Probably true of most peasants, but not merchants, mercenaries, masons, or shippers. Merchants and their goods traveled all over Europe in the Middle Ages.
Sure. There were people who traveled far and wide for military or commercial reasons. There were city dwellers who presumably at least saw foreign merchants coming and going in passing. The point is that there were way more peasants than soldiers and merchants. The
average person was pretty provincial by modern standards, and probably lived, worked and died in a smallish community composed almost entirely of members of their own ethnic group.
Getting back to the point of the thread, I’m not sure why you keep pointing out individual counterexamples as though they disprove the overall trend. No one is arguing that there isn’t individual variation among large human populations. To take one example, Genghis Khan is supposed to have had reddish hair. From this, we can reasonably conclude that red hair was almost certainly highly unusual for a Mongol. For one thing, it was remarkable enough for writers to comment on. If every other Mongol male had red hair, they may not have bothered to note it. Second, the contemporary art of Mongols we have depicts them with dark hair. Finally, modern people from the Mongolian steppe who are descended from the Mongols of Genghis’ time look, well, Mongolian. If we didn’t have contemporary writers commenting on Genghis’ red hair, the safe assumption would be that he probably had dark hair. It would be entirely unreasonable to say “Genghis Khan had red hair, therefore we can’t predict what hair color a random Mongolian man might have had. They’re all equally likely.”
Turning back to the Virgin Mary, all I’m saying is that in the absence of any compelling evidence that her appearance was atypical in some way, the safer assumption is that she probably looked more or less like the average person from her time and place. That’s all. It doesn’t preclude the possibility that she did have some less common feature, like very fair skin or light eyes. It just means that it’s the less likely scenario.
As you said earlier, none of this matters in any real sense. It wouldn’t change our theology to find out that Mary looked Korean or Scottish or Amazonian. It’s just a question of historical interest. The question of racial bias (and to be clear, I’m not accusing you of this, this is a general statement about the way these threads sometimes play out) comes up when someone has a strongly negative reaction to images like those in the OP. Since it wouldn’t change anything spiritually significant if she DID look like that, what motivates people to balk so hard at the possibility?
It would be like if I told you “I think Bob is left-handed” and you recoiled and said “NO! Bob must be right-handed! He’s a great guy, no way he’s left-handed!” I might reasonably conclude you had some animus against left-handed people, because the normal reaction would just be to shrug and say “Oh, okay.”
