Balthasar the wise king in fifteenth-century Norway

 
One of the many phenomenal treasures housed by the Oslo Museum of Cultural history is this section from a fifteenth-century altar. The scene is a fascinating, although not unusual, compression of various elements from the Nativity story, where all the actors are gathered but still on their way to the scene, as it were: Mary and Joseph are travelling to Bethlehem, the shepherds have not yet been accosted by the angels, and the three magi and their retinues have not yet arrived at their destination.

The altar is also interesting, although still not unusual, for its depiction of Balthasar the king, who was a black man according to the medieval tradition. In this way, the altar is a good reminder that people in medieval Norway knew very well that there were people of different skin colours than their own in the world. For anyone familiar with medieval Norwegian history, this comes as no surprise at all, and it is indeed incredibly banal to point it out. However, because we are in a political climate where the Middle Ages are re-imagined by right-wing forces as a place in time where ethnicities did not mix and that Europeans were pure-blooded and white-skinned, even such a banal reminder of reality serves a purpose. (Granted, this anachronistic racist vision of medieval Europe is not new, but it has gained greater political currency in the past few years.) 

Piece of an altar from Borre Church, Vestfold, Norway
Produced in the fifteenth century, probably Northern Germany 
Oslo Museum of Cultural History, C6131

Within scholarly circles, the idea that the Middle Ages - however you want to define that term in space and time - was a multicultural period, i.e., a period in which several cultures met, interacted, inhabited the same areas, and influenced each other. This is not to say that these cultural interactions were necessarily peaceful or marked by mutual respect - very often they were the opposite. But that the world was multicultural was not solely a fact, but also something that was well known even in a geographical periphery as Norway. Granted, in the second half of the fifteenth century, when this altar was made, it is most likely that most Norwegians had never seen a black person. It is even possible, although to a significantly lesser degree, that the woodworkers who carved this altar - probably somewhere in Northern Germany, such as Lübeck - might never have seen a black person in their lives. Even so, knowledge about other cultures circulated as part of the cultural impressions conveyed through art, literature and stories, and informed the worldview of Northern Europeans. This worldview included people very different to themselves. And even though this rendition of Balthasar, once featured in Borre Church in Vestfold, was not produced in Norway, the altar, and the figures in it, conveyed an image of the wider world to the Norwegian congregation. And it is not a hazardous guess to suspect that they had already heard about this black king long before the altar was brought to Norway.