Thread by @medievalpoc

And this is why I'll keep this up...because honestly, the majority of people feel super comfortable asserting this as if its a fact, mostly based on ubiquitous casting of white actors in fantasy fiction TV & films.

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In the 13th century Bruges was refered to as "Venice of the North" because sea trade was restored in 1134 after a storm. It became the crossroads of the northern Hanseatic league & crucial for Portuguese traders en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruges#Go…

As for Brussels, I mean...here's artwork of an Ethiopian princess entering the city with Joanna of Castile, from "the oldest illustrated testimony of a princely entry in Burgundy."
Belgium (1496)
Berlin Kupferstichkabinett 78.D.5 f° 13r: link.springer.com/chapter/10.100…

I've noticed many of the illuminated manuscripts I've come across from Belgium specifically have a lot of figures depicted with brown skin, including from 13th C:BnF n.a. fr. 16251 f. 24v (detail); Mons (Belgium), c.1285

And from earlier than that, too-like this Genesis initial from the Lobbes Bible
(Belgium, 1084)
Bibliothèque de la ville de Tournai
bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/mirador/index.…

But rather than keep on going like this, I'll just say, why should I have to dig up works buried in archives in languages I don't speak and try to find original ship manifests with descriptions that didn't exist then to "disprove" someone's feelings? Why should anyone?

The sad fact is, the original commenter above ^^ was *already* commenting on an artwork showing a brown-skinned person, from a Belgian illuminated manuscript. It's an endless circle: the skin color in the art must be "symbolic" because we "know" that 13th C Belgians were white+

which we know because there's "no evidence" that they were anything but white, and any evidence we CAN see must be discounted because....and so on.
That's what happens when you're emotionally invested in whitewashing the past AND the present.

Logic crumbles & becomes an endless loop of repeating, nonsensical denial when you're obsessed with defending an "identity" that's defined entirely by absolute exclusion, existing only because it *isn't* something, rather than what it IS.

I keep on doing this so that as many people as possible know that ANYTIME someone comes out of the woodwork with "but everyone was white back then!", they are 100% WRONG. Although everything I post is independently verifiable, & I encourage you to make up your own mind.

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