One of my history teachers once told me a few years ago that the people of Europe in the Middle Ages referred to the black skin of African individuals such as Moors, as blue, with black being reserved as a color to mean evil or dark. A person describing a Moor would not say that his skin was black, but blue, in other words.
I took his word for it at the time but now I'm not sure. Is this remotely true?
Thanks!
For the case of the Spanish territories it is not even remotely true. Black people were referred to as "black" (negro), or having "black skin" (tez negra), but I have not been able to find a single instance of "tez azul" or "piel azul" among the vast corpus of hundreds of thousands of Spanish texts provided by the Real Academia Española. I'll give you some numbers for the period 1450-1550, with the data provided by the Corpus Diacrónico del Español:
- "Un negro" (a black man), 80 cases in 37 documents.
- "el negro" (the black), 84 cases in 43 documents. I took notice and excluded "negro" when functioning as an adjective referring to other things (el negro velo, el negro día, el negro sable, el negro manto etc).
- "unos negros" (some blacks), 3 cases in 2 documents.
- "los negros" (the blacks), 110 cases in 38 documents.
- "muchos negros" (many blacks), 11 cases in 5 documents.
The word for blue (azul), never appears in relation to the skin of anyone in any text of that time indexed in the Corpus Diacrónico del Español.
Furthermore, I shall add that yesterday I saw on this very forum a royal charter from Queen Isabella I of Castile ordering to buy a number of things for the wardrobes of two young black slaves that should have been in the service of her grandson the prince Miguel de la Paz, and they are referred to as "blackies" (negrillos).
This is, of course, in the specific case of the Spanish territories. Maybe in other places it was different, but about the other cases I cannot give an opinion.
This is sort of true, with some caveats (of course!), for Old Norse. A dark-skinned person is called blámaður, a compound of blár and maður (man).
Caveat one, however, is that we don't know exactly how Scandinavians in the High and Late Middle Ages categorised colours. Colour terms are not universal, and within a language, they're not a constant, and in the absence of native speakers to interrogate, we have to infer from the usage of colour words in the surviving texts. Examples for this are the lack of a distinction between blue and green as basic colour terms in many languages, or the emergence of "orange" as a distinct basic colour in Early Modern Europe.
While the modern descendants of blár certainly mean blue, in Old Norse texts it is used to describe things we would more likely classify as black (particularly coal and, in poetry, ravens). However, it also sometimes contrasts with svartr, a term for black (or very dark colours in general) that is used for, among other things, hair, ravens in prose, and indeed often with negative connotations.
Caveat two is that the motivation for calling dark-skinned people blámenn does not survive.
It could have been motivated by a wish to use a less morally charged term than svartr, or to make a distinction to black-haired = svartr people, or that black people's skin was perceived to be more blár than svartr in a time when blár was a broader category than "blue".
Source:
Crawford, J. (2014). The historical development of basic color terms in old norse-icelandic.