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The black horse tender in exemplum 32 of Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor, a version of the "Emperor's New Clothes" story, is credited as the first black character in Castilian literature. However, the horse tender's portrayal as a wise and eloquent character is at odds with European Christian literary depictions of Blackness, which typically connote sin, the demonic, and the enemies of Christendom. Instead, I show how exemplum 32 draws upon an Andalusī Arabic tradition that associates Blackness with wisdom and rhetorical prowess. Texts from this tradition, such as Abū Bakr al-Ṭurṭushī's Sirāj al-mulūk, celebrate wise black figures, link Blackness to eloquence, and rehearse symbolic debates about the superiority of the color black. By considering not just the Latin Christian context but also the Arabo-Islamic one, we gain a more complete picture of how color, race, and other categories of difference are rhetorically constructed in late medieval Iberia. This not only sheds light on the cultural diversity of medieval Mediterranean societies and their literatures but also underlines the importance of historicizing racial categories and critically examining their functions.
