There's also this excellent author:

Africans in medieval Ireland and Britain:

http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/09/a-g ... tives.html

People of East Asian descent in Roman London:

http://www.caitlingreen.org/2016/09/eas ... ondon.html

And last, but not least, adding to Hyun Jin Kim's work on the Huns, speculation on Hunnic presence and overlordship over Anglo-Saxon England:

http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/07/wer ... gland.html

I hope this helps.

Depending on your political bent, you can also find books, which say that Europids founded high cultures, among the different ethnicities.

Reading Kim's book, it looks like it was a combination of ignorance, mainly from researchers not finding the study of Inner Asia to be worth a darn, and racial theory prevented us from noting, for example, the clear contributions from Inner Asia on medieval European artwork, which included polychrome art and setting gold artifacts with jewels, and other aspects of society, culture, and politics, like the eating of meat being reserved for people on the top. There's some evidence our word "beer" (the alcoholic drink) may come from Hunnish and thus likely ultimately from Old Turkic.

One of the most blatant examples Kim quoted in a footnote was a major book on Germanic history published in the mid-20th century (can't remember the author) which explained away the atrocities committed by the Goths before the arrival of the Huns, where Kim noted the same could be said for the Huns.

Also, your use of the word "Europid" and mention of "high cultures" being founded only by white people tell me a lot about you.

I already acknowledged that it was something political, to say.

Be specific, use examples, what movies are you talking about as being called out?

it has never been the case that any conscious and reasonable person could see a black person as purely at the status of an ape.
it has always been the case that black people have had the ability to converse with white people and all reasonable white people consider as equal to their own considerations, what black people say.

so in early england, and everywhere else as well, there was a large variety of humans who came for what ever reason.

but some people were psychopaths and saw black people as just "talking apes", and if they ever spoke to a very smart black person, maybe they may have changed their minds, but they remained in an ensconced cocoon of ignorance and considered them to be akin to animals. they were the ones who took slaves.

whatever i have lost interest

The only possible response to this topic is....so what?


Are you going some place with this?

Small numbers of individuals from each continent ended up on other continents in pre modern times. Nothing either newsworthy, nor significant about that.

Saw a TV doc in which they interviewed a Black woman in Tanzania who has Chinese blood because she is descended from maritime explorers sent across the Indian Ocean from China by the Ming Emperor in the 1400's.

Thats more mind blowing to me than the OP.

China had its own "age of discovery" (most of the 1400's) sending fleets out to explore, and they got as far as east Africa, before they quite arbitrarily and abruptly stopped (like we stopped our manned space program after Apollo). Their Age of Discovery stopped at about the same time (late 1400's) as Europe began to timidly start its Age of Discovery- when Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal began to send voyagers the other way: south and east from Europe to find a way around Africa to get to Asia.


Is this about trying to justify Hollywood casting Morgan Freeman to play one of Kevin Costner's "merry men" in the movie "Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves"? Casting that even American Black stand up comics made fun of for being excessively politically correct? Lol!



.

Have you not heard of the term 'Sample bias' perchance? There are black people in those pictures beacuse they are the focus of those drawings.

It wouldn't be indicative of population proportions, nor would it be indicative of average- which the TV people were implying. The country would still be majority white, probably to a proportion in excess of 90%. Not seeing a black person in Europe is still within living memory for some people, today.

That having been said, having the odd ethnic character, a group or as pointed out above a religious sect isn't entirely historical inaccurate. It's just not average.

The bias in films and TV, on the other hand, does tend to lie with filming locations. Film companies struggle to gather Chinese people for backround roles to have European forests double for China. Why go to the extra effort in a majority white country to hire an ethnic person whose presence may detract from the main cast, story and general suspension of disbelief? Nevermind why bother with the double edged knife of some political correct amateur academic would only make comments about they aren't being used effectively or not representing ,ironically, what ethnic people are now?

Because of the cosmopolitan nature of the Roman Empire, we know that people of color had been able to migrate to far off places in Europe, and so some Medieval Europeans might have still resembled their Roman era ancestors.

People in Europe, Middle East & North Africa have been mingling for thousands of years.

One of my favourite stories of that is the viking graffiti in the church in Istanbul from the 9th century.

'NN carved these runes'. It's a bit like a modern day John woz 'ere kind of graffiti.

Did he help found the church, or was he the odd-man-out.

So, we're mentioning taggers. We know that some writing has been left. Should it be honorable mention.

Vikings were used as hired muscle back then. Their reputation spread across Europe and the Middle East and as such they became well paid bouncers

The 2016 article "Hawks, Horses, and Huns" by John D. Niles, which is about the impact the Huns had on Anglo-Saxon culture, can be found here:

http://www.academia.edu/26820839/_Hawks ... 016_133-64