I'm now back home from my trip to Morocco and am completely exhausted by the experience. There were just too many early rises and long bus journeys for me. But at least I got to see a bit of Moulay Ismail's Meknes and the former pirate base at Essaouira. I also have no further excuse for not writing something about the Moors at the court of James IV, the first identifiable black people in Scotland since the creation of the nation in 843.
Much of what we know about these black courtiers comes from the accounts kept by James IV's Lord High Treasurer, which begin to mention Moors at the court from 1501 onwards, when a payment to 'the Moreyn' of 15s 4d is noted as having been made. More payments, often to named individual Moors followed- see here and here.
Of course, Moors were not necessarily black, and in 16th century Scotland, a 'black man' would more usually refer to a man with black hair, but there are good reasons to suppose that these Moors were of recent sub-Saharan African origin. Where we can trace the origins of the Moors, it seems that they all came out of Portugal, whether found aboard Portuguese ships taken as prizes by the Barton brothers, or brought directly from Iberia by William Wood. Traditionally, slaves in Portugal had been of Iberian Muslim origins, but by the end of the 15th century there were few of these left and they had been supplanted almost entirely by black Africans.
It was also a time when black servants and courtiers were quite fashionable in European courts and in a way in which Berber or Iberian Muslim slaves were not. They brought an exotic touch to the court, and one that demonstrated the universal reach of the king's power and the cosmopolitan nature of the court – and James IV was not the kind of man to be seen as being behind the times.
From the 15th century onwards, we have plenty of depictions of black servants and courtiers from other European courts, but none survive from the court of James IV, though I feel that it was likely that some would have been made. However, we do know from other sources how keen the king was to display his black Moors to the public. In the summer of 1507, an extraordinary pageant was held at Edinburgh to celebrate the birth of the king's son and heir, James, Duke of Rothesay, now known as the "Tournament of the Wild Knight and the Black Lady". In this pageant, the king, in the guise of the Wild Knight, jousted in the cause of the Black Lady, probably played by one of the two Moorish ladies in the household of Lady Margaret Stewart. The 'Moor lass' dressed in a 'gown of damask flowered with gold and fringed in green and yellow taffeta' was borne to the tournament in a 'chair triumphal", probably carried by Scotsmen with blackened skin. Upon the king's victory, she rewarded him with a symbolic kiss.
The tournament was such a success that it was repeated the next year, despite the death of the infant Duke of Rothesay on the meantime. The two tournaments were the two most expensive and flamboyant ever held during the reign of James IV, and the Black Lady herself was immortalised in verse by the makar William Dunbar, the greatest of that era. The poem itself 'Ane blak More [My ladye with the mekle lippis]' belongs to the Scottish flyting tradition, and so is far from complimentary. Be that as it may, it does immortalise one of the earliest black Scots.
Lang heff I maed of ladyes quhytt,
Nou of an blak I will indytt
That landet furth of the last schippis
Quhou fain wald I descryve perfytt
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
