We know the Cyclopes ate humans, but what about Human Cannibals?
How common are human cannibals in Mythic Europe?
I'm no expert, but they were probably more likely to occur in 1220 than in our times. Consider the following:
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There were some means of preserving and storing food in the long term: Salting for fish and meat, smoking and drying for grains, pickling for vegetables, and fermentation for cheese.
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But these probably could not be achieved in quantity necessary to feed a village on their own, especially options that rely on salt (my understanding is that salt was very expensive for most people).
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Most people relied on staple crops as the main part of their diet; wheat, barley, rye, etc. Now consider that due to the limitations of the times, they were much more susceptible to disease, pests or bad weather streaks.
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You also could not simply import more food from elsewhere in most scenarios, perishable food and all that.
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And God forbid lets not forget the constant war between the nobility where men of the village could be levied to wage war on their lord's behalf, or riled up into a religious frenzy to join a Crusade half a continent away. If you're particularly unfortunate your supplies for winter could be seized, or the (enemy?) noble could go full "sorched earth" on your farmland.
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Now compound all of these and most villages are always 1 or 2 bad harvests from food shortage or outright famine...At which point you would start looking for any means of survival and eyeing up that one neighbor you didn't like all that much...previously.
Granted, this is not accounting for the supernatural elements in Mythic Europe; Demons and some Fey might even encourage this. Other fey could be more useful in prevention of such. Dominion might help hinder degradation into such behavior. Magic certainly has the means of preserving and amplifying the harvest, but it isn't widely available.
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What do you have in mind? Stable canibalist cultures or freak incidents.
In our time, and our part of the world, I remember two true stories; the plane crash behind the movie Alive and a serial killer in Germany or Austria. I am sure that's not the only serial killer, and I do not think the other case is unique either. I would think such freak incidents are exactly as common in 13C as today, that is common enough to make your story plausible, and rare enough to make the story shocking. Frankly, that's all we need to know for a story-telling game.
Stable cultures is a diffrent matter. Why do you think they exist at all?
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Cannibalism happened during wars - where a party could find itself cut off from supplies for longer times. An infamous and rather well documented instance happened around the siege of Ma'arra (1098) during the 1st crusade.
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I'm with loke on this one - freak occurrences exist, it's unlikely that stable cannibal cultures exist.
However, in all times people have told stories in which their enemies regularly commit atrocities, including cannibalism, so "a monstrous tribe of human cannibals" is a form that faeries might take.
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I wonder if @OneShot 's example was meant as a freak incident. or if they were common enough to qualify as its own stable, martial culture ...
did it happen often enought to lose its power to shock?
That is hard to tell. Warfare within 13th century Europe had the purpose to change and afterwards restabilize societies. Stories about cannibalism did not help with that. I don't know even of reports of cottereaux - the universally despised mercenary-brigands - engaging in it in Europe.
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One thing to keep in mind that some stable cultures practiced ritual cannibalism, for example eating the bodies of their honoured dead. Herodotus describes this behaviour in some Scythian tribes, which modern archeological findings seem to confirm.
And let's not forget that technically every time there is a mass in Mythic Europe, the miracle of transubstantiation occurs, whereby wine turns into blood and bread turns into the flesh of the Son of Man - that the believers then eat (this is strict doctrine following the fourth Lateran council of 1215).
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This is true, but because of the unique kind of presence Christ's body is supposed to have in the Eucharist (i.e. in Ars terms it's not just a Muto Herbam (Corpus) effect concealed by an illusion), theologians would generally not have considered this anything like canibalism.
For instance, no one thought the recipients were being literally nourished by the flesh of Jesus, or that Christ's body was in any way damaged or broken in the chewing of the consecrated host. See e.g. Thomas Aquinas here, in articles 6 and 7.
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As said above, there are 3 types of cannibalism: necessity (the harvest has failed again and we're going to all starve, which kind of ties into the Hansel and Gretel story) and cultural.
The cultural splits into endo cannibalism (we keep the spirit of the tribe strong within ourselves) and exo cannibalism (my defeated foes are no better than pigmeat).
So for example 1225 is a terrible famine with war and sieges in the lower Rhine region, so odds are people could have been forced to resort to it, and even if they didn't there might be scary fireside stories about
it which would lead to faeries enacting such a story: hungry traveller comes knocking at the door, gets fed a bowl of meaty stew, and as reciprocity ends up strangled in their sleep and goes into the next batch of soup.
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Supposedly in the 14th Century there is Christie Cleek, and in the 16th Century is Sawney Bean and his clan.
I was wondering if they had antecedents around the 13th Century.
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As we are at grim fantasies, there is one about a political and military man of the 13th century, Conte Ugolino della Gherardesca.
He entered world literature mainly because of Dante, who knew the depth of hatred between Italian Guelphs and Ghibellines too well and made Ugolino's end a grisly example in Canto 33 of his Inferno:
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The early fourteenth-century Middle English romance Richard Coer de Lyon doubles down on its Islamophobia by depicting Richard Lionheart gleefully consuming Muslim flesh.
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In terms of cultural (ritual) cannibalism, I have seen analysis of the Dracula myth which suggest a Romanian warrior cult or subculture which ate human flesh to absorb the strength of the defeated enemies. Not going to vouch for its authenticity, but in Christianized Europe that is likely as close as you are going to get to even the possibility of ritual consumption of actual (as opposed to transubstantiated) human flesh.(not on transubstantiation- what the bread and wine are essentially being transubstantiated into is the divine body of Christ, which is in some ways a continuation of ancient pagan practices which viewed wine as the blood of Dionysus/Bachus or bread as the body of Plutus (not Pluto, a minor god of grain in Roman culture).
That being said, such rituals are likely a lot more effective when combined with faerie ceremonies or infernal rites, so in mythic Europe they might well be more common. A mallus Islam might encouraging the eating of infidel flesh as a way for "holy" Christian knights to gain power over the "infernal" Muslims they fight.
No medieval theologian worth their salt would have tolerated the notion of Christ's divine body. It's a human body, personally united to the divine nature in virtue of a single divine personal subject!
Ok, medieval theology rant over, back to rpg cannibals.
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I actually just posted about the Blood Libel over in Post a Day...
My understanding is that the idea that Jews were consuming Christian children's blood was not quite a thing in Mythic Europe. It would become part of the blood libel legend in 1475ish. But you could port the idea back to 1220. (Or I may be wrong about dates!)
Obviously taking the idea that Jews are actually consuming Christian blood as a real thing that happened in Mythic Europe would be setting your troupe up for a deeply antisemitic story. I do not recommend 
But you could use the story to deal with Christian anxiety around cannibalism, and the crimes they commit in the name of preventing it.
One of the big milestones in the blood libel is the story of the young Werner in Bacharach, but that is over a century after the game start, so while one can make allusions to anti semitism in medival europe, the infamous event remains out of scope (Wernerkapelle (Bacharach) – Wikipedia)
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At some level, it would be hillarious have have my tradition of Black Witches condemn cannibalism as "disgusting" and "just plain bad".
For context, they are a mongol infernal tradition. @Christian_Andersen knows what I'm talking about.
The blood libel is active in early 13C Europe, courtesy of English anti-Judaism: the William of Norwich story dates to 1144, and there were similar accusations throughout the final decades of the 12C in England. The libel appears to have migrated to the Continent by the 1170s.
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Trivia: Cannibal comes from Carib, the tribe the Caribbean is named for, who were reputed to eat people. Before European exploration of the new world and importation of that word, the term was "man-eater" or equivalent. In Iceland, the term is still "man-aetter". In Turkey (Turkish not being a major language in Asia Minor in medieval times) the term is "Yam-Yam", which I think is hilarious.
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