By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
In the medieval romance tradition, peasants and other lowborn or villainous characters are depicted as “black”, suggesting that their skin has been colored by dirt or exposure to the weather. In the Norse saga tradition, one brother might be “black” and the other “fair”, suggesting different colors of hair or complexion, while in one particular saga, a “black” warrior fathers a son who is half black and half white: not speckled or piebald like Feirefiz, but divided vertically.
The Appellation of “Black”
So, in some cases, black meant “dark-haired or swarthy”, and in others it seems to have meant “dark-skinned”. Art historian Roland Betancourt has shown that there is similar ambiguity in Byzantine visual and written sources from this era. Indeed, he shows that a dark complexion was considered manly and noble, whereas a light skin suggested effeminacy.
However, women were not supposed to be dark-skinned, probably because that was a sign of ignoble, peasant origins.
No Distinctions at All
In the early romance epic, The Song of Roland, the warfare between Charlemagne’s Christian knights and King Marsilie’s Saracens is depicted as a contest of equals. There are no distinctions drawn between the warriors’ physical appearance, dress, weaponry, or manners. Even the villain of the piece is not the Muslim enemy but Roland’s own stepfather, Ganelon.
Indeed, a very striking feature of chivalric romances from the 12th and 13th centuries—the heyday of medieval vernacular literature—is the absence of any commentary on the somatic, cultural, and linguistic differences which we modern audiences would expect from stories that revolve around adventuring knights from all parts of the known, and unknown, world.
Time and again, heroes from Scandinavia, or Germany or Flanders, travel to Constantinople, or Africa, or Outremer—that is, in Old French, “overseas”—and are shown as being able to communicate effortlessly, fluently, and to interact seamlessly with counterparts.
They all share the same modes of communication, culture, tastes, expectations, and values. We are told occasionally about physical differences, but those differences don’t affect the outcome of the plot in any significant way.
How Things Changed
And yet this seems to change in the later Middle Ages. In her book, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages, Lynn Ramey has argued that we see Europeans becoming preoccupied with skin color in this later period, and that this drawing of the color line appears to be what she calls a “black legacy” that will inform early-modern ideas of race.
Other scholars of (mostly English) medieval literature, notably Geraldine Heng and Cord Whitaker, have shown that tales of chivalry and travel become increasingly attuned to bodily differences in the 14th and 15th centuries.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Medieval Legacy. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
A Sign of Inferiority?
One of Professor Whitaker’s prime examples is the early Middle English poem “King of Tars”, in which the dark skin of a “pagan” sultan turns white after his baptism: “His hide, þat blac and loþly was / Al white bicom, þurth Godes gras.”
In “Parzival”, from over a century earlier, Feirefiz’s colored skin does not indicate compromised virtue or a checkered career, while Belacane’s kissing of her son’s lighter-colored skin can be read as a sign of tenderness and longing for his absent father. By contrast, this later-English poem is making the point that blackness is a sign of sin and inferiority.
Skin Color and Race Thinking
For Professor Whitaker, this later medieval “race thinking” generated what he calls “black metaphors” that would become crucial elements in the systemic, “scientifically” supported racism of the modern era. Like Professor Ramey, he argues that these emerging discourses of blackness were woven together in a web that could, when needed, create an epistemology of blackness—that is, a “theory of knowledge,” a way of looking at human differences as “evidence” of something beyond appearances.
Hence, black skin was not just a fact indicating someone’s parentage or place of origin, it was also a proof of their inhumanity. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explains it, the epistemology of racism is what creates “the fact” of race. Or, as biologists and geneticists tell us, there is no such thing as race. It is not a fact, but a construct that only comes into being when one group of people wants to “other” another group, usually to justify a sense of superiority.
Origins of Anti-Semitism
Professor Heng has argued that we can also see what she calls “the invention of race in the European Middle Ages” in the ways that medieval Christians came to represent Jews as racially different.
She traces a process by which Jews’s religious and physical differences were seen as reinforcing one another. And she sees this starting to happen around the end of the 11th century, as mounting anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery created the conditions for the racialized “othering” of Jews in order to authorize their policing and persecution.
And what could be applied to Jews could also be applied to other groups on the basis of other allegedly indelible characteristics, such as skin color.
Words Create Reality
Now, all of the medievalists whose work we discussed above are scholars of literature, not historians. And the discourses they examine were powerful: they were not “just” words.
And yet, in many parts of the medieval world, and for most of the Middle Ages, racializing rhetoric and even policies based on it were always breaking down in the face of stubborn realities: the realities of cohabitation, intermarriage, collaboration, and migration—especially along coastlines, riverways, trade routes, and throughout the Mediterranean.
Common Questions about Racism in the Medieval Era
Peasants and or any lowborn or villainous people were referred to as “black”, because of their skin color which had become darker by dirt or exposure to the weather. Also, sometimes, black meant dark-haired or swarthy, while in some others it seemed to mean “dark-skinned”.
In the poem “King of Tars”, the dark skin of a pagan sultan turns white after his baptism. In “Parzival”, Feirefiz’s colored skin does not indicate compromised virtue or a checkered career, while Belacane’s kissing of her son’s lighter-colored skin is a sign of tenderness and longing for his absent father. Parzival also makes the point that blackness is a sign of sin and inferiority.
Black skin was not only an indicator of people’s place of origin, but it was also proof of their inhumanity. This could also be applied to Jews and to other groups on the basis of other alleged characteristics, such as skin color.
