Black Metaphors in the King of Tars

Abstract

In the late Middle Ages, Christian conversion could wash a black person’s skin white—or at least that is what happens when a black sultan converts to Christianity in the late thirteenthor early fourteenth-century English romance the King of Tars. The remarkable transformation, however, is not what it might at first appear to be. While some critics have taken the conversion as the conflation of racial and religious identity, the change is in fact not indicative of a cut-and-dried relationship between Christian identity and the normativity of European whiteness.1 The connection between color and religious identity in the late Middle Ages is rather more complex, and the King of Tars in particular exploits the normativity of physical whiteness in western Christendom when it advocates the necessity of metaphorical, or spiritual, “blackness” in Christians. In the King of Tars, the physical reality of skin-color difference gives way to the metaphor of color that facilitates Christendom’s necessary “blackness.” The King of Tars didactically navigates the line between reality and metaphor in order to turn its reader’s attention from the Christian mission to convert others, a defining feature of late medieval Crusades ideology, to the project of examining and maintaining his own spiritual well-being.