The Middle Ages and Whiteness

There is a low-level but increasing tendency to see Europe's Middle Ages as a golden age of Whiteness.  As a medievalist, I must strongly disagree.

Of course I love my guys who lived in the Middle Ages.  But that doesn't mean that I admire them, want to be like them, or think they should be anyone's model.  (As the preachers say, "Love the sinner but not the sin.")  As I've said before, they were ruthless, violent, and intolerant of religious diversity—and those were the good guys!

But there's another side to it, that should be understood by those who like ruthless intolerance.  In spite of everything negative you can say about the Middle Ages, there was never a dominant white and Christian culture that excluded all else.

For starters, medieval people weren't racist in terms of skin tone.  A lot of this was just naïveté, they hadn't for the most part seen people of color and couldn't therefore work up any sort of antagonism against them.  In the Parzival story in which Parzival had a half-brother whose mother was an Ethiopian, the half-brother was spotted black and white, because it seemed that that's what you'd get crossing a black person and a white person.  The spots were considered intriguing.

And then there are the so-called black Madonnas of the Auvergne, very dark wooden figures of the Madonna, found all over southwest France, dating to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  No one tried to whiten them up.  Black was fine.  (The image below is of the one at Rocamadour.)

Medieval Europe had large minority populations of Jews and Muslims.  Sometimes they'd be persecuted, sometimes not.  In Spain especially everyone had to work out a way to get along with each other, at least some of the time.  When the first wave of fighters on what became the First Crusade (1095) got to the Rhineland, they decided they'd get a head start on killing the infidel by killing Jews, and the Jews were protected by, get this, the local bishops.

Now of course when the Crusade actually got to the Muslim Middle East, they were in slaughter-mode.  At the time the story was that the streets of Jerusalem ran ankle-deep in blood.  But as the westerners settled down to rule their newly-established Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, they got along most of the time with local Muslims—who were, after all, in the majority.  This was upsetting to those newly arrived from Europe.  It was mostly the new arrivals who kept the fighting going, until the westerners were driven back out in 1187.

Religious intolerance reached new heights in the thirteenth century, but the special focus was Christian heretics, not other religions (though those too came under attack).  Christianity, as those who have been reading this blog know, was never a single, unified religion, and although the persecution of heretics was an attempt to make it so, it was not successful.  Then, in the disastrous fourteenth century (famine, Black Death, Hundred Years War), religious difference became much less of an issue.  People had other things to worry about, like staying alive.

And of course Europe was not sealed off from the broader world.  A lot of their philosophy, science (think astronomy and Arabic numerals), and architecture was heavily influenced by the Arabs.  If one wants to find a time when everyone was white and Christian and therefore everything was swell (and I must say I think such a time is imaginary), it is not the European Middle Ages.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018 

For more on medieval society and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.