Advice for time traveling to medieval Europe

if you're watching this it's because you've recently acquired a time machine and are thinking about visiting Europe during the Middle Ages uh it's an interesting choice but it will present you with some challenges so I'm going to give you some advice here uh what to look out for and some things to think about before you go this can't be comprehensive you'll have to do a lot of your own research especially about the particular T time and place that you're going to go to but consider this a jumping off point first of all let me get a couple of caveats out of the way the Middle Ages is a long time and Europe is a pretty big place so I'm going to restrict what I'm saying here to the Central Middle Ages which is about 1100s through the 1300s and I'm going to talk about what kind of that core area of what English speakers usually think of when they think of medieval Europe which is England France Germany kind of Northern Italy that area also I'm going to assume that you're going to be visiting a medieval town if when you go and that's because if you're visiting a rural area or a small farming Village it'll just be harder to explain why you're there hanging around looking at people if you don't know anyone there it's not necessarily that you would be unwelcome actually you'd probably be very welcome um they'd be very curious about you but um yeah it just and there's not as much to see so I'm just assuming you're not going to visit a village also visiting a castle is not really a good option because that's really not a place that you can just wander in as a rando and poke around and look at things um it's a private it's private property essentially and it's kind of a quasi military installation so it's not really a thing for tourists you'll have to if you want to visit a castle as a tourist you'll probably have to visit now maybe maybe travel back to a period in time after the castles mattered you know but not in the Middle Ages okay so first of all health health is going to be a big concern uh you will need to get vaccinated for everything you can can and even then it won't be enough you will very likely get sick if you go uh especially you have to worry about GI issues gastrointestinal infections as someone coming in with shall I say a naive gut uh you will very likely um have your body will have a reaction to the native biome of the you know that that will be present in the food and water that you're consuming also many parts of Europe in the Middle Ages had malaria uh so you will also need to take anti-malaria medicine especially if you're in the southern part of Europe I don't think that's an issue in medieval England but I actually don't know for sure so you'll need to check about that if that's your destination uh so but anyway just something to keep in mind but I'm not a doctor definitely consult a healthc care professional before you go another important consideration is personal safety and this is going to be a big deal too you really have to put a lot of thought into this you should travel in a group uh don't travel alone and the reason I say that is there are a lot of Bad actors and not everyone is going to be a bad actor most of them are going to be totally cool people they're not going to try to hurt you but there are plenty of people who will do you harm uh crime uh is rampant especially like petty crime personal theft things like that but muggings or what we would call muggings today are not uncommon and uh that's especially something that Travelers need to worry about because a traveler is away from his support network um and and this comes to a really big difference between the way a modern society works and the way a medieval Society Works in a medieval Society you are protected by being part of a social network by being part of a a group that you were connected with and that group provided protection for you and it might be a peer Network like if you're a merchant being connected with a broader community of merchants through say a guild U or some other organization that was your support network also your family was actually a more important support network having cousins and brothers and sisters and nephews and you know having this like extended family where people are looking out for each other uh that was the the main protection that people had from violent crime uh because uh if someone were thinking about doing harm to you they would have to think about having repercussions you know having retaliation dealing with retaliation from your family or your broader support network um and the support network could take different forms so there's family there's your peer network of your colleagues in your field in your in your profession there's also hierarchical support networks like households so if you're a member of a a nobleman's household then you you know then if someone were to mess with you they knew that they were going to possibly you know have to deal with your entire household or you know the nobleman that you were a part of you know when you when you took on work with somebody you were considered to be under their protection a surf in a rural area was considered to be under the protection of the Lord that he worked under all uh relation ships in the medieval world and medieval Europe worked in these kind of ways where people were in meshed in Social webs with each other uh and and you know no one was an individual everyone was part of a group and actually of multiple groups in different ways and that was that in meshing of the social network that held Society together and from that arose a lot of the practices um and a lot of the kind of issues that you would come up as a traveler I'll be getting to some of these issues later on in the video but one one of these considerations is people in the Middle Ages had a deterrent against Crime in that um you know at least violent crime it wasn't a perfect deterrent but in the case of you know a a roving band of Bandits or thieves or whatever who might want to try to take advantage of you beat you up in the road and take your stuff um they would do that if they thought they could get away with it if they thought they didn't have to worry about retaliation a so traveling alone wasn't NE wasn't usually a good idea and that would vary actually from place to place in time to time especially if you have a situation where you know there were some periods of time in the Middle Ages where if there were a lot of famines or if there was like a succession of bad Harvest years that um drove a lot of people into destitution drove a lot of people out of the countryside into the cities looking for a better life and then they get to the city and they they can't find anything to do there they turn to Crime uh so certain times of certain periods of time certain places crime you know and the threat of violent crime was higher than at others but anyway just be on your guard all the time uh so travel in a group um don't go by yourself because you go by yourself you're a Target it's really common in the Middle Ages for people to carry protection uh and you should definitely do that you know carry a d a dagger learn how to use it um if you don't know how to use a sword don't bring a sword cuz you don't want to you because you won't know what you're doing but um a dagger or some kind of knife just something to help protect you if someone attacks you physically another thing to think about with regard to safety even if you're not personally attacked your stuff is likely to get stolen keep your valuables on your person at all times don't ever leave them unattended they will get swiped guaranteed and the thing is if someone stole your stuff there was no getting it back it was almost impossible to recover stolen goods unless it was like your neighbor and you knew he stole it then you could take him to court but um if you're just wandering around you don't know anybody in the town and then you get pickpocketed you don't have any recourse most crimes in the Middle Ages did not go punished and because of that when a criminal did get caught they gave that criminal really severe punishments and this is one of the famous things about the Middle Ages you may already be aware of this the very very severe bodily punishments that would be inflicted on people for what we would today regard as relatively minor crimes at least not not crimes that would rise to the level of necessitating maming someone or causing so much physical harm to someone but the reason that was done in the Middle Ages was that it was so hard to catch criminals the only way to deter crime was to make it make them think that in the unlikely scenario where they do get caught they're going to really regret it so is kind of like making up for the fact that most criminals didn't get caught you in modern society it's more common for criminals to get caught and also there are other things we have in modern society we have prison we have a prison system you know and and we have we have a police system that can enforce laws more effectively and so uh you don't need that severity of punishment anymore or maybe need's not the right word that's kind of a value judgment but um but anyway the prison system is another thing to point out in our modern society especially in United States but not not just in the US we have this you know very elaborate prison system for dealing with criminals in uh medieval Europe hardly anyone was imprisoned I mean you you might be imprisoned temporarily while you're awaiting a judgment or while you're awaiting execution and uh but that was mainly it uh when you got punished like if you did a crime and you go to court and they pronounce judgment on you the the punishment was usually inflicted immediately certainly that same day the only time that people in the Middle Ages got imprisoned for any length of time was when they were wealthy noblemen uh when they were part of the elite and they were captured in battle then they would be held um for ransom you know they would be they would be held until such time as their family could pay a bunch of money to set them free and so holding them in prison made sense because they were going to get a financial reward from holding that person in prison General imprisonment of like the general population of criminals in general did not make sense from a financial standpoint Point remember medieval societies were extremely poor by modern standards there was far less wealth in the economy and governments had way less wealth than modern governments do and this was true of medieval Europe it's not just true of that it was also true of larger more powerful Empires and states in Asia even though they were richer and more powerful than European States at the time like China and you know places like that they still were very poor by modern standards so it like it would be impossible for medieval culture to like have a prison system and have that be the way they punish people now let's talk about money you will need to bring money with you people in the Middle Ages used silver coins for everything so that's what you have to bring now different coins had different amounts of silver some mints would uh introduce more impurities or less impurities into the silver content so the silver would vary in Purity and that affected the value of the coin so different places actually everybody everywhere in Europe had the same like um denominations there were pennies Shillings and or I guess should say Pence Pence Shillings and pounds um and it was 12 P to the Shilling 20 shillings to the pound that was that's how it worked that will sound familiar to English speakers if you're from Britain if you're old enough you'll remember prior to decimalization like you know that's how British currency worked but that was also how currency worked elsewhere in the area that we're looking at in France Germany and Italy they all had these same denominations with the same amounts so and they had different names for it of course so in Romance speaking areas pennies were called U daer it comes from the Latin word da Denarius Denarius in Latin so Den in French uh Denaro in Italian uh in Germanic speaking areas they had some variation of the word Penny or in modern High German it's penic but some some like fenning or they would call it some variation of that that was the base unit and that was like the standard that was like the unit of exchange the penny that was what people used on a daily basis Shillings and pounds were never coin I shouldn't say never coined but rarely coined Milan did have Shilling coins but pounds were never coined you won't find pound coins they were only units of account so when like accountants or whatever were keeping track in the books they would they would keep track in terms of pound chilling pound Shillings Pence but uh in your day-to-day life you're only going to be work working with Penny coins silver pennies and half pennies and quarter pennies and stuff like that that's that's like the normal currency of exchange but because the silver content could vary from one place to another pennies in different places had different values relative to each other they had different exchange rates and the exchange rate was based on the silver content within the penny and so when you travel to an area like you'd go to another town you would have to change your coins for local you know youd go to a money changer and change your coins and um to get coins that local Merchants would recognize so they would know what the value of that was uh every town of any size would have money changers that was a standard institution uh this not the kind of thing you would find in a rural Village but but towns will have it okay now where should you sleep there are several options for this now if you're out in a rural area you don't have many options in a rural area you only have really two options that I can think of either you can stay with somebody say in a private home um and that would be like a very common thing uh that would be like for a traveler you're passing through people what what will happen I know I was going to talk about towns let me just talk about a village for a second if you're passing through a small V farming Village everybody's going to to notice oh a stranger you know and depending on like you know if they're on a main road where people pass by a lot that might not not necessarily attract a lot of attention but you know depending on how how remote the town is but people if you're stopping by and you're like looking around people are going to strike up conversations with you they're going to want to know who you are where you're going uh and uh so you'll need a backstory I'll be talking about backstory the backstory you need to set up later on in the video but people will be interested in you because people enjoy conversation uh the idea of having a conversation with somebody they haven't had conversation with before that would be very attractive remember people in the Middle Ages didn't have TV no movies no internet so you know they have to make their own entertainment by talking to each other that was a lot of what they did and so having somebody new to talk to and to hear from hear news from also you know there were no newspapers uh the way you got news was by talking to people uh talking to people who traveled through talking to someone like maybe you have a neighbor that went on a pilgrimage he comes back you want to hear all about the place he went to you know that's how news traveled in Europe so and that wasn't just there it was this was everywhere in the world at the time because there are new newspapers there is no news delivery system other than just word of mouth so um you will be welcomed into people's homes people will take an interest in you they will be very friendly with you they'll welcome you into their home that would be a very thing the other option in a rural area is a monastery monasteries and convents were required to take in Travelers now in the city you have another option there there are still monasteries and friaries in cities and you can find accommodation there you could also go to uh you might you know be invited to someone's home and and stay with them but a third option would be to stay at an inn uh like a like an establishment designed for taking in guests for the night now where to eat uh here again you have several options if you're staying at an inn they will have food there usually that you can purchase if you're staying at someone's private home they will provide you a meal another option is cook shops which are basically little takeaways or takeout joints they'll have a counter facing the street you walk up to the counter and you can order your food and either they'll make it to order or they'll have pre-made food they can sell you uh there's a variety of food you can buy this way especially food that like packs well you can carry with you like pasties that kind of thing uh and then another option would be um weekly Market where uh once a week Farmers or vendors in the area will come in and you can buy vegetables and fruit in in season everything's in season in the Middle Ages you can't ever buy anything out of season uh but depending on what time of year you're there that's another option okay now let's talk about the language barrier and this is a bit of a tricky situation because every small region had its own language or dialect depending on what you want to call it and so what language you you prepare for what language you study before you go depends on where you're going to go although we don't have good learning materials for every single language and dialect as it was spoken in medieval Europe most of the language materials we have for medieval languages are for languages that God a lot of literary work done so take French for example everywhere in France they had different dialects different every region every Province had its own language essentially that was not entirely intelligible with those of neighboring areas so if you were from Champagne For example you wouldn't necessarily be able to understand someone from piery or Normandy all of them had their own variation of old French but the old French of the textbook is the old French of Paris because that was the dialect that people wrote in when they wrote vernacular literature and same with old high German old high German that you learn in a textbook is not the way it was spoken everywhere throughout Southern Germany so if you learn a vernacular language be aware that you may still have some difficulty like communicating with people depending on where you go so if you learn old French and you go to Paris you'll be fine but if you learn old French and you go somewhere else like djon or something you might have some difficulty understanding people even though you studi the language but the local language or dialect is not your only option because Europe was a kind of Multicultural Place multilingual place and people moved around from one place to another and there were you know networks that spanned geographical areas and so because of that they used what we would call International languages to to handle those contacts from different cultures and the two most common situations where that would occur was in the church because the church was an international organization and so it used an international language for its internal communication that was Latin and then also Merchants would have long range contacts and they would have partners and people they were working with that lived in other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean and they needed to be able to communicate with each other and so there was a mertile language called lingua franka which was kind of a simplified romance language that was a goete language it was kind of a like an averaging out of different dialects in Italy and France and Catalonia such that you know Merchants from different parts of the Mediterranean would be able to communicate with each other but one interesting thing about lingua franka is it left its mark on modern day languages around around the region if you look at modern Greek uh modern Egyptian Arabic um probably also Turkish I don't really know um there are vocabulary words in those languages that derive from that late medieval early modern lingua franka of the merchants of the Mediterranean uh so anyway if you're presenting yourself as a merchant then knowing linga Franco would actually work out for you because you'd be able to you know communicate with people in different cities and and you should be okay um which language you learn and which language you use really depends on what your backstory is going to be now if you learn let's say you learn old French and I mean I'm going to be musing a little bit here so I hope you don't mind but let's say you're going to you're going to learn old French and then you're going to go to Paris I mean that would make sense old French is what they speak in Paris right uh the the you know the textbook old French uh but you're not from Paris or the ELD of France you're not from that area right and and you can't go around telling people oh yeah I'm from here I'm from a village 10 miles outside of town because you might meet somebody from that Village and they're not going to know who you are your backstory has to be that you're from far away um and uh let me talk about the backstory for a minute and I'll come back to the language thing but you will have to have a backstory you will have to have some explanation for who you are and why you're there because people are going to be curious and they're going to ask you um you I mean actually I should clarify it's not just curiosity I mean it is curiosity but it's not just curiosity so they also have to know who you are in order to know what to do with you and this is going to be something that's going to be kind of unfamiliar to Modern viewers especially if you're from North America or Europe or Australia or you know very egalitarian a very social equality oriented culture uh this is going to be a little bit weird you know because in our cultures we have this idea that everybody's on an equal footing everybody's equal to each other nobody's better or worse than anybody else nobody gets any special treatment that's that and we're so surrounded by that idea that's so ingrained in US culturally that going to Medieval Europe is going to be really weird because you go to Medieval Europe that is not at all what people think there there's very much an idea that people have different social levels people are on different parts of the ladder ladder is not even a good uh thing it's not something you can climb typically uh but you're on different levels of the I don't know the layer cake or whatever and um when you deal with somebody else you have to know are they a social super Superior or a social inferior and and there are a lot of social rules involved in how you deal with someone based on that so if you meet someone who's your social Superior you have to act very def deferentially to them you you know you might have to like uh get down on your knees to acknowledge them you'll have you know say very like polite language to them don't turn your back on them don't show disrespect you know all these like rules regarding how you deal with a social Superior and then there other expectations for how you deal with a social inferior and so because of those rules when people meet you they need to know what to do with you they need to know are you a social Superior or an inferior okay so you'll need a backstory that puts you in a certain class or a certain like Rank and then that will determine your social world so and first of all we have to come up with something that's it's plausible you need to become need to come from somewhere far away you can't be a local so uh you have two options you're either a merchant or a pilgrim I mean another option would be you're a refugee but um that's not a good idea people might try to take advantage of you so uh go with either Pilgrim or or Merchant if you or I guess you could try to do like I'm a Churchman you know you could do that that that would be interesting I mean if you know a lot of Latin if you're good at Latin you know a lot about the medieval Church you might try to pull that one off be a cleric but uh pilgrims could be anybody uh pilgrimage is you're you know you're traveling to some location in order to visit visit a shrine and and this was the most common form of what we would call tourism in the middle in the Middle Ages um there are a variety of shrines all over the place in Europe but there are only a few locations that would draw Pilgrims from a long distance so Santiago de compostella is very famous Rome would be another location Paris would be a a fair location to draw Pilgrims from far away uh canberries of course a a famous example from English literature because choster Canterbury Tales cologne in Germany um I guess probably vzet and you know there are different locations where that would be the case so if you're visiting a town that would be a major pilgrimage site that could be one thing or it could be on the road to a pilgrimage site and you're just stopping by for a few days that could be your backstory you you might not even be visiting you know let's say you want to you could you could visit Paris and tell everybody you're on the way to Santiago and you're just stopping by and that would be a totally legit backstory for you know people would totally buy that uh Merchant is another thing uh but then with a merchant you've got a you know you got to have a backstory about what do you trade in and where is your family located and you you know who are your contacts in this area and stuff um so that might be a little bit trickier to do um I personally would go with Pilgrim I think that would be the easiest but then you've got to decide then of course you're traveling with a group right you're not by yourself but you got to decide what is your what is your role in the town you came from are you a peasant are you a manual laborer are you a Craftsman do you have some trade or profession whatever that is research what the clothing would be for that person and wear that and then whoever you're dealing with whoever you're interacting with in the city those are the people that you would most likely have long conversations with those are the kind of people that would invite you into their homes and want to make friends with you and talk to you so decide ahead of time who it is in the city you want to be hanging out with and if you come into the city as in the guise of a wealthy Merchant you're basically not really going to have much interaction with the hired help you know or with the servants or with uh you know manual laborers or any of that and you're not going to have too much interaction with nobility you're really just going to be dealing with other Merchants especially merchants of your class especially Merchants who deal in the same item that you deal in which again is probably an argument against doing that because you really have to know what you're talking about oh I'm a silver Merchant oh I am too you know oh I got to let's have a 20-minute conversation about trading silver in the Baltic Sea and I'm like oh boy I'm not ready for that you know so think about think about the backstory uh and then coming back to language uh your choice of what to do with like what how to prepare your language skills for like come into this if your backstory is going to be that you're a church guy then you'll need to know some Latin not necessarily fluent not all clerics were fluent in Latin but they knew enough Latin to get by and they knew enough Latin to communicate with each other but if you're telling everybody that you're say a leather what do that called Tanner let's say you're you're selling everybody I'm a Tanner from a city 2,000 miles away and I'm on my way to do a pilgrimage if you know a bunch of Latin that'd be kind of weird or if you're telling if you're showing off your Latin skills people like why does a Tanner know Latin uh so be aware of that and people are uh used to meeting people from different places that have different dialects so they're used to dealing with uh language barriers so don't let that stop you from talking to people and people are going to definitely talk to you they're going to find out what's your trade where are you from they want to get a sense of not only what's your social rank in in relation to them but also who's your social network in the town who are you connected with in the town and they need all that information to know like how they should interact with you and if they find out that you're um a complete naive person who has no idea what's going on in medieval Europe um and you don't know anything then get ready to get swindled all the shop owners are going to see you as a mark and rip you off oh that's something about shopping I didn't mention shopping earlier all shopping is haggling in medieval Europe uh it's not like today where you go to someplace in Europe or North America and you go to the store and there's a price listed there that's exactly what you pay that is not how they did in the Middle Ages you will be haggling all the time and if they think that you don't know how much something costs they will rip you off uh just be prepared for that okay there's uh one more thing I want to talk about and that is what if you're not a white Christian and I guess I should clarify White Catholic what if you're not a white Catholic what do you do because obvious obviously almost everyone in Europe Western Europe in the Middle Ages was white Catholic okay well let's deal with this first of all let's let's cover what if you're not white what if you're you know what if you don't pass as European um you don't have to be as worried as I think you might be racism as it exists today did not exist in Medieval Europe I mean they did have Prejudice but it wasn't like it is now like nowadays there are a lot of white people who think black people like lack um intelligence they lack morals um you know they have no uh self-control they have all these ideas those ideas did not exist in the Middle Ages uh I think I don't know this for sure but my guess is that all come comes from slavery those are all my own personal Theory which I have not been able to verify because I haven't delved into the literature on this but my theory is these prejudices date back to slavery and they come from the slave owner slave Dynamic and the kinds of opinions that slave owners will have about slaves or the kinds of criticisms that slave owners will have of slaves they're lazy they're incompetent you know they're they're they lack intelligence and there are good reasons why slaves would appear to be those things uh but um but slave owners Were Somehow oblivious to to why why a slave would not seem to be hardworking it's weird slave slave owners are weird but um but but that's not in the Middle Ages there was some slavery in Europe actually but it wasn't race-based that's the difference and so people in medieval Europe did not automatically associate black people people are people with black skin with those negative traits like like happened in the 18th 19th centuries and continued on and has partially continued on till today so my point is if you're a black person visiting Medieval Europe you won't face exactly the same kind of racial Prejudice that you would if you were traveling to 19th century Europe but you know there there were ideas about races you know there there were theories like people in Europe knew that there were people in other parts of the world that looked different from them they knew that people in Africa had black skin they assumed that kind of the general theory um the only Theory from the Middle Ages that I'm familiar with I don't know if there were others but the theory that I've encountered was that it was because of the Sun that being farther south in the tropics you know the In the Zone near the equator you get a lot more sun down there sun is overhead all the time right and that kind of bakes you and it like Cooks your skin or whatever not literally Cooks your skin but you know like it was the sun's rays that made people dark and made made people have dark skin in Africa that was what people thought that was what medieval e Europeans thought um and I believe that was also what medieval Muslims in the Middle East thought too um but it's been a long time since I read about that so I could be a little bit mistaken actually medieval Muslims and medieval Europeans had very similar ideas about this sort of thing they believe that the EUR that the world was divided into climbs um which are like U ranges of latitude you know with the equator at one extreme and the polar region at The Other Extreme and then there were various zones in between and there were canonically seven climbs seven of these like parallel zones and the behavior of people or the kind of the nature of people people in different climes was determined by their environment you know it was a kind of environmental explanation for cultural differences uh you find this among Muslim writers in the Middle East talking about Europeans and talking about people from other areas but Muslims in the Middle East would talk about Europeans and saying well they are the way they are because they're so far north and it's so cold up there and then Europeans would say that about people in the Middle East and people in Africa well they are the way they are because it's so hot down there but when you show up I I think what you're going to encounter is just curiosity not necessarily fear um I know that there there's this popular idea that people in Europe in medieval Europe were afraid of anything that was different I don't think that's really fair I don't think that's accurate I think there's more to it than the Hat I they were very interested I mean they were interested in meeting people I mean okay I shouldn't generalize there were all there was a whole range of personalities obviously some people would have been really cool some people would have been um unpleasant you know they would have unpleasant personalities and that's true wherever you go and whenever you go uh but let me give you an example is actually not African but Chinese but there was uh there were these two Chinese um Christians from medieval China at the time of the Mongol uh Conquest was after after the Mongol conquest they traveled Westward from China to Iraq where the headquarters of their church was they were members of the Church of the East and so they traveled to Iraq and then once they got there the Mongol ruler in Iraq sent one of them on forward to Europe as a diplomat uh Mongols did this quite regularly they would get people who had some like something in common with the people they were going to contact so Mongols dealing with Europeans they knew they were Christians so they would find some Christian to send over there because they knew Christians would like to talk to Christians so this guy goes to Europe and he visits travels around Italy and France he's a Chinese guy you know he doesn't look European and he wrote A Memoir of his experience he had a great time he loved it he and he said everybody was really great everybody was really friendly you know that's basically what he says uh now he was going as a Churchman and as a diplomat and so of course that would affect how people dealt with him it meant that he mostly interacted with other churchmen and other political leaders or political people politically important um but I'm confident that if you're going as a Chinese person or someone who looks Chinese and you're going there with the backstory of I'm going there as a merchant or whatever uh that you'll do just fine now in modern times like 18th 19th centuries especially 19th century Europeans got really obsessed with with uh race and racial categories and they they like Define themselves as white and like that was their primary Identity or or you know or something some subset of that like German or whatever U but in the and and so what made you an ingroup or an out group was whether you're or not right so if you look at 1930s Germany ger Jews were on the out group uh because they were not like of the correct racial category and even people of Jewish descent who had converted to Christianity were still considered Jews in 1930s Germany right but in the Middle Ages What mattered was are you a Christian or not if you're a Christian you're in the in group if you're not a Christian you're in the out group so if you're an African Christian or an Asian chrisan Christian and you're going and visiting Europe or you're going presenting as Christian you know in the guise of a Christian perhaps then everybody will be cool with you they'll have no problem with you whatsoever uh but if you're going around telling everybody I'm a Muslim well you know they might not they they might be a little bit put off by that uh so um you know and and the reason that Chinese guy had such a great time in Europe was he was well first of all he was a diplomat representing a powerful foreign potentate but also he was a Christian and a Christian monk you know a Christian priest so um the the fact that he belonged to what we would call a different racial category didn't matter people in medieval Europe remarked on physical differences when Asiatic people would come into Europe you know um the Huns and the Mongols you know they came into Europe different periods but you know they writers with would remark oh they looked kind of weird you know they looked they had this these facial features or whatever they looked different from us um but uh so they were aware of physical differences but that wasn't the primary thing that they cared about in terms of deciding how they were going to deal with you again it's your class and your religion that really matters yeah so that's persons of color now what about religious minorities what if you're Jewish what if you're Muslim what if you're something else now if you're a Jew visiting Medieval Europe you've got a couple options you can either present as a Christian or present as a Jew presenting as a Christian is probably uh feasible if you're only visiting for a few days and you're not planning on going to the synagogue or hanging out with the Jewish population there you just want to like see the sites um just dress as a Christian tell everybody you're a Christian from far away they won't they won't question that um if though you want to actually visit the Jewish area the Jewish neighborhood and meet with the Jews go to the synagogue and see what it's like and you know that whole thing then you're going to have to present as a Jew you so make sure you dress as a Jew look up what were the rules for how Jews should dress Jews had usually it it varied actually by time and place but typically Jews were expected to dress in some distinctive way so that everybody would know just by seeing that they were Jewish and again this goes back to what I was talking about before where everybody had to deal with everybody else given some you know very intricate rules of social etiquette and they needed to know oh how should I be interacting with you right and if if if they couldn't tell the difference between a Jew and a Christian by looking at them from their point of view they felt like um kind of the social the social bonds and the social network is going to be you know start to fall apart so that they kind of made a big deal about that sort of thing so uh so yeah uh you will probably face some Prejudice if you're presenting as Jewish you're going to you know they're going to be a lot of the Christians are just not going to like you um but if you're hanging out in the Jewish quarter and going to the synagogue CU you know Jewish people typically just stuck to themselves they had their own kind of like separate social world that was separate from the Christian world and there were certain points of contact between those two worlds in like business dealings and things like that but uh typically the Jews kind of kept to themselves and you know and largely it was because they had to you know because they were forced to do that by the Christians um so that'll there'll be a choice you'll have to make as a Jewish person which way you want to go on that now if you're a Muslim or member of some other let's talk specifically about Muslims if you're a Muslim you want to go visit medieval Europe um don't tell people you're a Muslim now um it depends actually it depends on where you're going medieval Christians did not really get Islam they didn't they did not understand it at all as far as they knew Islam or Muslims were simply another version of pagan now Christians knew what pagans were they knew what Jews were they knew what Heretics were Heretics are like Christian Rebels those were the three categories of non Christian as far as medieval Christians were concerned those were the three categories they knew how to make sense of people who weren't Christian there was no concept of as far as you know they knew that there were probably variations among different Pagan groups but beyond that they didn't really think much about it generally speaking I mean the intellectuals did there were some people in Europe who like I'm talking about the general population um and in the general imagination Muslims are pagans if you read popular liter lature at the time when they portray Muslims they portray them as pagans worshiping Idols um you know setting up Idols in their temples and worshiping those and so generally speaking I'd say don't go around telling people you're a Muslim now there are some exceptions to that so there were some places around the Mediterranean that had Muslim merchants that would come and visit and even in Constantinople there was a mosque there were some Muslims living in southern Italy and Sicily there were also plenty of Muslims living in Spain obviously for obvious reasons but those would be possibilities for you to go and visit if you wanted to go there now um if you are some other religion like Hindu or Buddhist or whatever uh as far as they won't really know you know Hinduism that's like classic paganism as far as a medieval Christian is concerned Buddhism is an interesting one though uh there is an account by a guy named William of rubric who was uh originally from the Netherlands he lived in the 1200s and he traveled to Asia to meet with the Mongol con and in his travels he walked all the way over there and on the way he met Buddhists and it's so interesting to read him talk about the Buddhists because he clearly didn't really understand because he would talk to these Buddhists and the way he describes them he's like they wear yellow robes and they shave their heads and stuff and like yeah you you as the reader you're like oh they're Buddhists he's reading Buddhists and then he's like but you know they believe in the gospel they believe in like the one God and so oh they're Christians and and then he kept talking to them and he's like I don't get it they're they don't they're Christians but they don't quite talk like Christians he couldn't figure it out so um it's because like there was no way of fitting Buddhism into the category the mental categories he had but uh but that by I'm bringing that up to say that um it's possible that as a Buddhist people would just assume you're just a strange form version of Christian from from far in the East there was a substantial Christian population in Asia in the Middle Ages and it was not and and uh Christians in Europe were aware of their existence so uh being a Christian from Asia would not r eyebrows okay there's one more thing I want to talk about I don't know if I said one more thing before but this really is one more thing I have seen online when people talk about time travel to the middle e to to Medieval Europe they talk about oh I couldn't possibly go there because if I go there they'll hang me as a witch or they'll burn me at the steak as a witch because I'm wearing modern clothes and because I'm talk funny and whatever nope no no no no no that's totally wrong um people in the Middle Ages were not scared of people just because they were different they were scared of people who were different in a way that that challenged the social order and threatened social chaos like that would be an issue but uh just because you're strange and different and from a far away place they're not going to just assume you're a witch that's crazy and I've already talked about clothing if you show up in modern clothes they're not going to know what's going on you know cuz like I like I said like they need to know how to interact with you on a social in a social way uh like like should they be differential or not and you know what kind of language should they shoot should they use with you what kind of gestures should they use with you and they're not going to know that if you show up in modern clothing that looks totally foreign totally they have no frame of reference for modern clothing so that's why you should go in in local local clothing it's not because if you go they'll you as a witch in modern clothing it's that they'll um um they just won't know how to talk to you now if they see you arrive obviously that would raise some questions and you they'd probably assume there's some kind of Witchcraft at work but uh so make sure you arrive in in a manner and in a time where they would not notice so let's talk about a rival actually this is a good good thing to talk about you don't want them to see you arriving so how should you arrive you know there are going to be forests pretty near the town they're not going to have a lot of people in them people did not like going into the forest so you're not likely to you know be seen if you arrive there also you should arrive at night because there are no street lights or electricity or anything so night time was very dark and in fact if you want to be especially safe find out when the full moons are and don't arrive then you know arrive when when the moon would not be out it'll be extremely dark on the other hand make sure you don't arrive in a town at dark because towns typically had a curfew and if they find you violating the curfew they could throw you in prison and then put you on trial uh you want to avoid that whole business so arrive outside the town at night away from the roads um and then you can just go into the town when you're you know in the morning when you when everybody else is going in so that that's easy enough now if you're going around flashing your modern technology what's going to happen um it depends on what your modern technology does if somebody sees plastic or uh some strange fabric they're not familiar with that's not necessarily going to get you branded as a witch it'll just mean you have some EXO extic item people in medieval Europe were aware that farway cultures had exotic Goods that they did not make locally people were familiar with were were familiar with the idea of Asia and how exotic things come from Asia exotic foods exotic uh cloth exotic textiles and so if you've got some plastic doodad or whatever um they're going to be like oh what's that um and you tell them oh I you know bought this in Aleppo or whatever they're going you're like oh that's cool they're not going to try you as a witch um now what could you get into trouble now if you go around telling people I'm a time traveler um well here's what's going to happen realistically they're going to either think that you're crazy or a liar and either one of those will mean that they won't want to talk to you and like what's the point then like why are you going if you're not not going to if everyone's going to think you're weird and not want to talk to you so that's the main reason why you shouldn't tell people you're a time traveler I don't know predicting the future like if you go around telling everybody 700 years from now there's going to be a great war and blah blah blah like they're going be like what the heck dude like what are you talking about 700 years doesn't mean anything to them they're just going to think you're a crackpot if you tell them oh I remember reading in the history books 3 years from now the King's going to die of poisoning or whatever like don't say that cuz if it makes it seem like you're in on a plot or you have knowledge about a plot to assassinate the king then you're going to like come into you're you know you're going to be arrested you're going to be interrogated like don't even do that don't talk about anything that's going to happen in the Middle Ages don't talk about what an outcome of a battle is going to be don't don't do that but I want to address this this witchcraft concern I think people have this idea that everybody was being hung and burned left and right for being a witch in the Middle Ages let's clarify some things here the witch hunting craze was in the early modern period not in the medieval period it began in the late 1400s and continued on through the 15 1600s the 1500s was really the height of it early 1600s that was the height of the witch craze that's not medieval through this whole video I'm assuming you're visiting 1100s 1200s 1300s you know kind of time frame witch hunting wasn't a big deal then you know let's understand witchcraft what is witchcraft what's the deal with that now witchcraft was understood to be manipulation of unseen physical forces people believed that there are all these forces in the world that were there that could be manipulated analogous to magnetism obviously you know in in case of a magnet you have this object that can act on other objects from a distance there were obviously some invisible forces radiating out from that magnet and they thought there were other examples of this sort of thing and so uh using some kind of incantation in order to affect some you know some outcome somewhere else cause harm to someone or to you know do whatever uh they believe that those that that was a they believed that that was what we would phrase as a scientific thing is acting on physical matter and energy it was just doing it in a way that the general public didn't know how to do and so knowledge of how to do that came from ancient books or this is the idea like if you you get some kind of training actually it doesn't have to come from books actually it can come from oral tradition so you you'd get some kind of training in how to manipulate nature um you know and then you could go and do that U and so the fear of Witchcraft is the fear that someone would use that knowledge to harm someone now if you pull out a smartphone and you show them your you know uh Flappy Birds or whatever Candy Crush they're going to see this screen with all this stuff moving around they're going to assume that's magic they're going to call it magic um but whether they hang you for it whe you know whether they try you as a witch I think depends on whether they see that as a threat versus a novelty I don't recommend showing off a piece of tech like that just because it could draw negative attention you might have criminals who want to like attack you and beat you up and steal from you you don't want to flash your goods around to have thieves find out that they can take something from you you know you you don't want to do that that uh so it's just not a good idea from that point of view whether you be tried as a witch would you know it's not for sure but it is possible especially if there's some like coincidence that happens so if you show up and you're flashing around your fancy Tech makes people think you're a magician and then the local Bishop drops dead from an embolism they might connect you with that right so it's just not worth it it's not worth trying now another question I actually saw this on a Joe Scott video he did a Q&A video and somebody had asked him well what if um what if you go in medieval Europe and you try to explain to people germ Theory and he's like oh yeah you know blah blah blah be they think I'm a witch um germ theory is not necessarily going to get you in trouble talking about germ Theory uh most people would not care I dare say here's a situation people in medieval Europe had different theories about things um I didn't talk about the healthcare system system so to speak in medieval Europe but here's an example of it in medieval Europe there were different systems of medicine there was a system of medicine where uh you would uh learn Latin in order to read ancient texts and then you would go to university and study medicine and you would read all these old texts of ancient medical writers you know you read galin for example and you read all the commentaries on galin and you would learn essentially that old that ancient Greek helenistic Greek medical knowledge that had been passed down through the centuries and and then you would work as a doctor and you would prescribe medicine and you would diagnose people's illnesses you know using galenic style medicine but not everybody used use that there was also and there were there were other medical practitioners there were surgeons and Barbers that would do things like extracting a tooth or fixing a a broken bone or you know amputation or things like that that was more of a trade they didn't really have a medical theory that they worked with they just knew about the actual Act of amputation the actual Act of setting a bone you know stuff like that um and then there was another kind of area of medical practice so to speak using that term loosely which was kind of the um folk medicine that would be used in an area which was typically passed down through women lines of women from mother to daughter and they would have ideas with like okay you've got a scratch or a boil or whatever here's how you treat it you go get these herbs and you do this sort of thing and it was a combination of actual practical things like people knew that if you got an injury if your skin was broken pour wine over it before you bandage it up um they didn't know why wine helped they just knew it did and we know wine helps because the alcohol kills the germs they didn't know what that mechanism was they just knew that's what helped but then that would be com combined with what we would regard as completely like superstitious things like um oh I can't even think of the examples but the examples get really ludicrous actually um and for them it was all just the same mass of practice and Theory but anyway let's let take that wine example let's say you you come across uh someone who's got a gash in their arm and the local woman or maybe their cousin knows about this stuff cousin comes over and she's uh cleansing it with wine or vinegar and you're like oh you know what you're doing you're killing germs let me tell you about germ Theory the reaction is going to be like okay whatever you say man like I don't see them I don't see the germs you're talking about but I guess so they don't care they're not going to say oh foreign ideas let's burn you at the steak they're not going to do that they're just going to be like whatever dude you know I guess that's what you think um so I I think it gets a little bit my point is I is a little gets a little bit overblown when people think oh if you're a time traveler in medieval Europe you're going to be burned at the stake as a witch um no I mean there are situations where you could get into that where that could happen but if you're prudent and you don't draw attention to yourself you don't go around blabbing that you have all this fancy technology I don't think you need to worry about all right so that's it uh that'll be it for now this kind of a long video uh check out the suggested reading to do further reading about this before you go um I'll have it scrolling on the screen and in the description and uh have a good trip good luck stay safe

Channel: Premodernist

Views: 2,476,522

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Id: -aSdFrPnlRg

Length: 60min 16sec (3616 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023