When chess was the great equalizer: how a medieval board game defied racial hierarchies

University of Cambridge

A Black man sits relaxed on a decorated bench, a glass of red wine filled to the brim beside him. He is about to win. His opponent, a white cleric, faces defeat. The scene appears in a lavish 1283 treatise commissioned by King Alfonso X of Castile in Seville - and it tells a story that contradicts almost everything we think we know about race in the Middle Ages.

This image is not an anomaly. Cambridge University historian Dr. Krisztina Ilko has spent years tracking depictions of chess across medieval manuscripts, altarpieces, and carved game sets from Europe, Persia, and beyond. Her study, "Chess and Race in the Global Middle Ages," published in Speculum, has just received the Medieval Academy of America's Article Prize in Critical Race Studies. The findings paint a picture of chess as a social space where the usual racial hierarchies simply did not apply.

A king's treatise full of diverse players

King Alfonso's Libro de axedrez, now housed in El Escorial in Spain, features dozens of depictions of non-white players from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Each is shown demonstrating intellectual skill. One scene pairs a Muslim player against a Jewish one. Another shows four players identified as Mongols - one casually leaning on a saber that poses no threat. The only combat happens on the board.

That Mongol scene is telling. Other European manuscripts from the same period depicted Mongols as violent and vice-ridden. But in Alfonso's chess treatise, they are strategists. Thinkers. Equals.

Ilko argues that chess operated on a different plane from other medieval social interactions. The game's internal logic demanded it. Two players sit across from each other, bound by identical rules, and the smarter one wins. There is no room for social rank or skin color in that equation.

Eighty-eight of 103 problems followed Muslim playing style

The intellectual debt ran deep. Of the 103 chess problems depicted in Alfonso's treatise, 88 follow the Muslim style of play. This was not accidental. In the Middle Ages, Europe lagged behind Islamic science, and Alfonso's court actively sought out and translated Islamic knowledge. Islamic chess masters were admired for refined techniques and tactical brilliance. Among the most famous was Sa'id ibn Jubair, an early 8th-century judge renowned for winning contests while blindfolded.

The game itself carries this multicultural history in its name. The Arabic shatranj and Middle Persian chatrang derive from the Sanskrit chaturanga, meaning "four-limbed" - a reference to the four branches of the ancient Indian army: infantry, cavalry, chariots, and elephants. As the game traveled across civilizations, each culture reshaped the pieces to reflect its own world.

Color played a particular role in this reshaping. Chess boards have always featured two contrasting colors, and opposing pieces were differentiated the same way. Ilko argues that this built-in duality allowed medieval people to project ideas about skin color and race onto the game - but in ways that often subverted the expected hierarchy.

The Indian ambassador who was no defeated envoy

Consider the Shahnama, the monumental Persian epic. Two 14th-century illustrations in the Metropolitan Museum of Art depict the moment chess was transmitted from India to Iran. Previous scholars assumed the Indian ambassador's dark skin and baggy clothes signaled his defeat by the Persian vizier.

Ilko says that reading is wrong. The ambassador is shown as a champion of the powerful Indian raja, a guardian of coveted knowledge introducing chess to the Persians for the first time. His dark skin marks him as foreign, not inferior. According to the Shahnama's text, the Indian king challenged the Sassanian ruler Kushraw I Anushirvan (who ruled from 531 to 579 CE) to figure out how the game worked - or pay tribute. Only the clever vizier Buzurjmihr managed to solve the puzzle.

The dark skin of intellectual Indian figures in Persian manuscripts challenged value systems shared by both Christian and Islamic worlds that privileged whiteness, Ilko notes. Chess provided a context where intellectual achievement could override those systems.

A Mallorcan altarpiece hiding a chess miracle

One of Ilko's more surprising discoveries involves a late 14th-century altarpiece dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Myra, currently in the Museu de Mallorca in Palma. The altarpiece came from a demolished church in Portopi and depicts a dark-skinned man playing chess with a light-skinned opponent in a Muslim court.

Ilko identifies this as a rare depiction of a miracle from Le Jeu de saint Nicolas, a French play written around 1200. In the story, Muslims defeat an invading Christian army and find a sole survivor praying before a statue of Saint Nicholas. The Muslim king sets up the statue to guard his treasures, but after a chess-fueled gambling session in a tavern, three thieves rob the treasury. Nicholas eventually appears, the riches are returned, and the king converts to Christianity.

The painting makes a subtle but pointed choice: the king has visibly darker skin than the gambler-thief. That arrangement contradicts the dominant medieval value system, which associated whiteness with virtue and authority. The painting reflects Mallorca's complex Islamic and Christian heritage while quietly undermining racial assumptions.

What chess reveals - and what it does not

It is worth being clear about the limits of this research. Ilko's study draws on visual and textual sources - manuscripts, paintings, carved pieces - that were produced for elite audiences. King Alfonso's treatise was a royal commission. The Persian Shahnama illustrations were luxury objects. These sources tell us how chess was represented by and for the powerful. They do not necessarily tell us how ordinary people experienced the game or race in their daily lives.

The study also does not claim that medieval societies were free of racial prejudice. Ilko is explicit that racial structures and race-based thinking existed in the medieval period, even without modern terminology. What she argues is more specific: chess created a context in which those structures could be challenged, where intellectual prowess could empower people to push back against racial hierarchies.

The evidence is also concentrated in certain regions and periods. The sources span from roughly the 8th to the 15th century and come primarily from Iberia, Persia, and parts of northern Europe. Whether similar dynamics played out in other chess-playing cultures - China, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa - remains an open question.

A more diverse and fun Middle Ages

Ilko, who is writing a book titled The Pawns of History: A New Approach towards the Global Middle Ages, sees chess as a corrective to how we teach the medieval period. So much of what survives and gets taught is religious, dominated by a Christian worldview. Chess, she argues, reveals something different - a more diverse medieval world, connected across civilizations by a shared love of strategy and competition.

The game endures. It has outlasted the empires that spread it, the religions that debated it, and the racial hierarchies it quietly subverted. People still play because it is fun. And that simple fact - that humans across every culture and century have sat down across from each other to match wits - may be the most important thing chess has to tell us about the past.