More Africans and non-whites in Medieval Europe

One thing I never understood about Kingdom of Heaven was why Orlando Bloom's father's posse had a random African crusader. Maybe it was just to show he had a diverse crew, but it seemed kind of anachronistic to me.

That said, given how there were apparently Africans in northern Europe since ancient times. Blacks who came a-conquering alongside their whiter counterparts in the Roman legions. However, I'd be by the fall of the western Roman Empire, such crosscultural relations had faded away.

What could have led to more continuous relations between Northern Africa and points south with Europe? And so medieval Europeans could be more aware of Moors and other such races, not just in the context of nemeses?
 
One thing I never understood about Kingdom of Heaven was why Orlando Bloom's father's posse had a random African crusader. Maybe it was just to show he had a diverse crew, but it seemed kind of anachronistic to me.

That said, given how there were apparently Africans in northern Europe since ancient times. Blacks who came a-conquering alongside their whiter counterparts in the Roman legions. However, I'd be by the fall of the western Roman Empire, such crosscultural relations had faded away.

What could have led to more continuous relations between Northern Africa and points south with Europe? And so medieval Europeans could be more aware of Moors and other such races, not just in the context of nemeses?

Norman Sicily takes and holds Tunis and points west, eventually taking Morocco and Gibraltar.
 
After the Nubians conquer Egypt, they repel the Assyrian invaders and expand the size of their growing empire into the islands of Crete and Cyprus which are then settled by thousands of black Nubian soldiers, administrators, farmers, etc. Or is that sort of implausible? :p
 
After the Nubians conquer Egypt, they repel the Assyrian invaders and expand the size of their growing empire into the islands of Crete and Cyprus which are then settled by thousands of black Nubian soldiers, administrators, farmers, etc. Or is that sort of implausible? :p

Kind of implausible unless they move their base of operations into Egypt itself. Napata and Meroë are too far south to govern such an empire effectively. Of course, establishing a Nubian capital in Egypt is basically an invitation for the entire enterprise to be Egyptianized...
 
After the Nubians conquer Egypt, they repel the Assyrian invaders and expand the size of their growing empire into the islands of Crete and Cyprus which are then settled by thousands of black Nubian soldiers, administrators, farmers, etc. Or is that sort of implausible? :p

Assyria is so much more powerful than the Nubians that it's sort of ridiculous.
 
Kind of implausible unless they move their base of operations into Egypt itself. Napata and Meroë are too far south to govern such an empire effectively. Of course, establishing a Nubian capital in Egypt is basically an invitation for the entire enterprise to be Egyptianized...

The Kushite Dynasty kept their capital at Meroe during their one hundred and four years in power. If they continue to rule, they won't move their capital. I think it suffices if you want more black Africans in Europe especially if the Kushites can build up a navy and expand to those islands of Crete and Cyprus and transport Nubians to settle and garrison them.

EDIT: Then again it is rather implausible. Still interesting to me
 

Titus_Pullo

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One thing I never understood about Kingdom of Heaven was why Orlando Bloom's father's posse had a random African crusader. Maybe it was just to show he had a diverse crew, but it seemed kind of anachronistic to me.?



In otl There were alot of Arab Christian converts in Outremer. The Templars in particular had a sizeable number of Turkopole auxiliaries and Arab converts in their service.
Having a sub-saharan African in the Baron of Ibelin's service would not have been all that out of place in otl. He could have been a slave caught by Arab slavers, converted to Islam and then freed. Then when the Crusaders came, became a subject, converted to Christianity and somehow found service with the Baron of Ibelin.
Alot of Crusaders who stayed in the Middle East married Arab women. They eventually returned to Europe with their Arab brides and children.


As to your question, earlier than that there was a continuous flow of non whites into Europe, Huns, Avars, Magyars all of whom were Mongolian tribes that eventually got absorbed into the European population.
 
The Kushite Dynasty kept their capital at Meroe during their one hundred and four years in power...

True, but they were only ruling Egypt, a country that had been so divided by civil conflict for the decades upon decades beforehand that it complained very little about the stabilizing effects of Kushite rule, regardless of where the pharaoh resided.
If Kush wants to expand beyond Egypt, particularly into the Med, that's where it will encounter administrative difficulties with it's capital being so far up the Nile.

EDIT: Though, I suppose they could use Ineb-Hedj as a secondary administrative capital and Meroë as a royal residence, but then there are still the Assyrians to deal with...
 
True, but they were only ruling Egypt, a country that had been so divided by civil conflict for the decades upon decades beforehand that it complained very little about the stabilizing effects of Kushite rule, regardless of where the pharaoh resided.
If Kush wants to expand beyond Egypt, particularly into the Med, that's where it will encounter administrative difficulties with it's capital being so far up the Nile.

You're likely right. You never do see timelines on a continued Kushite rule over Egypt though as Impi bluntly said, the Assyrians kind of make this scenario rather hard to see lasting.
 
Well, they don't actually have to rule anyplace much north. They could simply have a situation that encouraged their people to trade with or visit Europe, for whatever reason.
 
Yeah that was a poor link. I'm trying to think of one I came across on this forum a week or two ago that talked about blacks in the Scottish court, who were descended from Roman legionaries. Can't quite remember which thread it's from.
 
How would you define "non-white"? Do you simply mean "not indigenous to Europe"? Where would you place the Romani and the Sinti? How about the various communities of Jews descended from Middle Eastern populations? The Kalmyks, or even older groups of Central Asian steppe peoples who blended into the local peoples they assimilated (Magyars, Bulgars, Avars, Huns, Cumans, Pechenegs, Khazars, Kipchaks, Seljuks, Mongols, Chuvash, etc)? The Moors, Carthaginians, and other Middle Eastern and African groups that entered the Iberian Peninsula and various Mediterranean islands?
 
Yeah that was a poor link. I'm trying to think of one I came across on this forum a week or two ago that talked about blacks in the Scottish court, who were descended from Roman legionaries. Can't quite remember which thread it's from.

Obviously, anyone of African descent from Roman times would not be black after many hundreds of years of interbreeding with the local population in Europe. Plus, who would keep track of this line of ancestry?

And the link, quite frankly, is complete rubbish. Its one of those stupid Afrocentric sites which takes historical quotes and local legends out of context, conflates them with selected myths from the Old Testament in order create the impression that all ancient European and Semitic culture as being founded exclusively by Black people.

For example, it assumes that the native British tribe of the Silures, as mentioned by Tacitus of having a "dark complexion and unusually curly hair" are blacks. Its a complete joke.
 
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Keep the ERE in power in North Africa Egypt (e.g. stop or slow down Islam, or even better the Sassanians). There would be plenty of trade contracts, eventually expanding across the Sahara and down the East coast of Africa. This would be aided by the fact that Nubia and Ethiopia are already Christian. Bonus points if you can butterfly racism away entirely by converting the upper Sahel to Christianity and thus leading Europeans to see Africans as their fellow Christians.
 
I forgot my history some there, but how Middle Age Europe was, to peoples obviously non white in modern terms? Would a christian catholic 'black' be accepted?
 
I forgot my history some there, but how Middle Age Europe was, to peoples obviously non white in modern terms? Would a christian catholic 'black' be accepted?

Accepted in what sense? Not immediately ridden out of town or burned at the stake? Certainly. You need a certain density before an exotically interesting other becomes threatening. Same reason the Nazis were never particularly nasty to blacks and Chinese in Germany - there weren't enough of them to matter. Allowed to become a normal member of society? Depends on the situation. Where he had protection, certainly. Where not, it would depend on how opportunity is distributed. A colonial eleventh-century town will take any warm body, a fifteenth-century inland city will cast out even the offspring of respected citizens for the slightest misstep. No matter what his status, he would always remain an exotic character, but probably no more so that someone who'd been on Crusade, a convert Saracen or an Englishman in a German town - you remembered, but it wasn't a crippling social disadvantage.

Of course if there are many such people, the sentiment is liable to shift. German communities were wasily able to absorb convert Jews and south Italian ones convert Saracens, but in Spain, where such numbers were significant, things turned quite nasty. Conversely, Italian towns happily took in Slavic converts to Catholicism while German ones, especially in the old frontier areas, long had severe restrictions on "Wends" settling there.

And BTW, the whiteness of medieval Europe tends to be overestimated. Much of the Mediterranean had people from the Near East and North Africa, and later on, slaves were imported from as far afield as Central Asia. A letter in the Datini archives makes quite casual reference to a Tatar kitchen girl.
 
How would you define "non-white"? Do you simply mean "not indigenous to Europe"? Where would you place the Romani and the Sinti? How about the various communities of Jews descended from Middle Eastern populations? The Kalmyks, or even older groups of Central Asian steppe peoples who blended into the local peoples they assimilated (Magyars, Bulgars, Avars, Huns, Cumans, Pechenegs, Khazars, Kipchaks, Seljuks, Mongols, Chuvash, etc)? The Moors, Carthaginians, and other Middle Eastern and African groups that entered the Iberian Peninsula and various Mediterranean islands?

Different looking enough that had there been some historical awareness of them by Europeans, and perhaps coexistence, then centuries down the line racism as we know it may exist differently.
 
Note how by example in Islam, we are told that we are all brothers (as far I know..), denunicating racism implicitly (in theory - in practice, things may be.. different, like slavery).
 
You need to have the Romans adopt a bit of a racist religion which is big on like sticking with like. Have their various transplanted communities continue to breed quite exclusively with each other and you can get black communities in Belgium and the like.
The trouble with them IOTL wasn't that they never existed but they were always in small enough numbers and assimilated well enough that in a few generations they vanished.
 
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