@antbed_fatbread: ​If you open up 16th-century European books on nobility, you will find hundreds of noble coats of arms featuring crowned Black kings, knights, and saints. Books like J.A. Rogers' Nature Knows No Color-Line document arms for German, Portuguese, and Polish noble families—such as the Mohr, Schwartz, Azambuja, and Korytowski lines. Some of these crests represented patron saints like St. Maurice, the Egyptian Roman military commander who became the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire, while others were visual puns on family names or commemorated medieval alliances, trade, and military encounters across the Mediterranean. By the time camera technology emerged in the 1850s, those painted crests were centuries old, but people of African and Afro-European descent were living directly across major European cities like Berlin, Lisbon, and Paris. In Prussia, figures like Gustav Sabac el Cher served as high-ranking royal court musicians in uniform, while in Lisbon, 19th-century glass-plate photos from municipal archives recorded Black dockworkers, merchants, and families who had been an integral part of Portuguese urban life for generations. While medieval heraldry shows us how Europe chose to paint them on shields, early studio photography from the 1870s gives us their real, unedited human history. #BlackTikTok 🟥🔱⬛️

🪶antbed_fatbread🇺🇸

Open In TikTok:

Region: US

Monday 02 November 2026 20:28:06 GMT