Do you have an estimation how much racism or xenophobia Yusuf would have encountered traveling with Nicolo across Europe up to the modern ages? This is a very vague ask, forgive me. I wonder how much the concept of racism has changed over time. I have the vague impression that pre-modern European societies were always more diverse than one might assume nowadays, but I have little factual historic knowledge. I also wonder how much xenophobia Nicolo would have encountered.
And you would be correct! Because the “medieval ages were all lily-white and anyone placing POC in them is Wrong” is yet again, surprise surprise, another total lie that is a product of right-wing reactionary revisionism and not based on actual historical evidence. A couple years ago, I wrote a very lengthy post about historical people of color in Europe, starting from the Roman era and going down to about the 19th century (everything prior to the 20th century, basically). Obviously, it only discussed each example briefly, but there’s definitely more than enough there to debunk any idea that medieval Europe was monochromatically white. Iberia, Sicily, and other “crossroad” kingdoms had the most visibly and long-term settled diverse populations, but major cities such as London were ethnically diverse from their founding (which if you know anything about the Romans, truly, is obvious). There is extensive evidence for Africans and Muslims traveling to, if perhaps not settling in, early medieval Ireland and Britain (though sometimes they did do this, as there is a record of at least one African abbot of an English religious house). I also have this list of readings on the golden age of medieval Africa, including the richest king of all time and the various powerful empires that existed particularly in West Africa.
As noted in the Historical People of Color post, the crusades themselves, despite their obvious violence and bloodshed, were vehicles for cross-cultural exchange, which resulted in both Islamic ideas traveling to the west and western ideas traveling to the Islamic world. Medieval Christians were fascinated by “Saracens” as much as they were frightened by them, and there was a flourishing genre of “Saracen romances,” such as Parzival (one of the most popular romances of German medieval literature,which features the half-Muslim hero Feirefiz) and The King of Tars. These romances obviously display complicated attitudes about race and religion; the Saracen heroes are usually depicted as having to forsake their mistaken beliefs (usually some jumbled combination of paganistic polytheism rather than actual Islam) to complete their moral and emotional journey, and in King of Tars specifically, that results in an actual physical transformation for the Muslim sultan, the Christian princess’ husband, from black-skinned to white-skinned as a symbol of his newly gained virtue. Obviously there is an element of colorism at play; I wouldn’t call it racism because racism as a scientific term and “biological” concept was invented in the 19th century when, yet again, the West was busy concocting “impartial” reasons for its colonialism and “civilization” of supposedly inferior people. In the Saracen romances, however, the Saracen characters are not unsympathetic (if misguided), and the star-crossed lovers trope between Christian princesses and gallant Muslim warriors is played pretty much as you would expect it to go (with the implication that we’re supposed to root for him converting to Christianity so they can be together). As long as religious identity is correct, skin color doesn’t really matter or is at least less important, is viewed as mutable and changeable, and not the only marker of a person’s identity.
So in that sense, Yusuf and Nicolo would not be unfamiliar as characters in their very own star-crossed Saracen romance, and since we’ve already discussed the bonds between knights and how deeply romantic and emotional friendships were often the case even between men who WEREN’T lovers, it’s entirely possible that people would have understood them in that context. It also depends on how much time they spent in medieval Europe (as in DVLA, I have them traveling across the Eastern world for several hundred years after the crusades and not getting back to Europe until the Renaissance, when ideas and attitudes toward race and religion were once more undergoing huge transformation). Obviously, yes, there would be an element of xenophobia throughout history, and England (aha, hello Ancestors of Brexit) has in fact pretty much always been known for hating foreigners. But these weren’t necessarily foreigners of color; white Europeans from France, Italy, the Low Countries, Flanders, Bohemia, etc could all be viewed suspiciously by the English, especially post-Henry VIII and the religious break from Rome. (But this was, again, also the case before that happened, because apparently the English just suck like that.) This plays into the fact that as has been pointed out before, racism in Europe is cultured along very different lines from how it is in America, and takes into account geographical, cultural, religious, and other factors, as well as simply skin color. (Though colorism is usually also unfortunately part of it pretty much everywhere, since the ideal medieval woman was often thought to be blonde and blue-eyed, and fair coloring has always been positively correlated with morality -- just look at “Dark Magic” and “Black Magic” and all those other fantasy tropes of the villain being Dark.)
So basically, Yusuf and Nicolo would probably have been equally mistrusted in, say, 16th-century England (such as when they go there in the attempt to rescue Andy and Quynh in DVLA). They’re sodomites, for a start (this is right about when male homosexuality starts to enter the books as a capital crime), and Nicolo is Italian and therefore deeply suspicious as a possible papal agent. Yusuf might have actually made out better in that case, because Elizabethan England had fairly friendly diplomatic relations with the Ottoman and Persian empires (this is written about in the Historical People of Color post) and there was even an idea of Protestant England and Muslim North Africa allying together to attack their mutual enemy, Catholic Spain. Othello is obviously a product of this cultural context, with its dashing but doomed and tragic Moorish captain (see once again: the character himself is not unsympathetic, and is misled by the evil Iago). So many Elizabethan Englishmen settled in Muslim societies that there were attempted royal incentives to lure them back, and Yusuf would probably have been an exotic curiosity more than an existential danger. (As noted, they would almost certainly hate Nicolo more.)
In places such as Constantinople, where I had them live for a while in chapter 4, Nicolo would also be the more obviously mistrusted party. In a Greek Orthodox city that had substantial and long-term populations of Muslims and Jews, a Latin Catholic would be more the Enemy, because... well, sometimes we hate the people who are almost like us more than we hate the people who are obviously very different and therefore cannot be compared. Emperor Alexios Komnenos of Byzantium helped launch the First Crusade, at least in part in hopes of getting formerly Byzantine lands back from the Turks, but very quickly realized that he couldn’t control the crusaders and things went sour long before the trauma of 1204 and the sack of Constantinople; relations between Latin and Greek Christians had been at the brink of outright hostility for most of the crusades. The Byzantine emperors were used to diplomacy and negotiation and trade agreements with their counterparts in the Islamic world, all of which was viewed as “consorting with the enemy” by the West. Besides, the Great Schism in 1054 had already broken the Western and Eastern churches apart after centuries of bitter theological disputes (these arguments may look like the most mind-bogglingly boring and tiny and insignificant details ever, but the battle over defining heresy and orthodoxy RAGED almost from the founding of Christianity in the first century). So yes, if they were in the Slavic lands, in Eastern and Southern Europe, in Constantinople, in anywhere that adhered to the Orthodox rite, the locals would be used to Yusuf, but HATE Nicolo.
So yes. As ever, the reception that they would have encountered is complicated, and it would not be immediately analogous to modern racism and Islamophobia. It would also be intensely mediated by their cultural, chronological, and geographic location, where sometimes Nicolo would (paradoxically) be MORE mistrusted by other white Christian Europeans. Not to say that Yusuf wouldn’t have encountered prejudice too, because he would, but not quite in the same ways as he would now, or that we would expect.
Thanks for the question!
This is an excellent answer: however, I feel that there is a need to clarify some points it raises about Byzantium and its relationship with the Western Christian world. This is not the first time I’ve run into an assesment similar to OP’s in this fandom, and while it might be common, it is not correct.
Constantinople had ‘substantial and long-term populations of Muslims and Jews’: but we cannot, in any way, characterise it as Greek Orthodox city before the late 13th century. ‘Greek Christianity’ only developed a sharply delineated view of itself after 1204, as we will see shortly. Constantinople was an imperial capital which defined itself not in relation to modern concepts of religion or nationhood, but rather to the empire it possessed: it was not necessarily territorial, but defined by common concepts of law, administration and rulership. Constantinople was the beating hearts of the networks that bound up its imperium: foreigners came along with trade and with information, and although the Byzantines could be very xenophobic and snobby about them, they were not in any way unusual. Muslims and Jews had their quarters in Constantinople in the 11th and 12th century: but so did the Westerners. Venetians, since they had a special relationship as a polity with the empire, were the first: they were followed by the Pisans, Amalfitans and Genovese in the 12th century. (Note that the Byzantine merchants did not like it, because the foreigners received special trading privileges: and we will shortly see how much of a problem that turned out to be.)
This is also exemplified by the example of the First Crusade. Throughout the 10th century - and well into the 12th - Byzantines came to rely heavily on foreign mercenaries instead of the thematic armies that previously formed their main millitary force. Peter Frankopan argues that it was something of a vogue for Western knights to serve in Constantinople in the period that preceded the First Crusade: in fact, he makes the point that Alexios I Komnenos directed his letters precisely to those families that previously had some of their family members sojourn in Constantinople. There was also a number of pilgrims and monks that passed - or stayed in - Constantinople: indeed, it is the very reason why Alexios even conceived of the idea that it might be a good idea to urge the pope to support his recruitment effort (which turned into the First Crusade: no one in Byzantium expected that). Note that the main crusader army cooperated with the Byzantines during the siege of Nicea and expected Alexios to come relieve them at Antioch: the fact that this did not happen and that Bohemond of Sicily seized this opportunity to claim the city as his own was extremely unfortunate, and it skews our sources on both sides to just pile on blame on the other.
But the fact that the Byzantines did not get along well with the Christian polities that arose in the Middle East did not mean that these extremely close relations ceased. Indeed, the very fact that Anna Komnene is so antagonistic towards Westerners reflects the fact that she was the witness to ever growing cooperation with the west. Her brother, John II Komnenos, continued to hire foreign mercenaries, had an alliance with the HRE and campaigned with leaders of crusader states in Syria (it did not go well): Manuel I Komnenos was extremely popular in the West, was allied to the pope and cooperated with the kingdom of Jerusalem in their invasion of Egypt. Indeed, to say that Byzantines ‘were used to diplomacy and negotiation and trade agreements with their counterparts in the Islamic world, all of which was viewed as “consorting with the enemy” by the West’ is only correct to a point: yes, the Byzantines were able to negotiate and cooperate with the Islamic world, but they also were rather adept at invading them and waging war incessantly. On the other hand, even though - for instance - the Byzantines had a persistent problem in the Norman kingdom of Sicily, this did not mean they could not get along phenomenally with other western states at the same time. Really, to speak of Byzantine ‘relationship’ to either the Islamic world or the Western one is extremely reductive: these were not homogenous blocks, had intense inner rivalries that Byzantines exploited, and most importantly of all, all of these allegiances shifted over time.
What of 1054, you might ask? It is not as important as you think it is. First of all, note that schisms were not uncommon in the medieval world: really, in a sense, the Church was always in some kind of a disagreement, because it worked with an extremely unclear, hard to interpret text that Christian theologians kept piling upon. There were schism between the Eastern and Western communions before 1054 (ask me about the Photian schism): there were questions about the filioque, primacy of Rome and some minor points about practice (eg unleavened/leavened bread for Eucharist, marriage of priests etc.) Mostly, everyone just politely agreed to ignore these: the pope was able to correspond with the patriarch of Constantinople, with the tacit understanding that they both thought the other one was terribly wrong and that they would come to their senses eventually. On occassion, tensions flared up: 1054 was therefore not a cause, but a symptom.
But what mattered was 1204. John and Manuel’s courts were cosmpolitan, loud, bright and fashionably-Western: not everyone liked that. Furthermore, the fact that trade privileges given to Western merchants tended to render the Greek ones less competitive was also a major factor that contributed to a counter-reaction in late 1100s (Massacre of the Latins), which dramatically worsened the relationship between Byzantium and the West and sort of contributed to 1204. This did not mean that all foreigners were expelled or massacred or whatever: no. Constantinople still was a cosmpolitan city and trading quickly resumed: but it points us to the underlying tensions between the Byzantine emperors and their subjects. It does not mean that relationships between Byzantium and West were bound to go from bad to worse from now: but it did meant that lot of the goodwill that John and Manuel had from the papacy or HRE was gone.
1204 was both an unfortunate accident of history and a logical development from this. It did not need to happen: it also did not come out of nowhere. In the aftermath of the sack of Constantinople, churchmen like Choniates started writing about the event as a nearly apocalyptic event that demanded the outrage of the entirety of the Greek world: and really, this is when we can start talking about ‘Greekness’ as a source of identity, because it was only after 1204 (when the underlying structures of empire that created the identity of Rhomanoi fell apart) that we see people grasping onto the idea of being ‘Hellenes’. While the empire fell apart, the church remained a firm presence in everyone’s life: whether you lived in a Byzantine rump state of Trebizond or under the Venetian protectorate, you were able to rally around the church. This is where we can start to speak about a self-conscious, independent Greek Orthodox church: and its strongly defined sense of identity would survive well into the future.
But note even after 1204, people were able to conceive of and attempt reconciliation between the Eastern and Western Church: indeed, after the reunification of the Byzantine empire, it was frequently the goal of individual emperors to renew their communion with the West. This never worked out, precisely because the patriarch and his church were to a fault strongly opposed to it (the trauma of 1204 and exile of the patriarch from the city was not something anyone could easily foget): but it is extremely telling that people still attempted this. Neither the Photian schism, 1054 or even 1204 could just get rid of the idea that the differences between the East and the West were reconcilable: and in the meanwhile, new kinds of relationships flourished in places like Frankish Morea.
So what does this mean for Niccolo? ‘So yes, if they were in the Slavic lands, in Eastern and Southern Europe, in Constantinople, in anywhere that adhered to the Orthodox rite, the locals would be used to Yusuf, but HATE Nicolo.’ No. In Constantinople and the entirety of Byzantium, Niccolo would be able to navigate just fine and would not be out of the ordinary anytime before 1204: it is a bit more complicated after that, but it would still be absolutely possible for him to travel around after, although it would really depend on what role and where would he assume. As for outside of Byzantium? A good chunk of Slavic lands operated according to the Western rites: Eastern and Southern Europe had complicated relationships with Byzantium and did often use alliances with Western nations to counterbalance their influence (Bulgaria in particular comes to mind). Furthermore, it is horribly reductive to say that anyone in this very wide region would be used to Yusuf: while Muslims were absolutely able to and did travel and reside in Eastern Europe, it does not follow that a Genoese man would be more out of place in 12th century Poland than a Maghrebi one.
TLDR: To speak of Byzantine attitudes to either the Islamic world or Western world is extremely reductive: relationships fluctuated depending on geopolitical situation and time. 1054 cannot be understood as the breaking point for the Eastern/Western church: 1204 can, but needs to be interpreted in a nuanced way. Byzantium had a longstanding tradition of cooperation with the Western world, which was not even broken by the trauma of 1204: Niccolo would not be out of place in Constantinople either after or before it.
I am happy to take follow up questions.
For further reading:
Michael Angold ‘Greeks and Latins after 1204: the perspective of exile’ in the Mediterranean Historical Review 4 (1989)
Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni (1996)
Peter Frankopan, The first crusade : the call from the East (2012).
Joan Hussey, Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (1986)
Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin West (2007)
A. V. Murray, ‘The Enemy Within: Bohemund, Byzantium and the Subversion of the First Crusade’, Crusading and pilgrimage in the Norman world, ed. K. Hurlock and P. Oldfield (2015)
E.A. Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (2010)
Mark Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium (1996
