The Black Saint Maurice of Magdeburg, the perfect symbol for today’s Europe

Please forgive a touch not of self-importance, but of affection for the name I have been given, if I mention here that today is St Maurice’s Day. The saint was a general of the Theban Legion during the reign of Diocletian and his co-emperor Maximian, notorious persecutors of Christians, who sent him from Africa with his 6,600 legionaries to Gaul (the globalisation of armies, not desertions) to quell a revolt. He was martyred in a village in the Valais, Agaunum – now Saint-Maurice-d’Agaune – because – according to two different hagiographic traditions – he and his soldiers refused to sacrifice to the emperor, or because he refused to kill Christian populations, declaring: ‘We declare ourselves Christians and cannot persecute other Christians’. From there, a widespread cult emerged, evidenced by the many Saint-Moritz or San Maurizio scattered here and there across the Alps. Perhaps the Burgundians were the first to do so, followed undoubtedly by the Dukes of Burgundy, such as the Frankish Rudolf II. Shortly before the year 1000, the Germanic emperor Otto I—who sought to rebuild the Holy Roman Empire by drawing on the myth of Rome—embraced devotion to Maurice and his sacred relics, making him the patron saint of the empire. In contemporary terms, as Lucien Febvre would have put it, this made Maurice the patron of Rhenish and continental Europe.

An African. But back then, it wasn’t really that important. Or rather, the concepts of places, borders, races and even skin colour weren’t so clearly defined. “Let’s just say it didn’t exist, and it doesn’t matter anyway,” the poet would say.

Whether he had the dark skin of an Ethiopian (literally ‘sun-burnt’, according to Herodotus), was a Moor from Mauritania (Mauro, Maurizio) or from Nubia, for centuries this mattered little, even in art. Among the most notable examples is the purely Gothic statue on the south portal of Chartres, with its spear and curls that already hint at the Renaissance; or El Greco’s magnificent Martyrdom of Saint Maurice at El Escorial, a hidalgo who is even pale against his dark beard. There are, however, others, less well-known – devotional panels or early medieval miniatures – which make no secret of, or perhaps simply pay no heed to, the saint’s African origins.

However, it is from another, little-known statue—and from an interesting historical essay that features it on its cover and reconstructs its symbols and context—that a brief narrative can begin, one that touches on current affairs. It is the statue of Saint Maurice, sculpted between 1220 and 1250 – two centuries after the cult established by Otto – and preserved in Magdeburg Cathedral, the ancient imperial seat and capital of Saxony-Anhalt, where neo-Nazis are now running rampant. This is an important statue, which for the first time – and in practice the only time – bears the features and skin tone of a man who is undoubtedly African. It remains to be seen whether the AfD, amidst one ‘remigration’ programme after another, have realised they have an African patron saint.

The book that tells this story is not a political pamphlet, but a substantial, complex and multifaceted historical essay recently published by Mulino. The title is "Il santo, l’etiope e il diavolo – Avere la pelle nera nel medioevo", and the author is the historian Giuseppe Albertoni, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Trento. As the title suggests, the work combines specialist analysis of primary sources with a broader and more contradictory perspective, showing a certain inclination to engage with contemporary debates and strands of cultural studies – not all of which are, perhaps, essential to understanding an event rooted in the mindset and religious conception of a thousand years ago. How might one reflect on concepts such as ‘people’, ‘language’ and ‘skin colour’ in a Middle Ages that had not yet developed any notion of race? Nor, for that matter, had it reflected on the symbolism of ‘black’ – not merely as a foreigner, not merely as a barbarian, but also as a diabolical element and a physical manifestation of sin – a symbolism frequently employed by scholars and preachers. In an era when there were not many people in Europe who were not only black-skinned but also simply from North Africa: often slaves, almost always enemies. After, as Pirenne put it, Muhammad had divided the Mediterranean. Who was a ‘black man’, a barbarian, an ‘Ethiopian’ to a 10th-century Franco-German? It is curious to discover that the colour black (beards, battle insignia) could refer to the Hungarians, the Magyars or the Slavs, just as, since the time of Charles Martel, the Saracens had been regarded as black. In short, all those peoples—often considered more ‘savage’—were deemed ‘enemies’ of their own social enclave and religious ecumene (pagans, Arians, Muslims and ‘blacks’ all ended up in the same pot).

Albertoni’s essay is rich and dense; it is impossible to summarise it here. On the saint’s feast day, we are particularly interested in discovering how the cult of this Roman soldier, who rebelled against the pagan emperor and thus established himself as a defender of the Christian faith, came into being. Legend has it that Otto possessed the Holy Lance of Maurice (formerly belonging to Longinus), which is still on display at the Hofburg in Vienna, when he won the crucial Battle of Lechfeld. It was the Dukes of Burgundy, who ruled over Valais, who founded the powerful Abbey of Agauno. It was probably Rudolf II who presented Otto with certain relics. Although more recent studies suggest a different origin, perhaps Saxon, from Wessex: as part of a marital dowry, which is said to have brought to the emperor the Sword of Constantine, the spear of Charlemagne – that is, the Holy Lance of St Maurice – and the banner of St Maurice. In 961, Otto I had the saint’s remains transferred to Magdeburg; the myth was established and the cult would endure through the centuries. Whether he was African seems not to have mattered much. Reading the medieval chronicles is like reading Borges’s Manual of Fantastic Zoology, when he speaks of the African panther. It is forbidden to apply modern categories. As Gombrich taught with regard to the rhinoceros that Dürer painted without ever having seen one, the decisive factor is not that drawing, but the fact that for centuries everyone continued to draw Dürer’s fantastical animal even though they had seen a real rhinoceros in the flesh. At the same time, it is difficult to apply our current understanding of African peoples or the symbolism of colours to medieval people – even to African saints – who had for centuries lost contact with, if not mythologised, the Church of Ethiopia. Even as late as the mid-fifteenth century, Beato Angelico was painting his Thebaid as a Tuscan landscape.

But in the meantime, Maurice had become the ‘defensor fidei’ and patron saint of the Christian European empire: ‘The overlap between the thaumaturgical power of the body of Saint Maurice and that of the Holy Lance “for the salvation of the entire homeland”’ became an established fact. A ‘link was forged between Saint Maurice, the Holy Lance and the struggle against the pagans and the darkness of sin… which charted a course followed in the decades that followed by the kings of Germany’.

The fact that he had different skin – and was even the colour of the devil – does not seem to have been an obstacle. After all, Augustine himself, when writing of the Ethiopians that ‘they too have a soul and, thanks to this, they too could be included within the human race’, clearly did not view this as a racial issue in the modern sense; rather, he was affirming the unity of the human family. Albertoni explains, through a fascinating web of research and references, that what may have sparked the imagination of the anonymous sculptor of the ‘black’ Saint Maurice could have been new encounters with the ‘Ethiopians’ who, from the 13th century onwards, began to frequent the ports and markets of Europe: as ambassadors, merchants, or, more often, slaves. According to some scholars, it was the influence of Frederick II, whom he may well have actually met whilst in Sicily. It is impossible to say for certain; perhaps the truly interesting thing is that, at the time, it was not considered such a significant matter. He was a defender of the Church – that ecumene of highly warlike Christian peoples – for whom, however, Africa was not a racial issue.