The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  Still the ceremonial colour was black. On significant days Abbasid towns were hung with black drapes. The caliph himself principally wore black and gold; often he wore a long black jubbah with a turban of black silk brocade. On honoured individuals he would bestow a black turban, and black garments decorated with gold inscriptions. The vizier, his first minister, wore black robes (as king’s ministers later did in Europe), and the vizier’s officials themselves wore black. As later in Spain, black was the prescribed colour for court dress – which included a tall, conical black hat in the Persian style. In courts of law the qadi – Islamic judge – wore a black cloak and black conical hat. Religious teachers wore black cloaks and turbans, and the learned more widely wore black gowns. And, as later in seventeenth-century Holland, black garments – of materials cheaper than silk – were worn at lower social levels. As we know from the Thousand and One Nights, a Kalender – a mendicant – was known by his ‘coarse black woollen robe’.5

  This was however (as later in Victorian England) a world of men’s black, for while women were supposed to be decently covered, they were not lost to sight in enveloping gowns that were shapeless and black, in the way that Islamic culture later required. They wore veils, but also waistcoats and trousers of muslin, cotton and silk, often richly patterned and embroidered. In decorations and furnishings rich colours were valued – deep reds, gold, deep indigo blues, as well as the prized colour called ‘sandalwood’. Above all, green had a role in Islamic culture not matched by any single colour later in Christendom. It was the favourite colour of Muhammad and also perhaps of God, since it was the colour of Paradise. Green was naturally attractive in a desert land, and the green of an oasis, as it appears in the distance, can be of a wonderful deep turquoise. Green was the colour of the turban one wore after making the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. For a brief period, in 817, the Abbasids themselves made green the official colour for robes, insignia and ceremonies. The violation of tradition was resented, however, and in 819 black was reinstated.6

  It is also true that, as in other, later societies, the grand and ceremonial use of black coexisted with the popular association of black with bad luck and bad omens, with death and with misery. A convicted criminal might have his face blackened with soot. Ambiguous beings like djinns might be black, either in their limbs or when first appearing as a twisting column of vapour. Black was the despised colour of hard, sun-scorched labour. Again, there was in Abbasid society – it is clear from the Thousand and One Nights – a substrate of anti-black (that is, anti-African) colour prejudice. The lover of the adulterous wife of the Sultan, mentioned earlier, was (in Burton’s translation) ‘a black cook of loathsome aspect’, while the Sultan’s brother presently discovers that his own wife has been unfaithful with ‘a big slobbering blackamoor . . . a truly hideous sight’. For all that, the Nubian infantry was an honoured division of the caliph’s army. The Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi later reported that when the caliph’s African armies marched out, formidable in their black turbans and black tunics, the whole force of them appeared as ‘a swelling ocean of blackness’.7

  THE CALIPH WAS a spiritual as well as a temporal leader, and his black robes claimed religious authority. The Abbasids circulated an apocryphal hadith, or saying of the Prophet, that the Archangel Gabriel visited Muhammad wearing a black robe and black turban, saying, ‘This is the dress of the rulers who will descend from your uncle al-‘Abbas.’8 The Prophet then prayed for al-‘Abbas and his descendants. Christian black dress also could be divinely inspired: the robes of the Dominican Black Friars were said to have been revealed to St Dominic by the Virgin, in a vision.

  One must, I think, ask – though I do not know that it has been asked – what contribution the black fashions of Arabia may have made to the later steady growth of black in the West. Many later practices occurred first in the caliphate: for instance the use of black by monarchs, first ministers, officials and law officers; by the learned and by merchants; and by many of the citizenry and the soldiery too. It cannot be said there was a sudden imitation, for the use of black in Europe spread slowly over centuries, and mainly spread in those centuries when Abbasid power had shrunk. But the prominent use of black continued in Islamic countries after the Abbasids, and for many centuries Islamic civilization was a large fact in European consciousness. In the year 800 Charlemagne sent envoys to open relations with the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, who made them wait a month before giving them audience. Harun al-Rashid is famous still for presiding over a high phase of Islamic civilization; among other distinctions, he opened the world’s first free public hospital. Islamic medicine was thought the best in the world, and a European physician of any ambition would seek to be trained by Islamic doctors. The caliphate was the centre of trade between East and West, and Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraish, were both the guardians of Mecca and the dominant mercantile force in Islam. They were known by their black dress, and one cannot but wonder whether their style contributed to the black style of European merchants. For in Europe, by the early Middle Ages, black was thought of as the customary wear of merchants; and merchant black did not derive from church or university. Venice in particular had extensive trade with the Middle East; her patricians were rich traders, not aristocrats of noble kidney, and were known for wearing their black ‘togas’ constantly.

  If the bazaar was one area of possible influence, another was the battlefield. The military use of banners and flags had expanded, in Islam, far beyond the precedent of the Roman battle standard. The Western use of banners was slower to expand, though in legend, Charlemagne raised the sacred banner of the Oriflamme when he rode into the Holy Land. In Europe the use of banners grew especially in the twelfth century, when knights began to wear their banner on their person as well – as a ‘coat’ of arms – with a matching design on their shield, and on the housing of their horse. European banners were not all-black, as their Muslim precedents sometimes were, but black (‘sable’) was one of the six leading colours in European heraldry. Creatures which are far from black – for example lions – may be black in their heraldic form, and in a certain sense the black ‘eagle’ banner returned. When the Roman Empire split, the Eastern Empire of Byzantium increasingly adopted as its emblem an eagle with two heads – as also, later, did the Holy Roman Empire. When carved in stone this eagle had to be stone-coloured, but in medieval heraldry it is most often black. Its wingtips and claws may be seen in a later illustration (see illus. 57). As the Holy Empire faded, the two-headed black eagle found a new home in the banner of Austro-Hungary and later figured, minus one head and oddly holding a hammer and sickle, in the arms of the First Republic of Austria. In the erstwhile Eastern Empire, meanwhile, it became an emblem of the Orthodox Church, and so entered the flag of imperial Russia. It is not of course surprising that empires should be depicted as eagles, since the eagle is emperor of the sky, but since most eagles are not black, it is interesting that in many cases this emblem of supreme power became black.

  As to Western adaptations of what had been Islamic black, the principal channel of influence would have had to be through Spain. The Spanish, with the Portuguese, already had a native taste for black. This was related to their care of black goats, sheep and cattle, whose hair and wool they wore. Black usages were consolidated when a large part of Spain was conquered and governed by the Abbasid caliphate. It should be said that the occupying Islamic population was mainly composed of Umayyad Arabs, who later threw off their Abbasid governors; the Umayyads sometimes used white ceremonially where the Abbasids had used black. A black emphasis remained in Islamic-Iberian culture, however, and evidently survived the eventual defeat of Islam in Spain. Spanish citizens continued to be noted for their black, a usage which harmonized with the increasing use of black by the Catholic Church. Much black was already worn in Spain, then, even before the black fashions of Burgundy arrived in the Spanish court in the early sixteenth century. This occurred when, in 1516, Charles of Luxemburg, Duke of Burgundy, became King Cha
rles I of Spain, and Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. He brought with him the rich court black of Burgundy, and thereafter Spain was key in propagating black through Europe.9

  Islamic black, in other words, was a component in Spanish black, which in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century was the active genius in Europe’s black. One should not discount a possible eastern contribution to the black style of Burgundy itself, for Burgundy was active in the crusading wars with Islam. John the Fearless, who was known for his black dress, had been a leader in the war against the sultan Bayezid I. When he was killed by the French in 1419, his son Philip the Good acted as the heirs of Muhammad had acted: he wore black ever afterwards in a perpetual mourning for his father that was grimly accusatory and promised revenge. Many in his court followed suit, changing black dress from a distinguished but occasional habit to the high fashion of royalty. Not that Philip was necessarily following eastern precedent, for his grandfather, Philip the Bold, also wears black in portraits, as Europeans of social distinction were increasingly tending to do.

  Cultural contact did not prevent the Saracens – as they were called – from being demonized, or from being seen as scarcely human. The prominence of black in Islamic culture, together with its southern provenance and partly African armies, must have contributed to the widespread belief that the skin colour of all Saracens was black – and if not black, blue. Both visually in the illuminations and verbally in the texts of romances, Saracens are regularly represented as black or blue, as were giants, monsters and devils. In the fourteenth-century romance The King of Tars, war is fought against ‘Sarrazins bothe blo and blac’. The sultan of Damascus, who marries the daughter of the king of Tars, is however simply black, the daughter herself being ‘as white as fether of swan’. The couple’s union is so unnatural that they cannot bear a human child, and the princess is delivered of a shapeless lump without limbs or features. Fortunately racial difference is secondary to religious difference, and on being given a Christian baptism, the lump becomes a bawling, beautiful human baby. The sultan is so moved that he converts to Christianity, and when he in turn is baptised his skin colour switches from black to white.

  His hide, that blac & lothely was,

  Al white bicom, thurch Godes gras.

  The later life of the young family is militantly Christian.10

  Our own Black Prince may have been swarthy, but the likelihood is that he was (after his death) called black because he rode to war – as his French enemies noted – ‘en armure noire’. It became a practice for quality armour to be coated with black lacquer, at once for style and to protect it from corrosion, as one may see in knightly portraits from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If the crusaders who fought the Saracens sometimes were (literally) knights in shining armour, they often also were knights in shining black armour. In an illumination in the Luttrell Psalter, we may see a blue Saracen being unhorsed by the red lance of a black Christian knight (illus. 30). The knight’s horse, it should be said, is also blue, while the Saracen bears on his shield the black head of an African man.11

  In Europe, then, the use of black was spreading, and an account should be given of its native growth.

  30 A Christian knight fighting a Saracen, illuminated page from the Luttrell Psalter (c. 1320–40).

  IN THE CHURCH in Europe, the increase of black had been slow. Though shirts of black goat-hair had been worn (unseen) since the third century, and the dress of hermits and monks tended to black in the sixth and seventh centuries, the vestments used in church services were light in colour and often white. They had survived from Roman civil dress, and become ‘vestments’ when civil fashions changed while they did not. They included, in the fourth century, the alb, a long linen shift based on the Tunica Alba that Roman senators wore, and the pallium, a rectangular white drape such as the Greek philosophers, and perhaps Jesus too, wore as they taught. The long-sleeved white dalmatic was worn in the first century by decadent youths in Rome and in the fourth century by bishops. After 500, in the higher ranks especially, rich colours were added: reds, violets, greens, not to mention cloth of gold. Embroideries and jewels multiplied, together with fringes, cascades of tassles and headgear that could resemble a crown.12

  Such robes were for church services on high and festive occasions. For lesser services, and both in processions and in daily wear, parish priests and bishops often wore – from at least the sixth century – the cappa nigra, the ‘black cape’ of the Church. This was woollen, black, bell-shaped and body-length. It was not itself a ‘vestment’, but it gave protection from the cold both inside draughty churches and outside too (it was also known as the ‘pluviale’).

  It was only at the start of the second millennium that the black cassock evolved, as one now might think of a ‘cassock’ – not a cape, but a long, loose, all-round garment complete with hood. It was almost always black. During services it was worn beneath other vestments; otherwise it was the public daily wear of priests. Popes, cardinals and archbishops sometimes wore cassocks that were white, scarlet or purple (respectively), but the black cassock said, at large, ‘Christian priest’. It carried into the world the grave, ascetic and penitential implications which the black habit had by then carried for centuries in monasteries, though well-to-do canons and clerics would have their cassocks lined with fur. In hard weather the cappa negra was worn over the cassock.

  Worn so generally, the cassock (and cape) made black the colour of other activities besides prayer and penance, for the daily business of the Church, early in the second millennium, included education, medical and social care, and a widening range of administrative functions. Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Church provided the bureaucracy within the emerging nation states, since it had a near monopoly of literacy, education and intellectual expertise. This sense of the priesthood survives in our words ‘clerical’ and ‘clerk’, which refer both to the clergy and to the keeping of written accounts.

  Within the Church, learning became more privileged – and more necessary for a career – as canon law was elaborated, and skills in logic and disputation were honed. In towns the children of the better-off would be taught by monks and nuns in schools attached to monasteries and cathedrals. During the twelfth century the well-to-do began to found academies on their own account and to hire priests to teach in them. By such means universities began, in time winning formal recognition (Paris in 1150, Oxford in 1167, Cambridge in 1209). Teachers were in holy orders, and the students also wore black clerical robes and were often tonsured. At an early point the cassock was open at the front, allowing freer arm movement, and thus became the black academic gown.13

  Students let their hair grow if they returned to civil life, but if they became lawyers or physicians they continued to wear the black gown of the academy. So the gown came to represent not so much faith as long-trained, authoritative expertise – in short, professionalism. The law, physic and the Church itself became known as the ‘long-robed professions’. On ceremonial occasions the grandeur of expertise was flaunted – for instance, a doctor of medicine in Paris would wear a red cope with an ermine cape – but daily wear was a black gown, more or less fine.14

  The Church itself, in its power, grew more militant. In 1215 (more formally in 1233) the Black Friars, the Dominicans, were founded. They were not to grieve and pray in monasteries but to go into the world, evangelizing and educating – with the harsh support of the secular arm, should that be necessary. They participated in the eradication of the Cathars and became a principal order in staffing the Inquisition. Their greatest power was to come in the fifteenth century, when a Dominican prior, Girolamo Savonarola, established a theocratic republic in Florence which he governed with passionate severity. In the four years from 1494 to 1498 games were forbidden, books and paintings were burned, and everyone was required to wear dark or black clothing. Though, as a Dominican, Savonarola wore a white cloak beneath his black cloak and hood (the white signifying his immortal soul), he arrange
d his dress, in the portraits of him that survive, so only the blackness shows round his shrewd, hawkish, purist’s face.

  His theocracy failed, and if there was much black, there had also been much colour in the medieval world. In the fourteenth century the short jerkin had come in, and on their newly visible legs men wore hose of different colours – one leg red, one black, or one leg blue, one yellow – ending in preposterous pointed toes which might curl round and be attached to the knee. Women’s shoes also had pointed toes, sticking out beneath the hem of fur-trimmed gowns which might again be parti-coloured, blue down one side and red or white down the other. These were young fashions: their elders wore gowns which could be richly damasked, but also could be sober and dark.

  Mid-century, the Black Death began. It was called black because its symptoms could include black spots, and black necrosis of the extremities, but it was black also in its deadliness. Very roughly one-third of the people in Europe died, each in three or four days of increasing pain while the swelling buboes oozed pus and blood. Grotesquely, the plague doctors who attended the sick looked themselves like carrion birds: their wide hats and long waxed coats were often black, while their face masks were shaped like the cruel beak of a bird, with red-glass eyepieces. The beak contained aromatic herbs to counter the smell of death and the bad air that was thought to carry infection. Their care must have helped, for they were well rewarded, but it can have given little comfort to see that dark figure bend down as though to peck you.