I work in an art museum. Among our exhibits is a gallery of arms and armor, which of course is always a big draw. The other day, as I was walking through, I heard a little African-American kid ask his mom if there were any black knights, and she said no, which I could see disappointed him. I kind of wanted to stop and tell him about Sir Palomides, who was a black knight, but I didn't. In any case, since it's Black History Month here in the US, I thought I'd do a bit more reading about Palomides and other black characters in the canon.

I was surprised to find that I was unable to actually find references to Palomides (and his brother Sir Safer) as being specifically black, instead of a "Saracen" (Saracen of course often referred to Muslims, specifically Arab Muslims, but it could also be applied to any non-Christians, including Vikings). My first exposure to him had been through T.H. White's The Once and Future King, in which Palomides appears as a "blackamoor," but I was unable to find references to him as such in Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Wikipedia, the Arthurian Encyclopedia, the Camelot Project, or any other of the usual suspects.

Perhaps it could be argued that to many, all Saracens were black: below is an image meant to depict Saladin, a Kurd, who for the most part are relatively pale.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Richard_vs_saladin.jpg

I've also seen other medieval illustrations of alleged Arab Muslims which bore rather striking resemblances to the racial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackface) caricatures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickaninny) of African-Americans from the late 19th/early 20th century, though I cannot find them online. So perhaps it could be argued that by referring to the character as "Palomides the Saracen," that it would be understood that he was black; still, I'd like something more solid.

While researching this issue, I came across a reference to a medieval Dutch romance called Morien, about a black knight of the same name. Forums poster Morien, would you know something more about this story? I'm afraid I can't find anything online besides Wikipedia.

Edit: I'm dumb, here (http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/morien.html) is the text of Morien.

There's Esclabor, who is recorded as a lord of Babylon and the father of Palomides, Safir and Segwarides.

I'm sure I also remember reading somewhere of an African or Egyptian knight who is supposed to be something to do with Prestor John, but I can't remember where I read it. I'll have a dig through the Arthurian Encyclopedia later and see if I can find it in there.

Phyllis Ann Karr's "Arthurian Companion" suggested that, when T. H. White referred to Palomides as "black", he meant "non-Caucasian" rather than "African-American" (the latter term, of course, would be anachronistic in this time period), but added that Palomides could indeed be black in the latter sense.

I work in an art museum. Among our exhibits is a gallery of arms and armor,

I see by your spelling you are a USian, so I feel qualified to reply

First, race was not a primary identifier in the Middle Ages
Europe had dozens of kingdoms, but their unifying factor was Christiandom
Certainly

First, Parzifal has black knights, and a gorgeous queen too, pitch black if I recall
It is a rare example of a medieval literature having respect for foreigners and women
Parzifal's father marries her then abandons her because it wasn't a Christian marriage
(He also has an indestructible helmet carved from a diamond, with a weakness)
Their child is Sir Firefaz, who is piebald colored
(although if one is going to invent strange genetics, I think a man half white and half black, right down the center, is kind of cool too)

Among Americans black often = all people of color, and among crackers the "one drop rule" still seems to exist, so the precision is hard to determine outside of context.
AfroAmerica includes all of the north African people of color, and in that sense I think anyone identified as Saracen could be included.
It is difficult to justify manuscript illustrations as models, unless your Saracens are going to have green, red and yellow skin. (The same thing is said about the horse colors on the Bayeaux Tapestry)
In my imagination Sir Palomides is a man of color


here (http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/morien.html) is the text of Morien.

Thank you!
I've not seen that! cool

My final word:
KAP encourages inclusivity and sensitivity to modern tender spots of race, religion and gender
I did get a check on my Pride once when Suzanne convinced a reluctant friend to play once who declared, "Only if I can make a black Jewish dyke, I'll play."

First, race was not a primary identifier in the Middle Ages
Europe had dozens of kingdoms, but their unifying factor was Christiandom

Yes, but my primary interest is in how it applies to modern race relations in the US, particularly kids like the one I mentioned in my anecdote, who may feel they are being excluded from participating in medieval Western history because the canon excludes people who look like them. I'm half Japanese, and I recall feeling similarly when I was really young, five or six or something. It is, for whatever reason, very important to me to be able to look kids like this in the eye and tell them that some of King Arthur's knights were indeed black, and at least one of them was a total badass.


First, Parzifal has black knights, and a gorgeous queen too, pitch black if I recall
It is a rare example of a medieval literature having respect for foreigners and women
Parzifal's father marries her then abandons her because it wasn't a Christian marriage
(He also has an indestructible helmet carved from a diamond, with a weakness)
Their child is Sir Firefaz, who is piebald colored
(although if one is going to invent strange genetics, I think a man half white and half black, right down the center, is kind of cool too)

Said black knights are also weaker than the European knights like Gahmuret or the knights of the king of Scotland, and the queen "nigra sed formosa" is very much self-conscious of her blackness; you can see why this might be problematic, despite the romance's relatively progressive treatment of race.


AfroAmerica includes all of the north African people of color, and in that sense I think anyone identified as Saracen could be included.
That's my sense as well, but I could have sworn there was an actual textual basis for Palomides' blackness. Didn't Isolde say something along the lines of "No, I don't love Palomides, he's too black" or something? This is driving me crazy.




My final word:
KAP encourages inclusivity and sensitivity to modern tender spots of race, religion and gender
I did get a check on my Pride once when Suzanne convinced a reluctant friend to play once who declared, "Only if I can make a black Jewish dyke, I'll play."

I've noticed in a lot of fantasy that when the creator does include persons of color in a Western European-ish setting, a distressing number of fans will decry the alleged ahistoricity and "political correctness gone mad." Setting aside the worrying fact that these people find black people to be more threatening to their verisimilitude than orcs, and the medieval examples of a diverse literary world, it just feels very backward and willfully ignorant. Thanks for this.

I've noticed in a lot of fantasy that when the creator does include persons of color in a Western European-ish setting, a distressing number of fans will decry the alleged ahistoricity and "political correctness gone mad." Setting aside the worrying fact that these people find black people to be more threatening to their verisimilitude than orcs, and the medieval examples of a diverse literary world, it just feels very backward and willfully ignorant. Thanks for this.

Its also quite wrong. All the "great" eras of european civilizations had people of color in them. In most of the medieval world they were a novelty, in the positive sense.
Greeks and Romans being the obvious example.
Heck even Vikings brought home scholars, warriors and slaves of color.

So in almost any such setting there would be options to insert people of color without any necessarily negative aspects.

Yes, but my primary interest is in how it applies to modern race relations in the US, particularly kids like the one I mentioned in my anecdote, who may feel they are being excluded from participating in medieval Western history because the canon excludes people who look like them.

Yes, thank you. Concrete examples.


I'm half Japanese, and I recall feeling similarly when I was really young, five or six or something.

My kids went through the same thing. I recall my daughter once saying, "Damn it, I'm not an Other." My "Mexipino" son just checked every box. My "awareness challenged" students in Mexico were so astonished at the mix in my grandson they had to write it down. (Not everyone, btw).


It is, for whatever reason, very important to me to be able to look kids like this in the eye and tell them that some of King Arthur's knights were indeed black, and at least one of them was a total badass.

Excuse me, M'am, excuse my interruption, but may I offer some information on your son's question? (sit on floor) This is cool stuff, huh? Well, I read a couple of stories about knights and they are mostly about white guys, but there is one badass knight who is kind of the best guy in the whole story. His name is Palamides, say it, Sir Palamides. Yea, he chases this monster all around and stuff. But my favorite is a man named Saladin, did you ever hear of him? One time a man knighted him, so he was a knight too.
Which one [armor] do you like best?


Said black knights are also weaker than the European knights like Gahmuret or the knights of the king of Scotland,

Well, so are all of the knights of Christiandom :)


and the queen "nigra sed formosa" is very much self-conscious of her blackness; you can see why this might be problematic, despite the romance's relatively progressive treatment of race.

Ouch. Had missed that.


That's my sense as well, but I could have sworn there was an actual textual basis for Palomides' blackness. Didn't Isolde say something along the lines of "No, I don't love Palomides, he's too black" or something? This is driving me crazy.

I don't recall that myself anywhere.
Although I wouldn't be surprised to find it somewhere, overall am happy that it's so difficult to find overt racism in the canon.
I actually find the Arthurian material quite free of a rabid bias even against Islam, which was an on-going worry for the whole of the Middle Ages. In Malory the heroes fade into the Crusader sunset, and one passing mention as background for a Gawaine story (sorry, don't have the book here). Parzifal wages a war against Pagans, or uses his pure religion to justify his massive bloodshed anyway.
But imagine how we would feel if the Arthurian canon included the glorious slaughter of infidels, burnings of Jews and hunts for Pagans across the frozen landscape of the Balkans?

Of course, Islam doesn't even exist yet during King Arthur's reign (in the "Pendragon" chronology, Mohammed would be born around five years after Arthur's passing - and longer than that in earlier dates for Arthur's end, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's 542).

I've read that "Perlesvaus" does bring in more of a Crusader-mentality (and in an especially bloodthirsty way), though it's had more of an "Alternate Universe" feel in other ways, such as Guinevere dying of grief after her son by Arthur is killed by Sir Kay, that keeps it from the mainstream path of Chretien de Troyes and Malory.

I've read that "Perlesvaus" does bring in more of a Crusader-mentality (and in an especially bloodthirsty way), though it's had more of an "Alternate Universe" feel in other ways, such as Guinevere dying of grief after her son by Arthur is killed by Sir Kay, that keeps it from the mainstream path of Chretien de Troyes and Malory.


It's also apparently the most anti-Semitic work among the more well-known stories, and the author has something of a morbid fascination with decapitation. It does have some really cool scenes, and I'm glad some of it made it into the GPC, but I can't say I'm too distressed to see it fade into the background.

Public domain translation:
http://omacl.org/Graal/

This is the on-topic bit!
For what it's worth, wikipedia notes a reference from one of the sources to Palomides being the son of the prince of Babylon, which would make him middle eastern, specifically from the Akkadian culture. A modern day Iraqi.


Some calculations.
This is all very rough, but based on a cruise around some current archaeology and anthropology websites:

The only identifiable african remains in Roman Britain come from a military setting. Not necessarily soldiers but from a militarised context. Eboracum roman military cemeteries give between 35 odd and 45 odd percent african(roughly two thirds, sub saharan, one third north). There were between 1 and 4 legions in Britain, depending on time period. Call it 3 legions. Between 1400 and 6000 men in a legion, again depending on period, less men later on. Call it 5000. I'm erring on the high side because we're looking for justification here but I'll be close enough for estimation. Let's allow three non combatants for every combatant. So that's 20,000 per legion, 60,000 "roman" people in total. in Britain at any one time. Getting on for half of those are people of colour. A later visiting emperor gave permission to settle and marry. Ok. Halve that for the % in the cemeteries gives us 30,000 africans in Britain at the end of the Roman period. Double that because we're at least a generation away from the Roman withdrawal. The population of Britain is reckoned to be 3.5 million at that point, though we do have a population crash after the withdrawal and a retreat from the urban setting which will dilute the black presence pretty quickly. Nevertheless there are probably still in the region of 30,000 identifiably black people in Arthurian Britain. These people aren't foreigners they are Britons.

30,000 in say 3 million. That's about 1%, which doesn't sound a lot. But there are (depending on source) up to 150 knights of the round table.

This means that just on the numbers, one of the knights of the round table from Britain is black.

Sorry for the maths,

GR

That's fascinating, please don't apologize! I heard about the discovery of a black woman buried in England here on these forums, but I never suspected it was so widespread.

By the medieval period, to Westerners Babylon was modern-day Cairo. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_(Egypt)) Still Arabic, but also in close proximity to countries like Ethiopia and Sudan.

A bit off topic, but I feel the need to share this image. (http://www.strangehistory.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/adowasd1.jpg) Though it depicts a 20th-century battle between the Ethiopians and Italians, if one were to replace the rifles with bows then it could easily pass for a medieval image, down to St. George leading the Ethiopians to victory.

Cool image.

The woman near York got media coverage because there was some (ambiguous) evidence to show she may have been a high status individual (posh grave goods and a stone tomb but a we'll miss you note in low class latin from her friends) and that ran contrary to the usual presumption.

It's a fascinating subject and one that I'll admit I didn't know much about before you asked the question.

Thanks for the inspiration,

GR

May I offer a historical suggestion of Antara ibn Shaddad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarah_ibn_Shaddad

Not a European knight, but certainly a knight, and a historical one to boot. It could definitely be argued he would be one of the most chivalrous of famous historical knights. He has all the elements in droves: a passionate love for a noble lady expressed in poetry of his own composition, tales of battle from horseback, a contempt for those without his skill at arms. His father was Arab and his mother Ethiopian, very cool. He's poetry is quite good in Arabic (from the paltry amount of Arabic poetry I can read).

Unrelated to the topic of Palomides etc, but as a sideways comment for the the original poster, you may care to note the following.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aoa/q/quilted_cotton_horse_armour.aspx

http://pinterest.com/pin/73394668897563213/

Chris

we ALL know PALOMYDES is the bomb! ;) LOl trystan is my favorite knight :) sort of! Strangely even though they spend their lives as bitter rivals , PALOMYDES is tied with trystan for the honour of my favorite knights! :) I LOVE knights that lose their heads over a lady! Passion among passions!! and when i was a teen let me tell you...i COULD readilt identify with being snubbed hard by a lady i liked , who liked some other guy way more! hahah
Palomydes is great! he seems to me to be a very deep character! :)

Well though i DO understand that your sad that the african american child may be sad that there were NO black knights( though i believe there were quite a few!) ;) I am not any more sad when i read the Chinese epic Romance of the three kingdoms and there are zero white dudes! LOL I LOVE those characaters and that amazing epic tale , but the simple fact is that white dudes just werent involved!! hahaahahahah
so dont fel too bad for that child. he can STIl enjoy the tales. :) and NOW he can play the GAME! yay!! and make his OWN story of a Black knight of the round table!! :)

Sorry to bump this thread, but I though this was a nice topic and like to add my 2 cents. Hope that's ok.

I find it strange that most people here see Sir Palomides as being "black". That characterization is only found in White's treatment and it's not based on anything, to my knowledge, in the original sources. It may also refer to the way that "black" is used (in the UK it seems, according to some sources) to mean anyone that is not "UK-white". Anyone from Southern Europe would probably fall into that description too. Even people from Ireland, Scotland, etc were not considered "whites" under some definitions of "white" in the UK. In the US, Irish, Germans, Greeks, Italians, etc, were at some point or another not considered white either. Sir Palomides was a Saracen, and that's pretty much as far as we can go, and Saracen includes no real racial description, since even Norseman were at some time called Saracens by the Byzantines. It's fine to say that Palomides was black within the context of your own version of Pendragon, but to make the case otherwise that he was black in the AfroAmerican sense makes no sense to me.

I'm making this point because I'm not sure telling the Afro-American kid from the original post that there were "black" knights" makes much sense. I presume that Afro-American is used in the US mostly to designate people whose ancestry is clearly of Sub-Saharan Africa. That kid probably want's to know if there were knights that looked like him. In what way would that kid feel identified with some random guy from say, Tunisia, that probably would look like any random Italian or Greek? Or Saladin, for that matter, that for all we know, could look more "European" than Nicolas Sarkozy, the ex-president of France? Most probably it would just bring disappointment later on.

Perhaps a much better way to deal with this would be to tell the kid that, for all we know, there probably were important horseman in the medieval Muslim armies that came from lands were people were black, the same way that many roman legions included people from Nubia, etc. Some of these people were probably quite important, plus Muslim lords and important horseman were for all purposes "knights" in everything but name. But saying that Palomides was black just because he is called a Saracen in the literature makes no sense whatsoever. This kind of reminds me of some black groups in the US some time ago that wanted to identify Hannibal as an Afro-American hero. Well, he certainly was from Africa, but so were the whites from Apartheid. Hannibal, for all we know, could have been whiter than Silvio Berlusconi, since he was from the Aristocracy of what is today Libya.

I think there are some black knights in the literature, though. One of the wives of Percival's father does seem to have been "really black". I'm not sure how the original texts describe her, but I think her skin is described in that way. And Percival's brother description does lend strength to that interpretation. Another one seems to have been The Invisible Knight from Malory. I don't recall his name, but in the "translation" by Keith Banes he is described by another knight as being "black-faced". I don't know if Malory's original text describes him in such a way.

Anyway, my two cents.

It would be more nearly true to say that there were no white knights because there were no white people.

I'm generalizing, but based on my reading and studies, it seems to me that most Medievals divided humanity based on religion, loyalty to a lord, family membership, guild or trade membership, rank, and so on.
'Race' as many people in the US or the UK today think of it was not a part of the worldview. Simply put, it was not noticed because it did not exist. Comments in literature about the exotic appearance of foreign peoples should not be read through an anachronistic lens of racial ideas from the 18th or 19th Centuries.


YMMV

Our current racial categories are arbitrary and culturally specific. The United States census has a list of several "races" and a separate question for "ethnic group" which divides the human race into "hispanic" or "non-hispanic." Not surprisingly, no other country determines whether people are "hispanic" or "non-hispanic." While the U.S. considers everyone from the Middle East to be legally white (based on [precedent from segregation days) despite rampant prejudice against them, the U.K. census has separate categories for Pakistanis, Indians, other South Asians, East Asians, etc.

Obviously everyone in the world is not identical, but where you draw the lines to create categories is completely arbitrary. Races are social constructions. If you want Sir Palomides to be black, then I say "Why not?" For that matter, why not make Sir Galahad black? It's a goddamned myth!