Acceso usuarios
Assessing the presence of Black Africa in Iberia through medieval visual culture is complicated by the multiple identities and meaning that medieval artists and viewers assigned to the dark-skinned figures that are often read by modern viewers as unproblematically "African." This article examines a rare medieval attempt to represent African identity within a historical frame: the depiction of a black man among pilgrims at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, found in an illustrated manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa María, made for King Alfonso X of Castilla in the late 1270s. Analyzing this image against the backdrop of changing European textual and visual traditions related to Ethiopia and Ethiopians, I suggest that unlike the more fantastical black stereotypes deployed elsewhere in the manuscript, this figure signals a growing Castilian awareness of the actual Ethiopian Christians who were present at the site and with this a new interest in the reality of black Africans as part of a shared world of faith, pilgrimage, crusade, and commerce.
