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A black chess player about to win against a light-skinned cleric. Chess problem 88 in the Libro de axedrez, dados e tablas (Seville, 1283).
view moreCredit: Patrimonio Nacional. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial
Medieval manuscripts, paintings and chess sets reveal that the so-called ‘game of kings’ defied social structures and racial attitudes by celebrating the intellectual prowess of winners irrespective of their skin colour.
A 13th-century Black chess player is about to defeat his white opponent. He looks relaxed – he has a bottle of red wine within reach and a glass filled to the brim. He sits on a finely decorated bench as an equal to his light-skinned opponent: a cleric. This friendly, intellectual scene appears in a lavish treatise on chess completed in Seville in 1283 CE for King Alfonso X of Castile.
This image is a world away from contemporary depictions of Muslim captives being forcibly baptized, or of darker-skinned people executing white Christian martyrs. But it is far from unique.
Cambridge University historian Dr Krisztina Ilko has found a wealth of international evidence of chess subverting racial stereotypes and structures in the Middle Ages. Today (19th March), Dr Ilko’s study ‘Chess and Race in the Global Middle Ages’, published in Speculum, will receive the Medieval Academy of America’s prestigious ‘Article Prize in Critical Race Studies’.
King Alfonso’s Libro de axedrez (1283), now housed in El Escorial in Spain, features dozens of depictions of non-white players from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, each demonstrating their intellectual prowess. One scene depicts a contest between a Muslim and a Jewish player. Another depicts four players identified as Mongols. One casually leans on a saber but the weapon doesn’t pose a threat – the only combat is on the chess board. This scene contrasts other European depictions of Mongols which often associated them with vice and violence.
“Medieval sources repeatedly state that chess is war without bloodshed, and that it represents a just world,” says Dr Ilko, a medieval historian from Queens’ College, Cambridge.
“Chess became a representation of the known world, the people in it and how society should function through orderly moves. Chess was a powerful vehicle for people hailing from widely different places, even civilizations, to interact with each other. It was an intellectual exchange."
Racial structures and race thinking were very much present in the medieval period, even if they didn't use the same words we use today. Chess, Dr Ilko argues, shows that these structures and ideas could be countered and that intellectual prowess could empower people to challenge them.
Dr Ilko says: “When people with non-white skin colour are depicted in medieval images, scholars have tended to see them in either exalted or subdued positions. So you get the Queen of Sheba at one extreme and executioners and other malignant forces at the other. Chess reveals a different, more complex story.
“Chess was and remains a game of logic, where intellectual prowess matters. Chess operated on a different plane where people could engage with each other as equals, irrespective of their skin colour. What mattered was ‘who's smarter?’, ‘who can win?’, not ‘who's more powerful or socially superior?’”
In the Middle Ages, Ilko points out, Europe was lagging behind Islamic science, and King Alfonso’s court actively acquired and translated Islamic knowledge. At the same time, Islamic chess players were admired for their refined techniques, cleverness and tactics. Out of 103 chess problems depicted in King Alfonso’s treatise, 88 follow the Muslim style of playing. Islamic chess masters included the early 8th-century judge, Sa’id ibn Jubair, who was admired for winning contests while blindfolded.
Chess sets represented the world and its people
The game’s name in Arabic (shatranj) and Middle Persian (chatrang) derive from a variant form of the Sanskrit word chaturanga or four-limbed. This is because chess pieces are thought to be originally inspired by the four main constituents of the Indian army of late antiquity: infantry, cavalry, chariots, and elephants.
As the game was adopted and adapted across different civilizations, Ilko argues, localised concepts of human difference constantly transformed how ‘chessmen’ appeared. Ilko points to the use of facial features including eye-shape and beards, as well as clothing, but argues that colour played a particularly important role.
“Chess boards immediately had two contrasting colours and the opposing chess pieces were also differentiated through colour,” Dr Ilko says. “This allowed medieval people to project ideas of skin colour and race onto the game.”
Persian respect for Indian chess masters
The Shahnama, a monumental epic narrating the history of Persian people from the Creation to the Islamic conquest in the seventh century, contains an image depicting how the game of chess was transmitted from India to Iran.
Scholars interpreting these 14th-century illustrations – including two versions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – have assumed that the Persians depicted the Indian ambassador with dark skin and baggy clothes to underscore his defeat to their vizier, the highest-ranking diplomat in the Persian court.
This interpretation is wrong, Dr Ilko argues. The Indian ambassador’s skin colour and clothing indicate that he’s a foreigner but certainly not a defeated one. He is, in fact, shown as a champion of the powerful Indian raja and a guardian of coveted Indian knowledge introducing chess to the Persians for the first time.
“The dark skin colour of intellectual Indian figures in Persian manuscripts challenged the value systems shared by both Christian and Islamic worlds that privileged whiteness,” Dr Ilko says.
According to the text of the Shahnama, the king of India sent an embassy to the Sassanian ruler Kushraw I Anushirvan (ruled 531–79 CE) challenging him to figure out how the game was played or pay tribute. The shāh ordered his counsellors to solve the puzzle but only his clever vizier Būzurjmihr managed to show the Indian ambassador where the pieces went and how they moved.
Chess in a Mallorcan altarpiece
Another of Ilko’s discoveries relates to an overlooked depiction of chess in a late 14th-century altarpiece dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Myra. Currently exhibited in the Museu de Mallorca in Palma, the altarpiece comes from the demolished church of San Nicolás in Portopí.
The game is set in a Muslim court and involves a dark-skinned man playing chess with a light-skinned opponent. Ilko argues that the scene is a rare depiction of a miracle narrated in the French play Le Jeu de saint Nicolas written around 1200. In it, a group of “pagans,” most likely Muslims, defeat an invading Christian army and stumble upon a sole survivor praying in front of a statue of Saint Nicholas. The local Muslim king positions a statue of Nicholas to watch over his treasures but after gambling over chess in a tavern, three thieves successfully rob the treasury. Saint Nicholas later appears and prompts the gambler-thieves to return the riches, eventually convincing the king and his court to convert to Christianity.
Ilko says the painting reflects Mallorca’s complex Islamic and Christian heritage, while counteracting widely accepted medieval ideas about skin colour. “By representing the king with visibly darker skin than the gambler-thief, this painting challenged the dominant value scheme that prioritised whiteness,” Ilko argues.
“So much has changed since the Middle Ages but chess is more global than ever,” Dr Ilko says. “People still play chess because it's fun and this helps us to look at the medieval period in a different way. So much that survives and gets taught about this period is religious. It’s especially dominated by a Christian worldview. Chess reveals a more diverse and fun Middle Ages.”
Dr Ilko is currently writing a book entitled The Pawns of History: A New Approach towards the Global Middle Ages.
Reference
Krisztina Ilko, ‘Chess and Race in the Global Middle Ages’, Speculum, 99:2. DOI: 10.1086/729294
