This is all types of wrong. Does this person even know the biological and geographical reasoning behind fair and dark skin? Why some peoples are tall and skinny, and others are stout and short?
Is it really that hard to understand that people consciously stayed within their own cultural regions? Why would a large middle eastern or African group of peoples migrate into medieval Poland?
Ultimately, when your entire argument is pedantic to the point of being pathetic, the only reason to make it is to be spiteful. I mean, really, potatoes?
Don’t like the product? Don’t buy it. You don’t have the right to not be offended, or to be catered to in every medium. If you seriously can’t get into a game because “too much wypipo” then guess what? You’re the one that’s racist.
Not to rain on your “Perhaps it is YOU who is Teh RACISMS!1!!” party, buuuut there’s some pretty simple answers to a rather straightforward question you asked: “Why would a large middle eastern or African group of peoples migrate into medieval Poland?”
Already in 1235 blacks had been observed in
the splendid retinue which Frederick brought with him on an expedition
to Germany. A monkish chronicler relates that the emperor “proceeded in
great glory with numerous carriages laden with gold and silver, byssus
and purple, gems and costly vessels, with camels, mules as well as
dromedaries, with many Saracens, and with Ethiopians having knowledge of
rare skills accompanying apes and leopards and serving as guards
bringing along money and treasure.”’ These unusual servants were surely
Lucerans, since we know that the exotic animals were kept in Lucera
between trips. Musicians are not mentioned, but the role of these
blacks as guardians of the royal treasury is noteworthy.
Black Africans in Hohenstaufen Iconography by Paul H. D. Kaplan.Gesta Vol. 26, No. 1 (1987),pp. 29-36. The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the International Center of Medieval Art.
Like…hello? Central Europe doesn’t have a “white only” forcefield around it, and you’re both a fool and a bigot if you think your racist assumptions trump scientific and historical evidence of this magnitude.
But honestly, I know better than to think anyone capable of throwing ^^ that kind of tantrum can be distracted by little things like “evidence“.
THANK YOU. This post uses The Witcher games, and historical Poland, as a microcosm, sure, but it’s representative of a good deal of fantasy media in general. The ones that make some kind of at least lip-service towards historical time and place. Which is to say, the ones that need to listen the fuck up, and either do some fucking research and do history right, or admit that they’re putting out pure fantasy. And when it comes to answering questions as to why their fantasy is whites-only, they can at least answer honestly. (Answers include: “I’m just a bit of a racist wankstain,” or “Sorry, I hadn’t really thought about it, and that was a bit racist of me — I apologise, and I’m gonna rectify this.”)
Why would people from elsewhere immigrate to Medieval Poland? TRADE.
The Vikings/medieval Scandinavians traded extensively with the Byzantine Empire – the Byzantine emperors even had an elite group of mercenary bodyguards composed of Norsemen and Kievan Rus (the Varangian Guard). So many Scandinavian men went to seek their fortune in Byzantium that Sweden had to account for it in its inheritance laws; archaeologists are always digging up Islamic coins and the like in Viking gravesites. A lot more could be said about this topic, but the most relevant fact is that there was a massive medieval trade route between the North Sea and Constantinople, running smack through – you guessed it – POLAND.
There are records of ethnic Arabs and Asians traveling and in some cases living in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages. But nooo, of course they all teleported from their homelands to Scandinavia. None of them traveled through eastern Europe along established trade routes to get there, and none of them stopped in Poland along the way, and certainly none of them stayed there. Likewise, no enterprising Polish traders ever made their way down those waterways to the Black Sea and the melting-pot capital of Byzantium, and none of those enterprising Polish folks ever married anyone of Asian or African or Middle Eastern heritage, and certainly none of them ever returned home to Poland with wife and children in tow. LOL.
Also, a large group of Middle Eastern and Asian people DID in fact immigrate to eastern Europe during the Middle Ages. The so-called “Golden Horde” – aka the Turkicized northwestern branch of the Mongol Empire, after Genghis Khan died and various sons inherited – conquered huge chunks of eastern Europe in the latter half of the 13th century and the first half of the 14th; at its height the empire extended right up to the borders of Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia (composed of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and yes – bits of southeast Poland) was a Mongolian vassal state right on the Polish border, and the Mongols launched several invasions into Poland itself (in 1240, 1259, and 1287).
Eventually their empire fell into decline and broke up into a bunch of Tatar khanates (someone already mentioned the Tatars above). So yeah, were there a whole multitude of black folks in medieval Poland? Undoubtedly not (though that doesn’t mean there weren’t any at all, as the above post points out, and we certainly can’t rule out a few people of African descent making their way there from Spain or Italy or Constantinople, either!). Were there people of color in medieval Poland? UNQUESTIONABLY YES.
Human beings move. They invade; they flee invasions. They trade. They form alliances. They intermarry. They immigrate. Sometimes they just explore. And they’ve been doing so for thousands upon thousands of years. No one is claiming that the majority of people in medieval Poland weren’t white. What they are claiming is that citing strict historical accuracy as a reason not to include any people of color in your fantasy world is absurd when the potatoes (and other New World foodstuffs) that nobody bats an eye at are wildly more ahistorical in that setting than brown people ever could be, and that the notion that including people of color would somehow ruin the medieval European ~aesthetic~ displays, AT BEST, a profound misunderstanding of actual European history.
IT GOT BETTER. YOU MADE IT BETTER. THANK YOU.
As far as the Turkic and Mongol influence on Poland in particular goes as well, you only need to look at the traditional swordsmanship of Poland to see where the Mongol and Turkic invasions left their mark. The Polish cross-cutting art is a half-lost-and-half-reconstructed system of techniques for curved sabres of heavy asiatic influence.
Honestly if you think ideas got left behind and were allowed to take root in Poland, but the genes of the invaders didn’t? Nah fam.
Not to mention the fact I think referenced above as well about movement of populations, immgriation, migration, etc. etc. Most – almost all – medieval nations were very very young in historical terms and were founded by peoples and cultures who conquered and settled the land during the aptly named Migration Period. Honestly, if anything blows the second poster’s notion that People Just Stay Put Forever Always it’s the actual foundation of almost all of the European kingdoms…by massed invasive migrators, during and in the wake of the Hunnic invasions from around the start of the 5th century CE. The establishment of Spain, Italy, France, by non-native groups — Visigoths, Alans, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks!
If history teaches us anything it’s that people just cannot fucking sit still and/or be chill with what they have. And that genes and ideas distribute and dissolve throughout populations like heck.
Overdressed & Underappreciated 