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* Black servants play a significant part in the series of ''[[{{Literature/Angelique}} Angélique]]'' novels by Anne Golon, set during the reign of [[UsefulNotes/LouisXIV King Louis XIV]]. They existed in RealLife in 16th century Paris, as former slaves acquired from the Mediterranean Turkish and Arab traders, or children of former slaves, and were much sought-after by the French aristocracy as exotic "pets" / status symbols. In the books, they display fierce loyalty to anyone who treats them as human beings, including the eponymous heroine and serve them as spies, couriers, and bodyguards.
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* Black servants play a significant part in the series of ''[[{{Literature/Angelique}} ''[[Literature/AngeliqueGolon Angélique]]'' novels by Anne Golon, set during the reign of [[UsefulNotes/LouisXIV King Louis XIV]]. They existed in RealLife in 16th century Paris, as former slaves acquired from the Mediterranean Turkish and Arab traders, or children of former slaves, and were much sought-after by the French aristocracy as exotic "pets" / status symbols. In the books, they display fierce loyalty to anyone who treats them as human beings, including the eponymous heroine and serve them as spies, couriers, and bodyguards.
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* Myth/{{Arthurian|Legend}} medieval literature has featured Saracen and Moorish (i.e. Middle Eastern and African) knights since about the 13th century.
** By far the most important example due to appearing in multiple derivative medieval works is Sir Palamedes (or Palomides), a Saracen frenemy of the Cornish Sir Tristan who joins him at the Round Table after competing for the Irish lady Isolde's hand. Palamedes's father Esclabor is sometimes said to be King of Babylon, and his brothers Safir (or Safere) and Segwarides also join the Round Table. Like all such non-antagonistic examples in Arthurian literature, they eventually convert to Christianity from "paganism".
** One-off characters in various works include Sir Morien (Moriaen), the half-Moorish son of Sir Aglovale, nephew of Sir Percivale and grandson of King Pellinore. Certainly he has a PunnyName, and he appears in a self-titled anonymous Dutch romance. Another half-Moorish knight is Percivale's half-brother Feirefiz, son of the Moorish queen Belacane and future father of the fabled Christian king in the East, Prester John, in Wolfram von Eschenbach's ''Literature/{{Parzival}}'', a work most scholars date to the 1310s. But here Percival and Feirefiz's father is named Gahmuret.
* In the medieval romance ''King Horn,'' Saracens invade Suddene (a mythical kingdom in the British Isles). This is probably a RaceLift as the villains act just like Viking conquerors, but by the time the story was written down Vikings had become passé and the Crusades were the new hot topic.
* In the same vein, in Sir Thomas Mallory's ''Literature/LeMorteDArthur'', an early war between the newly installed King Arthur and an alliance of rebel British petty kings and lords is defused after Saracens invade the latter's lands. In much earlier tellings such Geoffrey of Monmouth's ''Literature/HistoriaRegumBritanniae'', the invaders are Saxons not Saracens.
* The later Creator/SvenHassel novels introduced Stabsgefreiter Albert Mumbuto, a black soldier in the German army of UsefulNotes/WW2. However, the website [[http://www.svenhassel.info/ Porta's Kitchen]] mentioned a documentary where several black Germans were interviewed, including at least one soldier. Germany had had an African colonial empire until 1919 so there were a number of African-Germans long after that. This matter surfaces in Istvan Szabo's movie ''Mephisto'', taking place in the 1930s, in which the protagonist, a famous theatre director, has an African-German mistress and is therefore chastised by an angry Hermann Göring. Though it might surprise a modern reader, while [[ThoseWackyNazis Nazi]] [[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005479 racism toward black Germans]] [[http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/?lang=en&content=blacks is well-documented]] and horrible, this wasn't as systematic as their persecution of the Jews.
* {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d and {{Justified|Trope}} in ''Literature/{{Everworld}}'':
** There are Vikings of all different races because Everworld's transplanted cultures have a vastly different geography from "the Old World" (our world), so that Everworld-Vikings regularly raid Everworld-Aztecs, Everworld-Africans, and apparently Everworld-Asians; this results in many new people entering the Viking society as slaves (who may gain freedom and work their way up) or from mixed marriages between Vikings and captured women. Their king, Olaf Ironfoot, is actually black.
** The Amazons are described as similarly having children with whatever men they happen to conquer. The queen, Pretty Little Flower, is mixed-race.
* A [[SassyBlackWoman black Moorish woman prosecuting attorney]] named [[{{Valkyries}} Brunhild]] (!) appears in the eponymous ''Die Morin'', written by [[UsefulNotes/HolyRomanEmpire German]] poet Hermann von Sachsenheim in the year ''[[OlderThanTheyThink 1453]]''. She is supposed to prosecute love cases for the goddess Venus and her lover, King Theatre/{{Tannhaeuser}} (!!), who, according to legend, lived in a subterranean kingdom under some mountain in Germany. Probably Sachsenheim assumed that a servant of Venus was a pagan, and a pagan was a Muslim, and a Muslim was a Moor, and that "Brun-hild" meant "brown-maiden" (instead of "byrnie (=mail-coat)-warrior").
* A Creator/PeterDavid novel about King Arthur in modern times, ''Literature/KnightLife'', makes Percival, the Grail Knight, a Moor. Everyone is totally surprised by this in the novel and a scholar or two "refutes" it in front of him.
* Characters with red hair and blue or green eyes are fairly common in classic Chinese novels such as ''WaterMargin''. This may be justified given the ethnic makeup among the peoples of Central Asian regions bordering China during the Middle Ages, and mentions of giant men with red hair and light eyes on their far western borders, sometimes believed to have been, yes, Vikings (not entirely implausible, since the Viking trade routes down to the Black Sea went quite deep into modern Russia, and once the Kievan Rus' (founded by Vikings) was established in the 9th century, it started developing eastwards too.
* Ranec, from Jean M. Auel's ''[[Literature/EarthsChildren The Mammoth Hunters]]'', is a black Cro-Magnon living in Ancient Russia north of the Caspian Sea. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] by the fact that, in his youth, Ranec's father made a long journey to the region that is now Ethiopia, married a woman there, and returned to Russia with his son after his wife's death.
* Creator/MichaelChabon's ''Literature/GentlemenOfTheRoad'', which has protagonists that are a black Abyssinian and a very white Eastern Frank, both Jewish, who travel the world as bandits and mercenaries and end up in the Caucasus. The Khazars, a nation of Turkic Jews, also features heavily in the plot. It was Chabon's intention to explore the lesser-known branches of Jewish lineage.
* Sanya, one of the [[{{Paladin}} knights of the Cross]] in ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'', is a black Russian. He himself notes that his color would turn heads in Moscow and that he couldn't go to rural villages without causing traffic accidents.
* Black servants play a significant part in the series of ''[[{{Literature/Angelique}} Angélique]]'' novels by Anne Golon, set during the reign of [[UsefulNotes/LouisXIV King Louis XIV]]. They existed in RealLife in 16th century Paris, as former slaves acquired from the Mediterranean Turkish and Arab traders, or children of former slaves, and were much sought-after by the French aristocracy as exotic "pets" / status symbols. In the books, they display fierce loyalty to anyone who treats them as human beings, including the eponymous heroine and serve them as spies, couriers, and bodyguards.
* Children's novel ''Surviving the Applewhites'' has, as one of the subplots, a performance of ''The Sound of Music'' with color-blind casting. This leads to, among other things, an ad-libbed line that the von Trapp children are all adopted.
* The 16th-century Italian epic ''Literature/OrlandoFurioso'' has Ruggiero, an Arab, as one of Charlemagne's knights.
** By far the most important example due to appearing in multiple derivative medieval works is Sir Palamedes (or Palomides), a Saracen frenemy of the Cornish Sir Tristan who joins him at the Round Table after competing for the Irish lady Isolde's hand. Palamedes's father Esclabor is sometimes said to be King of Babylon, and his brothers Safir (or Safere) and Segwarides also join the Round Table. Like all such non-antagonistic examples in Arthurian literature, they eventually convert to Christianity from "paganism".
** One-off characters in various works include Sir Morien (Moriaen), the half-Moorish son of Sir Aglovale, nephew of Sir Percivale and grandson of King Pellinore. Certainly he has a PunnyName, and he appears in a self-titled anonymous Dutch romance. Another half-Moorish knight is Percivale's half-brother Feirefiz, son of the Moorish queen Belacane and future father of the fabled Christian king in the East, Prester John, in Wolfram von Eschenbach's ''Literature/{{Parzival}}'', a work most scholars date to the 1310s. But here Percival and Feirefiz's father is named Gahmuret.
* In the medieval romance ''King Horn,'' Saracens invade Suddene (a mythical kingdom in the British Isles). This is probably a RaceLift as the villains act just like Viking conquerors, but by the time the story was written down Vikings had become passé and the Crusades were the new hot topic.
* In the same vein, in Sir Thomas Mallory's ''Literature/LeMorteDArthur'', an early war between the newly installed King Arthur and an alliance of rebel British petty kings and lords is defused after Saracens invade the latter's lands. In much earlier tellings such Geoffrey of Monmouth's ''Literature/HistoriaRegumBritanniae'', the invaders are Saxons not Saracens.
* The later Creator/SvenHassel novels introduced Stabsgefreiter Albert Mumbuto, a black soldier in the German army of UsefulNotes/WW2. However, the website [[http://www.svenhassel.info/ Porta's Kitchen]] mentioned a documentary where several black Germans were interviewed, including at least one soldier. Germany had had an African colonial empire until 1919 so there were a number of African-Germans long after that. This matter surfaces in Istvan Szabo's movie ''Mephisto'', taking place in the 1930s, in which the protagonist, a famous theatre director, has an African-German mistress and is therefore chastised by an angry Hermann Göring. Though it might surprise a modern reader, while [[ThoseWackyNazis Nazi]] [[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005479 racism toward black Germans]] [[http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/?lang=en&content=blacks is well-documented]] and horrible, this wasn't as systematic as their persecution of the Jews.
* {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d and {{Justified|Trope}} in ''Literature/{{Everworld}}'':
** There are Vikings of all different races because Everworld's transplanted cultures have a vastly different geography from "the Old World" (our world), so that Everworld-Vikings regularly raid Everworld-Aztecs, Everworld-Africans, and apparently Everworld-Asians; this results in many new people entering the Viking society as slaves (who may gain freedom and work their way up) or from mixed marriages between Vikings and captured women. Their king, Olaf Ironfoot, is actually black.
** The Amazons are described as similarly having children with whatever men they happen to conquer. The queen, Pretty Little Flower, is mixed-race.
* A [[SassyBlackWoman black Moorish woman prosecuting attorney]] named [[{{Valkyries}} Brunhild]] (!) appears in the eponymous ''Die Morin'', written by [[UsefulNotes/HolyRomanEmpire German]] poet Hermann von Sachsenheim in the year ''[[OlderThanTheyThink 1453]]''. She is supposed to prosecute love cases for the goddess Venus and her lover, King Theatre/{{Tannhaeuser}} (!!), who, according to legend, lived in a subterranean kingdom under some mountain in Germany. Probably Sachsenheim assumed that a servant of Venus was a pagan, and a pagan was a Muslim, and a Muslim was a Moor, and that "Brun-hild" meant "brown-maiden" (instead of "byrnie (=mail-coat)-warrior").
* A Creator/PeterDavid novel about King Arthur in modern times, ''Literature/KnightLife'', makes Percival, the Grail Knight, a Moor. Everyone is totally surprised by this in the novel and a scholar or two "refutes" it in front of him.
* Characters with red hair and blue or green eyes are fairly common in classic Chinese novels such as ''WaterMargin''. This may be justified given the ethnic makeup among the peoples of Central Asian regions bordering China during the Middle Ages, and mentions of giant men with red hair and light eyes on their far western borders, sometimes believed to have been, yes, Vikings (not entirely implausible, since the Viking trade routes down to the Black Sea went quite deep into modern Russia, and once the Kievan Rus' (founded by Vikings) was established in the 9th century, it started developing eastwards too.
* Ranec, from Jean M. Auel's ''[[Literature/EarthsChildren The Mammoth Hunters]]'', is a black Cro-Magnon living in Ancient Russia north of the Caspian Sea. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] by the fact that, in his youth, Ranec's father made a long journey to the region that is now Ethiopia, married a woman there, and returned to Russia with his son after his wife's death.
* Creator/MichaelChabon's ''Literature/GentlemenOfTheRoad'', which has protagonists that are a black Abyssinian and a very white Eastern Frank, both Jewish, who travel the world as bandits and mercenaries and end up in the Caucasus. The Khazars, a nation of Turkic Jews, also features heavily in the plot. It was Chabon's intention to explore the lesser-known branches of Jewish lineage.
* Sanya, one of the [[{{Paladin}} knights of the Cross]] in ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'', is a black Russian. He himself notes that his color would turn heads in Moscow and that he couldn't go to rural villages without causing traffic accidents.
* Black servants play a significant part in the series of ''[[{{Literature/Angelique}} Angélique]]'' novels by Anne Golon, set during the reign of [[UsefulNotes/LouisXIV King Louis XIV]]. They existed in RealLife in 16th century Paris, as former slaves acquired from the Mediterranean Turkish and Arab traders, or children of former slaves, and were much sought-after by the French aristocracy as exotic "pets" / status symbols. In the books, they display fierce loyalty to anyone who treats them as human beings, including the eponymous heroine and serve them as spies, couriers, and bodyguards.
* Children's novel ''Surviving the Applewhites'' has, as one of the subplots, a performance of ''The Sound of Music'' with color-blind casting. This leads to, among other things, an ad-libbed line that the von Trapp children are all adopted.
* The 16th-century Italian epic ''Literature/OrlandoFurioso'' has Ruggiero, an Arab, as one of Charlemagne's knights.
