92 Religious Toleration: “The Variety of Rites” from Cyrus to Defoe, ed. John Christian Laursen (1999), ix–x; see also T. M. Scanlon, “The Difficulty of Tolerance” (1996), 226–40; Mary Warnock, “The Limits of Toleration” (1987), 123–40.
93 See, for instance, Nabil Matar, “The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England: Practice and Theory” (1999), 127–46.
94 Matar, “The Toleration of Muslims” (1999), 129, brings to light sixteenth-century voices that explicitly addressed this dilemma, especially for those who want to uphold a dogma, an ideology, or an orthodox religion to the extreme.
95 Alan Levine, “Introduction: The Prehistory of Toleration and Varieties of Skepticism” (1999), 3.
96 Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (1999), 25–26. Cohen comments, with reference to Augustine’s Contra Faustum, 27, “the survival of the Jews in exile vindicates the claims of Christianity in the eyes of Christians themselves; for this reason has God ensured that none of the Gentile rulers obliterates them or the vestiges of their observance.” There is a whole legion of excellent research on the history of Jews within the Christian context, which does not need to be reviewed here.
97 Levine, “Introduction” (1999), 6.
98 Levine, “Introduction” (1999), 8.
99 Levine, “Introduction” (1999), 8.
100 Levine, “Introduction” (1999), 8; see also the intensive discussion of religious freedom according to Scriptures by Moisé Silva, “Freedom,”, online at: http://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/freedom/ (last accessed on December 29, 2017); see also the contributions to Gnade – Freiheit – Rechtfertigung: augustinische Topoi und ihre Wirkungsgeschichte, ed. Cornelius Mayer (2007).
101 Leonard B. Glick, Abraham’s Heirs (1999); Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom (2006); see also the contributions to Integration und Desintegration der Kulturen im europäischen Mittelalter, ed. Michael Borgolte, Julia Dücker, et al. (2011); Hans-Werner Goetz, Die Wahrnehmung anderer Religionen und christlich-abendländisches Selbstverständnis im frühen und hohen Mittelalter (2013).
102 Goetz, Die Wahrnehmung, vol. 1 (2013), 357–77; Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614 (2014); as to the Muslims living under the rule of Frederick II, see, for instance, Ian Almond, Two Faiths, one Banner (2009); Dorothea Weltecke, “Emperor Frederick II, ‘Sultan of Lucera’, ‘Friend of the Muslims’, Promoter of Cultural Transfer: Controversies and Suggestions” (2012), 85–106.
103 See the contributions to Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (1997); and to Heresy and the Making of European Culture: Medieval and Modern Perspectives, ed. Andrew P. Roach and James R. Simpson (2013); L. J. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century (2014); cf. also Thomas A. Fudge, Medieval Religion and Its Anxieties (2016).
104 R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy (1995), 7. See also The Pagan Middle Ages, ed. Ludo J. R. Milis (1991; 1998).
105 See the contributions to Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration, ed. Alan Levine (1999).
106 Georg Eckert, True, Noble, Christian Freethinking (2009).
107 Tolerance in the Twenty-First Century: Prospects and Challenges, ed. Gerson Moreno-Riaño (2006).
108 Giulio Cipollone, “From Intolerance to Tolerance: The Humanitarian War, 1187–1216” (2001), 28–40; see also the contributions to Religious Toleration: “The Variety of Rites” from Cyrus to Defoe, ed. John Christian Laursen (1999).
109 Kate A. Tuley, “A Century of Communication and Acclimatization: Interpreters and Intermediaries in the Kingdom of Jerusalem” (2013), 311–39.
110 See the contributions to Zur Geschichte der Toleranz und Religionsfreiheit, ed. Heinrich Lutz (1977); Friedrich Niewöhner, Maimonides: Aufklärung und Toleranz im Mittelalter (1988); Otto Depenheuer and Karl Lehmann, Wahrheit oder Frieden (1999); Heiner Hastedt, Toleranz (2012).
111 Religiöse Toleranz im Spiegel der Literatur, ed. Bernd F. W. Springer and Alexander Fidora (2009). As to the history of utopias, see Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopia” (2005), 2403–2409.
112 See the contributions to Potency of the Common: Intercultural Perspectives about Community and Individuality, ed., Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta (2016); Experiencing the Beyond: Intercultural Approaches, ed. Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta (2017).
113 Hans R. Guggisberg, intro, Religiöse Toleranz: Dokumente zur Geschichte einer Forderung (1984), 10–11.
114 Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference, 118–19.
115 Jerold C. Frakes, Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (2011), xiii. Of course, Frakes closely follows the concept developed by Edward Said in his famous Orientalism (1978), but does not seem to have read Said’s own comments about the diverse map of medieval European ideology, where he explicitly excludes Germany from this ‘Orientalism.’ For Frakes, everything in the Middle Ages connected with the Crusades or Christian-Muslim contacts smacks of imperialism, which would be a rather anachronistic heuristicapproach. The problem with his concept seems to me that he uses a totalizing binary method and thus bludgeons the various medieval writers metaphorically to death, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, ignoring many differences, subtleties, historical contexts, deviations from the preconceived notions, and hence individualistic perspectives (e.g., 33–34).
116 Frakes, Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses (2011), 36. See also his sweeping comments on 33–35.
117 Lynn Ramey, “Medieval Miscegenation: Hybridity and the Anxiety of Inheritance” (2011), 1–19, closely follows Frakes’s lead and projects a strongly binary, racist world view in medieval literary texts, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, which I will contest in my chapter below. Ironically, in the same volume, David F. Tinsley, “Mapping the Muslims: Images of Islam in Middle High German Literature of the Thirteenth Century” (2011), 65–101, moves away from applying the race card to the medieval narratives but subsumes all those comments about Muslim Others or Blacks under the notion that this mirrored the imminent Apocalypse. This confuses the issue more than it clarifies it and diverts us from the central concern formulated by writers such as Wolfram. Nevertheless, Tinsley pursues a welcome strategy to differentiate carefully and to abstain from modern ideological positions in his analysis of the medieval sources.
118 See also the contributions to Toleranzdiskurse in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Friedrich Vollhardt, Oliver Bach, and Michael Multhammer (2015).
Here I would like to express my gratitude to Christopher R. Clason for his effort to read and comment on this chapter.
3 Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Encounters with the ‘Others’
Emergence of Toleration and Tolerance in the Early Thirteenth Century?
As scholarship has confirmed many times, the Middle High German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (fl. ca. 1190–ca. 1220) belonged to the poetic masters of his period and enjoyed highest popularity for his works, Parzival and Willehalm. He also composed significant dawn songs in which he endeavored to transform the genre itself by suggesting that it would be more preferable if the couple spending the night together would be married and could thus enjoy each other. Wolfram additionally created two mysterious fragments, his Titurel, in which he picked up loose narrative strands from his Parzival and apparently experimented with alternative concepts combining notions of love and death.1 Both his Parzival and Willehalm achieved greatest popularity, considering that the first has survived in eighty-seven, the latter in seventy-nine manuscripts. The Parzival was even printed once as an incunabulum, by Johann Mentelin in Straßburg 1477.2 By contrast, the Titurel was apparently of no great success, since it has survived only in three fragments.3
Scholars have examined both of these masterpieces at great length and in full detail, which makes it a bit redundant to review the huge number of pertinent studies once again, although I will engage with the relevant studies pertaining to the issue pursued here
in detail.4 Wolfram is, after all, a virtual household item known amongst all medieval Germanists and others and enjoys, in the literary histories, an overarching status similar to Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Boccaccio, or Chaucer.5 Here I want to focus on a number of scenes where the poet made serious efforts to portray the exchanges between and contacts with foreigners living outside of the Christian realm and at the limit of the European continent, irrespective of some postmodern theoretical claims to the opposite where the theoretical thrust matters more than the careful philological analysis.6
As we will recognize readily, there are many good reasons to pursue the topics of toleration and tolerance as discussed by Wolfram because he was daring enough to incorporate highly unusual episodes in both of his texts that strongly suggest an open-mindedness that we cannot easily find in the works by other medieval writers.
However, we know, as is very common in medieval literature, that Wolfram drew strongly from older sources, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval for his Parzival and the chanson de geste, that is, the anonymous Chanson d’Aliscance, for his Willehalm. In other words, there would be good reasons to pursue the same issues in those literary precursors, but here I want to focus on Wolfram only because his approach to our central concern proves to be most dramatic and explicit, favoring at least a form of toleration normally not found in the Middle Ages and even well beyond. This means we are not trying here to identify the entire pre-modern world in different terms, suggesting that it did not know forms of racism or intolerance; on the contrary. The purpose can only be to examine individual voices that came forward and outlined ideas about how people from different religions and races could interact with each other in a peaceful and constructive manner.
On the one hand, there is Parzival’s father, Gahmuret, who roams the world in search of knighthood, both in the East and West, without demonstrating any preference, as long as he can gain public recognition (Book 1, chs. 13–16).7 He does not pursue any specific religious goals and has nothing of a crusade in mind. In fact, he does not hesitate at all to offer his service to the Oriental ruler Balduc, who apparently appreciates him highly as a worthy warrior.8 Religious differences do not matter at all for either side and are never mentioned, not even in a passing comment, obviously because the military setting made such issues irrelevant. Gahmuret is highly appreciated by everyone at the Oriental court, and he gains fame for his knightly accomplishments, serving, basically, as a mercenary under a heathen ruler.
For Wolfram, as for the narrator, this all makes good sense because his romance Parzival is not predicated on religious issues in the narrow sense of the words. Of course, we later hear about the Grail, hence a quasi-religious kingdom situated in the most remote forest setting of Munsalvæsche, which Parzival will have to liberate, but the early part, determined by Gahmuret, is unconcerned with theological issues and focuses, instead, on the protagonist’s knightly accomplishments all over the world, that is, both in Christian and in heathen kingdoms.
We know of a fairly parallel case in the anonymous Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), where the Burgundian Queen Kriemhild marries the Hunnish King Attila/Etzel, despite their differences in religion. She raises her theological concerns briefly before their marriage, but she finds Etzel’s court to be most convenient for her purposes, ultimately, to avenge her former husband’s murder by inviting her brothers and their vassals to a court festival, where the murderous slaughter then sets in. However, at Attila’s court, warriors from many different cultures, languages, and religions reside, and mutual tolerance appears to be the modus operandi there.9 The same applies to Balduc’s court in Wolfram’s Parzival where knights assemble coming from many different cultures, religions, and regions.
But at first, Gahmuret encounters a black queen, Belacane, whom he regards as disgusting initially because of her skin color. However, soon enough he has fallen in love with her and enters, as far as we can tell, a kind of marital relationship with her.10 They communicate in French and seem to enjoy strong feelings of love for each other, and in that new setting, race has lost all meaning for the protagonist, and hence for the narrator as well. Wolfram does not elaborate much on this situation, and seemingly in a naive manner integrates it into the early part of his romance. But this matter-of-fact tone of voice should not deceive us regarding Wolfram’s overarching interest in his entire work to create connections between peoples, cultures, religions, and also languages. After all, without a good communication, there cannot be any meaningful effort to reach out to representatives of different social groups, and this both in the Middle Ages and today.
Unfortunately, the happiness between those two people does not last for long because of his strong urge to join manly entertainment again (“rîterschefte,” ch. 90, verse 30), in the form of tournaments and war activities. Although Belacane is already pregnant with their child, Feirefiz, Gahmuret abandons her anyway, sneaking away one day, only leaving behind a letter addressed to her in which he explains, at least formally, that their differences in religion urged him to leave her. Of course, as Belacane immediately indicates after having read the letter, she would not have minded to convert to his religion if he had asked her to do so (ch. 57, verses 7–8).
Her lover only pretended to be motivated by her lack of a Christian faith to abandon her, since he simply did not care about marriage and women as such. Gahmuret harbors only interest in manly entertainment and glory in combat, so Belacane cannot hold him back. Her own blackness and her non-Christian faith do not matter in any significant way, although she becomes a victim of Gahmuret’s selfish attitude. The latter, however, soon realizes how much he actually loves Belacane and bemoans his own restlessness, which has taken him away from a most admirable wife (ch. 91, verses 4–8).
Most interestingly, Gahmuret had first regarded Belacane as an ugly person because of her black skin color. He did not say anything about their religious differences since that matter did not concern him at all. Only now, having written that meaningful letter, does he bring it up and uses it as a mere excuse to justify the abandonment of his wife after such a short time. Moreover, as we learn from this episode, Gahmuret at first embraced a traditional European stereotype against blackness, but his feelings of love overcome it, rendering it effectively meaningless. As far as I can tell, there are no other significant or noteworthy medieval literary texts in which love blooms between a white and a black person, except for the medieval Dutch episodic tale of Moriaen, contained in the huge romance Lancelot (first half of the thirteenth century), where we also hear of a love relationship between a white knight, Agloval, and a black queen. He cannot marry her until he has accomplished his quest, to find Lanzelot, so he abandons her. She later delivers a son, Moriaen, who is entirely black and grows up as an exceptionally strong and impressive knight. Once he has encountered Lancelot and Gawain, who are searching for Perceval, they join hands in carrying out many adventurous deeds. Once they have found Perceval and Agloval, they help the latter to reunify with his beloved and to regain the lands from where she had been expelled.11
We hear a number of times of love relationships in which the woman descends from an Arabic (Saracen) family, such as in Aucassin et Nicolette or in Konrad Fleck’s Floire und Blanscheflor (and in many parallel versions of this narrative within the European context), but the marriage between a black queen and a white knight represents a rather unique phenomenon in Wolfram’s Parzival.
Did Wolfram try to embark on a revolutionary struggle to change his society? Was it just a playful configuration that interested him? Belacane is not only a non-Christian, but also a non-white person, and yet the shining knight Gahmuret falls in love with her and even has a child with her. Moreover, at the conclusion of Parzival, the two half brothers meet and create a close bond between each other. In other words, we can easily recognize here numerous indications of a rather tolerant attitude espoused by the poet. Curiously, he seems to have struck a significant cord with these thematic features, considering the great popularit
y of his work as documented by the large number of manuscripts containing the text. We might have to ask to what extent Wolfram hence influenced a wider audience to embrace the ideal of toleration and to ignore religious and racial differences in favor of love, chivalry, and knighthood.
Of course, Wolfram as the narrator does not go into any details here and simply includes this highly unusual scene into his romance, but the absence of comments indicates, first, that it was perfectly alright for him to consider a marriage between a black woman and a white man. Second, for him, in marriage, differences between religions did not concern him, as long as love bonded both partners together.
As Siegfried Richard Christoph confirms,
At no time previously did Gahmuret introduce any religious considerations in his relationship with Belakane. Gahmuret’s fait accompli in leaving Patelamunt prior to Belakane’s reading of the letter moreover belies his readiness to stay with or return to Belakane should she submit to Christian baptism.12
Undoubtedly, Wolfram wrote as a Christian author and addressed a Christian audience, but despite the many spiritual allusions, the poet pursued a rather universal religious perspective and did not harbor any particular church doctrine or dogma. More importantly, however, Wolfram also projected the possibility of marriage across race lines, and this ca. 800 years before the issue gained central importance in modern society. Yet, the poet does not address those aspects in explicit terms and simply operates with them in a surprisingly relaxed manner, as if race was of no particular concern for him or for his audience.13
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