Sir Morien

The Knights of the Round Table, part of the adventurers of the Medieval Arthurian legends, included the nobleman featured here in this manuscript from about 1350. He was courageous, he helped his mother gain political power, and he was a bad-ass fighter. And also, Sir Morien was black.

King Arthur et al were not real, not even a little (sorry), but their famous exploits captured the imagination of Medieval aristocrats in a way analogous to our modern DC and Marvel comic heroes. They embodied ideas about chivalry (TM Medieval-style and not what we think of as chivalrous today), and written stories about the Knights of the Round Table amused the nobility of Europe. This was the milieu of Sir Morien.

Sir Morien’s tales probably go back earlier than 1300, but the existing manuscript evidence about them comes from this period. They appear in almost 5,000 lines of Middle Dutch poetry, and deal with the adventures of the handsome Morien from the Moorish lands (Moorish referring to (Muslim, usually) people of African descent living around the Mediterranean Sea), who sought assistance from the Knights of Camelot in getting his mother back into power. She had fallen in love with Sir Aglovale of the Round Table when he was travelling afar, and he had left her pregnant to resume a quest, promising to return to marry her one day.

The baby was Morien himself, and in time both he and his mother were forced off their lands. Morien was “black of face and limb,” writes the poet, and he wore similarly colored armor and attire — “his shield and his armor were even those of a Moor, and black as a raven.” Eventually in the story, Lancelot and Gawain agree to help Morien get his lands back for his mother, and at the end of the adventure, Aglovale reunites with Morien’s mother and weds her, and both Morien and his mother get their estates and power back — But not before Sir Morien has to hack through several bad guys who get up in his business.