> “There were people with many different racial backgrounds, religious backgrounds, all present … in Western Europe,” Grollemond pointed out. But in the centuries since, a narrow, whitewashed vision of the past has frequently been perpetuated in popular fiction and fantasy versions of the Middle Ages.

This is a lie. This is an absolute lie. It is simply not true. There were no “different racial and religious backgrounds”. For medieval Western Europe, it was europeans ( for the americans, read white ) of different ethnicities, entirely catholic. There no other “races” and certainly no other religions.

“But but the jews” - No. A few of them were occasionally tolerated in the middle ages, for short periods of time before being expelled. Again, I am talking about the medieval period and western europe. Renaissance and after, as well as eastern europe are somewhat different but for medieval western europe, there most certainly were not different races and different religions.