Medieval Europeans’ geographical ignorance reduced Africa to crude caricature

Evidence

In western Europe, its peoples isolated from the centers of civilization by geography, the rigors of transhumance and resettlement, the absence of urban centers, and the lateness of their development, the subsequent dominance of the Mediterranean area by Muslim peoples proved to be catastrophic for their knowledge of peoples beyond the eastern fringes of the European peninsula. As one example, in the mid-thirteenth century, Bartholomew Anglicus observed with unjustifiable certainty: … Ethiopia, blue men’s land, had first that name of color of men. For the sun is nigh and roasteth and toasteth them. And so the color of men showeth the strength of the star, for there is considerable heat… . In this land be many nations with divers faces wonderly and horribly shaper. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 446

Categorization

• CANDY: Bartholomew Anglicus’s ‘roasteth and toasteth’ explanation of Black skin color is a vivid, quotable medieval absurdity.