this is not in the proper spirit of rumspringa

I've seen this post make the rounds on Tumblr a couple of times now, and while I agree with its main point (that there were non-white people in medieval Europe), I entirely disagree with how that point is made. There are documentary sources from medieval Europe which talk about people whom we would now describe as people of colour (ideas of what "race" is having changed enormously over the centuries, and of course the word "ethnicity" is a very recent coinage), but really none of them are the ones which this post talks about. As a (medieval) historian, the idea of making an argument based on insufficient or misunderstood evidence makes me twitchy, so let's go through this piece by piece.¹

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