‘Y nold hir ȝiue a Sarazin’: Desire, History, and Fantasy in The King of Tars

The normative hierarchy of desire constructed by the Princess’s rejection of the Sultan is supported by its converse: her desirability to the Sultan, which specifically presents whiteness as desirability, as Cohen and Heng also note.7 Cohen, ‘Race’, p. 119; Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 231. References to colour saturate the description of the Princess’s beauty in the first two stanzas of the poem: ‘non feirer woman miȝt ben’, she is ‘white as feþer of swan’, ‘wiþ rode red’, ‘eyȝen stepe & gray’, and a ‘white swere’, making the Sultan desire to ‘haue hir to wiue / Þat was so feir a may’ (11–12, 14–16, 23–4; all emphases mine). The Princess is the image of ‘normative female beauty in medieval European literature’, as Heng argues, and this normative beauty is defined by colour: it is her white skin, red lips, and grey eyes that are said to be attractive to the Sultan.8 Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 231. The emphasis on the corporeal features associated with whiteness here align with Friedman’s argument that ‘the white racial body is precisely what is being constructed and continually held together across the narrative’s trajectory’, assembling white racial identity from the sum of the Princess’s body parts.9 Friedman, ‘Making whiteness matter’, p. 53. While the Sultan’s race is barely remarked in the opening of the poem – as Siobhain Bly Calkin notes, ‘we don’t know until line 799 that the sultan is black’ – the Princess’s repeatedly is.10 Siobhain Bly Calkin, ‘Marking Religion on the Body: Saracens, Categorization, and The King of Tars’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 104.2 (2005), 219–38 (p. 224 n. 19). But the detailed description of the Princess’s features does not just construct whiteness but constructs whiteness as desirability, endorsing the ‘ideology of white beauty’ that Hall exposes as a ‘racial formation’.11 Hall, ‘Literary whiteness’, p. 80.

Desire functions on a political level to essentialise selective differences as race, and this is further developed by the King’s response to the Sultan’s proposal. The King condemns this more stridently than the Princess did, focusing directly upon the Sultan’s Muslim identity. He tells the Sultan’s messengers ‘Y nold hir ȝiue a Sarazin’ (43) and, according to their report, calls him a ‘heþen hounde’ (93). The King mobilises these racist stereotypes to a greater extent than the Princess and unites them with a focus on patriarchal ownership. ‘Y nold hir ȝiue a Sarazin’ potently yokes together racism and misogynistic anxieties about transferring patriarchal ownership of (white) women to people of colour, an anxiety Hall identifies in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where she argues it ‘strikes at the heart of European fears of the putative desire of the native other for European women’.12 Hall, Things of Darkness, p. 143. The King of Tars, like Prospero, is positioned as the rightful owner of (white) women and as protecting them from the sexual threat of racialised others, purportedly justifying patriarchal control. As Hall writes, ‘female bodies serve as the testing ground for the symbolic boundaries of culture and race’, but white women do so specifically through what Ruby Hamad categorises as their (or our) ‘sanctioned victim’ status.13 Hall, Things of Darkness, p. 101; Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color (New York: Catapult, 2020), p. 14. Positioned as desirable to racialised others (therefore maintaining the ‘ideology of white beauty’), white women’s supposed vulnerability justifies white patriarchal authority and characterises people of colour as sexually threatening – as abductors, proponents of forced marriage, or even as rapists. This racialised pattern also deflects attention away from the sexual abuse of women of colour. This dual operation of racism and patriarchal justification through the motif of the vulnerable white woman is still being echoed in white supremacist violence and far-right conspiracy theories today.14 See Laura Bates, Men Who Hate Women (London: Simon & Schuster, 2020), p. 176; Steve Rose, ‘A deadly ideology: how the “great replacement theory” went mainstream’, The Guardian (8 June 2022) <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/a-deadly-ideology-how-the-great-replacement-theory-went-mainstream> [accessed 18 August 2022]. See also Sanyal’s discussion of the Cologne attacks: Mithu Sanyal, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (London: Verso, 2019), p. 91.

I am not trying to posit a direct link between The King of Tars and modern far-right violence but to point out that the correlation of racism and patriarchal anxiety about white female vulnerability is deeply embedded in European literature, culture, and politics, in the hope of disrupting this association. As a white woman working in medieval studies, I feel it is particularly vital to draw attention to how problematic the leveraging of white female vulnerability is.15 This leveraging of white female vulnerability also characterises trans-exclusionary feminism: see the discussion in Alison Phipps, ‘White Tears, White Rage: Victimhood and (as) Violence in Mainstream Feminism’, in The Politics of Victimhood, ed. by Sarah Banet-Weiser and Lilie Chouliaraki (= European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24.1 (2021)), pp. 1–13 (pp. 8–9). Medieval studies has been characterised by Kim as an unbearably white field, in which people of colour have, as Whitaker has described, at times been made to feel ‘out of place’ – even as it is people of colour who have been doing the vital work of tackling racism in our discipline.16 Dorothy Kim, ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Medieval Studies’, In the Middle (10 November 2016) <https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/11/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-medieval.html> [accessed 22 April 2023]; Cord J. Whitaker, ‘Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race and trippin’ into the future’, in Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages, ed. by Whitaker (= postmedieval, 6.1 (2015)), pp. 3–11 (p. 3). Challenging the weaponisation of whiteness may be an area in which white people can helpfully contribute to critical race theory: as Heather Blatt notes, ‘white people need to take on more responsibility for speaking and educating about race’, but we must also acknowledge that our privileged perspectives may lead us to miss important nuances.17 Heather Blatt, ‘“Whiteness seeps through”: Resisting colorblind racism in Mandeville’s Travels’, postmedieval, 11.4 (2020), 484–92 (p. 486).

The link between racism and perceptions of white female vulnerability is evident not only in The King of Tars but across the works discussed in this chapter, which considered collectively show much greater concern about the marriage of a Christian woman to a Muslim or formerly Muslim man than they do for marriages between Christian men and (formerly) Muslim women. This may be influenced by the portrayal of epidermal race in narratives where Muslim women are described as white or white-passing, but it also seems to reflect anxieties about white female vulnerability. Within The King of Tars, the level of concern about a white Christian woman marrying a Muslim man is evident in the continued focus upon the Princess’s unwillingness to love the Sultan even after she marries him. She agrees to become his wife, but only when she sees there is no alternative after he defeats her father’s forces. The Princess’s words upon the healing of their child, born as a lump of flesh and miraculously restored through baptism,18 For discussions of the child, see Natalie Goodison, Deborah J. G. Mackay, and Karen Temple, ‘Genetics, Molar Pregnancies and Medieval Ideas of Monstrous Births: The Lump of Flesh in The King of Tars’, Medical Humanities, 45.1 (2019), 2–9; Molly Lewis, ‘“Blob Child” Revisited: Conflations of Monstrosity, Disability, and Race in King of Tars’, in Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, ed. by Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 147–62; Sarah Star, ‘Anima Carnis in Sanguine Est: Blood, Life, and The King of Tars’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 115.4 (2016), 442–62; Jane Gilbert, ‘Putting the pulp into fiction: the lump-child and its parents in The King of Tars’, in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, ed. by Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 102–23; Heng, Empire of Magic, pp. 227–30. I follow Lewis’s example in referring to the baby simply as ‘the child’, avoiding more reductive terminology. reveal that she still does not love him, even if she has been forced to marry him:

In the field of national politics as opposed to the politics of desire, The King of Tars allows more doubt about racial-religious hierarchies, through the Sultan’s military victory over the Christian forces. That the Sultan determines to win the Princess ‘in batayl’ (32) aligns with stereotypical romance depictions of Muslim–Christian relationships, particularly the trope of the Muslim knight besieging a Christian woman, which occurs in works like Blanchardyn and Eglantine, Sir Gowther, Sir Percyvell of Gales, and perhaps Ipomadon.20 On this trope, see Corinne Saunders, ‘A Matter of Consent: Middle English Romance and the Law of Raptus’, in Medieval Women and the Law, ed. by Noël James Menuge (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 105–24 (pp. 114–16). In these romances, it usually upholds the perceived or desired moral, chivalric, and romantic supremacy of Christians: a Christian knight who arrives to defend the besieged lady reinforces the idea that marital consent is prioritised by Christians where Muslims seek to force marriage upon unwilling women; the Christian knight’s military triumph ensures that Christian chivalry is upheld as the greater military force; the lady’s usual offer of love to her Christian champion suggests the desirability of Christians compared to Muslim knights, while also continuing to contrast the coercive force of the Muslim suitor with the apparently free offer of love to the Christian defender. However, while clearly invoking this trope, The King of Tars decisively veers away from it, as no Christian hero arrives to defend the Princess and her father’s forces suffer severe defeat, losing ‘þritti þousend […] / kniȝtes of Cristen lawe’ (211–12). The effects of the Princess’s resistance are not just to outline and impose a racial-religious hierarchy of desire, then, as they also function in the opposite direction. They expose romance fantasies as fantasies, as the Christian hero never materialises, leaving the Princess to surrender to the Sultan on his terms and casting doubt upon the racist hierarchy constructed by the operations of desire.

Instead of the fantasies of romance with which it begins, The King of Tars can be seen as turning to history to grapple with Christian defeat and loss. The King of Tars invites comparison with contemporary events: as Judith Perryman notes, ‘the basis of the romance is a historical incident from the late thirteenth-century crusades’, which ‘appeared in a number of chronicles’.21 Judith Perryman, ‘Introduction’, in The King of Tars, ed. by Perryman, pp. 7–72 (p. 42). The historical record concerns Ghazan, Khan of the Persians, who defeated the Sultans of Damascus and Babylon in 1299 and formed alliances with the Christian Kings of Armenia and Georgia.22 See Friedman, ‘Making whiteness matter’, pp. 54–5. Ghazan himself ultimately converted to Islam, but a number of chronicles record tales of a Mongol leader converting to Christianity. These layers of history and chronicle seem to have formed the basis for The King of Tars and may have influenced both the portrayal of the Christian King of Tars, a figure associated with the Tartars (as even if Tars refers to the Armenian city of Tarsus, this city was under Mongol rule), and the later conversion of the Sultan.23 See Perryman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 47–8; Friedman, ‘Making whiteness matter’, p. 55. The King’s defeat by the Sultan seems a provocative intrusion of the underlying history into its more common representation in narrative. As Bly Calkin notes, ‘the late thirteenth century’, shortly before The King of Tars was composed, was ‘the period during which the Crusader kingdoms definitively fell to Muslim powers after a series of Christian military defeats and failures culminating in the Fall of Acre in 1291’.24 Siobhain Bly Calkin, ‘Saracens’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. by Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 185–200 (p. 191). The loss of Acre in particular, Robert Rouse argues, ‘had a profound impact on the culture and literature of Western Europe’, as ‘Christendom was left to face the undeniable fact that the Islamic foe had triumphed’.25 Robert Allen Rouse, ‘Crusaders’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, pp. 173–83 (p. 182). The King of Tars’s stark depiction of Christian military defeat in its opening sequence challenges and disrupts contemporary fantasies of military supremacy, interpolating real-life losses into the fantasy context of romance.

However, this is not the full story. While the opening sequence reveals the lie of romance and its illusions of Christian supremacy, the end turns away from both romance and history to reaffirm Christian power through divine miracle. When the child is restored from a ‘rond of flesche’ (580) to a healthy baby upon being baptised, the Sultan agrees to accept Christianity, and his skin colour changes from black to white as he is given a Christian name, offering a double corporeal miracle that asserts the power of the Christian God to act in the world.26 As Whitaker notes, it is actually this transformation that precipitates the Sultan’s true belief: Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 26–7. The Sultan’s persecution of his own people who refuse to convert may have troubled medieval Christian readers insofar as it suggests continuity between his actions at the start and end of the romance, as Whitaker has argued, but it also effectively reverses the Christian forces’ initial losses.27 Ibid., p. 43. This return to and reversal of the opening may itself be unsettling, however, because if the opening exposed the motif of the Christian knight saving a woman besieged by a Muslim man as improbable, its refraction in the ending may question whether this is also an unlikely fantasy. However, the difference between these two types of fantasy is the centrality of Christianity. The King of Tars turns away from the illusions of romance, through and past historic losses, to assert the greater power of Christian miracle to achieve a desirable ending. That medieval readers may have perceived the narrative in this way is suggested by its manuscript contexts: the related manuscripts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1 (the Vernon manuscript) and London, British Library, MS Additional 22283 (the Simeon manuscript) are codices focused on ‘items of a moral or religious nature’, which contain only two other romance-affiliated works, the pious works Robert of Cisyle (in both manuscripts) and Joseph of Arimathia (in the Vernon manuscript).28 Perryman, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. For example, the Vernon manuscript includes the South English Legendary, the Northern Homily Cycle, the Miracles of the Virgin, La Estorie del Evangelie, Piers Plowman, works by medieval mystics like Richard Rolle, and a version of the Ancrene Riwle. See ‘MS. Eng. poet. a. 1’, Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2018) <https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4817> [accessed 12 February 2021]. Commenting on Robert of Cisyle and The King of Tars, N. F. Blake suggests that ‘they are more in the nature of exempla exhibiting moral and religious truths, and as such they fit well into this section of the [Vernon] manuscript’, while A. S. G. Edwards argues that The King of Tars pairs well with The Pistel of Susan, which it follows in the Simeon manuscript and precedes, a few texts apart, in the Vernon manuscript, as both emphasise ‘female devotional figures who provide models of Christian conduct, and who, by their submission to Divine Will, enable the triumph of that Will’.29 N. F. Blake, ‘Vernon Manuscript: Contents and Organisation’, in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. by Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 45–59 (p. 54); A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Contexts of the Vernon Romances’, in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, pp. 159–70 (p. 167). The other surviving manuscript of The King of Tars, the Auchinleck manuscript, supports these connections, as The King of Tars is grouped with religious narratives rather than romances there.30 See Edwards, ‘Codicology and Translation’, pp. 27, 30 n. 14. The manuscript contexts of The King of Tars therefore support a reading of it as turning away from the fantasies of romance to the promise of divine intervention.

The focus upon divine miracle may have appealed to Christian readers in the long aftermath of crusading defeats, which made an immediate military victory seem an unlikely fantasy indeed. Although Heng suggests that narratives like The King of Tars offer ‘an elegant solution to holy war: The simple agency of a Christian princess, acting as a missionary for her faith and her people, obviates the need for large armies, territorial invasion, and bloody combat’, The King of Tars also acknowledges the reality of brutal warfare.31 Heng, The Invention of Race, p. 139. It reassures anxieties about real crusading defeats not by sublimating those losses but by incorporating them into a story where accepting defeat results in ultimate victory. Although the Simeon and Vernon manuscripts postdate the loss of Acre by a hundred years, Rouse argues that the fall of Acre ‘precipitated a collective trauma that would haunt the Christian peoples of western Europe for centuries to follow’.32 Robert Rouse, ‘Romance and Crusade in Late Medieval England’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, ed. by Anthony Bale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 217–31 (p. 217). In the late fourteenth century and into the fifteenth, divine miracle and Christian endurance might still have been seen to offer an important message, even as large-scale crusading movements faded into the past. While the connections between the opening and the ending of the romance may open up questions about its fantasy of Christian supremacy, The King of Tars ultimately permits both readings, offering its Christian readers a recuperation of loss through miracle and conversion, while also enabling some questioning of the ending. Desire is central to race-making in The King of Tars, offering an arena in which differentiation can be imposed even as Christian military supremacy is challenged. In this way, desire operates as another means by which, ‘when the replication of colonial dominance in territorial and military terms falters, the preferred momentum of empire becomes cultural’.33 Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 190. Desire thus functions in accordance with the focus upon Christian miracle, as both assert Christian supremacy in contexts where this is called into doubt by military defeat.