Were medieval people white nationalists?

 Short answer: No.

As I have discussed earlier, medieval people were not advocates of "whiteness."  Sure, they were intolerant of religious difference, especially of Christian heretics, but skin color was well down the list of things they would get upset about.  This has not stopped a lot of people recently from trying to claim the Middle Ages as some golden age of white nationalism.  As a medievalist, I must object to their careless and a-historical use of medieval ideas and symbols.

One of the more recent efforts is to talk about the US as a land where "Anglo-Saxon" values should predominate.  But what is meant exactly by Anglo-Saxon?  The Saxons, from Saxony in northern Germany (hence the name), were raiders and attackers in late Roman Britain.  At that time you had Germanic peoples moving into Great Britain as the Romans pulled out, setting up their own kingdoms.  They called themselves English (England is named for them).  Only really in the nineteenth century did "Anglo-Saxon" become a collective name for these people who made England their own.

And what "values" did they have?  Well, they were ruled by kings.  The US hasn't had kings since 1776, and I hope we aren't going back.  For the first century after Angles and Saxons arrived, they weren't Christian, yet those who now want us to adopt Anglo-Saxon values also want to impose their version of Christian values.  (Protestant!  Obvious heretics by medieval standards.)  They had slavery, gone in the US for 150 years.  British scholars see Anglo-Saxons as part of the German wave that led (supposedly) to the Fall of the Roman Empire.  (And aren't we of the US supposed to be the reincarnation of Rome?  Minus slavery and imperialism and patriarchy and, well, never mind.)

At any rate, medieval society was not uniformly white and Christian.  Trade with other parts of the world continued throughout the Middle Ages.  Silk from China and spices from southeast Asia ended up in the Mediterranean, as did traders from those places.  For that matter, the Mediterranean was predominantly Muslim.  The Middle East was always of interest to medieval Christians, as site of the Holy Land.  Every city of any size had a Jewish population, tolerated during the early Middle Ages, regarded with increasing suspicion in the eleventh and later centuries, but still very much part of society—kings of both France and England relied on Jews as a source of loans.

For that matter, medieval people would not have struck us as "nationalistic."  The areas that a king considered part of his kingdom might or might not have agreed they were under him.  People identified themselves by culture and language by not necessarily by geographic boundaries.  The French epics talked about how "the French" were brave and honorable, but that was a cultural marker, not a geographic one.  People identified much more with their city or county than with their country.  The word nation (natio in Latin) meant something closer to family than country.  The Jews were considered a nation, no matter where they lived.

Medievalists get irritated when modern people try to appropriate  some medieval symbols and use them in ways medieval people would have rejected.  For example, Norse runes and Celtic symbols are sometimes mixed together as some sort of symbol of whiteness.  Well, the Vikings and the Celts were both fair-skinned.  But the Celts of the British Isles, the people who had been there before the Romans and who persisted after the English arrived (especially in the areas now called Wales and Scotland, plus of course Ireland), were attacked by the Vikings in the eighth and ninth centuries.  They would not have agreed that one could mix and match their symbols.  For that matter, the Normans of what is now France were only a few generations from Viking settlers, Vikings who had treated Christian churches as their rightful prey.

In the nineteenth century a lot of men's social groups decided they were really knights.  Some members of the Ku Klux Klan declared they were knights, "defending" their "way of life" which apparently was a way of life of prejudice and cruelty.  Knights really first appeared as a group at the beginning of the eleventh century, being persuaded by swear mighty oaths not to harm the weak.  Burning a cross on a terrified family's lawn hardly counts as not harming the weak.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval culture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.