Reference: Series of Articles About Concept of Race in the Middle Ages

[The Crawling Chaos]

"The Middle Ages wasn't diverse."

"Forcing diversity in historical fiction is PC bull5#17."

I'm sure we've all heard those many times.

Well the website The Public Medievalist has been putting together an ongoing series of scholarly articles about Race, Racism and the Middle Ages that not only contains detailed and researched essays on these topics but also delves into their representation in fiction, notably Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.

I am sure these will prove useful to many a writer trying to develop their storyworld, should they want to stray away from the default (and historically inaccurate) representations of a racist, all-white or nearly all-white medieval world, supposedly based on the European culture of those times.

 

[Onyx]

Racism is always most fervent in places that have mixed societies. Homogeneous, medieval societies seem unlikely to have developed theories about unseen races that are as significant as their feelings about the French speakers across the river.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

Racism is always most fervent in places that have mixed societies. Homogeneous, medieval societies seem unlikely to have developed theories about unseen races that are as significant as their feelings about the French speakers across the river.

With all due respect, it is pretty easy to find voting statistics that debunk your claim that racism is most fervent in places that have mixed societies (in fact, the opposite is true), but maybe this isn't the place to discuss this. All I will say is that the idea that medieval societies were "homogenous" is precisely the kind of myth that the articles I linked to aim to deconstruct through a more careful examination of medieval texts and art.

 

[Onyx]

With all due respect, it is pretty easy to find voting statistics that debunk your claim that racism is most fervent in places that have mixed societies (in fact, the opposite is true), but maybe this isn't the place to discuss this. All I will say is that the idea that medieval societies were "homogenous" is precisely the kind of myth that the articles I linked to aim to deconstruct through a more careful examination of medieval texts and art.

I'm not sure how you could use voting statistics to pass judgment on the internalized feelings about what we now call "race" - especially among the kind of medieval societies that I thought we were discussing. It is difficult to have laws about a racial underclass when you don't have one. To persecute your Lapp, Jewish, Armenian, black or Korean residents, you have to have enough of them to matter. There was little difference between Japanese racism and nationalism.

My point was that an 11th century Swede probably had stronger negative feelings about neighboring Norwegians than they would about the "threat" posed by an Algerian trader who sailed into port. Violence in the middle ages came between competing groups in the same geographic area more than it came from the mixing of what we call "races" today through trade routes and that sort of thing.

I was just trying to add that perspective to the conversation.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Something to bear in mind when writing about Mediaeval and Ancient European cultures is that they were class driven. Skin colour was usually irrelevant by comparison to social status.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

My point was that an 11th century Swede probably had stronger negative feelings about neighboring Norwegians than they would about the "threat" posed by an Algerian trader who sailed into port. Violence in the middle ages came between competing groups in the same geographic area more than it came from the mixing of what we call "races" today through trade routes and that sort of thing.

I agree but I don't think we are using the same definition of racism. I am not only talking about the fear of seeing one's safety, possessions or land threatened by outsiders, which I wouldn't call xenophobia. That Swede would probably be justified in fearing her Norwegian neighbours more than an Algerian trader, but that doesn't mean that she wouldn't consider that Algerian trader to be inferior to herself and her White Norwegian neighbours, which is the type of racism I'm interested in, in this case.

What The Public Medievalist aims to challenge is first and foremost the notion that populations in the Middle Ages would have lived a sheltered and hermetically sealed existence, with no interactions with people of different faiths and/or colour, something that far right parties throughout the Western world often use to try and co-opt the Middle Ages as this "ideal" world where nations kept to themselves and never mingled with different cultures.

Something to bear in mind when writing about Mediaeval and Ancient European cultures is that they were class driven. Skin colour was usually irrelevant by comparison to social status.

Exactly but also (maybe more importantly?) what god(s) they worshipped.

 

[Joshua Jones]

Exactly but also (maybe more importantly?) what god(s) they worshipped.

Truth be told, that one is pretty complicated as well. While there was certainly a great deal of fear among the common people of christendom of the Muslims, and this fear was somewhat mutual, the intellectual elite of both sides freely interacted with one another, both borrowing off of one another and debating. There were quite a few advancements in science, theology, and philosophy as a result of this.

The crusades and invasions by the Muslims were also a good bit more complicated than most people consider. For the Christendom side, the crusades were almost entirely political, with religion being used primarily to motivate the populous, based on what the leaders knew they would respond to. It is much the same as Hitler using religious points to justify his actions when talking to religious people, and quoting Darwin when talking to more atheistic people. He cared about neither; he only wanted to use what appealed to others to convince them of his hatred. Likewise, kings who wanted to hold Palestine and Asia Minor for the purposes of trade revenue gave the Pope political power in exchange for stirring up the masses. Quite frankly, the scene isn't far removed from what happens in contemporary politics (at least in the States) between political figures and the clergy they seek endorsements from. For Islam, maintaining a Caliphate required ongoing conquest, which led to the initial invasions. After a bit, though, both sides were simply counterattacking each other. I don't know if racism as we would think of it was present, though, for either side. The central issue between both parties wasn't ethnic identity, or even ultimately beliefs, but mutual political threat.

Heretics were the other group of relevance here. As demonstrated above, the Church and the State had a symbiotic relationship Europe, where the Church helped motivate people toward political ends while the State deferred political power (and money) to them. Any threat to this system was considered dire to societal harmony and put down mercilessly. So, when people came around who openly questioned the standing Church, they were considered to be threats to the common people's view of the Church, and therefore, to the Church's ability to motivate the masses. So, the Church would identify them, and the State would execute them, most often by burning. So, "what god(s) they worshped" was partially relevant here, but it was how this worship related to the undermining of the Church's ability to motivate the masses which was the real problem.

So, yes, you are correct that religious beliefs were important and divisive at that time, but this was more political than religious.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

So, yes, you are correct that religious beliefs were important and divisive at that time, but this was more political than religious.

What I meant to say was not that they were necessarily divisive, but that they were paramount in defining the relationships between people from two different cultures, and whether or not one might be deemed to have superior moral worth over another.

In fact, one of the articles on TPM focuses on the description of foreigners found in medieval journals from travellers who had met and interacted with Eastern civilisations (including, of course, one Marco Polo):

(...) non-Christian people are not always described in negative terms. The yogis of India are praised for their simple way of life. The astronomers of China are lauded for their great wisdom. The khans are often portrayed as very generous and just. The technological and social advancement of Chinese society was a marvel for travellers. Additionally, many of the peoples of the world are merely identified, and not judged. In all cases though, the reader is keenly aware of the faith of these people, whether they were good, bad, or simply there. This shows what writers thought was important information for their audience: a people’s religious and cultural practices were much more important than their physical characteristics.

(...)

Given the disinterest in the physical manifestations of difference in these examples of medieval travel writing, it would be tempting to say that racism wasn’t a feature of medieval Europe. But this is only possible if you use a very narrow, very modern understanding of what ‘race’ is. Travel writers divided up the world and stereotyped just as much as anyone else. But their social priorities do not seem to map particularly closely to our own. To the medieval traveller, the divide between faiths seemed to eclipse, almost entirely, the physical differences between them and other people. Faith was, by far, the most important factor in describing the world and ascribing meaning to actions.

 

[Phyrebrat]

I found this interesting from my research:

An African Abbot in Anglo-Saxon England - Medieval manuscripts blog

pH

 

[sknox]

These conversation tend to specialize in circles, but I'll say this much. Please remember that when speaking of the Middle Ages you're talking about an entire continent, a period of time that spans a thousand years, and a mindset profoundly different from the modern. Also, cite your sources. I gave up on the Public Medievalist site when I saw there were no citations. Opinions are fine, but unsupported arguments do not constitute historical reasoning.

 

[Onyx]

This is a little bit of a difficult topic to discuss because the genesis of the discussion is the (possibly racist) idea that diversity in historical fiction is politically motivated revisionism rather than an openness to the complex movements of people at all points in history. And it gets sticky because diversity or homogeneity in fiction can reflect realism, politics or both in its inception and acceptance.

People have always been on the move, and trading has happened between a large number of cultures. So there are plenty of opportunities for even the most unlikely mixing of people. This is looking at what is possible.


At the same time, the majority of human beings since the creation of agriculture have likely spent their whole lives within a few miles of their birthplace. There are citizens of China, today, who have never seen a non-Chinese citizen. So it isn't so wild to think that your average peasant/farmer has not only never met a Turk, they might have never heard of such a person or conceived of them looking any different from them.


History is written by people that travel and trade. These people for much of history were a very small percentage, and it is easy to assume that the experiences of the people that wrote their lives down are somehow typical, rather than extraordinary.



The website in the OP seems to be presenting a politically motivated perspective on race and people with the goal of opposing the equally politically motivated criticism of historical diversity. Because of that, the way the article is written, what is meant by "race" and how we read it is subjective.