The past few years have been host to a number of discussions regarding supposed “historical accuracy” in games that portray Europe as a wholly white and nearly-entirely-male landscape. The fact that Mordhau, a game that draws heavily from the same aesthetics as neofascist white supremacist movements draw inspiration from, is grappling with bigotry and hate movements within their gaming community , comes across as disappointing, but unfortunately not surprising.

Games and medievalism have a strange and intersecting history, as many video games’ embrace of “sword and sorcery” aesthetics places them naturally in conversation with a mythical ancient Europe. Unfortunately, that is the same ancient Europe that became a hub for white supremacists seeking a convenient mythology to ground their beliefs in—a troublesome pattern that modern medieval scholars are acutely aware of.

Depending on your viewpoint and sympathy for the team behind Mordhau, developers and community managers behind the game have come across as either unprepared or unwilling to tackle the rising tide of bigoted behavior. But how did we get here? What about Mordhau makes it fodder for this vitriolic of a response from its playerbase? The answer lies in its setting: The Middle Ages are a period that people think they know well, but the popular imagination has been informed by the context in which the field of medieval studies emerged.

The idea that medieval European society was wholly (or at least, mostly) white Europeans is flawed on a number of levels, as explained by Dr. Helen Young, medievalist and professor at the University of Sydney. The construction of race as we know it today happened after the medieval period, generally during a time period of medievalist scholarship in the Enlightenment period of the mid-1700s, and had a distinct goal in mind when theorizing a mythical white middle ages, which would allow for colonialist and xenophobic ideologies to have an historical foundation.

However, lacking a coherent narrative of European racial dominance of the Middle Ages, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars took it upon themselves to invent new hierarchies of race among Europe and the world, leading to the modern concept of European whiteness as a blanket racial term that synthesized the “grandeur” of the Greek and Roman states with the “barbarism” of medieval fiefdoms. By folding in the Greeks and Romans into histories of European whiteness, the military might of the Romans, as well as the intellectual milestones of the Greeks before them, could enter a narrative of a grand, white history.

These narratives were, in turn, built upon by popular culture inspired by periods of medieval history, as explained by Shiloh Carroll. In fantasy video games, we know these stereotypes as they grew primarily from Tolkien: the dark and brutish orcs, the sturdy dwarves, the lithe and airy elves of the forest, and the structured and king’d hierarchies of men. These tropes of medieval-inspired fantasy may have started with Lord of the Rings, but it’s easy to see their lineage in games like Dragon Age, The Witcher, or even “low-fantasy” medieval simulations like Mordhau (not to mention the official Lord of the Rings games).