Postby Marcus Woodhouse » Fri Aug 06, 2010 2:02 pm
English xenophobia of the time sems (to me) have been based not on colour of skin but on how much of a threat the alien was to either life and property (ie are those Bretons/ Nomans/French/Channel Islanders/Scots/Welsh going to act as fifth column in an enemy invasion) or trade (ie are those Flemish/Gascons/Germans/Genoese/Venetians/Florintines/Portugese/Icelanders going to undercut me and make me lose cash).
That seems (to me) to have been the root cause of the various riots and parliamentery attacks upon their status.
When there is verbal attacks upon them skin colour only ever gets mentioned as an aside (ie in identifying that one of the Venetians attacked in 1452 in London was a black galley hand). More often it is the cut of their clothes, their hair cuts, their beards, their preference for beer rather than ale, or even in one sermon from 1482 the kind of sausage they eat!
The Church made no distinction between black and white Christians (an immediate effect of baptising a Arabic or African slave in Florence and Venice was the expectaion that they would then be set free, unless they were serving time as crimminals in the alum mines or on board a Florentine ship) or non-Christian black or white peoples (the latter were all to suffer persecution be they Jew, Muslim or pagan, though there was not by the 15th century many of the latter left to convert in Europe anyway).
There was conflict between Roman and "Greek" Christians and between different sects of Islam but this would have beyond the comprehension of most I'd suspect even if it did get in the way of Persians supporting the efforts of the Turks to drive out Venetian/Genoese settlements or Western nations coming to the aid of Constantinople in 1453.
It might well have been that once it had been established that a single Indian was not really a French spy or a Dutch brewer and knew the Creedo they would have been ignored as an irrelevence. It used to be the same where I came from nobody cared a hoot about the Vietnamese families that moved in once they established they weren't left footers or bowler hat wearers, I guess both sides figured they'd still be there to give a good kicking once they had settled the important task of doing over the Fenians or Proddies down the road and never got around to it.
OSTENDE MIHI PECUNIAM!