1000-1500

What were Black experiences in Europe like before the arrival of the transatlantic slave trade? How did medieval Europeans view the continent of Africa? Where did the Black St. Maurice and the Black Magus come from, and why have they persisted into the present? Discover the travels and lives of Africans in German-speaking Europe as they interacted with painters, writers, emperors, and priests. Often labeled as “Moors,” many Black figures stood at the intersection between religion (Islam and Christianity) and culture. Coming from “exotic” lands full of riches and the promises of new alliances, the Moor in the European imagination symbolized the ambitions of Christian universalism and the expansion of European empires.

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Culture

 

•   Iwein goes mad and takes on the appearance of a Moor (ca. 1200)

•  Interracial romance in Parzival (ca. early 1200s)

•  Parzival: A mixed-race knight joins the Round Table (ca. early 1200s)

•  Parzival: A mixed-race knight takes Christianity to the world (ca. early 1200s)

•  Black devils and demons (before 1240)

•  An Ethiopian among the demons (before 1240)

•  Duel Between Parzival and the Pagan Feirefiz (1443-1446)

•   Hermann von Sachsenheim, The Lady Moor (1453)

•   A dancing “moor” (1480)

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Politics

•  A letter from Prester John (ca. 1165-1170)

•   The emperor’s retinue (1194)

•  Abuissac concludes a ten-year free trade treaty with Emperor Frederick II (likely 1221/1222)

•  Emperor Frederick II rules over a cosmopolitan empire (ca. 1230s)

•  Emperor Frederick II impresses with his processions (ca. 1230s)

• Black servants and slave musicians at Frederick II’s court (1239-1240)

•  Moors on crests

•  Johannes dictus Morus (d. 1254)

•  Crowned Moors on crests (ca. 1263-1400)

• The Black chamberlains of the “false Frederick” in the Rhineland and Hesse (1284)

•  The “Coburg Moor” (ca. 1380-present)

•  Wild Men and Moors (ca. 1431)

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Black Saintly Figures

Queen of Sheba

•  Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (1181)

•  Blackening the Queen of Sheba (ca. 1402-1405)

•  The Queen of Sheba becomes a temptress (1411)

Saint Maurice

•  The legend of St. Maurice (ca. 434-450)

•  St. Maurice comes to Magdeburg (ca. 1013)

•  St. Maurice in Magdeburg (ca. 1240)

•  St. Maurice becomes a savage and a caricature on a family crest (ca. 1345-present)

•  St. Maurice in Bohemia (before 1367)

•  Statuette of St. Maurice (ca. 1460-1470)

Black Magus

•  Imagining a crest for the Black Magus (ca. 1370-1395)

•  Hans Multscher, The Adoration of the Magi (1437)

•  The King of the Moors submits to the Antichrist (ca. 1440-1450)

•  Hans Memling, Adoration of the Magi (1470-1472)

•  The legend of the three kings (1483)

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Travel and contact

•  Imagining a world centered on Jerusalem (early 1200s)

•  The Black man as heathen warrior (ca. 1390s)

•  Georg von Ehingen fights infidels in North Africa (1457)

•  Martin Behaim’s globe  (1492)

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