I don’t consider myself an avid historian of Slavic exchanges historically but at least from everything I know it’s patently absurd to somehow implant a Mali Muslim into the service of a king who was directly involved in the crusades against the Ottoman Empire. From Varva:
6/10 The game takes place in one of the richest cities in Europe which was besieged by a massive foreign army. That´s the reason why the life in such a city is more diverse than the life in villages which were featured in the first game. 7/10 Musa came to Bohemia with an invading army as a member of the royal court of King Sigismund, whom he met thanks to his engagement at the court of Sultan Bayezid. He's an educated noble and renaissance man from the Kingdom of Mali.
So King Sigismund, a Hapsburg and king of Hungary, who was at war with bohemian Hussites (heretics) and was fighting a religious war supposedly hired a black Muslim retainer from an engagement with a sultan… who was already and repeatedly at war with the king and trying to take his claims in Hungary. Not only this but Sigismund was repeatedly engaged in the crusades against the ottomans and was notorious for fighting “heretics” and advancing Catholicism. How is any of that supposed to make sense?
Something hilarious to me is that with all these hoops they jump through to "justify" including a completely normal black person in these medieval stories, they're really driving home the fact that seeing a person like that would be completely out of the ordinary for the average joes of the time. It's something that cannot be brushed off as "business as usual" and would invite stares, questions, threats, all KINDS of potential interesting interactions, both good and bad. It's basically an Isekai situation.
And yet, they try to write the characters as "normal." Because being scared/fascinated by the differences of other people you've never seen before is obviously racist, and we can't have that, now can we.
Reminds me of super diverse period pieces you see today and how they twist themselves into knots trying to justify how ridiculous it looks
''History was a whitewash''
~Doctor Woke, visiting 1800 London full of blacks.
Oh yea. Since that was my first experience with it, it didn’t register but that was the last season of Dr Who I watched. His companion who couldn’t shut up about being a lesbian was another reason