Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Blackness
The Medieval Background \\ 57
Although before the fifteenth century a few Black people lived in Europe, such as
the trumpet and trombone playing slaves ordered to Lombardy by the Holy
Roman Emperor Frederick II around 1240, 20 their number was never large or well
distributed across the continent. Consequently, the kind of "marker" racism based
on gross somatic differences and associated most forcefully with the modern
United States and South Africa was rare. 21 In the Middle Ages ambivalence about
dark-skinned peoples in particular arose largely from encounters with texts rather
than from resentments arising out of personal interactions between people of different
colors. 22 But the texts that employed Blackness as a negative symbolic
marker for human beings were ubiquitous and penetrated a large number of genres.
Only a sampling can be marshaled here, but that sample will demonstrate
what was demonstrated above with regard to Jews and Judaism and for the same
time period, namely, the range of negative interpretative readings—allegorical,
moral, and mystical—to which medieval authors committed themselves.
Before doing so, however, it should be mentioned that as with any symbol
there were more or less conflicting valences, depending on cultural context and
tradition. 23 It was the Middle Ages, after all, that bequeathed the image of the
Black magus, one of the three kings, who followed the star and worshiped Jesus
as a child. The universalizing tenets of Christianity—its search for converts
among all people—helped to fix this likeness in the European imagination. The
now traditional Black king of the epiphany scene probably appeared for the first
time in art in the mid-fourteenth century, but his roots go back to the "positive"
depiction of Blacks serving the south Italian court of Emperor Frederick II in the
early thirteenth century. 24 The Middle Ages also saw pictures of heroic Black
saints, like Saint Gregory the Moor; word pictures of a fantastic parti-colored
(half-Black/half-white) courtly knight of mixed parentage, Parzival's half-brother
Feirefiz, a heathen who, once baptized, became a latter-day apostle; and the illustrated
legend of Saints Cosmas and Damien (where the miraculous grafting of a
Black man's leg onto a white man's stub is effected). 25 Indeed, one is tempted to
say that this countervailing tendency (to impute positive or at least equivocal
significance to Blackness and Black people as symbols) was richer and more powerful
than anything European Christians achieved with regard to Judaism and
Jews. Nonetheless, the weight of the evidence still points to a prevailing negative
characterization of Blackness and Black people.
One example of this can come from the so-called hagiographic romances of the
High Middle Ages. These vernacular stories, often based on ancient legends, were
the updated versions of the lives of the saints, adapted for a new lay audience in
the twelfth and later centuries. They were immensely popular, judging from surviving
manuscripts. The Life of Saint Margaret of Antioch is one such story. It
tells of the struggles between Margaret and various temptations, tempters, and
enemies. In the version recently translated by Brigitte Gazelles, we can read of the