‘Fascinating and obscure’ is how one recent writer has characterized the archaic hero Memnon.Footnote 1 A king of Ethiopia who came to the aid of the besieged Trojans and was killed by Achilles, Memnon is obscure because his action in the Trojan War falls between the events of the Iliad and those of the Odyssey, which record him only briefly and in passing: remembered as the handsomest of men, the son of the goddess Aurora (the Dawn) and the killer of Antilochus (Odyssey, IV.188; XI.522). ‘King of the black Ethiopians’ for Hesiod (Theogony, 985), Memnon would have featured prominently in the Greek epic that bore his toponym, the Aethiopis, but which is lost and survives only in summaries.Footnote 2 Memnon is fascinating because of the type and quality of images and texts in which he appears, and in their relation to changing ideas of race. Memnon’s fatal combat with Achilles was included on one of ‘the most important of monuments of classical antiquity’, the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi,Footnote 3 and was a theme on archaic vases and in the poetry of Pindar, who characterizes him as ‘man-slaying’, ‘unfearing’, ‘fierce in his pride’ (Isthmian, 5.40–1 and 8.54). Also represented was his post-mortem fate: received into the arms of his grieving mother on archaic vases; his tomb at Troy the scene of a yearly fight among a flock of birds from Ethiopia according to Pliny the Elder (Natural History, X.74.37); the smoke and ashes from his funeral pyre transformed into birds in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XIII.604–18); and his sonorous statue in Egypt noted by Pausanias (second-century Description of Greece, I.42.3) and later inscribed with Roman messages to Memnon as a deity.Footnote 4 This paper investigates the equally obscure and equally fascinating fortune of Memnon in the central and later Middle Ages, when knowledge of these classical sources was limited yet Memnon eventually achieved a second coming as a savior and an exemplary figure; above all, it examines how the Ethiopian-ness of Memnon took on different hue, as Memnon was turned in some representations from black to white.Footnote 5 How and why did that happen? The article will begin with a brief survey of the classical sources, before turning to its main focus on medieval reception.

Roman era sources are clear: Memnon was black-skinned. Virgil uses the single adjective ‘black’ to denote Memnon (‘nigri Memnonis arma’, Aeneid, I.489), as do Seneca, Ovid and other authors.Footnote 6 Philostratus (third-century ad) was explicit: in describing an imagined painting of Memnon’s corpse being laid out for mourning, he discusses the exact black tone of Memnon’s skin.Footnote 7 And when Ovid (Metamorphoses, XIII), narrating the transformation of Memnon’s ashes into birds, describes the black smoke and the black ashes turning into the dark-plumed birds called Memnonides (ruffs), the implication is clear. Virgil and Ovid were, of course, well known in the Middle Ages among students and scholars, though Philostratus was not, until the early sixteenth century.Footnote 8 In this period, white skin is implied for Memnon, without explicit ascription, only by Quintus of Smyrna (third-century ad), in his Posthomerica, which filled the gap between the Iliad and the Odyssey.Footnote 9 Diodorus Siculus (Library of History, II.22) allows both an Asian and an African Memnon, without implying any skin colour.

However, behind the Roman Memnon who was black, stood a Greek Memnon who was not. Although Martin Bernal argues that ‘Memnon’s being Ethiopian and hence black was central to the story [of the Aithiopis]’,Footnote 10 scholars have long argued that the Greek Memnon, until the Hellenistic period, was Asiatic not African, given the frequency among Greek writers of his association with Susa, the Persian capital, and the identity of his mother, Aurora, with the East.Footnote 11 His parentage pointed eastwards: his father was Trojan, his mother daily announced the rising sun. Memnon’s portrayal on archaic black-figure vases might seem to run counter to this: he is, to be sure, black as were most human figures in this medium, but the black body of the male hero was an artistic convention, with no reference to skin colour.Footnote 12 When he was accompanied on some vases by black African ‘squires’, their blackness obviously did refer to skin colour and served to signify Memnon’s African kingdom.Footnote 13

However, the contrast between Greek and Roman Memnon is not so clear. More recently, scholars have shown the picture to be much more complicated. ‘Being Ethiopian’ and ‘being black’ are no longer seen as concomitants. Scholars now prefer to refer to the classical ‘Aithiopia’, a much less definite geographical area, and to argue that blackness was attributed to ‘Indians’ as well as Aithiopians. In an extended analysis of the ‘confusions’ and ‘interferences’ between Aithiopia and India in ancient texts, Pierre Schneider has identified various categories of confusion (parallels, transfers, assimilations), the main textual domains of confusion (more in geography and poetry than in history or ethnography) and the key chronological phases of confusion (especially the extension of ‘India’ in the Roman period to include eastern Africa). Most recently, Sarah Derbew has written of the ‘uneven convergences’ between ‘Aithiopia’ and ‘India’ already in Greek historiography and ethnography, and of the slipperiness of ‘chromatic markers’ in that relationship.Footnote 14 Within this matrix, the myth of Memnon played an important role, maintaining the proximity of Aithiopia and India, and being loaded with ambivalence: African Aithiopian, but, as the son of Aurora, also an Aithiopian of the East.Footnote 15 The authors of the Middle Ages received this confusion, placing ‘variable and multiple’ Ethiopias on their maps, while also associating Ethiopia with Christian converts and saviors, which in turn influenced the reception of Memnon.Footnote 16

Of the Greek depictions and allusions, the writers and artists of the Middle Ages in Western Europe knew little or nothing, and their knowledge of Memnon took as its origin the late antique narratives of the Trojan War by Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia. Both texts claimed to be eye-witness accounts and were accepted as authentic, but they are of uncertain date and survive in copies datable to the fourth to the sixth centuries ad. Their prose narratives were credited as historical sources by medieval writers, in preference to the ‘lies’ of Homer, and they had the advantages, to a Christian readership, of reducing the ‘archaic heroism’, distancing the gods, and simplifying the style.Footnote 17 They also provided alternative points of view: Dares was explicitly pro-Trojan, while Dictys presents as a Greek participant critical of the Greek commanders, especially Achilles. Of Memnon, Dictys tells only of his arrival at Troy, with a large army of ‘Indians and Ethiopians’ (thus synthesizing accounts of his origin)Footnote 18 and of the collection of his bones by his sister, who took them to Phoenicia and then suddenly disappeared. It is Dares who reports that Memnon intervened to save the body of Troilus from being dragged by his killer Achilles and subsequently fought Achilles, falling victim to him, too.Footnote 19

Other classical narratives of Troy mention Memnon only briefly if at allFootnote 20; but the essential elements of the Latin Memnon were alluded to in other texts: dark-skinned (coloratus) in one of Claudian’s panegyric poems of the late fourth century; black (niger) in Corippus’s sixth-century history of ‘Libyan’ wars; and associated with Persia by Cassiodorus (sixth-century again), with India by Claudian.Footnote 21 One of the Vatican Mythographers of the Carolingian period still notes that Memnon was black.Footnote 22

Medieval narrators of the Trojan War built on the narrative in Dares and Dictys – of Memnon’s intervention, combat with Achilles and death – in order to create a dramatic confrontation. They were not the first to do so, as Quintus of Smyrna had already in late antiquity created a narrative of Memnon’s brutal killing of Antilochus, his seizure of Antilochus’s armour and his arrogant verbal exchange with Achilles, in which Memnon is presented as a feral force: ‘slaughtering the Argives like evil Fate itself’, taking great delight in killing the Greeks from behind as he drove them down to the beach, and boastfully disparaging Achilles and predicting Achilles’s death at his hands.Footnote 23 However, the tone and content of medieval stories of Memnon were entirely different, and the main responsibility for that lies in the complete reversal in attitudes to Achilles between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Partly owing to a political culture in which Trojan ancestry was prized and asserted by states and cities (Francio, Brutus, Antenor, etc.),Footnote 24 partly owing to the Ovidian diminishing of Achilles (lover not warrior), in medieval writings, he became the ‘perfect anti-hero: impious, violent, rancorous’,Footnote 25 ‘violent, vindictive, mentally unstable’,Footnote 26 or depicted in his youth and as a lover of women.Footnote 27 This negative revaluation of Achilles – a fate he shared with other Greek leaders such as UlyssesFootnote 28 – in one sense generated a compensating positive revaluation of his Ethiopian combatant.

In the second half of the twelfth century, in a significant ‘Renaissance’ moment, a group of clerics rewrote a set of classical foundation myths – Thebes, Troy, Rome – in the vernacular.Footnote 29 This re-emergence of Troy in medieval ‘historical discourse’ has been seen as a fundamental turning point, proposing Troy as the ‘seedbed of European history’ and embodying the claim of aristocracies and dynasties to the command of past time.Footnote 30 Among these new vernacular histories, the most influential was Benoît de Sainte Maure’s Roman de Troie of about 1160, much imitated, adapted and translated.Footnote 31 Benoît drew on the accounts by Dares and Dictys but amplified them through the addition of descriptions of people and places.Footnote 32 In this text, Memnon appears in two sections: in the catalogue of Trojan allies and in his combat with Achilles. Benoît’s portrait of Memnon celebrates his physical strength, his focus on action not words and his martial achievements:

King Memnon was noble and tall and a very agreeable knight. He was, according to Dares’ work, broad shouldered, with solid chest, strong arms and a head of curly, auburn-coloured hair. His face was longFootnote 33 and fine featured, with large, confident-looking eyes. Not very merry or talkative, he was formidable in combat. He feared nothing, nor did anything frighten him. He succeeded in everything he undertook, delivering and confronting many a hard onslaught. He was remarkable and did remarkable things. His great prowess and his exceptional deeds will be recounted forever.Footnote 34

This is the first verbal portrait of Memnon since antiquity. There is no ambiguity about his colour: his hair is auburn, not black (though curls might be seen as stereotypically African). However, Benoît does seem to show some uncertainties about Memnon, his origin (between Asia and Africa) and his status (between history and myth). For although he names Memnon as the son of the sister of King Serses, ‘from a country not too close to Ethiopia’ – later named as Persia – he says that he came to Troy accompanied by nobles, knights and mounted archers with black skin: ‘neither pitch nor ink was ever so black as they were’.Footnote 35 And though he thus places Memnon in history (Serses/Xerxes?), he also, through a mysterious sister (see below), allows Memnon to be related once again to myth.

In recounting Memnon’s fatal fight with Achilles, Benoît uses at a micro level the narrative device deployed by Dictys to articulate the whole story of the Trojan War: ideas of affront and the repair of affront, expressed in speeches by the characters concerned.Footnote 36 Thus, Achilles, motivated by hatred and a desire for revenge against the Trojan prince, Troilus, instructs his men to find and surround Troilus, so that he can take vengeance for the humiliation, bloodshed and injury he had suffered at his hands. When they do this, Achilles pulls off Troilus’s helmet, cuts off his head and then drags the body around the battlefield attached to his horse’s tail. This episode is not mentioned in Homer but is clearly modelled on the death of Hector in Book XXII of the Iliad, which has the elements of the isolation of Hector in battle and the dragging of his body, roped to a chariot. It is this affront to Troilus to which Memnon responds: in a direct speech to Achilles, he labels him a ‘scoundrel’ and a ‘brute’, condemns his action as a ‘savage’ and ‘insolent’ deed, ‘a flagrant atrocity’, which will be avenged.Footnote 37 Having issued his challenge, Memnon deals mighty blows to Achilles’s head, knocking him off his horse, and this allows the Trojans to recover Troilus’s body. Motivated now by deep hatred of Memnon, Achilles eventually returns to the fight, and his men again separate his opponent from any assistance, and Achilles ‘hacked him to pieces’. Memnon’s remains were buried alongside Troilus in a coffin of gold and silver. Later, his beautiful sister came and retrieved them and took them back to her own land, but she was never seen or heard of again: ‘she went away to her mother who was (I don’t know which) a goddess or a fairy’, comments Benoît.Footnote 38 Benoît allows this mythical element to fade into the intangible: he attributes the story to his ‘source’ (Dares) and also says that there are various opinions of what happened. If the sister stands in for Aurora, it shows how distant these ‘histories’ were from Ovid and Ovidian commentary: the goddess now appears as a nameless suffix to an uncertain story about Memnon’s remains, not as the main subject of a myth about the transformation of her son’s ashes.

Benoît’s Roman de Troie was later translated into Latin by the Sicilian Guido delle Colonne (finished 1287) and this version – ‘authoritative and prestigious’, ‘the text to draw on for knowledge of the Trojan War’ – went through many rewritings and translations into vernacular languages.Footnote 39 Guido follows Benoît in both describing Memnon’s body and character, and in narrating his battles. In his description, he makes two significant changes: Memnon’s hair was ‘golden-yellow’ (‘crinibus ... flavis’) and his eyes were ‘shining black’ (‘Oculorum ... eius orbes nigro fuerunt colore perlucidi’),Footnote 40 the latter perhaps suggesting awareness of classical Roman authors’ use of the term ‘black’, but restricting its potential scope to eyes alone. On the other hand, he eliminates the blacker-than-ink archers: cumulatively a double elision of black skin.Footnote 41 His narrative of the encounter between Memnon and Achilles intensifies the rhetoric directed at Achilles, calling him a traitor and accusing him of cruelty and disparagement (dragging the body of a king’s son as if he was the basest of men).Footnote 42 This provides an example of Guido’s treatment of the story of Troy: dramatic conflicts marked by emotionally charged speeches.Footnote 43 Later authors and translators elaborate on this sequence of elements, multiplying the condemnations of Achilles’ cruelty and treachery. ‘Traitor, scorpion, serpent’, is how John Lydgate’s Memnon (1421, for the king of England) addresses Achilles, he used ‘false engyn [trickery]’, ‘venom’ and ‘malice’ in killing Troilus, and his abuse of the corpse was a ‘cruel deed and ungentleness’.Footnote 44 Raoul Lefèvre’s version (1464, for the duke of Burgundy) describes Achilles’ action as ‘felonious’ (felonneuse), and his cruel killing of Memnon as inflicting ‘grant martire’ (that is, unnecessary torment).Footnote 45 These works consistently present Memnon as a valorous victim of dishonourable fighting: he intervenes to protect a noble corpse from degrading treatment; he is trapped by the bestial cunning of Achilles; he is the helpless victim of a treacherous desire for revenge. Like Benoît’s heroes, so too Guido’s ‘fight like knights’ and ‘think like knights’;Footnote 46 and the villains behave like negative copies, acting with cruelty, treachery and vindictiveness. This literary presentation had a clear impact on the treatment of Memnon in other genres.

On the one hand, Benoit’s uncertainties about Memnon’s origin and status are mirrored in another medieval genre where Memnon appears. Commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which are sometimes more focused on Aurora, naturally confine themselves to glossing the name Memnon and the circling and fighting birds.Footnote 47 To mention the major commentaries: one of the earliest by Arnulf of Orléans in the twelfth century additionally explains that Memnon ‘is said to be’ the son of Aurora ‘because he was king of Ethiopia which is in the east towards the dawn’,Footnote 48 a formulation that preserved the mythical Eastern Ethiopia, while also denying pagan maternity. Similar is the Vulgate Commentary, written in France in the mid-thirteenth century: ‘Memnon was an Eastern king who came to the aid of the Trojans and one morning Achilles killed him. Aurora is said to be his mother because dawn rises in his realm which is in the East’.Footnote 49 The influential Vulgate commentary thus accepts the historicity of Memnon but is vague on the location of his kingdom (the name Ethiopia is avoided), and distances itself from belief in divine motherhood. Later commentators filled out these few lines, while sticking closely to their outline. Giovanni del Virgilio, who in general expands rather than allegorizes,Footnote 50 distinguishes between the historical (‘it is true that he went into the army to aid the Trojans’), the figurative (the birds threw themselves on the pyre and were reborn from the ashes, ‘and so it was said that they were born from Memnon’) and the unbelievable (‘that they go every year to Memnon’s tomb, Augustine says is pagan’).Footnote 51 Distinguishing true ‘history’ from untrue ‘fable’ was part of the mission of these medieval interpreters of perilous classical texts: fable conceals and charms, whereas history commemorates great deeds, in John of Garland’s formulation.Footnote 52

On the other hand, the chivalric Memnon, enhanced by Guido delle Colonne, is also evident in some late medieval biographical works, particularly catalogues of famous men. The genre owed much to the early humanist Petrarch,Footnote 53 and two of Petrarch’s literary associates took his idea much further, participating in a popular medieval genre that disseminated ‘exempla … ethical lessons and exponents of virtue’.Footnote 54 Guglielmo da Pastrengo’s ambitious, alphabetical dictionary of illustrious men, compiled in the mid-fourteenth century, has only a vague idea of Memnon, saying that his brother or father, ‘as they say’, founded Susa in Persia, and that birds from Egypt fly to his tomb in Troy every 5 years and tear each other to pieces.Footnote 55 What lessons or virtues Memnon could have transmitted here is not clear. Much fuller in its range of sources – he ‘tried to collect all the available evidence’ – was Domenico di Bandino’s entry for Memnon in the ‘great dictionary of world biography’ that was his De viris claris of the later fourteenth century.Footnote 56 Again, the arrangement was alphabetical, the focus historical, the intention didactic.Footnote 57 Domenico insistently distances Memnon from myth. His two-page entry starts by clearing away all the ‘poets’ fables’ about him being the son of Aurora, ‘which I judge to be made-up’ (‘quod imo fictum arbitror’), ‘because Ethiopia is located in the East towards the dawn’.Footnote 58 In order to give didactic substance to Memnon, Domenico dismisses Ovid and embraces Guido delle Colonne. He presents a historical Memnon – a ‘knight of great strenuousness who did many deeds in the Trojan War worthy of memory’Footnote 59 – juxtaposing the accounts of Dictys and Dares, quoting Virgil without comment (an unusual inclusion), reading Ovid’s ‘fictions’ metaphorically (the birds as the far-flying fame of a celebrated man) and ending with a quote from Guido delle Colonne on the mysterious sister who collected Memnon’s ashes.

Another element in Benoît’s narrative came to have an important late medieval development: his self-sacrificial intervention to retrieve the body of Troilus. This is clear in Christine de Pizan’s handling of Memnon in her work of political/chivalric advice, the Letter of the Goddess Othea to Hector: not a history, not a commentary on Ovid, not a list of famous men, but a twofold interpretation, moral and allegorical, of her own didactic text. The oeuvre of Pizan (1365–1430) covered many genres, from biography to political poetry and feminist treatizes. Her Letter of the Goddess Othea was in the genre of a ‘courtesy book’ (teaching morally good conduct) but unusual in taking the form of a letter,Footnote 60 with one hundred figures from classical sources – ‘story moments or … personages, pagan gods’Footnote 61 – as examples of chivalric virtue or vice. Nearly one third of the chapters comment on characters from the Trojan War.Footnote 62 ‘Troy mattered to Christine. She knew that her aristocratic audience cared about the Trojan Wars’.Footnote 63 And in particular, Hector mattered to Christine: the Epistle is addressed to him, as to a pupil in chivalry, and it is his ‘incompletely mastered’ chivalry that she seeks to correct and improve, by exemplifying the ‘knightli deedes’ (to use the fifteenth-century translation) ‘that be full necessarie to his wurthyness and the contrarie’.Footnote 64 She intended this to have contemporary impact: the text is addressed to Hector, but the work is dedicated to Louis, Duke of Orléans (and beyond him to the wider French and European upper nobility: that it reached them is attested by the number of extant copies and translations, which have led some to suggest that this was Pizan’s most popular work).Footnote 65 The illustration of the Memnon chapter that accompanies a lavish manuscript copy, one that Pizan herself directed, even makes a direct political allusion to the assassination of Louis d’Orléans (brother of the king of France) in 1407: in the foreground a knight, presumably Memnon, is being prepared by his (white) squires for battle, but in the background another knight in armour and brandishing a sword is about to attack from behind an unarmed, unprotected man bearing a royal emblem on his clothing.Footnote 66 Indeed, the scene of Achilles and Memnon fighting for the headless body of Troilus seems to be common in the more generously illustrated manuscripts of Trojan War histories and romances, starting in the thirteenth century.Footnote 67 Christine’s presentation of Memnon as the epitome of self-sacrificing loyalty is spread across her own verses, her moral gloss, concerned with ‘preparing the Good Knight to enter the moral tournament of life’,Footnote 68 and her allegorical interpretation. Her brief text presents ‘Maymon’ [sic] as ‘your loyal cousin / who is your neighbour in your need / and loves you so much that you must love him / And in his need arm yourself’. Her gloss explains that Memnon, ‘a very valiant knight’ (‘moult vaillant chevalier’), was Hector’s cousin and wounded Achilles after he had treacherously killed him, ‘and this is to be understood [to mean] that the prince or good knight who has good and true kin, however, small or poor they are, should love and support them’. Her allegory interprets Memnon, ‘the loyal cousin’, as ‘God of Heaven, who has been so loyal a cousin to us that he took our humanity, which benefit we could not recompense’.Footnote 69 Christine’s main source in the rest of this work was the Ovide moralisé,Footnote 70 but for Memnon she is closer to the Latin Ovidius moralizatus of Pierre Bersuire, written in two versions in the mid-fourteenth century,Footnote 71 and notable for the inventiveness of its allegories.Footnote 72 After picking up from earlier commentators the distinction between ‘fable’ and ‘history’, Bersuire advances a different spiritual meaning and interprets Memnon as Christ, Aurora as the Virgin Mary and the birds as crusaders who are bound to fight their way to Christ’s tomb and to risk death for him. Those who are born from the dead body of Christ are encouraged in fatal combat by his example.Footnote 73 This was typical of Bersuire’s approach to Ovid: he ‘ceaselessly repeats, varies and recombines’ figurative groups from Christian belief (Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Devil, Jews).Footnote 74 Writing for preachers, he ‘transforms his work into a sermon handbook’.Footnote 75

Through these medieval retellings of Memnon’s story, some rewritings of his identity are evident. These should not be seen as getting Memnon wrong, but rather as receiving Memnon differently. One aspect of this is a redefinition of his status: Guido delle Colonne has Memnon accompanying ‘King Perses’ from Ethiopia (translated as ‘Perseus’ by Caxton, suggesting a further confusion of Africa and Asia). The fourteenth-century sources also portray him more as a ‘strenuous knight’ than as a king. A more significant aspect is the definite preference for an Asiatic origin, and the elimination of an African one. For Benoît, he comes from Persia. The Vulgate Commentary on Ovid has Memnon as an ‘Oriental’ king. The late thirteenth-century Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César has ‘King Memnon of Persia’ (‘le roi Menon de Perce’), and one Italian prose version of the Roman de Troie speaks repeatedly of Memnon and his Persian troops.Footnote 76 Both Pastrengo and Boccaccio make the link between Memnon and the construction of Susa, ‘the famous city in Persia’.Footnote 77 Some authors (Arnulf, Domenico di Bandino) retained the classical mythic Ethiopia ‘in the East towards the dawn’. Giovanni del Virgilio has Memnon reigning ‘in Eastern Ethiopia’. Ethiopia was an ambiguous term: classical and medieval geographies denoted huge swathes of sub-Saharan Africa with this term,Footnote 78 but ‘Ethiopian’ was also confused with ‘Indian’ and ‘Nubian’ in medieval writings, as in ancient ones.Footnote 79 Of the many medieval terms for Africans, ‘Ethiopian’ was the one that most consistently meant ‘black’;Footnote 80 so Memnon’s non-African provenance allowed him once again to be depicted as white, as in illustrations to Christine de Pizan’s Epistle of Othea,Footnote 81 or in the Trojan War tapestries made in Tournai and now in Zamora (Spain).Footnote 82 Few commentators or authors cited those well-known Roman authors who specified that Memnon was black. Indeed, the tapestries, part of a huge set (comprising 11 pieces and stretching over 100 m in total) woven in Tournai in the early 1470s and delivered to the duke of Burgundy, show Memnon in Asiatic costume; and though there are two black infantrymen (not archers) at the edge of the panel, it is difficult to argue that they relate to Memnon or recall his African origin, because they are positioned two scenes away from Memnon’s fight with Achilles over the body of Troilus, and because similar black guards are to be found in other panels in the series (Achilles in his Tent, Paris’s combat with Ajax).Footnote 83 Whether Memnon’s men or not, pictorially these black squires seem to be examples of the new artistic motif of black servants portrayed often at the edges of the picture plane.Footnote 84

It must be admitted that skin colour almost entirely disappears from these medieval sources. Benoît and Guido imply whiteness through their colouring of Memnon’s hair, but none of the texts is explicit about skin, only the images are. Even those texts that present Memnon most positively – his mother as Holy Church, himself as Christ – do not specify his skin colour as white. Is whiteness presumed here, and blackness avoided? Even in the few instances where blackness is suggested or implied – black eyes, black blood, black servants – there is no hint of negativity. So, either readers were aware of Latin sources describing Memnon as black and admitted him to the ranks of the virtuous ‘other’ (in line with St Maurice or the magus Balthasar or Saracen knights), or they envisaged him as white (like the good Saracen women in French chansons),Footnote 85 or they saw him as an exotic Asian.

Each of these readings should be considered as possible. All of them can be related to the value of blackness in medieval ideas of race. The connotations of the colour black were strongly negative – it was the colour of demons and executioners, of ‘ugliness, bodily uncleanliness, poverty’Footnote 86 – but not wholly so, as the later Middle Ages did see the depiction of black Africans in more positive roles as princes, magi and noble warriors.Footnote 87 There were also cross-overs, from one medium to another, as from text to image. The fictional Saracen knight Otinel, who converted to Christianity, was depicted as black-skinned in a north Italian fresco, even though his skin colour is not mentioned in any text (and his father was described as having ‘white hands’ and ‘long, blond hair’).Footnote 88 Conversely Memnon, king of Ethiopia, whose colour was described in well-known classical texts, was envisaged as Asian or white. This could be strongly indicative of the power of whiteness in stories of Troy and of Trojan refugees that were seen as foundational in European history. When Memnon became a proxy for Christ, was only whiteness appropriate? Black was not beautiful.Footnote 89 If Memnon in Roman sources could be black-skinned, that was because discrimination did not then operate by skin colour;Footnote 90 but by 1300 this was no longer the case, as ‘Whiteness became normative, integral, and central to Christian European identity in the thirteenth century’.Footnote 91 Skin whitening was widespread across a range of medieval texts: in cosmetic recipes for women’s faces,Footnote 92 in literary works featuring Eastern rulers or Saracen princesses,Footnote 93 in representations of the biblical queen of Sheba,Footnote 94 and in miracle stories and preachers’ exempla.Footnote 95 Even if readers of texts assumed Memnon was black because he was Ethiopian, when he was visualized in images, he was not: like good Saracens and other characters, Memnon’s blackness was washed away, and he was transformed once again.Footnote 96