Imagining the Moor in Medieval Portugal

Abstract

�� ��� For medieval Portugal, Africa was familiar and strange, a known place across the modest parcel of the Mediterranean between the Algarve and Ceuta, and, farther south, an unknown expanse of land that glimmered black under the equatorial sun. And for Portugal, like for Spain, Africa was part of the demographics and history of Iberian culture in the figure of the Moor, at once an “other” and a closer, more intimate presence. Jeffrey J. Cohen reminds us of the “cultural work” of the Saracen (one of the medieval terminological possibilities for “Moor”), “whose dark skin and diabolical physiognomy were the western Middle Ages’ most familiar, most exorbitant embodiment of racial alterity” [189]. Cohen argues, therefore, that the Saracen (grosso modo) existed in a network of literary and ideological productions of western Europe; in the case of Iberia, the Moor was sometimes but not always a Saracen and was both a figure of alterity and of familiar ity and sameness, less an aprioristic other and more of a figure that could be variously othered as a marker of boundaries including “race,” spirituality, and sexuality. While this essay does not take on the idea of racial alterity per se, it does assume the notion that in the literary culture of Portugal blackness, in some manner, informed constructions of the Moor. My purpose here is to delineate an understanding of the Moor in medieval Portugal as a construct that resists easy categorizations as an undifferentiated figure of otherness, a consideration that culminates with the work of Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1410?–1474?), the first chronicler of Portuguese exploration into (west) Africa. To this end, I will briefly consider the Moor in representative examples from the livros de linhagens (genealogical books) and the cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer (poetry of mockery and insult, hereafter abbreviated CEM), not so much in order to trace a direct influence between these texts and the work of Zurara but to provide an idea of how the Moor was variously fashioned in earlier texts. The analysis here is not exhaustive nor conclusive but suggestive, and is meant to indicate how the Moor—and the idea of the Moor—in Portugal can add to critical conversations on the imaginative and ideological constructions of the Moor and of Africa and its inhabitants. The formulations of national and cultural identities in European texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance 1 that in some way engage Africa and the African have increasingly 1. “Renaissance” is increasingly being replaced with “early modern” as many scholars have noted as a way of indicating, inter alia, a more theoretically inflected approach to the study of this general time period. All critical labels are conveniences and therefore shift as the methodologies, assumptions, and objectives of scholars change. I agree that, under the rubric of “early modern studies,” an array of provocative work is being produced; the designation brings with it an invigorating refurbishment of critical postures toward the centuries following the Middle Ages. Yet a note of caution should also be sounded, since “early modern” can imply that what scholars in the field do is only worthwhile insofar as it inevitably relates to the “modern.” Modernity thus becomes the teleological justification and arbiter of value for anything preceding it. A large part of the appeal of the cultural productivity and mindsets of the centuries preceding modernity (and this includes the Middle Ages) is precisely that which is different, alien, strange to the modern world and in